Dawn had declined the State of North Dakota’s generous offer to supply her with a public defender, and signed papers to the effect that she would be acting as her own lawyer. To his credit—and to her surprise, for she was new to this sort of thing—her adversary, the local prosecutor, had tried to dissuade her. He had spelled out the gravity of the charges and listed all of the ways in which even the most poorly trained and inattentive public defender might be able to reduce her sentence or conceivably even talk a jury into returning a not-guilty verdict. Dawn was gratified that this man had identified her as a young woman of some intelligence, even promise. He was trying to talk to her as one reasonable, educated person to another; perhaps a rare sort of encounter in his line of work. One that he found worth putting some time into. Dawn had tried to cut the conversation short by announcing that it was her intention to plead guilty at her arraignment, and she didn’t think she needed a lawyer for that. Even then the prosecutor had persisted, explaining that a lawyer might be able to find some hole in his, the prosecutor’s, case that would render a guilty plea a foolish mistake on her part.
It was all quite interesting from a standpoint of understanding the legal mind, but Dawn suspected, and Reggie confirmed, that the prosecutor was doing it not because he really wanted to help Dawn but because he needed to make sure that all the rules were followed so that the conviction would stick.
As far as Dawn was concerned it was neither here nor there. She needed for the arraignment to take place on a predictable schedule, and soon. A lawyer might just create trouble by filing motions and causing delays.
Reggie paid her more visits during the week leading up to the arraignment. There was no place in the jail where they could really talk in private and so they spoke obliquely, with Reggie making frequent reference to an upcoming family reunion that would be attracting brothers, uncles, and nephews from all over the West and Midwest. Many of the details of what he was getting ready for, though they were obviously of interest to Dawn, were really none of her concern and best left unsaid. She had only a few specifics that she wanted to get straight with Reggie. First of all, that this really was going to happen on a specific date and time. Secondly, that she needed to get her trunk. And third, a detail that came to her late one night as she was thinking the whole thing through: she needed a hundred feet of rope. This last item was difficult to say out-right, but important, and so she wrote it down on a scrap of paper and snuck it into Reggie’s hand when none of the guards was watching. He couldn’t read, but some who had already filtered into town for the “family reunion” probably could.
That settled, she had nothing to do but wait for the big day. She was the only occupant of her cell. Reggie had brought her a book—a dime-novel western—but she’d already been through that twice. As bookmark she’d been using a newspaper clipping consisting of a story about Bonnie and Clyde. This had been mailed to her, care of Reggie, by a second cousin in Montana, a pen pal of sorts who knew of Dawn’s interest in the doings of the Barrow gang. Most of the story was a poem, written by Bonnie Parker herself, and apparently typed up in some moment when Bonnie had got access to a typewriter and some carbon paper. It was entitled “The Life and Death of Bonnie and Clyde,” though, as far as anyone knew, they were still alive. Either way the poem seemed worth studying. On the night before her arraignment, Dawn perused it one last time before the jailers turned out the lights. Tomorrow at this time she’d be dead or alive, that much was for sure. If alive, she’d be on the run, just like Bonnie. If dead—well, then it hardly mattered.
Some day they’ll go down together;
And they’ll bury them side by side;
To few it’ll be grief
To the law a relief
But it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.
She wondered if that made it any different—dying next to your boyfriend. Being buried next to him. She’d been raised not to believe in God or an afterlife, but she still found it affecting that Bonnie loved her Clyde so that she believed that death would somehow be different if her corpse was buried next to his. Dawn’s father’s voice sounded between her ears, pointing out that it would make a difference to the living, politically. The grave would become a monument, visited by the masses. A rallying point. But Bonnie didn’t seem to have much political consciousness beyond disliking cops.
If they try to act like citizens
And rent them a nice little flat,
About the third night
They’re invited to fight
By a sub-gun’s rat-tat-tat.
