Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (60) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
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all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Tuesday,
April 30, 1918,
concluded

Thus had begun a long and mutually prosperous relationship between Duval County and Barnett Bank. Bion swore on the spot his bank would never charge the county a dime in transfer fees, if the county would simply deposit its funds with the Barnett National Bank of Jacksonville. From that day on, the fortunes of Barnett Bank began to increase.
    According to Geneva, every other Tuesday was the day the county’s receipts were deposited, by armored truck, at around six-thirty AM. Today was that day.
    It was now six-thirteen, according to Joe’s gold watch, which also had a fob connected to his vest.
    Geneva had made those eyes at him again when she told him all this, saying “He’s such a sweet darling.”
    Joe frowned. “Barnett?”
    She rolled her eyes. “That old stick? Hell no, he’s so tight-assed he squeaks when he walks. No, silly, Henry.”

Geneva had all sorts of side hustles

    So, Joe thought, even the tax collector of Duval County needed his ashes hauled now and again, and he had to admit, Henry could do a lot worse than Geneva Pitt. She was probably flim-flamming L’Engle too; Geneva had all sorts of side hustles; investment scams, forged bearer-bonds and non-existent land in the Everglades. She couldn’t help it, he reckoned; it was just in her nature. Gators would eat a man, snakes would bite him, and Geneva Pitt, if she got her claws into him, would suck a man dry and throw away the bones.
    John Ashley, Tom Maddox, Tom Middleton, Shorty Lynn and Hanford Mobley walked slowly towards the bank, maybe a three-minute walk from the riverfront.
    Ed pulled the Isotta up the marl extension of Main Street down to the river, and stopped before the car got past the bushes. It was summer and the sun was up early, promising to be as brutal and unforgiving as always, but the car sat back in the shade, almost invisible in the light morning mist off the Saint John’s River.
    The five robbers on foot strolled past them and out into the morning sunshine, squinting around to check for cops or anyone else who might interfere. Jesus Christ, Joe thought; they’d stuck their pistols in the back of their pants, all but John, and from the back it was plain as day every one of them was packing. Even Tom Maddox! Jesus! He saw John slap the back of Hanford’s head and spit something his way, and they all pulled the guns out and stuck them in their pockets. It was better, but not much.
    John had his .357 Smith and Wesson down by his leg, and had some magical ability to walk like that with no one noticing it.
    Joe nostalgically remembered John as a boy, taking bets from his buddies and brothers that he could shoot through the neck of a horizontal beer bottle from twenty feet, without hitting the lip, and blow the back out with his 1903 Winchester .22 rifle. Most times, he took anyone’s money who would bet. Before long, he could do it every time, at forty feet. Not long after that, no one would bet him anymore. He had started that at ten years old.
    The group of men dawdled along, sipping from hip flasks and hanging on each other’s shoulders, the picture of a bunch of farm boys having spent the night in town drinking.

This kind of subtlety was new to Tom Maddox

    Tom Maddox was amazed. He’d always just walked into a bank, most times alone, stuck his Colt in somebody’s face and shouted, “Give me the money!” This kind of subtlety was new to him, and he hadn’t really expected subtlety from the Ashley Gang.
    John stopped them all with a hand at Forsyth, right across from the bank. He faked a bit of a drunken two-step, taking a sip from his flask, making it look like more than it was, and turned to them, gathering them, heads together. “Wait for the truck,” he said, his voice low.
    He looked west, to his left, down Forsyth, saw nothing. He swiveled his head around, awkwardly spying to the east with his remaining left eye, blinking into the rising sun. Saw nothing.
    Then Middleton bumped his arm, swung his chin back west.
    Up the slight rise from the brightening lower West Forsyth Street came a Bellamore Armored Bank Wagon. Geneva had told him that this type of truck would be used, which came in handy. David Havelock Bellamore had designed the first mass-produced armored bank car in America, inspired by his time working as a salesman for the Mosler Safe Company, in the 300 block of Broadway in Manhattan. Earlier models, from about 1910, had a fatal flaw: the back and sides of the driver’s compartment were armored, but with an open-cab design. There was simply no way to armor the front, where the driver had to grasp the steering wheel.
    John was actually counting on what he called “cheating” to make the nab; he wanted to catch the guards with the doors of the car open, while they unloaded the cash. He only intended to assault a closed armored car if he absolutely had to, and his only leverage would be to threaten to kill the driver if the men inside wouldn’t open up. That, in his calculations, would be the worst possible outcome, in which case he gave them only a twenty-five percent chance of success. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, most certainly not kill them; yet as such men will, he would have his way whatever happened.
    So, as the truck turned left and pulled up by the front doors, the group of “drunken farmers” staggered across the street to the north, headed for the slot between the truck and the bank doors. They continued to hang on each other, sipping from flasks, which none of them had to fake.
    They reached the far corner, and the armored car guards eyed them, but didn’t stop unloading sacks of money onto a four-wheeled cart they had ready to haul the sacks into the bank. There looked to be three workers and one like a sergeant who didn’t help with the bags. John saw, as he stepped up on the sidewalk, that one of them sipped from a flask of his own.
    Right then Ed, driving Joe, wheeled out of the mangrove shadows, cruising slowly past the armored car and pulling to the curb in front of it. Ed couldn’t resist revving that engine again; the whole point was to distract the guards. He then jumped out and scurried around to the rear passenger side and opened the door for his “employer,” as a good chauffeur would.

The guards ogled the fancy man who stepped out of the fancy car

    First the guards ogled the fancy car, then ogled the fancy man who stepped out of it. He was clean-shaven except for his pencil-thin mustache, his brown hair dyed black and greased back like Rudi Valentino. He was a big man but trim, and wore a black, double-breasted three-piece suit with tiny white stripes barely visible against the dark silk. His bow tie was black with tiny white checks, and his fedora was black felt with a matching silk hatband. He carried a shiny briefcase that was more like a large doctor’s bag, the bottom much wider than the top. Bion Barnett would have approved.
    He did not, however, approve much of what Joe did next. As Ed waited by the car door, not fifteen feet from the guards and their sacks of money, Joe walked briskly to the bank’s doors and pulled on the handle.
    Of course the doors were locked, and normally wouldn’t open until the manager inside saw the guards were at the door and ready to hustle through it, to have it securely locked again behind them. Joe figured he could have talked his way into the bank in his getup, but he didn’t need to. The money was out here, in fact right behind him, as he peered through the thick glass in obvious irritation.
    Meantime the drunken farmers weaved their way from the corner, right at the guards and the money, but the guards were looking at Joe, who began banging on the glass doors and shouting, although to the guards he seemed to shout in a civilized manner.
    Joe could see the bank manager coming, and his confusion at this obviously rich and important man banging on his bank doors. The manager was halfway across the vast lobby when the man outside put down his briefcase and turned. “You men!” Joe barked at the guards, although the manager couldn’t hear him. “See here, I have an important meeting here this morning, you must open the doors.”
    They stared at him in confusion, and one man began to speak. “We can’t open no doors, mister, they gotta…” when Tom Middleton staggered into him and knocked him flat. Another guard yelled and all three still on their feet turned to the group of farmers.
    Joe spun back to the door, popped open the briefcase, and pulled out a Thompson .45 caliber submachine gun. He didn’t use the fifty- or one hundred-round drum magazine, just the twenty-round block magazine, which he figured would be more than he would need. These guards would know in about one second that he could mangle them into hamburger in about two seconds with this chopper, but he still packed extra magazines.

The manager stopped dead

    Joe stood. The manager saw the gun, still hidden from the guards, who were now yelling at the drunken fools stumbling down the early morning sidewalk. The manager stopped dead, his face draining of color. Joe twitched his head; get lost. The manager nodded carefully, once, turned, and stepped unsteadily back towards his office.
    The second guard who’d yelled grabbed Tom Middleton by the left arm and Tom sucker-punched him in the gut so hard the doctors said later he’d ruptured the man’s spleen.
    Joe jacked a round into the Thompson as all the farmers drew pistols and aimed them at the astonished guards, two on their feet and two on the ground.
    The sergeant, still standing, was speechless to see even the rich man’s driver pointing a pistol at him, while the rich man had a tommy gun for God’s sake!
    The man Middleton had punched was puking up blood, which terrified the rest of them. Almost casually, John said, “Get that cash in the car boys, or this fella behind you is gonna make your wives widows right now.”
    Ed stepped back, still training his gun on the guards, and opened the trunk, which Joe had ordered to be extra-spacious for just such an opportunity as this, and the tool boxes on the running boards, which had been emptied for the trip. If they broke down or got a flat tire on a getaway, there would be no time for repairs.
    The sergeant grabbed the cart handle and desperately pulled it towards Joe’s car. “Come on you guys, Jesus! Move it!” he yelled, and the man standing stepped over while the one Tom had knocked down scrambled up to help. They got the money into the trunk and the boxes, surrounded by the robbers, and the sergeant looked at John.
    In the middle of the gang, out of sight of onlookers, he held out four stacks of bills, all that was left. He raised his shoulders and his eyebrows, questioning. John looked around at the rest of the boys, and they all smiled; even Middleton was nodding. He seemed pleased to learn the guards were as crooked as they all were, as if it confirmed a long-held opinion. It was a tiny fraction of what they were making off with, and a bank robber needed friends just like everybody else.

