Susan has the Bee open before her, and she pretends to read it while spreading grape jelly on a buttered English. 9:01: The Chevy pulls away from the front of the bank. She smiles up at the waitress and accepts more coffee. 9:07: She hears distant sirens. 9:09: A sheriff’s cruiser enters the lot. Uniformed deputies leap from the car, leaving the doors open, and run into the bank, guns drawn. She turns over the check and puts a couple of dollars on the table, then ambles over to join the gathering of curious shoppers and store clerks assembled outside the bank. A deputy stands blocking the door, telling everyone that the bank is closed. He still holds his.38 in his hand. Susan can hear another siren’s faraway howling.
Beside the pond in McKinley Park, Tania and Yolanda sit on a bench, sharing a cigarette and watching the approach of the switch car, a green and white Plymouth. Tania holds a Styrofoam cup of tea that she sips through a small hole she’s torn in the plastic lid. The car pulls to the curb, and Jeff and Teko get out. Roger, waving, attempts to catch her eye from behind the wheel. She lifts a single finger — not now. Actually, she feels like ignoring him. In fact, she feels a mild distaste for all three of them: for their fear, excitement, and affected bravado. She can tell immediately that everything went smoothly inside the bank, that the entire incident will assume an epic contour as it is told and retold and retold still again. As Jeff and Teko begin to relate their adventure, she cuts them off sharply. Yolanda allows herself a slight smile. Chastened, the men get back into the Plymouth and continue on their way, leaving behind a hemp bag containing the weapons and disguises and a green duffel holding the money for Tania and Yolanda to carry to the bus stop. Yolanda hugs the duffel tight as they ride back to W Street with kids playing hooky and two Mexican cleaning ladies carrying their supplies in a stained plastic caddy.
GUNMEN ROB NORTH SACTO BANK
(February 25) Two men robbed the Guild Savings branch on Arden Way shortly after the bank opened on Tuesday morning. The men entered the branch, located at the Arden Plaza Shopping Center, and immediately announced the robbery, displaying guns and ordering customers and staff to the floor. One suspect acted as a lookout while the other forced a teller to fill a bag with cash and money orders. Both suspects then fled through the bank’s rear exit with an undisclosed amount. No one was injured. The suspects are described as Caucasian males in their mid-20s. At the time of the robbery both were wearing long raincoats and hats, and one covered his face with a scarf or bandanna. Eyewitnesses told sheriff’s deputies that the suspects were dropped at the bank in an older blue sedan.
This particular bakery yields an oven-fresh $3,729. They sit in a circle while Yolanda removes a small blue duffel bag from the larger green one that camouflages it and then counts up the cash, separating the folding money into neat piles of twenties, tens, fives, and ones, a skill derived from many games of Monopoly on the screened-in porch back in Clarendon Hills. Yolanda always liked to be the banker, an irony that does not occur to her now.
“PAKES,” SAYS ONE OF the technicians. He is looking at the wrought-iron lettering, spelling out PAIX, affixed to the balcony handrail. He lights a cigarette and leans against the car. “That who owns this dump?”
“No, it’s some fireman in New York. Lafferty.” An FBI supervisor from Scranton, Silliman, is outside talking to the technician because neither of them has much to do. The technician is up from Philly to look for trace evidence, but the place is turning out to be clean. Shoe prints? No. Tire impressions? Not even theirs. No semen, saliva, sweat, vomit, or blood in drops, pools, spatters, splashes, or stains. No slugs or shells. Plenty of hair and fibers. Some of the hairs appear to be synthetic, but there’s nothing in particular that looks foreign to the scene. Fragments of broken glass here and there, chips of paint. This and that. They bag the stuff and tag it. Each day for a frigid week they’ve returned to the farm.
“You talk to him?”
“We talked to him. He rented it out to Guy Mock all right. Summer thing. He said Mock claimed to be an author who needed a nice quiet place to work.”
“Ain’t that pretty.”
“He sure got it. Christ, go nuts out here.” Viewed from the house, the pines stand plain and lonely atop the bare gray hills. Silliman slaps his gloved hands together and rubs them briskly. The air feels cold enough to slice the skin.
They’ve talked to everybody. Storekeepers, neighbors, mail carriers, the propane delivery man. Silliman’s certain that they have the right place. Everyone who’s gotten a look at it remembers Guy Mock’s face, everyone speaks of a nondescript couple, a pretty Oriental girl. Or gook, depending on who you talk to. Silliman has an inkling of who this person might be.
“How’s the garbage?”
“They burned it in a pit back of the house. The usual cans and bottles and bones. They’re trying to lift prints from them.”
“They’re animal bones?”
“Oh, shit yeah. Pork chops and chicken.”
The propane man recalls seeing an additional woman, who lay on a cot with a blanket over her head for the entire time he was there. In July heat. Silliman elects not to show him the photo of the famous fugitive. No sense inviting every crank in the county to put their two cents in. He waits for the dogs to arrive on their chartered flight from California. They go apeshit when they get a whiff of the cot.
Chartered flight. He likes that.
“Let’s go in. I’m freezing my ass off.”
Inside the house, furniture is draped with dropcloths while dusting for prints goes on nearby. No visibles. No plastic impressions. No latents so far, though there are plenty of indications the place has been wiped, not least of which is that there are no prints. But this is not evidence, this is not admissible, this is merely suspicious, something that gives cops a reason for rising each morning and banging their heads against the wall. Dusting continues. Elsewhere, where dusting and evidence gathering and photographing have already happened, the government men have tossed the place. Silliman knows the fugitives were here. Because there’s no sign they were here.
Silliman goes through pockets in the mudroom. He finds receipts from local vendors dating back to the mid-sixties. He finds a shopping list that mentions “Tricks Cereal for Brian and Tim” and concludes that this is the work of Mrs. Lafferty, whoever she is or was. He finds thirty-seven cents in change, including a dime and a penny minted in 1974. He bags the coins. He bags a Bic pen that has bled half its ink into the pocket of an old field jacket. Screaming Eagles patch on the shoulder. He finds a book of matches advertising the U.S. Auto School and bags that too. In a Lee Riders jacket that looks as if it would fit someone about sixteen years old, he finds a beat-up copy of Penthouse Forum. It falls open to a certain page.
Dear Penthouse Forum:
I want to write about the greatest oral sex I have ever had. Now let me say that due to my above-average (ten inches) endowment I have never had satisfactory oral pleasure from any woman. I have long wanted someone who would eat me — all of me — whenever I so desired, swallowing all of the frothing sperm cocktail I pumped into her soft willing mouth, while asking nothing more in return than to be regularly walked, fed, and watered, the ultimate lover and soul mate. Well, in my four-year-old collie Donna I have found mine. Donna is gorgeous, with a long, silky coat and expressive brown eyes. One day when she was a puppy I awoke to find her licking dried sperm from my abdomen (I’d fallen asleep after jerking off). Well, one thing led to another and before I knew it I’d trained her to pleasure me orally. Now, let me tell you about the beautiful blow jobs I receive from Donna. Not once in four years has she bitten me, not even a nip. Well,