“Oh Christ, this is bad,” said Karpis.

  They decided to send Dock down to retrieve the cars and park them in front. When he returned this time, he said the policemen had ignored them. They appeared to be watching the adjacent building. “Let’s go,” someone said. Outside everyone hustled into the waiting cars. There were no cops in sight. They drove to Fred’s apartment without incident. But Fred wasn’t satisfied. He had to know if the plan was blown, and he couldn’t wait for Sawyer; if they were being watched, they could all be in Chicago by sunrise. Fred decided to return to Weaver’s building.

  “Well if we do this,” Karpis said, “you’d better take some equipment over there. Don’t just go with a pistol.”

  Barker stepped to the closet and brought out a submachine gun with two 50-shot drums. He and Karpis returned outside, where they slipped into Dock’s Chevy. Fred drove, Karpis beside him, the tommy across his lap. By the time they reached Weaver’s building, it was past midnight. “Should I go down the alley?” Barker asked.

  “Yeah, go on down the alley,” Karpis said.

  They eased down the alley, deep in shadow. The patrol car was gone. Reaching the far end, they turned into the street. The neighborhood was chockablock with brick apartment buildings, the streets lined with darkened cars. As they turned the corner, a set of headlights flashed behind them, a parked car coming to life. As Barker watched in the rearview, the car pulled out.

  Karpis turned in his seat.

  “They’re following us,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Barker said. “I can see.”

  They turned a corner, then another, driving slowly. The car stayed with them. Karpis peered backward, trying to make out the car’s occupants. There were two. In silhouette Karpis could just make out the driver’s peaked hat: a patrolman in uniform. “Them guys look like cops all right,” Karpis said. “What the hell are we gonna do?”

  “Only one thing we can do,” Barker said. “That’s stop ’em.”

  They eased around another corner, threading their way through the lines of parked cars in the narrow streets.

  “How do you want to do it?” Karpis asked.

  “I’m gonna pull around a corner real fast and stop, and you jump out with that machine gun and if they come around, start shooting.”

  Butterflies danced in Karpis’s stomach as they approached the next corner. They surged around it and stopped. Karpis stepped out into the frigid night air, holding the submachine gun. Barker jumped out the other door, pointing his .45. When the car behind them turned the corner, both men opened fire. The night exploded: Karpis fired from the hip, emptying the entire fifty-shot drum into the car. Barker fired the pistol. The car shook as bullets ripped into it. When they had emptied their guns, both men peered at the car. They couldn’t see anyone sitting upright. They jumped back in their Chevy and drove off. Back at Fred’s apartment they turned on the radio, waiting for the news. They sat up all night waiting, listening. Not till dawn, when Dock ran out to fetch a newspaper, did they discover they had just machine-gunned a uniformed Northwest Airlines employee.

  The man in the car turned out be a radio operator named Roy McCord, and he was following Barker and Karpis because he thought they were peeping toms. When McCord returned home from work that evening, his wife had told him of a prowler, presumably the man Karpis and Barker had seen earlier. McCord, still dressed in his aviator’s uniform and peaked cap, left his apartment with a friend to check out the report, spotted Barker’s car, and ended up in a hospital with three bullet wounds. He survived. The other man was unhurt.

  All that day the gang debated whether to abort the Bremer job. In the end, they decided to put it off two days, till Wednesday, January 17. In the interim, both Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde struck.

  East Chicago, Indiana Monday, January 15

  After three weeks in the Florida sun, Dillinger headed back to the Midwest with John Hamilton. The others planned to extend their vacation by driving cross-country to Tucson, Arizona. Dillinger said he wanted to pick up Billie Frechette; he promised to meet the others in Tucson. While in Chicago, he would try to cash bonds the gang had been unable to pass. Hamilton hoped to reunite with Pat Cherrington.

  According to Cherrington, who later told her story to the FBI, Dillinger and Hamilton left Florida on Sunday, January 14. Hamilton sent her a telegram that afternoon from Savannah, asking her to meet him in a Chicago hotel.1 Driving through the night, Dillinger reached Chicago the next morning. That same day, probably low on cash and unable to move the stolen bonds, he decided to rob a bank. It was an impetuous decision. Some would credit it to Dillinger’s growing belief in his own invulnerability, others to restlessness, a yearning to return to the limelight; he hadn’t robbed a bank in two months.