“Here, some extra for your friend”

    John reached in the driver’s side tool box and pulled out another stack. “Here, some extra for your friend. I think this dumbass swamp rat messed him up.”
    Middleton glared. “He’s gonna need good doctors, and his family—he got a family?”
    They nodded vigorously, the sergeant saying “Yeah, pretty young wife, and two little girls…”
    He sounded a little wistful to John, who never had children, or none he knew of. “Well, family is the most important thing you got in this world, maybe the only thing, and his are gonna need that extra money, so you see that he gets it, y’hear? All of it. Personally. Or I might have to come and visit you. You wouldn’t want that.”
    The sergeant was positive he would never want that, then said, “Ah, are you…?”
    Joe smiled, reached in his pocket, and pulled out a bullet. “This is for Sheriff George B. Baker of Palm Beach County. See he gets it, and tell him the King of the Everglades is back.”
    The guards all thanked him for robbing them, except the poor bastard still by the armored car, puking blood.
    John said “That’s great, guys, but now we gotta rough you up a little to make it look good. By now people are watchin’. Get that money out of sight, stuff it inside your coats.”
    They did, and as soon as they had, Tom Middleton, John Ashley and Tom Maddox each punched one of the officers in the chest, got them down and pummeled them on the pavers, still hitting them right where the bundles of money were. It looked way worse than it was.
    It looked good, and a few people were indeed watching. In the inquiry, the guards’ story was borne out by the injuries to the man Tom had punched in the gut. He got the best surgeon in town, and required sufficient surgery that the doctors could not say at first if he would live.
    With the money in the car, Joe had Ed drive him slowly away north on Main, and took the first left, Adams, out to Coastal Highway, where he took another left. He headed the car south, and when they got out of town, Ed let it out of the cage. He ran up to sixty in second gear, shifted smoothly into third, and ran her up to ninety-seven miles an hour.
    Joe said nothing, so he edged up over a hundred. The trees and fences flew by like branches in a hurricane; he’d never gone so fast in his life. It was like flying. Sweat began to pour down his forehead and into his eyes, although nothing changed about the solid, stately way the vehicle handled. Ed thought that if he dared close his eyes, he could imagine he was parked, not moving at all. He felt a tiny jolt of envy; Hanford would have dared.
    At one hundred and eleven miles per hour, Ed’s nerve broke. He backed off, and Joe grunted from the back. “You get that outta yer system?” He wasn’t talking like the Dapper Bandit now.
    Ed was nodding, grinning ahead. “Yeah Pa, I think I did…”

“Now pull over and get the hell out of my car”

    “Good,” Joe said flatly, “now pull over and get the hell out of my car.”
    Meantime, the “drunken farmers” locked the guards in with a padlock; this armored carriage had lock hasps inside and out. Tom Maddox had good-naturedly taken their keys before they left.
    They stuffed empty bank bags inside other empty bank bags from the truck. The gang then ran south down Main Street, carrying the bank bags, hooting and hollering drunkenly and firing their pistols in the air. They ran to the Peugeot in less than two minutes, threw the bags into the Saint John’s River, and all five crammed into the little car.
    Hanford spun out of the mangroves and west along the river. The marl road under the oaks ran parallel to Adams, three blocks north, and also opened on the Coastal Highway. As they pulled up to the highway, still back in the shade, the rising sun behind them, they saw the Isotta flash past like a bolt of tan lightning, gleaming like gold and silver.
    Hanford gave a whoop. “Yee-haw, look’it Ed go!” He pulled left behind the Fraschini but it was pulling away like they were standing still, or maybe going backwards. Handsome ran the Peugeot up to ninety, but he lost sight of the luxury car and it was several minutes before he saw it again, and only because it was stopped on the side of the road, and Joe was getting in the driver’s seat.
    Middleton was the one to laugh this time, and it gave Shorty the creeps. “I knew Joe wouldn’t let Ed rub his new pussy for long!”
    John slapped the back of Hanford’s head again, jammed in between Maddox and Shorty.
    Still doing ninety, Hanford scowled back without watching the road in that terrifying way of his. “What the hell was that for?”
    John looked out the right window, gritting his teeth. He wasn’t terrified, he was pissed.
    The seconds went by, Hanford looking at John, John looking away, and Shorty Lynn fearing he would soon shit his pants.
    “You passed the other God damn car about five miles back, dumb ass.”
    Hanford’s head snapped back to the road, but he needed no correction to his driving. He’d driven this road ten times for practice, and that was enough for him to know every bump and pothole. He slammed on the brakes, did a screeching U-turn, tires smoking, and sped back north.
    “Slow down,” John bitched. “I don’t wanna go to prison again for a God damn speeding ticket.”

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens