Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (69) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
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By Roger Owens

Sunday,
July 18, 1920,
7:00 AM

The Citizens Bank of Tampa was considered Tampa’s first high-rise building of any kind. It was built in 1913 at 701 North Dale Mabry Boulevard, with ten stories, and was one hundred and twenty feet tall. That in itself had not been terribly interesting to Joe Ashley. The fact that Eli Witt, the founder of Have-A-Tampa Cigars, deposited his receipts into Citizen’s Bank on a regular and predictable basis was, however, very interesting.
    Joe had still never told even John who Geneva was, who it was that gave them most of the leads they turned into profitable jobs. John didn’t mind, in fact he agreed that the less he knew the better. They let it be known it was John who came up with most of the jobs, and that it was Laura who cased the targets ahead of time.
    The truth was, Joe thought disgustedly, that Laura Upthegrove was the most famous woman in Florida, “Queen of the Everglades” for God’s sake, having called down all the attention in the world on them, the stupid bitch. She had an ass the size of the Everglades, with a mouth to match, and couldn’t have walked into a Five-and-Dime in Pahokee to “case” it without being recognized immediately.

Laura Upthegrove was fucking psychic

    She was also dumber than hammered dogshit. Besides keeping John on a short leash, her one talent was something Joe couldn’t quite define. The woman was fucking psychic. She could smell trouble on the wind before the best bloodhound got a sniff. She could spot a cop a mile away, and if she saw a guy two blocks down and said, “I don’t like that man,” they all took the next turn.
    Today it was Joe’s intention that, just like the Jacksonville job, the money would never get into the bank. But this time, they needed different tactics.
    Unlike the Jacksonville job, the Ashleys had an inside man in Tampa. One of John’s delivery men was up Jacksonville way and had talked to a police sergeant who had been sent to buy the liquor for the cops that week. The sergeant had assured the bootlegger that the young man injured in the “accident” had gotten the best care, and was doing fine. He also suggested a name in the Tampa area, should John ever turn his attention in that direction; he was sure whatever reward John thought fair would be satisfactory.
    With these two critical points of information coinciding, the deposit schedule for Have-A-Tampa and an inside contact, the chances of a successful job were high. The tactical problem was the sheer volume of the take; there were three armored trucks full of nothing but cash. Eli Witt didn’t deal with bonds or gold, just the cash takes from his many cigar shops and factories. There would be no chance to put it into their cars there on the street. The only solution was both simple and scary: take the trucks.
    That’s where the inside man came into play. The Ashleys were about to put on a show. They were parked in three older Model T’s across the street as the trucks pulled up on the east side, right in front of the bank doors. Another beat-up Model T was parked just in front of where the inside guy, sergeant Robert T. Whitmer, pulled up in the first truck.
    The second all three trucks stopped, the gang were out of their cars with Thompson submachine guns, while Clarence Middleton carried a BAR with a “bail,” the handle that allowed one man to fire the weapon without blistering his hands. He stopped one step out of another banged-up old jalopy, and fired twenty heavy rounds into the Ford in front of the armored trucks. The vehicle was torn to scrap in seconds, and many of the bullets went on through to gouge massive pock marks in the concrete sidewalk and the wall of the bank.
    “Get yer asses out a’ them trucks or you’re all gonna die!” Clarence yelled, and gave the ford another half-dozen shots. All the tires went flat, the windows blew out, the front bumper hung down to the road on the left, and the driver’s door, with a despondent squeal, fell off to crash on the pavement.

Whitmer said loudly, “Don’t kill us, guys, please!”

    Whitmer jumped up and slammed open the back doors. Hands in the air, he said loudly, “Don’t kill us, guys, please!”
    The two guards in that truck piled out behind him, scared to death.
    Middleton turned the Browning on the other trucks. “Out! That armor won’t stop this baby! Out right now or you’re dead!”
    It was true. The trucks’ walls were made to stop pistols, even some rifles, but not a .50 caliber. Both the other trucks opened up, and five more men stood in the street shaking, with their hands in the air.
    “The keys! Hand over the keys!” Joe took the keys for the front truck, Hanford the second, and Tom Maddox the rear. He’d driven big trucks and farm equipment up in Minnesota, he’d said, at least a hundred times, in Middleton’s opinion. The farm boy irritated him no end with his funny accent and constant yammerin’. He made sure to get in the second truck; Handsome knew how to drive. In one minute, they were wheeling the trucks around the corner going north on Dale Mabry, then right on Cypress Street, headed west towards the Hillsborough River.
    The river here was a lot like the St. John’s in Jacksonville, a tangle of mangroves, swamp and backwaters. The only ways to the river by land were mostly dirt fishing roads, thoroughly checked out ahead of time by Hanford Mobley.
    Since Prohibition had come, earlier in the year, Ed and Frank had bought a couple of fishing boats to run in rum from the Brits in the Bahamas. This job would pay significantly better than smuggling bootleg booze, and so they had sailed around through the Florida Straights and were waiting at the Hillsborough River.
    The cops had no time to react; they drove through the quiet Sunday sunrise, hardly a car on the road. Three armored trucks downtown was not the least unusual, so people who did see them ignored them. The bank called the West Tampa Police Department, and officers Juan Nales and Tranquilo Martinez were dispatched to the scene.
    Juan was a short, stocky man with straight black hair cut military close on the sides but longer on top, who made the West Tampa police uniform look like it was ironed onto his muscled frame. He didn’t like working Sunday mornings. His wife Concepcion was very devout, and didn’t like it that he had to take one Sunday a month in the rotation and miss Mass.

Tranquilo was anything but tranquil

    His brother Lorenso, also a West Tampa police officer, had the same problem. Sometimes they rode together on the rotation, and that was good, but this time Tranquilo was his partner. Tranquilo was anything but tranquil; he was nervous, fidgety, he worried all the time and he smoked too much. He was too skinny, and his clothes hung on him like a coat on a hanger. He had black curly hair like a Jew, his eyes seemed to bulge just a little too white, and he always held his head back, looking down his nose like a snake ready to strike.
    Juan’s first child, Isabella Valentina Cordoba y Nales, was thirteen months, and Concepcion was living up to her name, now three months along with what his mother-in-law, Isabella Cordoba, assured him was a son. The last thing he needed on this quiet Sunday was a bank robbery.
    Seven minutes after the robbery, Tranquilo and Juan drove up in front of Citizen’s Bank, to find eight off-duty cops, moonlighting as bank guards, standing in the street looking confused. Three beat-up black Model T’s sat on the west side of the street, and one in front of the bank was chopped up like nothing Tranquilo’d ever seen.
    “Holy Mother of God, Juan, will you look at that car?” It looked as if a hailstorm of lead had flown sideways at it and blown a significant portion of it out the passenger side, onto the sidewalk.
    Juan had seen the like before; he’d served a year in the Army at the end of the Great War and knew the work of a machine gun when he saw it. Juan recognized Whitmer as a sergeant on the City of Tampa police force. Out the window of the car he said, “What the fuck happened?”
    “The fuckin’ Ashleys happened!” Whitmer yelled. He had his own show to put on now, and for the money he was being paid, and to keep his ass out of Raiford, he was going to make it a good one. “They had a God damn machine gun! You see that fuckin’ car? John Ashley himself gave me this.”
    He showed them a .45 caliber bullet with two capital B’s scratched on it. “Said, ‘If you see Sheriff Bobby Baker, tell him this is for him, just like the one for his daddy.’ What the hell you think that’s supposed to mean?”
    They believed him. Everybody else believed him too. It was them God damn Ashleys, after all. With machine guns! What could a man do?
    The West Tampa officers determined that the trucks had gone north on Dale Mabry, so they went that way. At Cypress, for no reason he could think of, Juan turned right. That way lay the mainland, and he instinctively figured the robbers had to get off the Hillsborough Peninsula to get away with the trucks.

Somehow Handsome Hanford Mobley missed the turnoff

    In fact, the Ashleys had gone that way not to escape the water, but to escape on it. They rolled across the Laurel Street bridge at 7:14 AM. They should have taken the first dirt road south, towards Cass Street, but somehow Handsome Hanford Mobley missed it. Before he knew it, they were rolling past Oaklawn Cemetery, and he whipped the ungainly truck to the right on North Jefferson.
    Son of a bitch, Middleton thought, Handsome done went and got hisself lost. He yelled from the passenger seat, “Pull over! I’ll find out how to get back to the river. Pull over there by the cemetery!” He jumped out and ran back towards a house he’d seen when they turned off Laurel.
    Margaret Mabry wasn’t nosy; she just liked to know what was going on in her neighborhood. When she saw three armored cars swerve off Cypress and pull to the side, she snatched the curtain halfway closed, and watched a man, a big man, run to her neighbor’s house on the corner of Laurel and pound on the door.
    He must not know the Sanfords, she thought; they were never up this early. When he continued to pound and yell at the door, she decided she needed to do something. She was the second person in her neighborhood to have a telephone, and she was proud of that fact. She went to the kitchen and lifted the handset on her Western Electric telephone, and cranked the handle.

“Operator? Operator? Mary Beth, are you there?” Mary Beth answered, not surprised to hear Miss Margaret this early on a Sunday; she called anyone she could think of at the drop of a hat.

“Could you connect me to the West Tampa Police Department?”

    “Mary Beth, could you connect me to the West Tampa Police Department? Somethings going on over to the Sanford’s…”
    Officers Nales and Martinez stopped at a call box at Cypress and Munro and Juan called in, and was directed to an address on Laurel, just the other side of the river. A resident claimed to have seen the armored trucks, and now there was a prowler, possibly connected. Suspects armed and dangerous.
    “Yeah, base, we saw how dangerous they are.” He hung up and Tranquilo stared at him, his eyes bulging even more than usual.
    “These hombres malos in armored cars with machine guns, I do not think I wish to catch up with such men.”
    Juan said, “It might be just a burglar.” Some burglars took advantage of good Christian folk and tried to rob them when they knew they would be at Mass, and it just flat pissed Juan Nales off.
    Tranquilo flicked his cigarette away, ran shaky hands over his face, through his thick black hair. “Let us hope so,” and crossed himself.
    They jumped in the car and raced north on Munro the five blocks to Laurel, then sped west over the bridge. The address was on the south east corner of Laurel and North Jefferson.
    The pulled up three minutes after the call and sure as hell, there was a guy in overhauls coming off the front porch. The second he saw the black-and-white he took off running, east, back towards the bridge.
    Juan screeched into a u-turn and cut the man off, as Tranquilo bailed out and jumped him from behind. He was a big man but Tranquilo was quick, and stronger than his slim build would suggest. He had the man down and had a knee in his back, but somehow the suspect twisted away, struck out, and Tranquilo was thrown to the ground.
    Juan was out of the car at that point and made his own run at the prowler, ploughing into his left side as he turned to run, expecting the man to go sprawling. It was like running into a tree. Santa Maria, the fellow was a brute!
    The brute turned on him with a snarl and grabbed him by his shirt and his crotch, crushing his cojones in a brutal grip. The man was lifting him off the ground like a child would swing a doll, and he cried out from the pain in his balls.

This monster manhandled him as if he was a boy

    He felt himself being turned on end, and the road came up fast and slammed him in the face. He felt his nose break, and the impact seemed to jar something loose in his brain. He was flailing at this monster that manhandled him as if he was a boy, but his arms didn’t want to work right, and his vision was going double.
    He tried to pull his service pistol, the Colt MP .38 most cops carried, but felt it ripped from his hand. He grabbed at an arm and hung on, saw Tranquilo just getting to his feet, a huge bruise on his face, his jaw crooked; the monster had hit him hard enough to break it. The arm he would not let go of held his pistol. The last thing Juan saw was the flash of that pistol going off.
    Tranquilo cried out as the man ran back past him, going west, turned right at North Jefferson and disappeared. He staggered to Juan, his jaw a grinding agony, and fell to the road across his friend’s body, wailing in pain and sadness. They never saw the armored cars.

Clarence Middleton couldn’t believe he’d had to shoot a cop. He hated shooting cops; all it really did was piss off more cops. You couldn’t kill ’em all. The damn fool just wouldn’t let go of his arm! He was sure he’d cracked the guy’s skull, had heard it hit the street and pop like a ripe coconut. Anybody else would have gone down for the count. This kid had pulled his gun. He’d had balls, that was for sure, but when his buddy got up, Middleton knew he had no time.
    He shot the kid, then as he ran past his partner realized that guy would have been no threat; Middleton had seen enough broken jaws to know he was out of the fight. Felt kind of proud about that. One right hook had shoved that guy’s teeth into next Tuesday.
    As he pelted up to the armored truck and jumped in, he saw Hanford had the map out. Good thing too; Middleton hadn’t found out shit.
    “Got it,” Handsome said, “straight down to Cass and then right to the river.”
    When the three trucks rolled around onto Cass, it quickly turned to marl and sand with mangroves and water all around. They came to a cross road and could see the river through the tangle of swampy saltwater jungle ahead.

A boat horn tooted just south of them

    Hanford hit the horn button, and a second later, a boat horn tooted just south of them.
    They turned left, and within fifty yards came to an opening in the mangroves big enough for the three trucks to back up to the water. A dock ran out to where Ed and Frank had their boats backed up to the dock and tied up, both forty-eight foot Western-rigged Stonington Draggers.
    These were New-England-built trawlers with the wheelhouses in the bows, as opposed to the Eastern-riggers with their pilothouses aft. They were used for inshore ground-fishing and perfectly capable of making the crossing to the Bahamas to bring back British rum and gin, or sailing around the Straits of Florida and back to Stuart.
    But these boats held no fishing rigs. Instead, they’d been fitted with swivel sockets for two of the .50 caliber Browning automatic rifles to be mounted at either corner of the transoms. The Ashleys saw no reason to have guns pointing forward; if they had to shoot at anybody on the water, their targets would be behind their boats, trying to chase them down.
    Ed and Frank each manned one of these guns, on the port sides of either boat. The boats faced south, down the Hillsborough River, ready to load the money and make their way into Hillsborough Bay. From there they would enter greater Tampa Bay, a gigantic inland sea lake, and make their escape, back around the Florida Keys to the east coast.
    It took over an hour to unload the trucks and stow the money sacks belowdecks, in the reeking holds that had recently held fish, bait, and ice.

Ed left his gun to help hump money

    Ed left his gun to help hump money; they figured that if the cops showed, Frank could hold them off easily enough to give them time to get away. The whole time, police cruisers wailed their sirens up and down the nearby streets, and they were so close to the Laurel Street Bridge just to their north that they could see the black squad cars zipping back and forth across the river, through the tangle of mangrove and seagrape.
    When the two boats were loaded with about half the cash each, they stowed the Brownings, cast off, and with the river flow carrying them southward, motored sedately through the early sunlight into the vast, empty, sun-glittering expanse of Hillsborough Bay.

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens