The first thought that went through Max Shank’s mind when he opened the door was that the four men who came into the bank were the weirdest looking bunch he’d ever seen. His second thought was a realization that he should not have opened the door at all and the third was Holy Cow! They’re going to rob the bank!
Back to his first thought. The four men at the main entrance of Metro Savings & Loan were an odd lot to be sure, at least in appearance. The one who had impersonated the bank messenger, and so far the only one to do any talking, wasn’t so much overweight as he was lumpy. And the extra pounds were all concentrated below his waistline so that he looked like a giant pear with feet. It didn’t help either that the uniform jacket was too loose and the pants too tight.
Two of the others looked to Max like a bad version of Mutt and Jeff. One was a full head taller than Max, with a long face and extremely long arms and huge hands that hung down like saddlebags. The other was a head shorter — a huge head, and it was completely bald. Both Mutt and Jeff carried large sports bags and although the contents were obviously very heavy it did not seem to occur to either of them to set the bags down once they were inside the bank. The fourth man was the only one whose body shape appeared close to average but anyone looking at him was inevitably drawn to long clumps of fiery red hair that stood out like airplane wings above both ears at precise right angles to the side of his head.
In sharp contrast to their physical differences, all four wore identical George W. Bush face masks. Jeannie, the teller, recognized these as coming from the giveaway bin at A Buck or Two out at the edge of town, but she wasn’t able to explain that to Max until some time later.
Despite the unique appeal of their physical appearance, Max had little time to reflect on that, nor on his second thought — the fact that he’d opened the door to a night messenger without first checking his credentials, even though it was not their regular man. Instead, Max was totally absorbed by his third thought. These guys had come to rob his bank, and it was soon apparent that they’d done some advance planning. Not only did they know that the night messenger regularly arrived at 6:30 p.m., they also seemed to know that the same four bank employees worked late every second Thursday.
Once inside the bank all four had pre-assigned tasks. The phony night messenger, the one who soon made clear he was in command, was the only robber with a gun, a visible one anyway. By immediately putting its muzzle under the security guard’s nose, he’d successfully persuaded that worthy to lie down in the manager’s office and submit to being wound up like a mummy with duct tape. While that was happening, the fourth man — Max thought of him now as the Red Baron — herded Jeannie the teller and Wilma the assistant accountant into the same office, but in what appeared to be a gentlemanly gesture decided to leave them untied. The Red Baron then took up position in the manager’s swivel chair, where he found particular delight in spinning himself around and around. The phony messenger, having exchanged his jacket and hat for that of the security guard, with Max in tow, took up the guard’s normal post at the front door. It was the only portal through which the interior of the bank could be seen from the street and should a patrol car drive by — as happened twice — anyone looking in would have an unobstructed view of the back of a uniform, quietly on duty.
Mutt and Jeff meanwhile took their bags of tools back to the vault where the heart of the operation was to beat. Here the initial smoothness of the break-in experienced a few bumps. Mutt took a long power drill from his bag — Max needed only a second to realize that the safety deposit boxes were his target — while a heavy sledge hammer emerged from Jeff’s. The rows of boxes could be seen behind a door of clear Plexiglas and it was this door that represented Jeff’s first assigned objective. The little man rotated his shoulders one after the other, hefted the hammer and took a mighty swing at the center of the door. A major miscalculation as it turned out because the Plexiglas absorbed the blow and, like a slingshot, fired the hammer back at twice the speed. Instead of dropping it, Jeff clung to the hammer for dear life and was thus catapulted back into the lobby, skidding to a stop on the tile floor in front of the manager’s office.
The Red Baron was so startled by the sudden arrival of a sledge hammer with his colleague in tow that he tipped the swivel chair over backward and landed in Wilma’s lap. It was her scream that finally broke the spell and caused the messenger-now-guard to yell at Mutt to make Jeff swing at the latch on the door, at which point Max intervened to explain that the door wasn’t locked anyway and simply had to be pulled open.
A second bump occurred when Mutt began drilling the locks on the safety deposit boxes and burned out two drill bits before he realized the tool was set on reverse. That would have been only a minor setback had the process not blown a fuse. The backup system came on immediately but with lighting only and no air conditioning so that Mutt and Jeff particularly had to work in increasingly stifling conditions, a factor that definitely slowed their progress.
It was about an hour later, with Mutt drilling and Jeff emptying the boxes into his sports bag — the two had stripped out several dozen boxes and had many more dozens to go — when the Red Baron suddenly appeared behind the messenger, his George W. Bush mask askew, and pleaded, “I’m hungry, Ollie, can’t we send out for something?”
To Max, that was the dumbest thing that had happened yet, but the fact that the messenger, who’d been treating the other three like a cranky babysitter, received this quite calmly and did not react to being called “Ollie” convinced him it was part of the plan. Then, when Ollie summoned Jeannie, Max knew for sure, for Jeannie was asked what she normally ordered when they called the diner down the street for takeout around 9 o’clock. She told him it was almost always tuna on rye with a diet lemonade. Whereupon the messenger instructed her, “Well, you’re gonna order two of those. Now what about these?” he added, nodding vaguely at Max and with his gun hand pointed at Wilma and the guard.
Jeannie told him as she was the one who normally phoned the diner and knew the usual orders. Once again she was told to order doubles of everything. Max couldn’t help but be just a bit impressed. Obviously, in casing the bank the gang had learned that it was regular practice for the four overtimers to call out for food, so what the robbers were doing was duplicating normal behavior and rewarding themselves at the same time with a bit of nourishment.
Ollie watched through the open door of the manager’s office as Jeannie phoned in the order with the Red Baron hovering over her. When she hung up, the Baron flashed ten fingers twice.
Ollie looked at his watch and muttered, “Twenty minutes,” through the mask.
Fifteen minutes later he clapped his hands loud enough to get the Red Baron out of the swivel chair to close the office door. Mutt and Jeff caught the signal too and went into the office. Ollie motioned Max into a chair a few feet away, behind the drapes that covered the front window. He then bound Max’s hands and feet to the chair with duct tape and covered his mouth too. Max understood that Ollie would be taking no chances when the takeout delivery arrived but was surprised that the police had not arrived by now. Could it be, he wondered, that the gang’s inadvertent alarm had been missed? Or worse, misunderstood?
What inadvertent alarm call has the gang sounded?