Bonnie had a lousy sense of meter, that was for sure. Dawn tried to make excuses by supposing that the whole poem had been written in the backseat of a Ford jouncing down a potholed country road, its V8 straining to stay one gunshot ahead of pursuing lawmen.
Bonnie’s devotion to her Clyde, her placid expectation that she would die next to him, was fascinating but completely alien to Dawn. There’d been three boys in her life. Billy Bach. But Patton had pointed out his unsuitability, which was completely obvious the moment he’d said it. As if to underscore that, Billy had then fallen in with the Landesjäger. Dick for his part was charming enough, but look where that had got her. And then there was the curious case of Silent Al. And as she lay on her cot in the dark of the Fort Sickles jail the night before her arraignment, staring up at the ceiling, she had to admit that—if you ignored the part about how he had deceived her, betrayed her, and been a key figure in a government operation that had put her father and friends to death—he’d really been the best match for her in a lot of ways.
She drowsed off to sleep while imagining something pretty naughty involving Silent Al and handcuffs. If he tracked her down, and got the drop on her, and put her in shackles, would it be in her power as a woman to make him break that iron self-discipline? Hands behind her back, powerless except for her face and her words, could she break him? And what would it be like if she did?
WHEN SHE WOKE UP, THOUGH, HER THOUGHTS WERE ON A FOURTH MAN WHO HADN’T entered into last night’s drowsy reckoning because he was homosexual. Bob Overstreet, the clean-cut Wisconsin engineer who had sheltered her for a spell at his house in Gary. During the subsequent year she’d kept in touch with him through the mail. In his most recent letter, posted just a couple of weeks ago, he’d mentioned that the steel company had sent him to San Francisco to build some sort of bridge. Bob hadn’t come out and said so directly, but she understood that he was offering her a bolt-hole if she needed one.
The notion of going, not just to the West Coast but all the way to Magnitogorsk, had apparently come to her in some already-forgotten dream, for it was just there, fully formed in her head, when she opened her eyes. It was obvious. She had to do it. Dawn would die today. Aurora would somehow get to San Francisco and begin a new life in the Soviet Union. A better life by far than the outlaw road described by Bonnie:
The road was so dimly lighted;
There were no highway signs to guide;
But they made up their minds
If all roads were blind,
They wouldn’t give up till they died.
The road gets dimmer and dimmer;
Sometimes you can hardly see;
But it’s fight, man to man,
And do all you can,
For they know they can never be free.
There was just the inconvenient detail that she was locked up in a jail cell in Fort Sickles. But a plan to fix that had been set in motion and there was nothing she could do now either to stop it from being carried out or to abet it.
She sat there on her cot for most of the day, just waiting. They’d expected it would all go down in the morning, but—as far as she could discern from scraps of information filtering down from the courthouse—there’d been delays. The westbound train carrying the judge had arrived hours late. The judge had been drawn into some last-minute conferences in his chambers. Several other cases were on the docket before Dawn’s. These had become unexpectedly complicated. It was time for lunch. Lunch was running long.
Dawn began seriously to entertain the possibility that it was all going sideways. The bank closed at three. The gang—no point in calling it anything else—was awaiting a signal from Reggie. He wouldn’t give that signal until Dawn had been unlocked from her cell and led into the courtroom by the bailiff. At that point the robbery of the bank would commence, with a lot of shooting. This would be clearly audible from the courthouse. Most of the cops in that building would head for the bank, leaving a skeleton crew in the courtroom. Reggie and two of his confederates would be there, with pistols in their pockets. They could easily spring Dawn at that point. They and the bank robbers would head for a rendezvous outside of town: a certain house above the river where Dawn had a trunk she needed to collect.
But if the court proceedings were delayed past three o’clock, the bank would lock its doors. Rather than miss that opportunity, the bank-robbing contingent would probably just go in guns blazing shortly before the hour. If Dawn was still locked in her cell at that point, then that was where she would certainly remain.
She heard the bells in the church across the square ring two, then two thirty. She was sitting on her cot, eyes closed, mentally composing a little statement to the judge, requesting a public defender after all, when she heard keys rattle in the lock and looked up to see the bailiff. “You’re up, young lady,” he announced.
She got to her feet. The blood fell out of her head and she became light-headed. She drifted unsteadily out of the cell. The bailiff grabbed her by the arm and frog-marched her around a corner and down a row of men’s cells. Then through another locked door, up some stairs, along a connecting passage to the courthouse. She sat for a few agonizing minutes in a sort of anteroom before finally the door to the courtroom was opened. The bailiff marched her in. She found herself in the defendants’ dock, which was surrounded by a low, basically symbolic wall. The judge sat on a dais to one side. He was facing out over a courtroom with a seating capacity of perhaps fifty. No more than a dozen onlookers were there, and one of those was just in the act of stepping out the back. This drew her eye to the back row of seats. Reggie was sitting there next to one of his confederates. The other had just stepped out—he was going to signal the boys waiting near the bank. It was all going to happen now.
The courtroom was silent except for a faint rustle of papers from the judge’s dais as he opened the relevant documents. Dawn was able to hear, quite distinctly, a man’s voice emanating from a row of seats near the front. Three men were seated together. Well groomed and well dressed by the standards of Fort Sickles. Out-of-towners, clearly. Ranging in age from mid-twenties to mid-thirties. The one in the middle spoke up clearly. “That’s her,” he said to his comrades. “I’d know her anywhere.” He aimed his index finger at her. Dawn stared up it, like the barrel of a revolver, and directly into the eyes of Silent Al.
He stared back. Their eyes were locked together for a spell.
Finally he looked away, though, distracted by the sound of a Thompson submachine gun being fired down the street.
THE COY STYLE IN WHICH DAWN AND REGGIE HAD CONVERSED DURING THEIR MEETINGS meant that Dawn had only a general notion as to the plan. She had got the sense, though, that even if they’d been able to meet privately and talk for hours, Reggie might not have had much more to say as to the exact order of operations. In that, some might have seen reckless disregard. Until the summer of 1932, Dawn would have been one of them. But everything she’d seen in D.C. had made her skeptical of plans in general, and complicated plans in particular. From time to time, reviewing the events of that summer, she would shake her head in dismay at the sheer amount of time and mental effort that those Communists had poured into the framing of plans. They had even planned their planning, setting up schedules of meetings at which planning was to take place. Guys who had actually done stuff, like the riotous marine John Pace, showed polite but absolute lack of interest. Pace’s attitude seemed to be that the sole benefit of plan-making was that it kept the plan-making sorts out of his hair.
It was through this lens that Dawn had conducted all of her subsequent research into the publicized exploits of Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and other “public enemies” as they were styled in the press and denoted in stern G-man press conferences. Bonnie’s poem, in which she likened their life to a dimly lighted road with no signs—a road that might turn out to be a dead end—didn’t seem like the work of a dyed-in-the-wool master planner. Reggie, while he had not achieved the headline-grabbing notoriety of a certified public enemy, had been in enough scrapes that he had a general sense of how these things were likely to play out, and was apparently not one for making plans either. Life was not entirely a crapshoot—there were a few commonsense things you could do to stack the odds in your favor—but as soon as the shooting started, only the most brute, elementary plans were of any use. Which might say as much about the human brain and how it reacts to the sound of gunfire and the sight of blood as it does about the plans themselves.
In this case, the plan was “the courtroom and jail will have a lot of cops but they’ll be drawn to the bank robbery and then something something something.” To the extent Reggie had made any plans at all, in other words, they had not included three presumably armed G-men in the courtroom—G-men who had apparently come here specifically targeting Dawn and who, unlike the bailiff standing behind her in the defendants’ dock, knew her to be something more than a wayward orphan who’d experienced a spot of female trouble on the train.
But in a sense it didn’t matter. That was the beauty of the Reggie approach. A plan can’t go awry if it doesn’t exist. Whilst appreciating that, Dawn thought it might benefit Reggie and his two confederates if they knew more.
The sound of multiple submachine guns being discharged a hundred strides away at the bank, interspersed with shotgun blasts and revving V8s, had the paradoxical effect of causing the courtroom to become absolutely quiet as everyone listened excruciatingly, wondering if this was really what it sounded like. Everyone, that is, except those who’d been expecting it. An amusing detail here was that the church bells were beginning to ring three o’clock.
A windowpane popped, developing a hole and a system of cracks.
“Reggie,” Dawn said—speaking up clearly, but there was no need to shout—“these three right here are G-men.”
“I know,” Reggie said, and shot one of them. Not Silent Al. The one on Dawn’s right. “You’re in my line,” he added with a demonstrative nod.
This put Dawn in mind of a new and important topic: what she ought to be doing. It was all well and good to be part of a gang—as she now was—with a propensity for shooting first and making plans later—or never—but it did require that she get in the spirit and actually do things.
She’d vaguely expected that she would sit demurely in this box until all of the lawmen ran off to deal with the bank robbery. Reggie and his friends would then pull bandannas up over their faces, draw pistols, approach the front of the courtroom, and disarm the bailiff. But the presence of the G-men had already thrown a monkey wrench into that plan. Now, as Reggie was pointing out, she was creating a problem for him by being downrange, from his point of view, of his targets. This hadn’t discouraged him from getting off one meticulously aimed shot. But she did need to move.
She glanced back at the bailiff. His job was to keep an eye on Dawn. He was failing at it, to a degree that almost made her indignant. Much more interesting to him at the moment was a federal agent exhaling blood and sinking to his knees. Dawn braced both of her hands on the railing of the dock and vaulted over it. It was a good thing no one was looking at her, because this went poorly. She was wearing a skirt, for one thing, and her internal organs were still in a bit of a state from Mrs. Kidd’s surgical intervention of a few weeks back. She did make it over the rail but ended up lying full-length on the floor in no small amount of discomfort. This was a good place to be during what, to judge from what she was hearing, was now a full-on gunfight.
Papa and other vets had told stories about being trained by the army to crawl on one’s belly under barbed wire, using elbows and knees, and of putting that skill to use in the no-man’s-lands of the Great War. Dawn now began to move in that style laterally across the front of the courtroom, right in front of the judge’s dais, because that was where she needed to be heading in order to put distance between herself and the last observed position of the G-men. Being handcuffed by Silent Al no longer seemed like an opening to romance. Even that amount of planning turned out to be wrong, though—the two surviving G-men had moved to take cover behind the dais. One of them even vaulted over Dawn on his way there. Shards of marble hit her in the face. She risked getting up to a low crouch. In that attitude she scurried over to the box where the jury was supposed to sit, then headed down the side aisle toward the back of the room.
Suddenly a man was right in front of her, down on one knee, firing a revolver. But this must be one of Reggie’s. The one who’d ducked out of the courtroom to give the signal. He’d re-entered through another door and put the G-men in a crossfire. He’d pulled a red bandanna up over his face. Recognizing Dawn he waved his arm vigorously toward the back, as if she were a vexatious horsefly he wished to expel from the room. Dawn stayed low until she was well past him, for the G-men were returning fire. Then she got up and ran out.
Looking across the square to the bank as she ran down the courthouse steps, Dawn was a little taken aback to see that the robbery was still very much a work in progress. Several cops had taken up positions behind cars or the corners of buildings. Perpetrators inside the bank—a suitably fortress-like piece of architecture—shot at them when they showed themselves. So it was a standoff. How long did it take to ransack a bank? she wondered. Had they found the Lord’s money yet? Then she reflected that probably no more than one or two minutes’ time had elapsed since the signal had been given. Everything inside the courtroom had happened very fast. Faster than thought.
A car pulled up in front of the courthouse as Dawn, pursued by Reggie and his two henchmen, was running down the steps. Red Bandanna was hopping on one leg, not making very good time. Reggie and the other fellow, who was wearing a blue bandanna, were covering for him, moving very much in the style of men who were expecting to get shot, at any moment, from the building’s interior. Reggie only turned around long enough to shout at the driver of the vehicle—who, given that he, too, had a bandanna pulled up over his nose, seemed to be part of the operation. “Get them to the drop-off and come back!”
The driver reached back behind his seat, stretched across, and shoved the rear door open a moment before Dawn reached it. She was of a mind to dive in, but that amount of haste didn’t seem warranted, and she was still feeling a little stiff. So she entered the vehicle in reasonably ladylike style and scooted across to sit behind the driver. He, though, had already exited and was running up the courthouse steps toward the one who was limping.
Reggie and Blue Bandanna had found cover behind the stonework and were engaged in the curiously meditative procedure of reloading their revolvers. Pounding directly up the steps, the driver bent low, tucked a shoulder into Red’s body, and picked him up in a fireman’s carry. As he was stomping back down the steps toward the car, gunfire sounded from a courthouse window. Reggie and Blue returned fire immediately. The driver bent forward and pitched Red in the general direction of the front passenger-side door. Red managed to crawl halfway in while the driver was running around and getting behind the steering wheel. As they went into motion, Red’s legs were still outside the car, dragging on the pavement, but he was able to pull himself all the way inside during the first couple of blocks that they put between themselves and the action. After that, the driver stepped on it. Dawn had prostrated herself on the rear seat, as she’d heard a few alarming noises suggestive of the car’s being shot at. Whether by G-men inside the courthouse or cops surrounding the bank she couldn’t guess.
They were at “the drop-off,” as Reggie had called it, no more than sixty seconds later. It was a city park. Or it would be once the settlers found time and money to populate it with parklike structures. For the time being it was just a stretch of wooded floodplain with a sign in front. Smaller trees and scrub had been cleared away and the ground planted with grass. Bigger hardwoods had been permitted to stand, creating a transition between the town and the lower, more heavily wooded river valley farther back. The driver simply jumped the curb and drove straight across the open grassy part, slaloming around trees, until he came to the verge of the woods. Several horses, saddled, were grazing there under the eye of a boy of perhaps thirteen.
Dawn during all of this had sat up straight in the back again, the better to hold on for dear life during the jouncing drive over open ground. She was gripping the driver’s seat. Before he had even brought the car to a halt he turned around and barked, inches from her face, “Get out! And get you gone.”
FROM FORT SICKLES IT WAS OPEN PLAINS IN EVERY DIRECTION FOR HUNDREDS OF MILES. But there was this river that ran through the town, and its valley was cut deep into the sandstone bedrock that underlay the thick pelt of prairie soil. The town had been built entirely to one side of it, since bridging it would have been expensive. For though the stream itself was only twenty feet across, the valley was half a mile wide. All of it was forested. Running from the cops in cars across the prairie would have been a purely automotive competition—a question of which cars were fastest and which gas tanks were fullest. You could see for miles. Getting away clean would require pulling so far ahead that they could turn at some rural intersection without being observed.
Running from cops in the valley of the river would be a different matter altogether. Visibility was limited to a few yards. And the cops wouldn’t be expecting such a gambit. They’d have to go back and get horses to even begin a serious pursuit. And the type of men Reggie had recruited would be able to ride circles around them anyway.
They didn’t seem to have been pursued. The scene here at the edge of the woods was so placid compared with what was happening in town that Dawn would have been of a mind to dawdle, had the driver not been so keyed up. She approached the lad who was looking after the horses. Part Indian, she guessed. No, all Indian, but short-haired, and dressed after the fashion of a ranch hand. “Which one, do you reckon?” Dawn asked. For the saddles and other tack made it obvious that most of the horses belonged to specific men, and she’d no sooner touch one of them than steal a man’s car.
