STIFF SENTENCE

...And you’d better be careful what you steal, too!

It was a bad job, right from the first. Kenny had cased that little bank way out in the boonies—he had a relative that lived in the little bitty town not too far from there, and he never could keep his mind off business, even when visiting his kin. Always had an eye out for the main chance, did Kenny.

Sibley was a place you’d miss if you winked going through it. If you sneezed too, you’d miss everything from the cemetery at one end of town to the school on the other. But Kenny never missed anything. He stopped at the café and listened to the old codgers gossiping.

He learned a lot, like the fact that the bank was one that people for miles around seemed to use, because it was still a country bank that hadn’t computerized itself right out of the human race. Your character, for instance, made the difference in making a loan.

The place even sounded good to me, and I intended to help rob it. Of course, Kenny wasn’t sentimental about things like that. He got Robert to come in for the inside work, and he located me to tend to the transportation. I’ve always been good at that: I can hotwire a car faster than most people can crank it with a key.

I usually can figure out and fix what’s wrong when one stops running too. Nine times out of ten that’s true; it would turn out that the Sibley job would be the tenth time.

Sibley was a bedroom community for a middle-sized industrial town about fifteen or twenty miles up the road. It also had a batch of senior citizens who lived on Social Security and pensions of one kind or another. Around the first of the month, they kept a lot of cash on hand, for the old nesters out in the East Texas woods don’t like to pay by check, mostly. They want cash in their hot little hands.... I expect that if they could get ahold of gold, they’d hold out for that.

It made it perfect for our needs. Big banks in cities keep lots of cash on hand, but they also have a lot of trigger-happy security. Little banks may not have more than a hundred thou’ in cash, but their security is enough to make a cat laugh.

We planned the hit for the second day of the month, a Monday. All the commuters would be off at work. The oldsters would be heading toward the bank with their checks ready to cash. If we hit early, not long after opening, we felt that we would get the whole pot.

We made the run in a black Chevy I lifted from a used car lot in Houston. It was the sort of car that can run straight over you, and you couldn’t describe it if you lived. We had a Buick hid out on a woods road about five miles out on a county oil-top, and it could put us over the Louisiana line in about an hour flat, if things went right.

Naturally, things didn’t.

Kenny and Robert came boiling out of the bank’s side door with a couple of bags full of cash. I had the engine running, of course, and Kenny yelled, “Hit it, Ray!” before he got the door shut. We took off like scalded cats.

I hooked a left, and we were behind the big trees, out of sight. Then I slowed and doubled back through a field, along a wagon road, and that got us almost to our second car, which was waiting in the woods. We ran the Chevy away back into the thickest part of the timber and shoved it down into a ravine. We pulled brush over all the tracks. Nobody was ever going to find that sucker.

The ski masks and the jackets the two inside men wore went down with it, and we pulled on the coats to our business suits, put the money into leather briefcases, lit up big expensive cigars, and pulled out onto the oil-top. We caught a through highway in five minutes, and from there it should have been smooth sailing.

About a mile outside of Croft (population 7,200), the engine began to overheat. Badly.

I nursed her along, scared to stop, because I felt in my bones that when that engine died even Jesus Christ wasn’t going to bring her back to life again. We got to Croft and pulled into the parking lot around a smallish shopping mall. It was just filling up with cars, and that made it a good place to dump a car without its being noticed, maybe for days.

“Ray, you go and lift us some wheels,” Kenny said. “We’ll go into the mall and mingle. Won’t do to stand out here in the open and get noticed.”

I could see a couple of service stations from where the car sat. The parking lot was too busy to risk hotwiring anything there, but I thought there might be something that had been washed and serviced and parked out behind one of those stations. Anything to get us out of town would suit me fine.

I locked the briefcases in the Buick. Then I took off my jacket and stuffed my tie in my pocket. Little places like Croft, in hot weather, are not where you find men in suits unless they are from out of town.

The first station was busy, but nothing promising showed up on its parking ramp. Ambling down the street, I kept an eye on the next, which was a big Exxon on a corner. As I watched, a hearse slid up to the pumps and the driver got out and went into the office. I could read his motions—he wanted the thing filled up, oil checked, and parked while he went down the street to the little café for his breakfast.

The boy came out and filled the tank, checked everything, and drove it around to the back of the station, so nobody would run into it. I had it out of the parking ramp before the boy had got himself set down in the office again.

I parked it behind an empty house in an overgrown driveway and walked to the mall after Kenny and Robert and the money. Five minutes later, we were on our way again. Time had been lost, but we still felt we were in good shape.

This time, of course, we became bereaved relatives, instead of hotshot businessmen. We were on our way to the mortuary to pick up Uncle Albert’s corpse. We’d gone twenty miles before Kenny said, “Say, did you look into the back of this thing?”

What with one thing and another, I hadn’t. We stopped in a dirt track and opened the doors.

We had lifted a stiff! He must’ve been picked up at a hospital and was on his way to be embalmed—he was still in that skimpy hospital gown. Looked awful too. What was worse, I recognized him—that was the body of Judge Walker Johns, who’d sent me up four times for felony over the past ten years. I thought Kenny would bust a gut—he’d sent him up a few times too.

Robert was almost crying. “This guy’s from a big rich family over to Rogersville!” he moaned. “They’ve got money and own politicians and run things like lords. They’ll have everybody in the state looking for him. The feds too—what’s the penalty for kidnapping a judge?”

“My God, Robert,” I said, “you can’t kidnap a stiff. And I dunno as I ever heard of any law against stealing one. You, Ken?”

He shrugged. “No, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. We’ve got to dump this bird. Someplace where nobody will ever find him or this meat wagon. Then we’ve got to lift another set of wheels. You idiot, Ray: I’d of thought you would look in the back!”

That made me a little hot. “It was sitting there full of gas, with the driver gone for a good half hour, if not more. You’d have done the same,” I protested. But he looked skeptical.

It was a very hot day. Of course, we all knew the man in the back hadn’t been dead for more than a few hours. Probably died in the night. But we all kept wrinkling up our noses and I could swear I could begin to smell him. It almost drove us out of our gourds.

We crept through little towns at the speed limit or below, keeping our eyes peeled for a promising set of wheels. Nothing showed; junkers seemed to be all that anybody out in the woods country could afford.

When we got to Dobson, I said, “Let me out here. Go on across the state line and hide the wagon in that big stand of pines four miles past the marker. Wait for me there, back in the woods, while I find something and catch up to you.”

I should have known better. When a job goes sour, it goes all the way. They caught me red-handed hotwiring another Buick. Big silver job that looked fast too.

Oh, you can go ahead and look for Kenny and Robert, if you want, but it’s already been a long time since they left me. They’re not dopes. They’ve found some way to go on, and if you find ’em in that stand of pines, holding hands with that stiff, they’re stupider than I took them for.

I still want to know how you got my description, though. I didn’t even go into that tacky little bank, and not a soul even so much as glanced at the Chevy while I waited.

Damn! You don’t mean it! An old lady with a telescope? You’ve got to be kidding. Well, I can sort of see that a little bitty place like that doesn’t have much excitement....

How many? Six divorces? My God, I didn’t know little towns had so much action going on. She ratted on ’em all, did she? And on me too.

Oh, well. I guess the public defender will do me as well as anybody. My own lawyer gave up on me after the last conviction. He didn’t do me any good anyhow.

Too bad—this looked like such an easy job. And with my luck, Kenny and Robert will make it away clean as a whistle, while I’m stuck with the rap again.

It’s almost enough to make a man go straight.