Red grass river, p.33
Red Grass River, page 33
Made no damn difference. Not to him. Not anymore.
Stubbs told him the robbers had fled north. As he got in his car Bob Baker told him to send a bulletin to all police departments as far north as Jacksonville and as westwards as Tallahassee. He asked where Heck Runyon was and Stubbs said he was still in the Everglades tracking an Indian wanted for murder—but Fred Baker was in Fort Pierce. Bob Baker told him to send word to Freddie to put up roadblocks at that town’s exits. It’d likely be too late to catch them going into town but if the robbers lingered there for any reason it might not be too late to catch them trying to come out. He also wanted Freddie to have two fast unmarked cars ready to go—and six good men with arms and ammunition. Stubbs ran off to send the messages and Bob Baker headed off to Ford Pierce.
He paused in Stuart long enough to go in the bank and make quick interrogation of the robbery witnesses. The tellers said they had no doubt whatever that Mobley and Middleton were two of the bandits. George Doster who appeared to be ill said he wasn’t so sure as all that. Sheriff Bob accepted the majority opinion. He dispatched four deputies to the Ashley place at Twin Oaks with explicit order not to engage in a fight should they find Mobley or Middleton on the premises. “If they’re there, you just let me know,” Bob Baker instructed them. “Dont do anything but keep the sonsofbitches under watch till I get there.”
Twenty-five minutes later he rolled up to the south town limits of Fort Pierce where Fred Baker stood waiting beside his own police car. They’d found the green Dodge getaway car in an alley at the west end of town. It had been stolen. A witness saw four men get out of the Dodge and into a Ford sedan and head out on the Yeehaw Road. Fred had two cars ready to go and in them sat the Padgett brothers, and four other Baker Gang deputies, all of them as heavily armed as soldiers.
Bob Baker bit off the end of a cigar and spat it out and tugged down his hat and looked off to the flat horizon in the west. “I figure they got less than a hour’s headstart. Let’s go!”
They were unaware they’d been identified in the bank. As he stripped off his female disguise Hanford Mobley yelled, “Anybody comin?” Roy Matthews was looking out the car’s rear window and said, “Nary soul.”
Clarence Middleton watched Mobley taking off his woman’s clothing and now hollered as though at a cooch show, “Put it on, baby, put it on!” Roy Matthews laughed and said Mobley was sure enough about the skankiest woman he’d ever seen. Hanford Mobley told them to fuck themselves, the disguise had been a real smart idea.
“That’s right, honey,” Laura said, glancing at him sidewise and grinning as she sped them down the dusty road. “Pretty is as pretty does and dont you let these peckerwoods tell you different.” But she couldnt help laughing along with Clarence and Roy. “And you watch your goddamn language, hear? There’s a lady present in case you didnt know.” Mobley glared at her but held his tongue.
He swiftly counted the take and said, “Forty thousand, my sorry ass. It aint but a little over twenty-three thousand here.”
“I think Old Joe ought to figure Doster’s five percent out of the difference,” Roy Matthews said.
“I think he should pay Doster with the difference,” Laura said. “He ought say, ‘Hey bubba, you know that seventeen grand that wasnt there? Well it’s all yours. And it’s all thats yours.’”
Hanford Mobley put twenty thousand dollars in one satchel and the rest of the money in another. Laura slowed as they came in sight of Fort Pierce. They followed the highway through town and saw but one police car and it parked in front of a cafe. Near the north city limits and the Yeehaw Road she turned down a street and then into an alley behind a closed roadhouse where Clarence had parked a Ford sedan he’d stolen in Vero before sunrise that morning. They abandoned the Dodge and got into the Ford and did not see the bum watching them from his nest of crates and cardboard twenty yards away—he who would wait till they drove from sight on the Yeehaw Road and then be rummaging through the Dodge when a police car pulled up and a pair of cops pointed guns at him and told him to freeze or die. They had no inkling of the telephone call Fred Baker was receiving even as they swapped cars, no notion that ten minutes after their departure on the Yeehaw Road every exit from Fort Pierce would be posted with police.
Thirty miles west at the Okeechobee crossroad they were met by Albert Miller in a coupé. Laura took the twenty thousand dollars and got in the car with Albert and they headed back the way Albert had come—south to the town of Okeechobee and around the lake’s east side to the Indiantown Road and then east through the swamp and pineywoods toward the road to Twin Oaks. Hanford Mobley took the wheel of the Ford and he and Matthews and Middleton pressed on to westward, bound for Lakeland. The plan was for them to take refuge with Mrs. Ella Fingers, a trusted woman friend of Joe Ashley’s whose lucrative business was to shelter and feed men on the dodge, no questions asked. There the three would lie low for a week or so until Old Joe sent word whether they could return to Palm Beach County without fear of arrest or would have to slip back surreptitiously.