“Posey,” said the boy, turning his head to nod at an Appaloosa mare shyly grazing off to one side. “You’re big,” he said, sizing Dawn up, “but the other fellas is bigger, most of ’em, and Posey’ll take care of you just fine in the woods.”
“I don’t suppose you have any spare jeans or chaps?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Can I borrow a knife then?”
The boy produced one from a sheath on his belt and Dawn used it to slit her skirt halfway from hem to waist, fore and aft, so that she could at least get her legs over the saddle. “Thataway,” the boy said after helping her up. He made a blade of his hand and squinted into the woods. “About a mile.”
“I asked Reggie for—”
“A hundred feet of rope. Got it here.” The boy walked over to a place where various supplies had been arranged on bare earth around a big old oak. Dawn and Posey got to know each other a little in the meantime. Posey got the idea that Dawn wanted her to follow the boy, and she did. A few strides away from them, the driver had been performing some kind of makeshift first aid on Red Bandanna, who was lying spread-eagle on the grass where he’d dragged himself out of the car.
The boy handed her a hank of manila rope, neatly coiled. Dawn hooked it over the horn of her saddle, got Posey turned around, and rode into the woods. It was the first time in a long while—years at least—that she had been alone, moving at will through wild country, and in spite of the bad things she was leaving in her wake and the uncertainty of what was to come, she found that it was like going home.
ON THIS SIDE OF THE RIVER THE FOREST RAMPED GRADUALLY ABOVE THE LEVEL OF THE stream. In two places, tributary creeks snaked down from above, each enfolded in its little ravine. Dawn found it easier to ride along the river’s bank or even have Posey wade knee-deep than to negotiate those obstacles. Most of the way, the land to the right, on the opposite side of the river, was every bit as steep and densely wooded as on the left. But shortly after she made it past that second creek, the river commenced a big, sweeping turn to her left, almost a full horseshoe bend, as it dodged around an outcropping of pink stone. This was too steep for most horses, and so it was at that point that Dawn forded the river. The right bank rose quickly to a lip—nothing Posey couldn’t scramble over—but beyond that it was as flat as the left one was steep. An expanse of sand and gravel, too coarse to be called soil, stretched for fifty feet or so to where the woods resumed. Some combination of bad soil and frequent flooding prevented the growth of any trees thicker than Dawn’s wrist. Much of what did grow had been hacked away or smashed down by the wheels of cars and trucks. For this was the place where Reverend Kidd baptized people. Dawn knew that if she put the river to her back and rode toward the woods she would find a tunnel through the vegetation, arching over a dirt track—just a pair of wheel ruts left by the comings and goings of the Kidds’ parishioners, and of others who came here to drink beer and catch fish. Farther away from the river this connected to a gravel road that led eventually to the Indian reservation. It was along that road that Reggie’s gang would later be making their escape. No getaway vehicles were here yet though.
Discarded bottles and the cold craters of fire rings were strewn about. Dawn rode Posey to a place where there was at least a little bit of tall grass to munch on, and draped her reins over a feeble sapling. She took the rope from the saddle horn, slung it over her shoulder, and walked to the riverbank, following the track worn into the loose earth by the Kidds and their flock. As she knew from experience, there was a pocket of deeper water just below the bank. Her skirt inflated and went inside out, almost covering her face as she sank into that. She whooped in a sharp breath at the coldness of the water and stifled a bit of panic as her feet lost traction and the current swept her along for a few yards. But she’d already crossed the deepest part of the channel. With every bit of floundering progress she made toward the opposite bank her footing grew more secure and the current got slower. There were a few more stumbles as her feet came down on unseen rocks, but before long she was striding up onto a sandbar in water only knee-, then ankle-deep. Then she was on bedrock, looking directly up at the Kidds’ house.
They’d hired men, and paid them with the Lord’s money, to construct a deck out over the brow of the stone outcropping that supported their house. It did not extend more than a yard past the brink, but Dawn could see its underside and the row of posts that held it up as she followed a somewhat devious course up the rock. This looked like a cliff from a distance but when you were up close you could find ways to scale it by traversing this way and that to take advantage of natural folds and ramps.
Suddenly she was at the top, crouched under the deck, full in shadow as the low afternoon sun would be striking the opposite side of the house. She uncoiled the rope, letting it tumble down the face of the bluff. She passed one end around a post—a creosoted four-by-four set in a crude concrete footing that the workers had poured directly on the bedrock. She began pulling the other end up toward her while letting the first end snake its way down. When she could see that the two ends were about even with each other, just a couple of yards above the river, she stopped. By grabbing both ropes, anyone could use this to climb up or let themselves down. Pulling on one end, though, would take the other up and around the post and allow the whole thing to be retrieved without leaving any trace.
During this whole time she had heard no sound from the house. She knew the Kidds well enough to be confident that they would still be at the clinic. Or, perhaps, since the job had run so late, on their way back. But they weren’t here. That was all that mattered. She found a little flight of steps that got her onto the deck. Part of it was open to the elements but the rest was a roofed and screened veranda. From this an unlocked door led her into a pantry. Beyond that was the kitchen, and then she was in the house proper.
It would have been interesting to wander through the whole place looking at their family photographs and so on, but she didn’t have time. She went upstairs and found the bedroom where the Reverend Kidd kept his wardrobe. No shortage of black suits here. She swapped her ruined skirt for a pair of his trousers. The waist was too big but she threaded a necktie through the belt loops and cinched it tight. She was wearing a cream-colored blouse. She pulled a blue denim work shirt on over that and then a black suit jacket. The smell of the Reverend Kidd made her gag. Worse, the smell of Mrs. Kidd was all over her collection of scarves, but Dawn picked out the darkest ones and arranged them around her neck and over her hair.
Down the hall was the bedroom that had been promised her—the place where Mrs. Kidd would have jabbed the fatal overdose into Dawn’s arm. But the trunk wasn’t there. Of course not. It was heavy and awkward. Why bother bringing it upstairs?
Dawn found her way to the basement. This was low-ceilinged, with an uneven floor—just a layer of dirt over the bedrock. On the river side was a hatch giving way to the crawl space under the deck. That seemed valuable, and so she left it propped open and dragged some obstructions away from it.
On the other side of the basement, toward the front of the house, was a set of steps leading up to a sloping cellar door. At the base of those steps her trunk was just sitting there on the dirt. She opened the lid and saw mostly Communist theory and propaganda, since her clothes had all been removed. Tossing those aside she exposed the false floor of cedar planks. When she levered that out of the way, there was the violin case, just as she remembered it.
It was still locked. The jailers had confiscated the key when they’d booked her. She didn’t expect to see that key again. This basement was too cramped to serve as a workshop, so there were no tools. She carried the violin case up the steps to the underside of the cellar door and shoved it open. Emerging into the side yard she spied a detached garage only a few strides away. She entered that through an unlocked side door and found an oil-stained plank workbench along one wall. Pumpkin was clearly no handyman, but he had a few screwdrivers and a couple of hammers on a pegboard. With those Dawn was able to make short work of the lock. She opened the lid to find all the parts of the tommy gun precisely as she had last seen them in the barn in Virginia, more than a year ago, when Silent Al had helped her close the lid.
She made a couple of wrong guesses early in the process of reassembly, but the parts would go together only one way, and soon the whole thing made sense. She got it all together, heaved the drum magazine up, and slid it into the side of the trigger assembly, doubling the weapon’s weight. Angling it into a ray of low red sun coming in through the door, she operated the charging handle and satisfied herself that a cartridge had been fed correctly into the breech.
The thing was a real bear to carry around. She stole a few yards of stout twine and threaded it back and forth through the lugs at either end of the weapon, creating a makeshift shoulder strap. With the fully assembled and loaded weapon thus slung over her back, she began looking around the garage for things that would burn vigorously. Of this there was no lack.
SHE’D READ ENOUGH NEWSPAPER CRIME STORIES TO KNOW HOW THIS ONE WOULD BE written up. After a standoff at the bank, the gang, protected by a withering barrage of covering fire from tommy guns, surplus Great War hand grenades, and Browning automatic rifles, piled into a couple of stolen vehicles and made a break for it. One vehicle was soon abandoned at a local park. Its occupants got clean away by riding horses into the woods. The other car, pursued hotly by local police, stiffened by a couple of federal agents who just happened to be in town, headed out of Fort Sickles but soon lost their way on unfamiliar local roads and made the mistake of going up a dead end. It was a dead end because it led to a cliff, and a river. The last structure on it was a fine house owned by the Reverend Kidd, an independent preacher, and his wife, a nurse who worked at the nearby Indian agency. Fortunately these decent and upstanding citizens were not at home when the stolen vehicle roared into their front yard. The bank robbers, finding their retreat blocked by a fleet of pursuing law enforcement vehicles, piled out and sprinted into the safety of the house under a hail of gunfire. Trapped in the building, they made a desperate stand, shooting out of shattered windows with every weapon at their disposal, shouting imprecations at the police during lulls in the action. Amid the volleys of taunts and curses a woman’s voice could be heard, leading to speculation that the perpetrators might be none other than the Barrow Gang. A woman clad in black was glimpsed popping up in one window, then another to deliver bursts from a tommy gun. The standoff continued through the hours of dusk. At some point a stray bullet apparently touched off a fire inside the living room. Within minutes the house was fully engulfed in flames. The screams of the trapped gun moll were interspersed with sporadic reports of ammunition cooking off. A grenade detonated—someone committing suicide rather than be burned alive? After that, the woman’s voice was heard no more.
Not until the following morning was it possible for law enforcement to approach the smoldering remains of the house. Some members of the gang were suspected to have escaped out the back by jumping off a cliff into a river. If so, and if they had survived the jump, they had gotten away clean.
The Reverend and Mrs. Kidd could not be reached and their where-abouts were unknown.
THE REAL STORY, AS SEEN BY DAWN, WASN’T FAR OFF FROM ALL OF THAT, SAVE THAT IT WAS like an opera as viewed, not from the audience but from backstage.
They waited until it was nearly dark to slosh the gasoline on the floor and strike the match. By that point most of the gang had already gone down the ropes and across the river to meet up with the horseback contingent; cars awaited them there. Reggie pulled the pin from the grenade and underhanded it up the flaming stairs into the master bedroom. Before it even exploded he and Dawn were running downstairs to the cellar. The fire above was sucking a river of cold air in through the hatch beneath the deck. They could have found it with eyes closed. Dawn went down the rope, then Reggie, and when he’d made it to the river he pulled on one end of it until the other end came loose and fell into the stream. The cops had got wise to the fact that some were escaping out the back, but down on the opposite bank, men with long rifles discouraged anyone trying to creep around the side.
They drove the cars up the dirt track through the woods, working their way up out of the valley to the intersection with the gravel road. Headlights, but only a single pair, were approaching from the direction of the Indian reservation. Everyone piled out of the cars and took cover in the trees, unslinging and unholstering weapons, cocking hammers and chambering rounds.
The car came recklessly close before it stopped. “These ain’t no cops,” someone chuckled.
The passenger-side door opened and someone got out. Dawn heard the chiff-chiff-chiff of the stockings before Mrs. Kidd came round into the beams of the headlights, radiant in her white nurse’s uniform.
Dawn stood up and stepped out onto the road, swinging her tommy gun’s muzzle around. “I’ll handle this,” she said.