Red Grass River

TWENTY

September 1923

THEY HIT THE STUART BANK FIVE MINUTES AFTER IT OPENED FOR business on a warm and humid morning. Although Hanford Mobley was disguised as a woman his voice and demeanor identified him to the two tellers on duty who had done business with him in the past. A bank patron who ran a haberdashery and had once sold Mobley a pair of trousers recognized him as well. The tellers were also certain that one of the other two robbers—both of whom wore bandanna masks—was Clarence Middleton. Neither the tellers nor the customer were so foolish as to let the bandits know they’d been recognized. The identities of the third robber and the getaway driver were yet mysteries.

They rushed from the bank with guns in hand and people fell away from their path. A rumbling green Dodge sedan waited at the curb, Laura at the wheel in overalls and large sunglasses and with her hair tucked up under a highcrowned hat of wide floppy brim. The holdup men tumbled into the car and she gunned it away northbound on the Dixie Highway.

Sheriff Bob Baker was attending an outdoor inauguration ceremony for a new circuit judge in West Palm Beach when Deputy Henry Stubbs sidled up to him and whispered that the Stuart bank had been robbed ten minutes ago. The sheriff made apologies to the judge’s party and took his leave. As they hurried to Sheriff Bob’s unmarked car Stubbs told him that Hanford Mobley and Clarence Middleton were among the robbers. “I knew that little son of a bitch would be trouble,” Sheriff Bob said. “Knew it the first time I laid eyes on him.”

He strove to affect a cool demeanor but his blood was in a fury. He had been fair with them, damn it. More than fair. After he’d put John away he’d let that peckerwood family be. He hadn’t bothered their moonshine business since way before John went back to prison. Hellfire, he’d let them hijack other bootleggers at will. He was no friend of the Ashleys and never would be (never again, anyway) but what was past was done with, and his past troubles with John hadnt kept him from doing the smart thing, which was to let the Ashleys go about their whiskey business any way they wanted, so long as they didnt upset the good citizens of Palm Beach County. As long as the Ashleys didnt make him look bad as sheriff he’d cut them slack. They knew that. It was a condition unspoken but understood. And now look how they’d gone and broken their side of the bargain. And for what? For putting John back in the pen? For not bothering to keep his pleasure a secret when he heard two of the Ashley boys got drowned during a least. Why would they wait so long to do something about it? But if thats why they’d done it—if they’d put personal feelings above good common sense, if they couldnt see that bygones were bygones and live and let live was the way to go—then they were just plain damn stupid, thats all, so damn stupid they were dangerous. Crazy goddamn swamprats. Hell, you didnt see him going around eating himself up with wanting to get even with John Ashley, and he sure enough had plenty of reason. Whoever lived in the past was dead to the present—he’d heard that somewhere and thought it was sure enough true. If he could let the past go, why in the purple hell couldnt they? (He had the briefest flash of a thumb gouging an eyeball, of a dick at a dead man’s mouth—and instantly had to remind himself of being stripped of his leg and pistol. Of being coldcocked in the jailyard in the rain. Of Julie. Julie who he loved.) Anyway, it wasn’t as though it was his doing Frank and Ed Ashley went down in the Stream. Old Joe had no reason to go and rob a bank in his county where a bank had not been robbed in years. He’d given that crazy old man no call to make him look bad in the public eye. But by God if this is how the bastard wanted it, well, they’d just see who got the last laugh. He’d put all their asses in jail or know the reason why. In jail or in the ground.

Made no damn difference. Not to him. Not anymore.

Stubbs told him the robbers had fled north. As he got in his car Bob Baker told him to send a bulletin to all police departments as far north as Jacksonville and as westwards as Tallahassee. He asked where Heck Runyon was and Stubbs said he was still in the Everglades tracking an Indian wanted for murder—but Fred Baker was in Fort Pierce. Bob Baker told him to send word to Freddie to put up roadblocks at that town’s exits. It’d likely be too late to catch them going into town but if the robbers lingered there for any reason it might not be too late to catch them trying to come out. He also wanted Freddie to have two fast unmarked cars ready to go—and six good men with arms and ammunition. Stubbs ran off to send the messages and Bob Baker headed off to Ford Pierce.

He paused in Stuart long enough to go in the bank and make quick interrogation of the robbery witnesses. The tellers said they had no doubt whatever that Mobley and Middleton were two of the bandits. George Doster who appeared to be ill said he wasn’t so sure as all that. Sheriff Bob accepted the majority opinion. He dispatched four deputies to the Ashley place at Twin Oaks with explicit order not to engage in a fight should they find Mobley or Middleton on the premises. “If they’re there, you just let me know,” Bob Baker instructed them. “Dont do anything but keep the sonsofbitches under watch till I get there.”

Twenty-five minutes later he rolled up to the south town limits of Fort Pierce where Fred Baker stood waiting beside his own police car. They’d found the green Dodge getaway car in an alley at the west end of town. It had been stolen. A witness saw four men get out of the Dodge and into a Ford sedan and head out on the Yeehaw Road. Fred had two cars ready to go and in them sat the Padgett brothers, and four other Baker Gang deputies, all of them as heavily armed as soldiers.

Bob Baker bit off the end of a cigar and spat it out and tugged down his hat and looked off to the flat horizon in the west. “I figure they got less than a hour’s headstart. Let’s go!”

They were unaware they’d been identified in the bank. As he stripped off his female disguise Hanford Mobley yelled, “Anybody comin?” Roy Matthews was looking out the car’s rear window and said, “Nary soul.”

Clarence Middleton watched Mobley taking off his woman’s clothing and now hollered as though at a cooch show, “Put it on, baby, put it on!” Roy Matthews laughed and said Mobley was sure enough about the skankiest woman he’d ever seen. Hanford Mobley told them to fuck themselves, the disguise had been a real smart idea.

“That’s right, honey,” Laura said, glancing at him sidewise and grinning as she sped them down the dusty road. “Pretty is as pretty does and dont you let these peckerwoods tell you different.” But she couldnt help laughing along with Clarence and Roy. “And you watch your goddamn language, hear? There’s a lady present in case you didnt know.” Mobley glared at her but held his tongue.

He swiftly counted the take and said, “Forty thousand, my sorry ass. It aint but a little over twenty-three thousand here.”

“I think Old Joe ought to figure Doster’s five percent out of the difference,” Roy Matthews said.

“I think he should pay Doster with the difference,” Laura said. “He ought say, ‘Hey bubba, you know that seventeen grand that wasnt there? Well it’s all yours. And it’s all thats yours.’”

Hanford Mobley put twenty thousand dollars in one satchel and the rest of the money in another. Laura slowed as they came in sight of Fort Pierce. They followed the highway through town and saw but one police car and it parked in front of a cafe. Near the north city limits and the Yeehaw Road she turned down a street and then into an alley behind a closed roadhouse where Clarence had parked a Ford sedan he’d stolen in Vero before sunrise that morning. They abandoned the Dodge and got into the Ford and did not see the bum watching them from his nest of crates and cardboard twenty yards away—he who would wait till they drove from sight on the Yeehaw Road and then be rummaging through the Dodge when a police car pulled up and a pair of cops pointed guns at him and told him to freeze or die. They had no inkling of the telephone call Fred Baker was receiving even as they swapped cars, no notion that ten minutes after their departure on the Yeehaw Road every exit from Fort Pierce would be posted with police.

Thirty miles west at the Okeechobee crossroad they were met by Albert Miller in a coupé. Laura took the twenty thousand dollars and got in the car with Albert and they headed back the way Albert had come—south to the town of Okeechobee and around the lake’s east side to the Indiantown Road and then east through the swamp and pineywoods toward the road to Twin Oaks. Hanford Mobley took the wheel of the Ford and he and Matthews and Middleton pressed on to westward, bound for Lakeland. The plan was for them to take refuge with Mrs. Ella Fingers, a trusted woman friend of Joe Ashley’s whose lucrative business was to shelter and feed men on the dodge, no questions asked. There the three would lie low for a week or so until Old Joe sent word whether they could return to Palm Beach County without fear of arrest or would have to slip back surreptitiously.

They did not think they were being followed but thought it the wiser course to proceed as though they were. Rather than take the Sebring Road they drove on a narrow dirt road flanking the Seaboard rail line. The road was of sand and rock and even more rugged than most backcountry routes. The Model T jounced and pitched as it made its way through pinelands thick and dark that periodically gave way to marshy savannah rife with palmetto scrub. A covey of white herons took to wing like fluttering scraps of paper falling upward. A hawk swooped into the prairie grass near the edge of the road and arced back for the sky with a rabbit flailing in its talons.

Thunderheads purple and blue as fresh bruises were shaping in the western sky. At the Kissimmee River the railtracks crossed on a narrow trestle but the road veered north and followed the river to a bridge at Fort Basinger two miles away. Not wanting to be seen by anybody who might inform pursuers of their passing, they chose to cross over on the trestle rather than show themselves at the bridge. Hanford Mobley eased the car slowly onto the elevated tracks and the Model T lunged and yawed as it advanced from tie to tie in the manner of a cautious cockroach. Roy Matthews and Clarence Middleton gaped at the green river rippling below the tracks and arched their brows at each other and clutched tightly to the door posts against the car’s erratic sway as it forged ahead. Hanford Mobley caught their stricken looks and laughed.

Once across the trestle they continued on the tracks for nearly another mile before the narrow backroad from Fort Basinger came curving out of the pinewoods and again ran alongside the track bed and Hanford steered the Ford down the embankment and onto it. Five miles farther on, the rail line met with the Sebring Road and ran parallel with it for almost ten miles to the north end of Lake Istokpoga before road and track once again diverged, the raised track bearing directly for Sebring through its bordering swampland and the highway curving around the swamp to come up into Sebring from the south. They had just gone around the bend of the lake when the radiator sprang a leak and began hissing loudly. A handpainted roadsign announced the Lorida Fishcamp just a mile ahead and down a narrow dirt lane to Lake Istokpoga. They drove on with steam keening before them and blowing back with a smell of hot metal and came to the camp under high wide oaks hung with Spanish moss. Here they bought cold bottles of bootleg beer and a raw egg. Clarence Middleton wrapped his hand with a bandanna and removed the radiator cap with a whoosh of steam. He cracked open the egg and dropped it into the radiator and while they drank their beer and chatted with a couple of locals about the best ways to rig a trotline the egg circulated in the steaming water and found its solidifying way to the leak and plugged it. Clarence then filled the radiator with water from a dispenser can and replaced the cap. They finished off the beer with huge sighs and ripping belches and got back in the car and pushed on.

They drove into Sebring under an early afternoon sky darkening with storm clouds. A wind had kicked up and was shaking the trees. They topped off the gas tank at a filling station and then went to a cafe and bought sandwiches and bottles of soda and asked for the food to be bagged so they could take it with them before the rain hit. While they waited for their order they flirted with the waitresses. Roy Matthews told the prettiest, a blonde named Marybelle, that he was going to be visiting an uncle in Lakeland for the next week or two and asked if she ever got up that way. She said it so happened her best girlfriend lived in Auburndale which was only a few miles from Lakeland and she would be going to visit her this coming weekend. She gave him her friend’s telephone number and he winked at her and said he’d be sure to call on Friday night. Hanford Mobley had been first to speak and smile at Marybelle but after Roy Matthews caught her attention she had eyes for no one else. As they went back out to the car Mobley said it surely was pathetic to see a fella practically having to beg women for a date just because he couldnt get him a steady one. “I’m sure glad I got Glenda,” Mobley said. “She makes both them girls back there look like skanks.” Roy Matthews spat and laughed and let the remarks pass. Now they got on the paved main highway and bore north for Lakeland, still nearly sixty miles distant, but the roads from here on were all good and they would be there in two hours.

Barely fifteen minutes after the fugitives’ departure from Sebring a three-car caravan of Palm Beach County police officers swept into town in a crashing rain. At the Fort Basinger bridge fishcamp they’d learned that two men who’d been fishing from a skiff just upriver from the railroad had seen a Ford sedan drive over the trestle earlier that afternoon and Sheriff Baker knew it was the robbers.

“They say it was only three men in the car,” Fred Baker said as he drove off in the lead car with Bob Baker in the passenger seat beside him.

“Dont matter,” Bob Baker said. “One might of been laying down. One might of gone off on his own for some reason. I know it’s them, I know it. Let’s move, Freddie, goose this thing.”

Bob Baker had already considered that from Sebring the robbers could go north, south or west—and he planned to send a car in each direction in hopes that one of them would pick up the trail. But first all three cars pulled into a filling station for gasoline and the attendant there recognized Bob Baker’s description of two of the robbers and pointed out the cafe where they’d gone after they’d fueled their car. Ten minutes later Marybelle had told him about Lakeland. Ten minutes after that he was in the Sebring police chief’s office, forming a puddle of rainwater at the feet as he talked on the telephone to the Lakeland chief of police, shouting into the mouthpiece to make himself heard above the steady sequence of thunderclaps and the clatter of rain on the roof. The Lakeland chief he’d post cars at every end of town and have any suspicious vehicles stopped for questioning. Bob Baker said he was on his way and rang off.

The police cars motored north through the swirling storm and flickering lightning, their speed hindered by poor visibility, the cars weaving sharply in the windgusts and raising little roostertails of water as they went. At Avon they turned west to Fort Meade and there cut north again and bore for Bartow and Lakeland some twenty miles beyond. Sheriff Bob Baker had been holding his own silent counsel and studying the regional map he’d been given by the Sebring chief.

“What would you do if you were them and you spotted a bunch of cops all over when you got to Lakeland?” Sheriff Baker shouted at Fred over the rain drumming on the car.

“Try to get away to someplace else, naturally,” Fred yelled, staring hard into the slashing rain. “Find me another road out of there if I could.”

“Wouldnt you figure the cope would probly be watchin all the roads around there?”

Fred Baker considered for a moment. “I reckon. Leastways the main ones.”

“So wouldnt you maybe figure it’d be smarter to quit the car and travel some other way?”

“Like how?” He glanced at Bob Baker. “Like by train?”

“That’s what I’m guessin.”

“Not the Lakeland depot. Not with cops all over.”

“No,” Bob Baker said, “they wouldnt go there. Stop the car.” Fred pulled off onto the shoulder and the other two cars fell in behind. The rain swept over them in torrents and the cars were jostled by the wind.

Bob Baker was staring at the map spread open in his lap. “Here’s where.” He put his finger to a spot and Freddie leaned over to look.

“How you know?” Fred Baker said.

“I dont know,” Bob Baker said. “I just know.”

A moment later Freddie was out of the car and the rain knocked down his hatbrim and pasted his clothes to his flesh as he went to the car directly behind and told the Padgett brothers to bring the shotguns and get up in the first car with him and Chief Baker. He put Henry Stubbs in charge of the rest of the detail and told him to proceed with both cars to Lakeland and take custody of the suspects if they’d been apprehended or to render whatever assistance the Lakeland police might ask for if the robbers were still at large. He told Henry that Chief Baker would join them in Lakeland later that night.

They were almost to the Lakeland city limit when Roy Matthews said “Cops!” and pointed to the two cars bearing police insignia on their doors and looking ghostly in the whipping rain on the shoulder just ahead. Mobley slowed the Ford and pulled off the road and into a filling station as if that had been his intention all along. He wheeled the car in a U-turn to park it next to the pumps on the side away from the highway and further under the overhanging roof for better protection from the rain—or so, he hoped, it would seem to anybody watching them. They maneuver also put the pumps between them and the cops and positioned the car so it pointed back the way they had come. They all three stared back over their shoulders and through the rain at the police cars which remained as before.

“What you boys think?” Clarence Middleton said.

“I aint sure they even seen us,” Hanford Mobley said. “I aint sure they even on the lookout for us. Could be they waitin on somebody else. Could be they just waitin out this damn rain.”

Roy Matthews grimaced. “Who the hell you kidding, boy? You bet you ass they waitin on us. How many other people you know robbed a bank today.

Hanford Mobley glared. “Who knows? Maybe there was a goddamn dozen robberies today. How would we know?”

“It’s us they’re lookin for and you best know it,” Roy Matthews said. He alternately checked the loads in his shotgun and looked out at the cop cars as he spoke. “I dont believe they seen us. Not yet. But we can forget about goin to Miz Fingers’.”

“We best get a move on before this rain lets up and they can see some better,” Clarence said.

“It’s that fucken girl!” Hanford Mobley said. “You told her we was comin to Lakeland and now here the cops are, just waitin for us. You and your big mouth!”

“Why would she of called the cops on us?” Roy Matthews said. “She didnt have the first damn reason to call the cops on us.”

“What if the cops went callin on her?”

“Well why in the hell would they do that?”

“I dont know! But who the hell else knew we were comin here?”

“Goddammit thats enough,” Clarence Middleton said. “This aint hardly the time. What we gone do here?”

And old man stepped out of the station and was struggling into a rain slicker as he started toward them. Clarence Middleton waved him away and yelled, “Never mind, bubba. We dont need no gas after all.” The old man shrugged and went back inside.

“Shit!” Hanford Mobley hammered the steering wheel with the heel of his fist. “They’re like to have cops set up on all the roads around here.”

“Listen,” Roy Matthews said, “Plant City’s not but ten miles from here and there’s a backroad to it—about half a mile yonderway. I know cause I took it once. No way in hell they’d think to watch that little bitty road. Dont nobody hardly ever use it.”

“What the fuck’s in Plant City?” Hanford Mobley said.

“A fucken train station,” said Roy Matthews.

The rain did not slacken and they nearly got stuck in the mud several times but Hanford Mobley each time adroitly maneuvered the car free and they pressed on. It took them the better part of an hour to traverse the ten miles. As he drove, Mobley proposed they take the next train to Tampa, a big enough town so strangers didnt arouse suspicion. They would check into a hotel and call Old Joe to jell him of the change in plans and let him say what they should do next. Clarence said fine by him. Roy Matthews shrugged and nodded and said sure, why not.

