Girl Out Back by Charles Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

and then shot his way out. The first one, in St. Louis, had resulted in the death of a teller and a bank guard, and had netted him less than nine thousand dollars. The second one was in suburban Detroit. It gained him eighty thousand dollars for a few short minutes until the gang member carrying the majority of the loot was shot down in the street outside the bank in a gun battle with police. Haig and the other two escaped with something like fifteen thousand dollars, leaving behind them a dead patrolman and another with a bullet-shattered hip. The outcry in the newspapers crescendoed.
    It was in Sanport in February that the realities of life in the 1950s with their police networks, F.B.I, co-operation, protective alarm systems, and traffic clogged streets and highways caught up with him at last. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say they caught up with his gang. He hit the Gulf First National with three other men. They killed another guard, wounded a bank official, and looted it of nearly a hundred and seventy thousand dollars. The whole thing caved in on him then, as anybody would know it inevitably had to, and the getaway became a shambles. They left the first member, Red Jolley, on the steps of the bank with a police bullet in his abdomen. The driver of the getaway car was shot through the head in the first block. The other man in the front seat shoved him out of the door and took the wheel. Haig was in the back seat with the bag containing the loot. Twenty minutes later, on the outskirts of the city but still inside the crystallizing ring of roadblocks being set up by the police, the getaway car slammed into the rear of a slow-moving truck at better than sixty miles an hour. Both vehicles careened across the dividing line into oncoming traffic, involving two other cars in the smash-up before coming to rest. Police were swarming all over the scene in slightly more than ninety seconds. The driver of the getaway car was still behind the wheel, dead of a broken neck. Haig; Haig was nowhere.
    It was as if he had calmly stepped from the wreckage and boarded a flying saucer for Mars, carrying the bag of loot with him. Nobody saw him. The money was gone. Nobody had ever seen him again, to this day. That was a year and a half ago.
    It was not so much that it was impossible he could have escaped in that ninety seconds of wild confusion as it was just unthinkable he could have got completely away and continued to elude the vast and continuing search for him that was still going on eighteen months later. There was simply no place he could hide. He was too hot for the underworld to touch with a barge-pole. He was a cop-killer, and he was on the F.B.I.’s “most wanted” list. He couldn’t have bought protection or concealment from anybody with any kind of money, with ten times the amount he was carrying.
    And they knew everything about him that there was to know.
    Red Jolley had lived long enough to talk. He told them who Haig was and where he’d come from. The F.B.I, had gone on from there and when they were through they could have written a six-volume biography of him. They had photographs, descriptions, fingerprints, and a dossier on his personal habits all the way from his preferences in girls down to the way he liked his eggs for breakfast. His picture had been on the front page of every newspaper and displayed on the walls of every post-office in the country. And it had all come to exactly nothing. Haig had, to all outward appearances, evaporated. Along with the entire haul from one of the biggest bank robberies in history.
    I lit another cigarette and lay looking up at the dark, aware again of the fantastic impossibility that this could have anything to do with him. But, damn it, the facts were there, and they were incontestable. I lined them up in my mind.
    One. That money had never been found.
    Two. The fact that they were still looking for it proved that. It also proved that at least part of it was