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to make a rest for his
    rifle. Tim was up front, next to me. He had a pistol in each hand.
    We
    were all dressed in the same white jackets. Tim and Virgil pulled the black
    stockings over their faces. We all had on black gloves. I was wearing a white
    cowboy hat and sunglasses.
    Cars were parked in front of the poolroom,
    but there was space between them. I came to a stop.
    Wallace never
    looked our way.
    “Back us up just a little,” Virgil said.
    “I need a better angle … yeah!”
    I pulled the lever
    into low, held the brake down with my left foot and fed the car a little gas. I
    watched the left mirror to make sure we weren’t going to get blocked when
    we pulled out. Then I said, “Okay.”
    A bomb went off just
    behind my head. Then Tim opened up with both pistols, like he was spraying with
    a pair of garden hoses. I moved my left foot off the brake as I stomped down on
    the gas.
    I slipped through traffic as smooth as I could, trying to
    balance speed with not calling attention to us. I had to bust a red light at
    one corner, but that wasn’t so unusual, the way people around there
    drove.
    A few blocks later, a squad car came right at us, siren
    blasting. But he went on by, probably heading to the poolroom.
    Once I
    was sure nobody was chasing us, I pulled in behind the bus depot and Virgil
    jumped out. He had a duffel bag over his shoulder. Inside was all three guns,
    the stocking masks, my cowboy hat, and two pair of gloves—I kept mine,
    because I was still handling the wheel.
    After that, we were okay. I
    drove Tim all the way across town, to where he was parked. He was going to pick
    Virgil up from the bus depot, like he just came in from out of town.
    That left me alone. I wasn’t worried about an APB on the car. It was
    a grayish Toyota Camry; looked like a million other cars on the road. I just
    drove it through the alleys until I found a nice quiet spot. Then I climbed
    out, leaving the door open and the engine running, just like that guy in the
    Camaro, a long time ago.
    I t came out just the way
    Tim said it would. They had the chief of police on TV. He was a square-faced
    guy, wearing a regular suit. The woman asking him questions had a lot of makeup
    on. Her hair was blonde, stiff, like a helmet.
    “The shooting
    appears to have been gang-related,” the chief told her.
    “We’ve been charting a significant increase in drug trafficking in
    our area recently. We attribute this to an influx of gangs from major
    metropolitan areas. This is typical of their pattern; they’re like
    salesmen trying to establish new territories.”
    “Is it true
    that you already have suspects?” the woman said.
    “I
    don’t want to comment at this time,” he said. “We don’t
    want to say anything that might compromise an ongoing
    investigation.”
    I thought maybe they were just trying to trick
    us, make us think they didn’t know what really had happened. But then
    they showed the TV woman talking to a couple of the people who had been there,
    outside the poolroom. They both said it was black guys who had done the
    shooting, a whole carful of them.
    W e probably would
    have gone on forever, except for that little bank. Tim was the one who found
    it. He studied up on things like that, and he was a real good planner.
    The bank was about an hour’s drive away from where we were. It was an
    old one, sitting on some high ground outside the town. Tim told us the bank was
    there even before the town got built up, when the only thing around was the
    mill.
    “It was a company town,” Tim said.
    “What’s that?” I asked him.
    “That’s
    when the only work is for this one company, Eddie,” he said. “Like
    when there’s a mine, and nothing else. So the mining company owns the
    houses the workers live in, and it owns the stores they buy their goods in,
    too.
    “It’s like being in prison. If you have money on the
    books, you can get stuff from the commissary, right? Candy bars, cigarettes
    … even