They deserted the Ford two blocks from the depot. Each of them carried a .45 under his coat but they had no means for concealing the shotguns and the automatic rifle and so had to leave them with the car. Hanford Mobley took the little grip containing the three thousand dollars and tucked it under his arm and they set out down the street at a quick walk. The rain had abated but little and before they were halfway down the block they were sodden. At the corner was a small store with a Chesterfield ad in the window that reminded Roy Matthews he was nearly out of cigarettes. Clarence Middleton said to buy him a pack too. A train whistle squealed and Hanford Mobley said that might be the train for Tampa and called to Matthews to hurry and catch up and he and Clarence set off at a jog.

“Think it’ll rain?” the clerk said as he handed over the two packs of smokes and laughed at his own lank humor. Roy Matthews grabbed up the cigarettes and threw a bill on the counter and hastened from the store just as the rain assumed a new intensity. At the next corner he had to wait for a few cars to go by and the train whistle blew again and he saw a locomotive huffing steam on one of the sidings in preparation to move out, but the train was a long freight carried facing north, not the passenger transport to Tampa.

And then through the rainy gloom he saw Bob Baker. With him were three other men, none of whom he recognized except to know with absolute certainty that they were cops too. They were coming from the parking lot at the south end of the station and he figured they must have only just arrived. All four were without raincoats and all carrying shotguns and keeping the breeches dry under their arms. Roy Matthews backed away from the curb and stood under the awning fronting a real estate office at his back and slipped his hand under his coat to the Colt automatic and pushed the safety off with his thumb.

The cops paused at the far end of the depot and conferred and every man checked his pocketwatch. Now Bob Baker pointed and two of the cops went off around the corner of the building and Roy Matthews knew he had sent them to cover the depot’s trackside doors. As Bob Baker and the other cop started for the front of the station a man approached them with his hands deep in his raincoat pockets and his head down against the rain and he didnt see them until he was almost on them and then he saw the guns and stopped short and backed against the depot wall. Bob Baker said something to him and gestured for him to go on and the man nodded jerkily and hurried away. Now Bob Baker and the other cop paused at a depot window and the other cop carefully peered inside and then turned to Bob Baker and nodded and they both checked their watches yet again.

And now here came the store clerk around the corner and clutching an umbrella and looking intent. His face brightened on seeing Roy Matthews under the awning. “Hey, mister!” the clerk said, and held up a sheaf of dog-eared dollar bills. “You give me a ten-dollar bill and probably thought it wasn’t but a one. Here’s you change.” Roy Matthews barely glanced at him before turning his attention back to the other side of the street. The clerk stood there with the rain running off his umbrella and his handful of money extended toward Roy Matthews and nothing in his experience told him what to do now.

Bob Baker and the other cop stood waiting by the front door and Baker kept looking from the front door to the pocketwatch in his hand. The freight whistle keened again and let a great blast of steam and the locomotive lurched forward and the couplings of the cars behind sent up a great clash and clamoring of iron and the cars shuddered one after the other as the train began to move. Roy Matthews saw a pair of men scurry from the bushes fifty yards south of the depot and clamber up onto the side of an empty stockcar. The bigger of the men clung to a slat and struggled with the door and now pushed it partly open and both tramps slipped into the car. The door slid back again but remained open just a little.

Roy Matthews walked quickly down the street and when he was a block north of the depot he jogged across the road and scaled a low wooden fence as lithely as a cat and dropped into the railyard. He loped to the siding on which the freight was slowly rumbling past and ran alongside the cars and looked over his shoulder and saw the cattlecar with the partly open door coming up behind him. He half-expected to hear the warning shout of railroad bulls but this was no big city railyard plagued by tramps and hobos and no warning shout came nor did any bull appear. The train was picking up speed now and here came the car he wanted and as he ran alongside he grabbed a slat near the door and swung his feet up and planted them against the edge of the door and he pushed hard and the door slid open enough for him to wriggle himself into the car feet-first.

The two tramps were standing up and looking at him as he lay gasping on the floor. “Pretty neat trick, mister,” the bigger one of them said. “But this here car’s spoke for, so you can just roll your ass right back out again.” The floor of the car was littered with dirty hay and smelled of cowshit.

Roy Matthews sat up, his breath slowing, and looked at him.

“Ah hell, Bosco,” the other tramp said. “It aint no need to be like that. It’s plenty room for him.”

“Fuck him,” Bosco said, and advanced on Roy Matthews. “Now you gone jump out or I gone throw you out?”

Roy Matthews stood up and stepped away from the open door and pulled out his .45 and cocked the hammer. He pointed the gun in Bosco’s face and said, “Now you gone jump out or I gone kick your dead ass out?”

Bosco stood fast.

“I dont care either fucken way,” Matthews said. “I’ll count three.”

“Hold on,” Bosco said.

Roy Matthews said, “One…”

Bosco raised a hand as though he might deflect the bullet as he stepped back and snatched up his bindle. He went to the door and stared out at the passing world a moment and then glanced at Matthews and then tossed his bindle and leaped after it and was gone.

Roy Matthews put up his pistol and told the other tramp he was welcome to stay. The tramp said he’d as soon stick with his buddy if it was all the same to him. Matthews shrugged and said to suit himself. As the tramp took up his bindle and went to the door Matthews asked if he knew where this freight was headed. The tramp said Jacksonville.

Roy Matthews smiled. “No shit?”

“No shit,” the tramp said. Then looked out of the car and picked his spot and jumped.

Hanford Mobley thought their luck was running just swell. According to the ticketseller the Tampa train would be arriving in eighteen minutes. The man punched out three tickets and passed them through the arched window to Mobley and then counted out his change.

As Mobley scooped up the money he heard Clarence say “Shit!” He turned and saw Clarence leap over a bench and bolt for the trackside door and he was looking back over his shoulder just as Freddie Baker came in though the doorway with a shotgun at port arms. Clarence turned face-front just in time for Freddie to hit him full in the face with the stock of the shotgun like a boxer throwing a right cross and the sound was like a shingle splitting. Clarence’s feet ran out from under him and for an instant he was completely supine in the air before the crashed to the floor like a full sack of feed and with an explosion of breath.