They did not think they were being followed but thought it the wiser course to proceed as though they were. Rather than take the Sebring Road they drove on a narrow dirt road flanking the Seaboard rail line. The road was of sand and rock and even more rugged than most backcountry routes. The Model T jounced and pitched as it made its way through pinelands thick and dark that periodically gave way to marshy savannah rife with palmetto scrub. A covey of white herons took to wing like fluttering scraps of paper falling upward. A hawk swooped into the prairie grass near the edge of the road and arced back for the sky with a rabbit flailing in its talons.
Thunderheads purple and blue as fresh bruises were shaping in the western sky. At the Kissimmee River the railtracks crossed on a narrow trestle but the road veered north and followed the river to a bridge at Fort Basinger two miles away. Not wanting to be seen by anybody who might inform pursuers of their passing, they chose to cross over on the trestle rather than show themselves at the bridge. Hanford Mobley eased the car slowly onto the elevated tracks and the Model T lunged and yawed as it advanced from tie to tie in the manner of a cautious cockroach. Roy Matthews and Clarence Middleton gaped at the green river rippling below the tracks and arched their brows at each other and clutched tightly to the door posts against the car’s erratic sway as it forged ahead. Hanford Mobley caught their stricken looks and laughed.
Once across the trestle they continued on the tracks for nearly another mile before the narrow backroad from Fort Basinger came curving out of the pinewoods and again ran alongside the track bed and Hanford steered the Ford down the embankment and onto it. Five miles farther on, the rail line met with the Sebring Road and ran parallel with it for almost ten miles to the north end of Lake Istokpoga before road and track once again diverged, the raised track bearing directly for Sebring through its bordering swampland and the highway curving around the swamp to come up into Sebring from the south. They had just gone around the bend of the lake when the radiator sprang a leak and began hissing loudly. A handpainted roadsign announced the Lorida Fishcamp just a mile ahead and down a narrow dirt lane to Lake Istokpoga. They drove on with steam keening before them and blowing back with a smell of hot metal and came to the camp under high wide oaks hung with Spanish moss. Here they bought cold bottles of bootleg beer and a raw egg. Clarence Middleton wrapped his hand with a bandanna and removed the radiator cap with a whoosh of steam. He cracked open the egg and dropped it into the radiator and while they drank their beer and chatted with a couple of locals about the best ways to rig a trotline the egg circulated in the steaming water and found its solidifying way to the leak and plugged it. Clarence then filled the radiator with water from a dispenser can and replaced the cap. They finished off the beer with huge sighs and ripping belches and got back in the car and pushed on.
They drove into Sebring under an early afternoon sky darkening with storm clouds. A wind had kicked up and was shaking the trees. They topped off the gas tank at a filling station and then went to a cafe and bought sandwiches and bottles of soda and asked for the food to be bagged so they could take it with them before the rain hit. While they waited for their order they flirted with the waitresses. Roy Matthews told the prettiest, a blonde named Marybelle, that he was going to be visiting an uncle in Lakeland for the next week or two and asked if she ever got up that way. She said it so happened her best girlfriend lived in Auburndale which was only a few miles from Lakeland and she would be going to visit her this coming weekend. She gave him her friend’s telephone number and he winked at her and said he’d be sure to call on Friday night. Hanford Mobley had been first to speak and smile at Marybelle but after Roy Matthews caught her attention she had eyes for no one else. As they went back out to the car Mobley said it surely was pathetic to see a fella practically having to beg women for a date just because he couldnt get him a steady one. “I’m sure glad I got Glenda,” Mobley said. “She makes both them girls back there look like skanks.” Roy Matthews spat and laughed and let the remarks pass. Now they got on the paved main highway and bore north for Lakeland, still nearly sixty miles distant, but the roads from here on were all good and they would be there in two hours.
Barely fifteen minutes after the fugitives’ departure from Sebring a three-car caravan of Palm Beach County police officers swept into town in a crashing rain. At the Fort Basinger bridge fishcamp they’d learned that two men who’d been fishing from a skiff just upriver from the railroad had seen a Ford sedan drive over the trestle earlier that afternoon and Sheriff Baker knew it was the robbers.
“They say it was only three men in the car,” Fred Baker said as he drove off in the lead car with Bob Baker in the passenger seat beside him.
“Dont matter,” Bob Baker said. “One might of been laying down. One might of gone off on his own for some reason. I know it’s them, I know it. Let’s move, Freddie, goose this thing.”
Bob Baker had already considered that from Sebring the robbers could go north, south or west—and he planned to send a car in each direction in hopes that one of them would pick up the trail. But first all three cars pulled into a filling station for gasoline and the attendant there recognized Bob Baker’s description of two of the robbers and pointed out the cafe where they’d gone after they’d fueled their car. Ten minutes later Marybelle had told him about Lakeland. Ten minutes after that he was in the Sebring police chief’s office, forming a puddle of rainwater at the feet as he talked on the telephone to the Lakeland chief of police, shouting into the mouthpiece to make himself heard above the steady sequence of thunderclaps and the clatter of rain on the roof. The Lakeland chief he’d post cars at every end of town and have any suspicious vehicles stopped for questioning. Bob Baker said he was on his way and rang off.
The police cars motored north through the swirling storm and flickering lightning, their speed hindered by poor visibility, the cars weaving sharply in the windgusts and raising little roostertails of water as they went. At Avon they turned west to Fort Meade and there cut north again and bore for Bartow and Lakeland some twenty miles beyond. Sheriff Bob Baker had been holding his own silent counsel and studying the regional map he’d been given by the Sebring chief.
“What would you do if you were them and you spotted a bunch of cops all over when you got to Lakeland?” Sheriff Baker shouted at Fred over the rain drumming on the car.
“Try to get away to someplace else, naturally,” Fred yelled, staring hard into the slashing rain. “Find me another road out of there if I could.”
“Wouldnt you figure the cope would probly be watchin all the roads around there?”
Fred Baker considered for a moment. “I reckon. Leastways the main ones.”
“So wouldnt you maybe figure it’d be smarter to quit the car and travel some other way?”
“Like how?” He glanced at Bob Baker. “Like by train?”
“That’s what I’m guessin.”
“Not the Lakeland depot. Not with cops all over.”
“No,” Bob Baker said, “they wouldnt go there. Stop the car.” Fred pulled off onto the shoulder and the other two cars fell in behind. The rain swept over them in torrents and the cars were jostled by the wind.
Bob Baker was staring at the map spread open in his lap. “Here’s where.” He put his finger to a spot and Freddie leaned over to look.
“How you know?” Fred Baker said.
“I dont know,” Bob Baker said. “I just know.”
A moment later Freddie was out of the car and the rain knocked down his hatbrim and pasted his clothes to his flesh as he went to the car directly behind and told the Padgett brothers to bring the shotguns and get up in the first car with him and Chief Baker. He put Henry Stubbs in charge of the rest of the detail and told him to proceed with both cars to Lakeland and take custody of the suspects if they’d been apprehended or to render whatever assistance the Lakeland police might ask for if the robbers were still at large. He told Henry that Chief Baker would join them in Lakeland later that night.
They were almost to the Lakeland city limit when Roy Matthews said “Cops!” and pointed to the two cars bearing police insignia on their doors and looking ghostly in the whipping rain on the shoulder just ahead. Mobley slowed the Ford and pulled off the road and into a filling station as if that had been his intention all along. He wheeled the car in a U-turn to park it next to the pumps on the side away from the highway and further under the overhanging roof for better protection from the rain—or so, he hoped, it would seem to anybody watching them. They maneuver also put the pumps between them and the cops and positioned the car so it pointed back the way they had come. They all three stared back over their shoulders and through the rain at the police cars which remained as before.
“What you boys think?” Clarence Middleton said.
“I aint sure they even seen us,” Hanford Mobley said. “I aint sure they even on the lookout for us. Could be they waitin on somebody else. Could be they just waitin out this damn rain.”
Roy Matthews grimaced. “Who the hell you kidding, boy? You bet you ass they waitin on us. How many other people you know robbed a bank today.
Hanford Mobley glared. “Who knows? Maybe there was a goddamn dozen robberies today. How would we know?”
“It’s us they’re lookin for and you best know it,” Roy Matthews said. He alternately checked the loads in his shotgun and looked out at the cop cars as he spoke. “I dont believe they seen us. Not yet. But we can forget about goin to Miz Fingers’.”
“We best get a move on before this rain lets up and they can see some better,” Clarence said.
“It’s that fucken girl!” Hanford Mobley said. “You told her we was comin to Lakeland and now here the cops are, just waitin for us. You and your big mouth!”
“Why would she of called the cops on us?” Roy Matthews said. “She didnt have the first damn reason to call the cops on us.”
“What if the cops went callin on her?”
“Well why in the hell would they do that?”
“I dont know! But who the hell else knew we were comin here?”
“Goddammit thats enough,” Clarence Middleton said. “This aint hardly the time. What we gone do here?”
And old man stepped out of the station and was struggling into a rain slicker as he started toward them. Clarence Middleton waved him away and yelled, “Never mind, bubba. We dont need no gas after all.” The old man shrugged and went back inside.
“Shit!” Hanford Mobley hammered the steering wheel with the heel of his fist. “They’re like to have cops set up on all the roads around here.”
“Listen,” Roy Matthews said, “Plant City’s not but ten miles from here and there’s a backroad to it—about half a mile yonderway. I know cause I took it once. No way in hell they’d think to watch that little bitty road. Dont nobody hardly ever use it.”
“What the fuck’s in Plant City?” Hanford Mobley said.
“A fucken train station,” said Roy Matthews.
The rain did not slacken and they nearly got stuck in the mud several times but Hanford Mobley each time adroitly maneuvered the car free and they pressed on. It took them the better part of an hour to traverse the ten miles. As he drove, Mobley proposed they take the next train to Tampa, a big enough town so strangers didnt arouse suspicion. They would check into a hotel and call Old Joe to jell him of the change in plans and let him say what they should do next. Clarence said fine by him. Roy Matthews shrugged and nodded and said sure, why not.
