Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (23) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
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By Roger Owens

March 1915

Kid Lowe had readily admitted to shooting John, in front of the whole family back in Gomez. “He was back inside reloading. Smart, like, so’s the front-seat guy can shoot, ya know? Like he knew what I was thinkin’.”
    Lowe’s nasal whine irritated Hanford Mobley no end, and he was disgusted by the sucking up, but he listened closely to what was being said.
    “I fucked up,” Lowe continued, “I was too far out th’ window, and when we hit that bump, fuck, I shot him. Saw it all. He started hollerin’ right away.”

Everybody knew John was her baby

    Aunt Lugenia took to wailing. She rarely cried, but everybody knew John was her baby.
    Bob and Frank stepped up behind Lowe, as if to collar him. They would kill him right now, Lowe was sure, and he’d deserve it for a fuckup like that, especially after blowing the train payroll caper. But Hanford waved them off, and they backed up. Lowe and Shorty Lynn both caught it.
    Joe Ashley said nothing, just hugged his wife as she sobbed quietly. Looked like the nephew was in charge now. He bucked right up in Kid Lowe’s face. He looked like a punk, but Lowe had seen him drive, crazy as nine hundred niggers, and it had scared the living shit out of him.
    “You,” Mobley said, “need to do somethin’ to see to it they don’t railroad Uncle John. I don’t care what you do, long as it works. Now we got work to do. Bob, work with Lowe and Shorty on a way to break Uncle John outta that clink. Frank, we need some new transportation.”
   The older men nodded; it indeed appeared Hanford was the new boss. He assigned Ed and Clarence “Tom” Middleton to go around to the locals and spread a little cash around, just like John always did. Not enough to make folks jealous, but enough to make them thankful. The gang regularly understated the amounts they made off with. When Ed distributed what was essentially hush money, he let it about that they had taken about forty-five hundred dollars. Their actual take that day was over forty-six thousand in paper and silver. Hanford figured it would hold them for a while, but Joe had other ideas. He and Geneva had been talking.

Two weeks later Hanford, Frank, Joe, Ed and Tom Middleton robbed the Miami Mutual Savings and Loan. Joe drove his Peugeot, with Ed riding shotgun. Hanford drove with Frank and Tom in a 1912 Austro-Daimler Prince Henry, stripped down, souped up, and modified to have a covered cab.
    Frank had driven the battered Austin down 441 and across Alligator Alley to Naples and traded with some boys they knew over there named Rice who boosted cars for a living. He’d come back with the Daimler, saying they’d told him it had been snatched in Huntsville Alabama, and was cold as ice.
    It would be the first time Mobley had driven a car someone else had worked on, and he was skeptical.
    Frank tried to put his mind at ease. “She drives like a dream, Han,” he offered hopefully. “Jack Rice said to tell you, some guy named Ferdie designed the engine. He said you’d want to know.”
    “Ferdie? Did he say the last name?”
    Frank, not the sharpest knife, thought hard. “Porch. Somethin’ like porch.”
    Hanford’s eyes popped open. “Are you saying Ferdinand Porsche designed this car?”
    Frank was shaking his head. “The engine. He said he designed the engine.”
    Mobley just laughed. “Good enough for me. Let’s take her for a spin.”
    She indeed drove like a dream and would do ninety-six miles an hour on a decent road. The Daimler had been designed as a race car, so the suspension wasn’t the best for rough country, but it wasn’t the worst either. And it would leave those Model T Sheriffs’ cars in the dust.
    The gang repeated the setup of the heist in Stuart in February, only this time Joe, dressed as the Dapper Bandit, drove away north with fifty thousand dollars in bearer bonds in a briefcase, looking for all the world like a legitimate businessman or banker. Ed, dressed as a high-class chauffeur, nevertheless sat in the passenger’s seat; Joe still wouldn’t let anyone else drive his car.
    Most of the cops had no idea what bearer bonds even were, and if a well-dressed gentleman in a fancy car claimed they were his, what could they say? This was a stroke of fortune for Joe, who owed Geneva big time, and that’s how she preferred her cut. Bearer bonds were negotiable anywhere, anytime, to the “bearer” thereof, hence the name. If they were on any known bank, any other bank would cash them, for whoever presented them. Bearer bonds required no paperwork and no signature. They had been designed to make the transactions of the super-rich untraceable; they worked just as well for criminals.

Bearer bonds had a certain glamour to Geneva

    And, they had a certain glamour to Geneva. She would ride up the coast in style on Henry Flagler’s railroad to Jacksonville, or sometimes Savannah, and cash them out in banks where she, as well as the origin of said bonds, were unknown. Joe thought that it was because when a mysterious woman showed up at a bank with a fortune in bonds to cash out, she was treated like the rich socialite she had been and was becoming again. She could have taken cash, but she would have missed the ass-kissing adoration of those she considered beneath her.
    Joe and Ed’s end worked out well; for Hanford, Tom Middleton and Frank Ashley, it was another story entirely.
    This time Mobley insisted on being in on the action, taking a chance and leaving the new Daimler unattended on the street.
    The front of the Miami Mutual Savings and Loan faced east, so this time Hanford’s car was on the same side of the road, pointed south. He parked a few spaces down, leaving the motor running. It was common to do so, and two of the cars they passed were also rumbling softly, their drivers in stores or the bank.
    Frank went in first, and, true to form, got in line like everybody else. It was a slow day, and only six other customers were in line.
    Hanford and Middleton followed closely behind, got in another line, and they waited until they were next in line for the two tellers to serve them.