Waiting passengers scattered shrilling from their benches like birds flushed from a roost.

“Duck down, mister!”

Mobley heard the words clearly through a woman’s scream and caught a sidelong glance of the ticketseller dropping out of sight behind the counter and he knew the voice even before he turned and saw Bob Baker pointing a pump action .12 gauge at him from a distance of ten feet. And beside him Joel Padgett with a shotgun pointed at him too.

“You can live or you can die, sonny,” Bob Baker said. “You dont put them hands way up right now, I know which it be.”

Hanford Mobley gave an instant’s thought to making a fight of it, to jumping aside as he drew his piece and they’d just see who lived and who died—and then remembered that the safety of his .45 was on and knew he’d never fire a shot before Bob Baker and Joe blew his head off.

He put his hands way up.

The store clerk came across the street to the depot to see what all the excitement was about and learned that the Palm Beach County high sheriff and his deputies had just captured two members of the notorious Ashley Gang. A porter told him that the sheriff had asked the little one over there getting the chains put on him hand and foot where the other two were and the bandit had said it’d be a cold day in hell before he ever ratted.

The clerk presented himself to the Palm Beach sheriff and said he’d seen something that probably didnt have anything to do with this but he thought he ought to know it anyway—and he told Sheriff Baker about the man he’d seen jump aboard the freight train.

Fifteen minutes later Sheriff Baker had contacted the Duval County Sheriff and given him a thorough description of Roy Matthews—who was yet but an unidentified suspect. The Duval sheriff said he’d post men at the freight yard to watch for the train’s arrival and agreed not to arrest the suspect right away if they saw him. Rather, they would do as Sheriff Baker suggested and follow him to see if he might lead them to the fourth member of the holdup team. The Duval sheriff said he’d be in touch as soon as he had something to report.

Bob Baker now borrowed a car from the high sheriff of Hills-borough County so the Padgett brothers could transport Clarence Middleton to the hospital at West Palm Beach. One side of Clarence’s faced was hugely and darkly swollen and his articulation was reduced to a guttural groan. He was manacled hand and foot and put in the front passenger seat of the car and Joel Padgett sat directly behind him with a shotgun muzzle pressed to the back of his head. Elmer Padgett got behind the wheel and looked at Clarence and said, “Hey, bubba, is it true what they say in the adventure books about the outlaw life bein so much fun?” Joel Padgett laughed and poked Clarence sharply in the back of the head with the shotgun muzzle. Clarence turned and glared at him with eyes so bloodshot they looked like cranberries. Joe jabbed the muzzle lightly against his broken jaw and Clarence jerked back shrilling through his teeth. “You just face front and stay that way, tough guy,” Joe Padgett said.

Bob and Fred Baker took Mobley with them. Before heading back to the east coast Sheriff Bob contacted the sheriff of Broward County and asked if he might house a special prisoner in his jail for a time. The Palm Beach County lockup was undergoing renovations and its security would be frail until the construction work was finished. The Broward sheriff said to bring the rascal on down.

During the drive to Lauderdale Bob and Fred Baker chatted with each other about their families and about a fishing trip to Lake Okeechobee they were planning for upcoming weekend. They were in such high spirits they couldn’t keep from laughing, whether anything was funny or not. Hanford Mobley sat in the backseat with his ankles cuffed against the frame of the front seat and his hands manacled behind him. So completely was he ignored by the lawmen he might not have been in the car with them. Only twice did they pay him heed, the first time was about midway through the trip when Bob Baker adjusted the mirror to look at him and laugh hard and then repositioned the mirror off him again. The other time was when Freddie Baker turned to look at him and grinned and then suddenly lunged and punched him just under the right eye.

Mobley saw stars and his eyes welled with tears and he cursed Freddie Baker for a son of a bitch.

“That’s enough now,” Bob Baker said, glancing casually at Fred Baker.

“Shit-eatin son of a nigger bitch,” Hanford Mobley said.

“You hear this little boy’s mouth?” Freddie said.

Without turning to look at him, Bob Baker told Hanford Mobley that if he didnt keep his trap shut for the rest of the drive he’d gag him with a piss-soaked oilrag balled in his mouth.

Hanford Mobley snorted but kept mute the rest of the trip.

The Ashley grapevine brought Old Joe the word about Hanford Mobley and Clarence Middleton even as Clarence was being manacled to a bed in the West Palm Beach hospital where he would have his broken jaw wired and be under round-the-clock guard by armed deputies. Old Joe told Bill Ashley to get Ira Goldman up to Twin Oaks immediately. That evening the three of them talked well into the night. On the following afternoon the assistant state’s attorney announced that John Clarence Middleton had been charged with bank robbery and his arraignment was set for the day after tomorrow. The prisoner’s trial and the state was happy to oblige. Trial was scheduled to begin in two weeks.

“Good,” Old Joe said when Ira and Bill reported how things stood. “I wish they was tryin him tomorrow.” They had recently come to secret agreement with Assistant Warden Webb at Raiford—at a price of twelve thousand dollars for John Ashley and five thousand for Ray Lynn. The underwarden had enlisted into the plan a trusted guard and one of the drivers of the trucks that delivered limestone to the rockpile twice a month. The confederates’ cut would come out of Webb’s seventeen thousand, which was part of the reason his price was so high. The rest of the reason was John Ashley’s notoriety and the fact that his escape had to be from inside the walls. Assistant Warden Webb had the authority to assign Ray Lynn to a road gang—from which escape was easier—but could not reassign John Ashley, whom the warden was sworn to keep inside the penitentiary for the full length of his sentence. The underwarden told Ira Goldman that John Ashley’s escape could be effected only on one of the two days each month that the limestone trucks delivered to the prison. The plan depended on the truck. That was find with Old Joe, but he wanted Ray Lynn—and now Clarence, as well—to make their break from the road camp at the same time John was slipping out of the pen. If John got free too soon before Ray and Clarence, the warden might get the idea of locking them up in isolation to keep them from getting away too.

“I want Clarence up in Raiford just as quick as we can get him there,” Old Joe said to Ira. “Go see that Webb fella again and tell him hold off on John till Clarence is up there too and can come out with the Lynn boy.”

“It’ll cost more to include Clarence,” Ira Goldman said. “The bastard will probably want another five.”

“I know it,” Old Joe said. “Offer three and settle at five if you have to. Five’s way more than enough and he knows it. But he’s got to wait for Clarence. That’s the condition.”

Hanford Mobley he could help more directly and immediately. When he heard that Mobley was being put in the Broward County Jail Old Joe grinned like he’d been told a good joke and Ira Goldman asked him what was so funny.

“You know W. W. Hicks?” Joe said, looking from Ira Goldman to Bill Ashley. “Either you?”

They neither one did.

“Well, I do,” Old Joe said. And he laughed again. “Knowed him from the time he was a pup and his daddy and me used to fire-hunt deer together in the Big Cypress.”

“Who is W. W. Hicks, daddy?” Bill Ashley said.

“The night jailer at the Broward County lockup.”

Hanford Mobley had been in the Broward lockup three days when W. W. Hicks sidled up to the bars of his cell late in the evening and introduced himself as a friend of his granddaddy’s and said he’d spoken with Old Joe earlier that day. He informed Mobley that as the night jailer he was authorized to appoint two inmates every evening to the jail cleanup detail. “You know,” Hicks whispered, “if a inmate on the cleanup detail was to somehow overpower the guard and tie him up, and if he was to get aholt of a small crowbar, and if he was to know that one of the skylights in the storeroom off the other hallway got a real old rusty lock on it, and if he was to boost hisself up to that lock some kinda way, why, he’d probably be able to bust it open with no trouble at all. Then he’d be up on the roof and would find out that in a back corner of it is a drainpipe he could skinny down. Then he’d likely do well to get his ass into the swampwoods back of the jail and make his way to Turtle Creek and follow it about two miles to the intracoastal. If he was real lucky he might could find him a skiff there. Then he’d like as not pole his way up through that mangrove channel where not even the dogs could follow in case the jailbreak had been found out and a posse was after him. Once he got past the mangroves he’d practically be to Pompano and if he was to put in at Skeet Massey’s fish camp there, why, it might not be too much of a surprise to have somebody waitin there for him in a car.”

Hanford Mobley was smiling. “You can put me on the cleanup detail?”

“Like as not your sheriff dont know thing one about how the sheriff runs things here,” Hicks said. “And for a fact my sheriff aint give a whole lot of thought to you—you not bein one of his own prisoners and all. What I’m gettin at is, aint nobody said to me you caint be on the detail.”

“Well now damn,” Hanford Mobley said, his smile wider.

“You feel like maybe doin some cleanup work round here tomorrow night?” Hicks said, smiling back at him. “You know, make yourself useful?”

“I always was raised to believe that cleanliness is next to godliness,” Hanford Mobley said.

The Duval County sheriff had posted men at the station to watch for anybody coming in on the freight from Tampa, especially somebody riding in a stockcar. The sheriff was proud of his law enforcement heritage—his daddy had been a respected sheriff of DeSoto County for years and his grandfather had been a deputy sheriff in Pensacola and part of the team that captured the notorious Texas desperado John Wesley Hardin at the train station there in the summer of 1877.

He was shrewd, this sheriff. He figured anybody riding the freightcars might think to jump off before the train pulled into the railyard. So he and a deputy, both of them in civilian dress, hiked a half-mile up the railway and hid themselves, one on either side of the tracks, on a sandy rise in the pines from which they could see along the rails a good long way.

When the train appeared far down the track they watched it closely but nobody jumped off as it came toward them. Then the train was rumbling by and they both saw the slatted stockcar flash past and if anyone was in it neither of them saw him. And then the train was past and no one had jumped off and just as the sheriff and his deputy were dusting themselves and about to step out of the pines, the deputy said “Look!” and pointed up the tracks and the sheriff looked just in time to see a man tumbling in the grass alongside the rails. The sheriff and deputy quickly got back into the cover of the trees and watched as the man rose stiffly and stepped about gingerly and tested his limbs and seemed to find himself hale. He was too far away for them to compare him to the description they’d been given but the sheriff was sure he was their man. The suspect looked up and down the tracks and peered hard at the woods flanking both sides of the rails and then set out at a quick pace along the tracks toward Jacksonville.

They followed at a distance but kept to the edge of the woods and faded into the cover of the trees every time the suspect turned to look over his shoulder. As they drew close to town the man veered from the tracks and took to a narrow dirt path through the pines and the sheriff and his deputy closed their distance from him now that they were better hidden in the shadowed woods. The suspect seemed less wary and but infrequently looked back anymore.

When they got into town they kept a couple of blocks back of him. Then he went into a drug store and they quickly closed the distance and the deputy took up a position on the opposite side of the street and from there watched the front door. The sheriff lit his pipe and casually strolled past the drug store and glanced in the window as he went by the he saw the suspect talking on the telephone and smiling and saw that he fit exactly the description he’d been given by the Palm Beach sheriff. A minute later the man was outside again. He looked at a piece of paper in his hand and looked around and got his bearings and set out toward the river. The sheriff and the deputy, one on either side of the street, followed at a block’s distance.

Forty minutes later they were in a residential neighborhood near the river and the man stopped before a large Victorian house that had been converted to rooms to let. He checked the piece of paper in his hand once more and then went up the front steps and onto the porch and knocked on the door. The main door opened and he spoke to someone just the other side of the screen door. Now the door swung open and he went in and the screen door closed and then the main door behind it.

They waited ten minutes and then went around to the kitchen side door and knocked and the sheriff showed his badge to a shapeless woman who said she was the cook. She let them in and went to fetch the house manager. He was a bespectacled man of middle years and in answer to the sheriff’s question said that the man who’d come in just ahead of them had been expected by one of the tenants, a young woman who’d received a telephone call from him a little earlier. Her room was on the second floor, number 222.

They ascended the stairs and moved softly down the hall and stopped at room 222 and drew their pistols. The sheriff put his ear to the door and listened for a moment and grinned at the deputy. He backed away from the door and mouthed the question “Ready?” and the deputy tugged his hat down and gripped his gun tightly in both hands and nodded. The sheriff raised his booted foot and delivered a powerful kick to the door that burst it off its lock and they rushed into the shrieking room.

“They say the Matthews boy went ten feet straight in the air when the door bust open,” the day jailer said. He was a fat man named Glover who never stopped sweating. He was leaning on the cell bars and fanning himself with his hat. “They say he stood there with his hands stickin up in the air and his dick stickin out in front of him all shiny with pussy juice.”

Hanford Mobley sat on his bunk smoking a cigarette and grinned. It galled him plenty that Matthews was the only one of them to escape being caught at Plant City, especially since it had been the bigmouth’s fault that him and Clarence had been taken. If Matthews hadnt told that bitch in Sebring about Lakeland the cops never wouldve known where to hunt for them. Hanford couldnt help feeling a little lowdown for taking pleasure in a partner getting caught, but he didnt really mind the guilt. He was glad Roy Matthews had been caught while humping some whore and no use to deny it. The jailer had said Matthews would arrive at the Broward jail tomorrow. Hanford Mobley expected to be long gone by then.

“They sky ever man in the house come into the hallway and all of em crowdin at the door and makin fun of the nekkid fella and gawkin at the girl in the bed with the sheet up to her chin and just cryin her eyes out,” Glover said. “That sheriff up in Duval, he can be a good old boy or he can be one mean sumbitch, all depends, and this time he was feelin mean. Told the both of them to get their clothes on and never made a move to close the door to give them the least bit of privacy from the them old boys lookin on. They say the gal really got to cryin then and said would they turn they backs and the men all just laughed. The sheriff told her it was the price a person paid for a life of crime. She said she aint never led no life of crime and he said they’d see about that. Hell, he knew she wasnt no member of you all’s gang, he was just blackassed about havin to foller Matthews over half of Duval County in the blazing sun and sweatin like a hog.”

“Figured he’d make her blush some, hey?” Hanford Mobley said, He began to roll another cigarette.

“Made her damn good and mad too is what he did,” Glover said. “At everdamnbody, includin the Matthews fella. When the sheriff asked him his name he said Reynolds, but the girl hollers no it’s not, it’s Matthews, Roy Matthews, and he’d a no-good son of a bitch criminal who never brung her nothin but trouble is who he is. Whooo, she was hot! They say the Matthews fella looked like he wanted to kick her all the way go Georgia.”

Mobley laughed. “That’s the way it is with whores aint it—cant trust a one of them. I bet the sheriff made her get out of bed nekkid anyhow.”

“Damn sure did. She tried to keep her arms crossed over her titties, but hell, she couldnt keep everthin covered all at once and get herself dressed too, could she now? Right goodlookin too, they say. Nice jugs on her. Real nice ass.”

“You best quit tellin me such,” Hanford Mobley said with a chuckle. “It aint polite to get a man all hot and bothered when he’s in the can and cant do nothin about it.”

“I wouldnt of minded seein that show my ownself,” Glover said. “They say she was a real redhead that one, if you get my meanin and I reckon you do. Say she had a damn tattoo. A little turtle, like, right down here, just over her pussy.”

Hanford Mobley sat with the cigarette to his mouth and a ready match in his hand and stared hard at something that was not there.

When Hicks the night jailer came on duty Hanford Mobley called him over to the bars and said he wanted to postpone things till the following night, His partner was being brought in tomorrow and he wanted to take him out with him.

“Whoa now, bubba,” Hicks whispered, looking about and leaning against the bars. “That aint the deal. Old Joe paid me just for you. He didnt say nothin about nobody else.”

“You’ll get paid for it,” Mobley said.

“How I know that?”

Hanford Mobley stared at him. Hicks licked his lips. “You’ll tell Old Joe you asked for your partner too?”

Hanford Mobley turned and spat on the stone floor and then looked at him again.

“Goddamn, man, I just wanna be sure I get paid for it is all I’m sayin.”

They brought Roy Matthews into the jail that afternoon and put him in a cell at the far end of the lockup. As Matthews went past Hanford Mobley’s cell they looked at each other but neither said anything.

That evening W. W. Hicks came into the cell block with his heels clacking on the stone floor and a clipboard under his arm. Besides Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews, there were but five other inmates in the lockup this night and some of them observed the proceedings with idle curiosity. Hicks went to Hanford Mobley’s cell and called out loudly in his official jailer’s voice, “All right, Mobley, you’re on cleanup detail tonight and I dont want no fucken argument about it and no slackin on the job neither! You and…” He made a show of looking at his clipboard, of running his finger down a sheet of paper. “You and the fucken new fish…Matthews.” He unlocked Hanford Mobley’s cell and Mobley followed him down to the end of the block where Roy Matthews sat on his bunk and stared out at them. “Get on out here, new fish,” Hicks said. “Dont nobody get free room and board, not in this jail. You gone earn you keep with a bucket and mop.”

He led them to a closet just outside the barred door to the row and from it they took a broom and a mop and a bucket. “Now I want you boys to start out here in the store room where they was unpacking stuff this week and it’s a real mess,” Hicks said, still addressing them in his official voice as he guided them down the hall to a thick door he unlocked with his ring of keys. They went in and he closed the door behind them. The room was littered with broken boxes and small crates and baling wire and torn canvas tents.

“All right, you boys,” Hicks said, “there it is.” He pointed to a skylight nearly ten feet over the center of the room. The glass was thick and iron-framed and locked shut with a padlock through an eyering. A slim crowbar about two feel long lay on a box and Hicks took it up and said, “This oughta do for her.” Roy Matthews took the crowbar from him and tested its heft.

“Now you got to tie me up good,” Hicks said as he rummaged in the debris. “Make it look right.” He came up with some thick strips of canvas. “This here’ll work good as rope. Then you put a gag on me and get youselfs out that skylight and thats all she wrote. You just a coupla jailbirds got the jump on me and made away.”

