Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

44

THE TWO MONTHS following the robbery were completely uneventful, which I found startling. I was now a bona fide graduate bank robber, a hardened criminal, no stranger to guns and violence; and yet I was completely the same. And so was the world around me, the pattern of prison and tunnel and apartment and Marian, all exactly as it was before.

Except that my financial problems had been relieved. I’d been eating into the three thousand my mother had sent me, pretending to commit stings now and again to explain where my cash was coming from, but that money couldn’t last forever. Particularly once I had an apartmnet of my own, and a girl friend. Now, with an additional nine thousand in the kitty, I might even make it through the two years till parole.

Yes, nine thousand. We’d been hoping for a top of a hundred fifty thousand from the two banks, but of course we’d only managed to rob the one. Luckily, our halfaccomplishment had been at the high end of our estimates. Just under seventy-three thousand dollars had been carried out of Federal Fiduciary in those liquor store cartons; divided equally among eight men it came to nine thousand one hundred twelve dollars apiece.

Not bad for one night’s work. That’s one way to look at that number, as my fellow conspirators did. Pretty goddam small pickings to risk a life sentence for, that’s the way / looked at it. I just didn’t have the proper criminal attitude.

Nevertheless we’d done it, and apparently we’d gotten away with it. Marian had no idea I’d been involved in the big bank robbery-the most exciting crime in Stonevelt’s history-and I saw no reason to burden her with the knowledge. As to Joe and Billy and the rest, now that the robbery had actually been performed they were all as calm and gentle and easygoing as well-fed horses. And lazy. Despite their sudden wealth, most of them hardly took a turn outside the prison at all for a while, meaning much more opportunity for me to be out; having to return every damn day for breakfast and dinner was becoming an annoyance, in fact.

So March went out like a lamb, with April gamboling after. The weather improved, Marian and I took some outings in her Volkswagen, and Max developed a pleasant new girl friend named Della; the four of us double dated sometimes. I was happy and content, playing no practical jokes, putting on a little weight, wallowing in my happy life. Then, on Wednesday, the twenty-seventh of April, the Mad Message Maker struck again.