“Everybody down!”

    Joe burst in the doors, yelling “Everybody down!” and firing his Short Colt into the ceiling, playing John’s role.
    Ed barreled in right behind him, and they broke for the manager’s office, to the right of the teller windows.
    Handsome Hanford Mobley and Frank Ashley muscled their way past screaming women and an old man with a cane, jumped over the counter and began cleaning out the drawers, dropping stacks of cash into a burlap bag held by Middleton.
    This manager gave the pair of pistol-waving dandies, a gent and his chauffeur apparently, no trouble at all. He seemed almost eager to help them into the vault.
    They went right to the bearer bonds, but when Joe saw how much cash was there, he called the other boys into the safe. “Forget the drawers! Get in here!”
    Hanford and Frank scrambled in, drew up short at the unexpected piles of cash, then started shoveling it into their burlap bags.
    Tom Middleton took what had come from the drawers and ran through the frightened women and out the door. He noticed the old man looking at him almost defiantly but thought nothing of it.
    “Watch ’em, watch the door!” Joe shouted. They had no lookout, they didn’t even have anyone watching the terrified victims, who were likely as not to run screaming into the street.
    Joe placed the cash and bonds into the briefcase, and Ed covered him with his gun down by his thigh as they strolled out the door and across the road to the Peugeot.
    Frank and Hanford stumbled from the vault thirty seconds later, and stopped dead, looking straight into the barrel of a security guard’s gun.

Where the hell had he come from?

    Mobley looked at the man. Where the hell had he come from? He was at least sixty, and his Police Special snub-nosed thirty-eight wavered in his hand. His eyes looked like dinnerplates. Hanford raised his own Police Super in one smooth motion and shot the guard three times in the chest.
    The terrorized customers screamed. The man hadn’t landed in his own blood before the newly-minted teen-aged murderer was trampling him, hauling a sack of cash the size of a bag of horse feed.
    Frank was on his heels with another, and as they rushed from behind the counter, they saw the old man with his cane on the floor to their right. He wore a threadbare, brown-striped suit with matching brown bowler hat, shiny with age, and in his hand, he held a cocked Colt Peacemaker, a single-action forty-five caliber cannon right out of the Old West.
    Had Mobley not been moving so quickly the old man would have drilled him for sure and for certain. He started to raise his pistol when the Colt roared, and his right arm went numb. It was like being hit with a baseball bat. The Super went flying and Hanford spun helplessly to his right.
    Frank, who carried the same model of forty-five automatic Kid Lowe did, pushed him down from behind and blasted the old bastard to rags with five shots. More screams from the women on the floor. He might not have been smart, Hanford thought, but he was an Ashley, and by God he could shoot. Wasn’t never an Ashley born couldn’t shoot.

“Let’s go let’s go let’s go!”

    Frank was shouting, “Let’s go let’s go let’s go!” The big beefy man grabbed Hanford easily up by the shoulder and he cried out in pain.
    But then, Hanford stopped, turned, spotted his pistol and went to get it before he would run. He also grabbed the old man’s Colt. It was a beautiful piece, silvery steel with a knurled bone grip. The old man had managed to cock it for a second shot before Frank had killed him.
    Frank couldn’t figure out if Mobley and the old man were both brave, or just stupid. Frank would have run out the door, but Mobley put a hand on his shoulder.
    “Ain’t nobody raised no ruckus yet ’cept for the shots, we just walk, like normal. And put your gun away.”
    Frank nodded, turned, and pointed his gun around at the cowering women and the bloody, crumpled form of the old man. “Don’t you come out this door, or I’ll shoot you deader’n him!”
    The women all nodded vigorously, shuddering in fright. Hanford had time to wonder what the hell the manager was doing, maybe hiding under his desk like the last guy, the one they told him pissed his pants?

Frank tucked his forty-five in his belt

   Then Frank tucked his forty-five in his belt under his shirt, and they stepped out into the South Florida sunshine.
    Hanford stuck both pistols in his own belt and turned right towards the car, Frank following a pace behind, looking around nervously. Mobley strode purposefully ahead, eyes forward, toward that beautiful new Daimler.
    They were almost to the car when a Palm Beach Sheriff car slewed around the corner behind them. They threw the bags into the back and jumped in. Hanford clutched into first and floored it, the tires spinning and throwing sand out behind.
    The patrol car, already moving fast, came up beside them. Handsome Hanford Mobley, as Frank would later tell it, while accelerating and shifting gears, also calmly aimed the old man’s Peacemaker at the cop’s front right tire and blew it to shit. In third now and doing sixty, he looked in Frank’s eyes for several seconds while the hog-wire field fences went by the window in a blur.
    “Thank you, Uncle Frank. You saved my life.”
    Only then did he look back to the road. The wheel, Frank swore, never wavered.

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens