Handsome Harry Read Online Free Page B

I go see him immediately. She stood out on the porch till he drove out of sight, then came back in and said, Good Heavens, what a sorry specimen of a man. She gave me a kiss and admonished me to be careful.
    Earl knew he’d been holding on to the stolen roadster for too long already, but it was a sweet car and he hated to part with it. Still, Larkins had seen it and for sure given its description to Hollis, andthe Franklin would be hotter than ever. So we went to a certain repair garage not too far outside of Indy, a place run by an ex-con named Elmore Brown who accepted fine-quality cars of unspecified ownership in exchange for a car of less worth but with a legal title. We arrived at Earl’s place in a well-used Maxwell coupe.
    He lived in an industrial neighborhood, in a garage apartment behind the house of an old Swedish couple named Carlson. His mother lived in an apartment house a few blocks away. He had so many brothers and sisters even he had lost the exact count, but the only ones still living with his mom were a pair of teenage sisters, Mary and Margo. His stepfather, a guy named Burke, was doing a stretch in the county slam for some kind of fraud, and Earl’s mother had been forced to take a job in a tire factory. His sisters worked too, when they weren’t in school. Mary did housecleaning and laundry for the elderly Carlson couple, and Margo, who was three or four years younger, earned a few bucks a week at babysitting jobs.
    Earl’s apartment was small but clean. It was equipped with a stove and an icebox and it had a bath with shower and hot water. Earl had the tiny bedroom, but the sofa was comfortably firm and large enough for me. It stood under a big window flanked by a maple tree that gave good shade against the afternoon sun.
    There was some bootleg beer in the icebox and we opened a quart bottle to toast our reunion. And to our new career as bank robbers.
    We’d talked it over in the car. When I told him I was through with nickel-and-dime stickups and wanted to hit a bank, he said Oh man, Harry, I don’t know. He thought it was a hell of a risky step up the ladder. Filling stations didn’t have armed guards or robbery alarms. They didn’t have teller cages or vaults or a whole bunch of witnesses standing around. The way he saw it, banks were strictly for guys who knew what they were doing, guys with experience at it.
    I said the only way to get experience at something was to do it.
    We batted it back and forth a while, but my mind was made up. Listen, I said, which is it—in or out? If he’d said out, I would’ve hadhim drop me off at a hotel and figured my next move from there. But he said Ah hell, man, of course I’m in.
    We talked late into the night and came up with a basic plan. The Indytown banks were out of the question. They were sure to have the most money, but they were also the best guarded and would be the hardest to make a getaway from. And common sense told us it wouldn’t be smart to rob a bank in the same town you lived in. We spread open a road map and picked out a dozen towns inside a forty-five-to-seventy-five-mile radius of Indianapolis. During the next few weeks, while Earl was working at the lumberyard to earn the rent and keep us fed, I’d go visit all twelve towns and make a note of every bank that didn’t have a guard and was well situated for a getaway. When I finished making the list, we’d decide which bank to hit. As for weapons, Earl had a four-inch .38 and he said he could get me one for a good price from the same source.
    And so we were settled on a course of action. Earl fetched us a nightcap beer from the icebox and clinked his bottle to mine and said Big time, here we come.
     
    O n my second morning in the apartment I woke to Earl’s muffled snoring behind the bedroom door and an excited shrilling of birds. The room was full of sunlight and the heat of the summer day was already building. I flung the sheet off me and stretched, feeling grand. My usual