Relentless

by Brian Garfield

  The reason for Hanratty’s presence became gradually clear: he was the one who had proposed the operation.

  They had released him from the Florence penitentiary eight months ago and the parole department had helped get him a job in the San Miguel smelter. The company bank’s Friday afternoon ritual had drawn his attention from the start. He had begun to think about getting in touch with some of the professionals he’d met in stir but in the meantime he’d run into his former brother-in-law in a Las Vegas casino and somehow the conversation had worked its way around to the San Miguel bank-Hanratty had a habit, he kept talking until he found something to say-and Burt had introduced him to the Major. After that it had been inevitable that the Major would take over.

  The others had already been over the ground. Baraclough had Polaroid photographs of the bank and the street. That first night in Reno they sat around the kitchen table and the Major filled in the details of the plan, using a No. 2 pencil as a pointer, outlining the campaign like a field general giving instructions to his battalion commanders.

  The next day Baraclough had driven him to the airport to show him one of the planes they were going to use. “We’ll use two planes because they may get a fix on the first one. Anybody could spot us-there’s always that vulnerable moment just after you take off. Once they know we’re using a plane they’ll figure we’re heading for Mexico. That’s where we’ll have the edge on them. We’ll change planes here-we’ll have to set up a second plane, something with enough range to get us up into Canada across the Idaho border. We’ve already set up a landing strip in British Columbia.”

  “How long?”

  “The strip? Four thousand feet. One of the lumber outfits used to use it. It’s on the weedy side but it’ll do, I checked it out myself last week.” They were sitting in the Plymouth beside the runway; Baraclough had his arm across the back of the seat. “I thought I’d leave the choice of the second plane up to you.”

  The plane beside the hangar was a Piper twin Apache. “Where’d you get the money to buy that one?”

  “Who bought it? I rented it in Pasadena under a phony name. We hired a pilot to fly it up here for us and I told him we’d get in touch with him when we needed him again. He thinks it’s something to do with a rich man’s divorce case. They do that all the time around here, people hiring private planes to sneak in and out of the state while they’re supposedly living here establishing six weeks’ residence.” Baraclough took the key out of the ignition and opened the door. “You’ll want to have a look at her.”

  Walker went over to the plane with him. A mechanic working on a Cessna gave them an incurious glance and went back to work, standing on a ladder propped against the cowling.

  It looked all right but appearances didn’t mean anything. You couldn’t tell much about an airplane by kicking the tires. “You got a key to it?”

  Baraclough supplied one and Walker climbed inside, unlocked the glove box on the inside door panel and had a look at the logbooks: three of them-one for the airframe, one for each engine. The plane had quite a few hours on it since its last overhaul. One explosion per cylinder for every two rpm’s-after 460 hours, how many explosions? The plane had something like fifteen thousand parts. Walker shook his head. “I’d like to take her up and try her out.”

  “Tomorrow. We’ll get your documentation fixed up and you can tell the tower you’re a Los Angeles pilot we hired. Now what about the other plane? What’ll we need?”

  They discussed it and settled on a twin Beech. “If we can find one for rent.”

  “If we can’t,” Baraclough said, “we’ll just have to steal one, won’t we.”

  8

  The Major and Baraclough obtained hand grenades and the Mace chemical spray cans from a Guard Armory near Sacramento. They drove over by way of Tahoe and pulled the Inspecting Officer bit. The National Guard sergeant on duty had been conditioned to demand identifications and passes from everyone who tried to get in but the Army had started earlier and spent longer conditioning him to salivate properly to the sound of a high-ranking officer’s voice, and Hargit’s bluff carried them through. He brought out three grenades and four cans of the chemical in a canvas AWOL bag and the sergeant gave him a smart salute as he left.

  There was a suitable Beech for rent in Salt Lake and Burt drove Walker up there to pick it up. Walker was nervous around airports-there were bound to be people around who would recognize him-but he kept his head down and let Burt take care of the paperwork. They brought the Beech back and set it down on a meadow near the rented cabin. Burt went into town, rented a tank truck and brought aviation fuel out to the meadow to fill up the Beech’s tanks.

  Wednesday afternoon-D-day minus two-Baraclough left Reno alone, driving the Lincoln. They were going to use it for their getaway car and abandon it afterward. Walker was surprised by that until Baraclough explained they had stolen it in the first place. They had cruised a rich El Paso residential neighborhood one evening until they’d found a house where there was a big party. People often left keys in their cars at parties because they didn’t want their carp to block the driveway. Hargit had picked out the big new Lincoln and they had driven it to Las Cruces, repainted it, and put a pair of Arizona plates on it that had come off a one hundred fifty dollar flivver Burt had bought in Willcox under a fake name. It seemed a lot of money to spend on a pair of plates but this way the license number wouldn’t be listed on any police blotter of stolen car numbers. They parked the flivver in a pay lot in Tucson and threw away the ticket.

  Ultimately the cops would trace the Lincoln and find out that it belonged to some rich doctor in El Paso. It seemed to amuse Baraclough.

  After Baraclough left Reno to drive to Arizona the rest of them had nothing to do but wait thirty-six hours. It wasn’t a good time for Walker. Up to now he hadn’t had much time for reflection. It had taken all his concentration to get the plan straight in his head and to account for the tedious details that were going to be his responsibility. He had his courses plotted on sectional air charts and it took a while to get the radio ranges worked out on Jeppesen charts; he had to figure fuel-consumption versus weight, possible wind directions and velocities, take-off and landing time schedules, and a low-altitude route that would keep them out of the Nellis radar picture and at the same time take them as far as possible from any highways and towns where people on the ground might notice the plane. There was no point giving the cops a chance to get a fix on their course.

  But when all that was done and they had gone over the last verbal runthrough there was nothing left to think about but the risk of failure, and nothing left to do but think about it.

  It had a complete unreality about it. You heard about such crimes, you read about them. You saw a dapper, good-humored, aging fellow being interviewed on a late TV talk show and you were enormously amused to realize that this engaging little old man was Willie Sutton, giving his classic answer to the interviewer’s straight-man question: But what made you decide to rob banks, Mr. Sutton? Well, Dick, y’know, it’s because that’s where the money is, see? And as audience to a trivial television entertainment you were amused by Willie Sutton’s quiet sparkling understatements about how he’d broken out of Sing Sing-he made it sound absurdly casual-how he’d disguised himself as a bank guard one time, a cop another, an armored-car guard yet another. But when you turned the set off and thought about it you saw that Willie Sutton didn’t have all that much to laugh about. He’d spent two-thirds of his life in prison.

  It was depressing to think about. Walker wondered why he’d let them talk him into this. He went through Wednesday night and all day Thursday with a hard knot in his throat and a dry coppery taste on his tongue. On the face of it the whole caper was absurd. None of them knew anything about banks and the only one with any criminal experience was Hanratty-and Hanratty’s batting average was a lot worse than Willie Sutton’s. Hanratty had never tried anything above the level of petty crime before but just the same they’d nailed him three times ru
nning and he’d spent fifteen of the last twenty-three years of his miserable life behind bars. Here they were, a grounded pilot, three ex-soldiers, and a petty thief, hoping to bring off a million-dollar score without a ruffle. It just didn’t make sense. The percentages were wildly wrong.

  Three things kept him from clearing out. One: Hargit, and Baraclough in his erratic way, appeared to know what they were doing. The plan seemed workable, the escape system was ingenious, and the Major had a self-confidence that was infectious. When he told you it was going to work you believed him, partly because of his personality and partly because you knew his record in the Army. Hargit knew guerrilla operations as well as any man alive. Two: if Walker tried to bug out now they’d probably kill him; they couldn’t let him walk around loose knowing what he knew about them. Nobody had uttered any threats but it was too obvious to ignore. The risk of quitting was at least as volatile as the risk of carrying it through.

  And Three: There wasn’t anything else Walker wanted to do. He wanted the money-he had 10 percent of the take coming, and it looked now as if that would be closer to one hundred thousand dollars than to the fifty thousand that the Major had mentioned in the beginning. With that kind of money in the right South American country you could buy a lot of silence, you could buy all the licenses and certifications you wanted, you could pick up two or three serviceable airplanes and build the beginnings of a workable international airline. In a way he realized his ambitions weren’t all that much at odds with the Major’s. They each wanted the money not for itself but for the jobs it could buy for them.

  In the end he knew it was the only chance he was going to have-one last grab at the brass ring before they shut down the merry-go-round. And so after all the panic and all the considerations of what might go wrong, he stayed with it.

  9

  Thursday night-H-hour minus eighteen-the Major gathered them together in the log-paneled front room for a precombat pep talk. Walker, who was scared but had made a kind of peace with himself, sat in one of the leather captain’s chairs and lifted his pack of cigarettes out of the bicep pocket of his leather flight jacket. His chin stung a little-a tiny nick from a nervous morning razor-and the tooth cavity was giving him trouble, but he felt surprisingly good: alert, anxious to start; confident and balanced like a halfback who, expecting to be rammed, intended to stay on his feet regardless.

  He lit the cigarette and watched the Major open the long brown case and display the guns they would use.

  “The shotguns will make them nervous. We want them scared. Baraclough and Hanratty carry these because they’re the two who’ll be in front holding everybody still. Burt and I will take out the armored-car guards; we’ll need our hands free for the spray cans so we’ll carry these revolvers. Walker stays with the car, he won’t need a weapon. Burt will stay with the guards in back until he gets my signal, and then he’ll come around the side of the building to the car. As soon as we’ve taken out the guards I’ll go into the bank and Steve Baraclough will come across the tellers’ fence with the duffel bags. The two of us will stuff the bags while Hanratty stays by the door and keeps the room covered with his shotgun. Any questions?”

  They had been over it a dozen times; nobody spoke. Walker saw how cleverly the Major had worked out the assignments. The Major figured the weakest links were Hanratty and Walker. He had to assume that because he had combat experience with the other two. So he was leaving Walker out in the car where he wouldn’t cause trouble and he was sending Baraclough into the front of the bank with Hanratty so that at no point would Hanratty be alone. Hargit himself would be taking out the armored-car guards in the back room because that was the trickiest part of the operation, neutralizing those armed men, and he would have Burt with him because Burt was almost as accomplished a jungle fighter as the Major was himself. The two of them weren’t likely to have much trouble with a crew of hick truck guards.

  For himself, Walker had no objection to the arrangement. He had no desire to hog the limelight or the action. Sitting in the car was fine with him.

  The Major put the guns away and zipped up the case. “You all know the operation depends on timing. They’ll be setting off alarms, we can’t stop that, and we’ll have no more than four minutes to get in and get loaded and get out. But we’ll do fine as long as everybody does his own job. I don’t want to have to kick ass every half minute-if anybody hangs back too long he’s going to get shot dead because we can’t afford to leave any of you behind alive to talk. I guess you understand that.”

  It wasn’t a threat. The Major wasn’t the kind who made threats. He made logical statements and trusted that everybody could see the logic.

  Walker felt chilled. He had begun to wonder why he had got along at all with Hargit during the Vietnam thing. At the time he had regarded the Major with respect and admiration-Hargit had been a bit of a legend out there. Now he saw that Hargit was as cold as any human being could be.

  It wasn’t that Hargit had changed; it was only, Walker thought, that war gave men a common enemy, it threw them together so that men with nothing in common created between them a temporary brotherhood which was not false, but conditional. Now the conditions had changed and Walker was no longer a bystander to Hargit’s feats but a part of them, and he understood why the men who had served under the Major had been terrified of him. With the Major around you didn’t have to worry about the enemy, or in this case the police; you had to worry only about the Major, because if you made one slip you were finished.

  “By this time tomorrow night,” the Major said amiably, “we’ll be crossing the Idaho mountains into British Columbia and we’ll all be rich men. We have three automobiles staked out in the trees beside the runway up there. Baraclough and Sergeant Burt and I will take our share of the money and one of the cars. The other two cars are for Hanratty and Walker, and personally I don’t care where the two of you go from there. By the time either of you gets a chance to blunder into trouble the rest of us will be halfway, to Africa. But let me repeat one warning. Arizona still has the death penalty. I don’t want anybody killed. I don’t even want anybody bruised. They’ll forget the money but there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  At the time the warning had not meant very much to Walker. He didn’t expect anybody would get killed.

  10

  There had been a hitch that had almost soured the whole thing but Walker hadn’t found out about it until afterward, when Baraclough had told them about it.

  Baraclough had cruised through San Miguel on Thursday afternoon to have a last look around. Everything looked calm and he had driven across the plateau and up over the mountains to Fredonia to spend the night in a motel. There was no point hanging around San Miguel overnight because someone later might remember having seen him there; it made sense to drive a few extra miles and spend the night elsewhere. There would be plenty of time to drive back to San Miguel Friday morning and Baraclough had it planned nicely to arrive in San Miguel not more than twenty minutes ahead of time so as to spend as little visible time there as possible, waiting for the plane to land on the highway beyond town.

  Only when he’d gone out after breakfast to drive away from the Fredonia motel, the Lincoln had refused to start.

  By that time the rest of them were already airborne out of Reno and Baraclough didn’t have a radio to make contact with them. He spent a few minutes angrily poking around under the hood of the Lincoln and finally determined the trouble was in the fuel pump. Nothing serious, but it would have taken time to get it towed to a gas station and even then there was not much chance this town would have the right parts in stock.

  In a town that tiny it wasn’t easy to boost a car. Baraclough had spent almost an hour in fruitless exploration and by the end of it he felt clammy and slightly panicky, sweating in the cool mountain air.

  Finally the old Buick came down out of the pines and stopped at the curb and Baraclough watched the driver get out carelessly, leaving the keys in the car. The man walked
half a block and turned into a cafe. Baraclough crossed the street and looked in through the window-if the man was just having coffee it wouldn’t work.

  The man was putting on an apron and going around behind the short-order counter.

  Baraclough walked up the street, got into the Buick, drove back to his motel. He had a bad ten minutes there; he parked the Buick around the side of the motel where nobody was likely to see it, but he had to make several trips to transfer all the gear from the Lincoln into the Buick and that was hard to do without looking like a thief.

  When he drove out of town he kept his head down and hoped no one would recognize the Buick or notice a stranger was driving it.

  Nobody raised any alarums but by then he was running twenty minutes behind schedule and he had to push the old kluge up to its maximum-and a hick cop had pulled him over.

  “I’d have shot the son of a bitch but he had a partner back in the car. Anyhow it takes a special kind of stupidity to leave dead cops around.”

  On his way into San Miguel he had watched the power lines and when they began to diverge from the highway he pulled off into a side street to follow them; tossed his rope over the high lines, tied both ends to the Buick and pulled the cables down.

  Then he had driven straight through San Miguel, glancing at the bank as he passed it. It was just about lunchtime and there was quite a crowd of workers streaming into the place. That would subside by one-thirty or so and then the next mob would appear about three o’clock when the shifts began to change. They had settled on two o’clock as the best time to hit the bank.