“Maybe that rope there be better for tying you,” Roy Matthews said.

“What rope’s that?” Hicks said, turning to look where Matthews pointed. Matthews swung the crowbar against the back of his head with a soft crack and Hicks fell as if his bones had gone to milk.

“God damn, man!” Hanford Mobley said. “What you do that for?” He stepped over Hicks so he could watch Matthews ever as he squatted to check the fallen man.

“Make it look right, didnt he say?” Roy Matthews said. “Well, this’ll look right and didnt take near as long. What the hell, he aint but a fucken jail hack.”

“He’s a friend of Grandaddy’s, who he is,” Mobley said. He probed for a pulse under Hicks’ jaw and could not find it and was sure Hicks was dead and then he felt it. Mobley stood up. “He’s alive, no thanks to you.”

They both looked up at the skylight and then around the room. “Dont look like any these busted crates any good for standin on,” Roy Matthew said.

“Give me that iron and make a stirrup with you hands,” Hanford Mobley said.

Roy Matthews looked at him.

“I’m lighter than you,” Mobley said. “You boost me up and I’ll bust the lock. Then we’ll make a rope of them pieces of canvas and I’ll brace myself and haul you up.”

“Real good plan, sonny,” Roy Matthews said. “What’s to keep you from going on without me once you make the roof?”

“You damn fool. You think I couldnt of got out of here before now? I been waitin on you. Not cause I give a shit about you—cause I dont. It’s only cause Grandaddy wanted me to. Now we gone stand here arguin all fucken night or we gone get out of here?”

Matthews gave him the little prizing bar and interlaced the fingers of his hands to form a stirrup and Hanford Mobley stepped into it and Matthews heaved him up and braced Mobley’s foot at belly level. Mobley caught hold of the frame around the skylight with one hand to steady himself and worked the bar into the padlock yoke. On his third hard pull the yoke broke open. He took the lock out of the eye-ring and tossed it aside and pushed the skylight window up and it fell open onto the roof with a loud bang and it was a wonder the glass did not shatter.

“Shitfire!” Roy Matthews grunted under Hanford Mobley’s weight on his hands. “Think you might can be a little noisier about it?”

Hanford Mobley laid the crowbar on the roof and called down, “Higher! Boost me higher.”

“God damn,” Roy Matthews said. He grit his teeth and raised Mobley’s foot up almost to his chin, elevating him high enough so he could pull himself up onto the graveled roof by arm strength. Mobley took a moment to catch his breath and then slipped the crowbar into his belt and lay on his belly to look down at Roy Matthews who was quickly trying together some of the strips of canvas. Matthews then tied a loop in one end of the line and slipped it under his arms like a sling and tossed up the other end of the line to Mobley who took up the slack and wound it around his back for support and then sat at the edge of the skylight with his legs drawn up and his heels braced against the frame of it. He leaned forward into the opening and reached as far down on the line as he could and got a tight two-hand grip and then slowly straightened and leaned back and pushed himself away from the window frame with his legs and thus raised Roy Matthews up high enough so he could grab onto the skylight frame and work himself up on the roof.

They scurried to the corner of the building and shinned down the drainpipe there. They paused to listen for sounds of alarm but heard none and then raced across the moonbright stretch of grass to the woods beyond and plunged into the pines. They made their way to Turtle Creek and followed it eastward through the swamp where little light of the waning gibbous moon did penetrate. They came at last to the lagoon which formed a portion of the intracoastal waterway and they began searching for the skiff. The clouds of mosquitoes were so thick they could be clutched by the fistful and squeezed to bloody paste in the palm. They flailed at the maddening whine at their ears as they tramped through the brush and stumbled on mangrove roots along the lagoon bank and finally both of them dug dripping scoops of malodorous muck and coated their faces and arms with it against the rage of mosquitoes.

They found the skiff lashed to a mangrove in a small cleared portion of bank about twenty yards north of the creek. In it was a jug of water and a croker sack containing a dozen oranges, some smoked mullet and cornbread, a box of matches and a sheathed skinning knife. They gobbled down the food and Hanford Mobley put the knife on his belt. Then Roy Matthews set himself in the fore of the boat and Mobley pushed them off and took up the pole and stood near the stern and began poling north for Skeet Massey’s fishcamp at Pompano.

Roy Matthews turned once and grinned palely in the moonlight and said, “We done er,” and Hanford Mobley said, “Yeah we did.”

They spoke no more as the skiff glided through the water with a barely visible green-yellow glow in its wake. The mosquitoes were not so severe out here on the water where there was at least a small breeze to help keep them at bay. From the dark pine came a deep hollow hooting of an owl. An enormous school of mullet broke the surface ahead of them in a great phosphorescent shimmer like a shattering of burning glass and both of them sucked their breath at the sight.

The moon rode high and made slow progress across the black heaven and its spangled of stars. After a time the mangroves drew in on them from both sides and shadows dappled the skiff and again mosquitoes closed on them in a densely humming mass.

Hanford Mobley put down the pole and slipped the skinning knife from its sheath. The blade was eight inches long and felt razorous to his thumb. He had intended to use the crowbar but a knife was so much better. An engine of keener intimacy. Used properly a knife allowed for at least a moment’s mutual reflection between the principals and thus a truer sense of reckoning. He stepped forward lightly as a cat.

Roy Matthews noted the slowing of the boat and started to turn around as Mobley’s shadow fell over him and he felt a sudden horrid pain at his neck and knew in the instant that his throat had been slashed to the neckbone.

His hands went to his wound in a desperate pawing and he tried to get up but Hanford Mobley kicked him in the chest and he sprawled in the rocking bow and felt the blood coursing hotly down his chest and sopping his shirt and his horror was such that he would have screamed but for windpipe and voice box having been severed as well. The sound from his mouth was the deep gurgle of a drain abruptly unplugged and blood rushed into his lungs and he choked and saw the dimming moon above the through his last loud try for breath he heard Hanford Mobley asking if she’d been worth it.