  Whatever the case, that day Dillinger performed like a hungry actor on a brightly lit stage. The bank he selected was in East Chicago, the corrupt mill town where he had spent time the previous summer. There is evidence Dillinger knew certain members of the East Chicago police department, and some have suggested his decision to hit the First National Bank that day was a prearranged affair. If so, somebody forgot to tell the rest of the East Chicago police.

  At 2:45 Dillinger and Hamilton stepped out of a car double-parked outside the bank. They left a driver in the car; his identity has never been established. Inside the marble lobby, Dillinger pulled a submachine gun out of what several eyewitnesses thought was a trombone case. “This is a stickup!” he shouted, startling the dozen or so customers in the bank. “Put up your hands everybody!”

  A bank vice president named Walter Spencer pressed a silent-alarm button beneath his desk; a block away, it rang at police headquarters. As the customers raised their hands and lined up against a wall, one forgot his cash on a counter. “You go ahead and take your money,” Dillinger said. “We don’t want your money. Just the bank’s.”2

  Hamilton stood by, apparently unsure what to do.

  “Come on,” Dillinger told him. “Get the dough.”3

  Hamilton hustled behind the teller cages and began clearing stacks of cash off the counters into a leather satchel. Just then a police officer named Hobart Wilgus appeared at the front door, apparently unaware of the robbery in progress.

  Dillinger saw him. “Cop outside,” he said to Hamilton, who hesitated. “Take your time,” Dillinger admonished. “We’re in no hurry.” When Wilgus entered, Dillinger stepped forward and disarmed him. He emptied the cartridges from the officer’s gun and tossed it back to him. He noticed Wilgus eyeing his submachine gun. “Oh, don’t be afraid of this,” Dillinger said. “I’m not even sure it’ll shoot.”

  As Hamilton worked the cages, Dillinger saw men in suits hurry toward the bank: plainclothes detectives, answering the alarm. Hamilton saw them, too. Dillinger, playing to his audience, seemed eager to display his insouciance. “Don’t let those coppers worry you,” he told Hamilton. “Take your time and be sure you get all the dough. We’ll take care of them birds on the outside when we get there.”

  A few moments later Hamilton was finished. Dillinger waved his submachine gun at Walter Spencer, the vice president. “Come on out here with me, Mr. President,” he said. Spencer asked if he could grab his coat. Dillinger shook his head. “You’re not going very far,” he said. He then grabbed Officer Wilgus by the arm. “You go first,” Dillinger said. “They might as well shoot you as me. We love you guys anyway.”4

  As he had at Racine two months before, Dillinger shoved the hostages ahead of him as a human shield. This time, however, he wasn’t facing a curious crowd. Arrayed outside, behind parked cars and in storefronts on both sides of the front door, were seven East Chicago policemen. As he edged onto the sidewalk, Dillinger hunched behind Officer Wilgus; Hamilton kept an arm around Walter Spencer.

  For a long moment, as the four-man scrum scuttled across the sidewalk toward the waiting getaway car, no one spoke. Dillinger locked eyes with at least one of the officers, several of whom stood no more than twenty feet away. They were just steps away from the car, and for a fleeting second it appeared Dillinger could brazen it out. Then one of the officers, a forty-three-year-old detective named Patrick O’Malley, shouted, “Wilgus!” Officer Wilgus turned, giving O’Malley a clear shot at Dillinger. O’Malley fired his pistol four times, at least one of the bullets striking Dillinger’s bulletproof vest.

  Dillinger appeared stunned. For the first time in his career, he appeared to lose his temper. “Get over!” he snapped to Wilgus, shoving him aside. “I’ll get that son of a bitch.”5 He raised his submachine gun and fired a burst directly into Detective O’Malley. The policeman, a father of three little girls, fell dead on the sidewalk, eight bullet holes across his chest.

  As O’Malley crumpled, the six remaining officers opened fire. The sidewalk erupted in gunshots. Dillinger and Hamilton dashed for the getaway car, jumping between a line of parked cars. Hamilton didn’t make it. He was struck by several bullets, one passing through his bulletproof vest, and fell to the ground. Dillinger stopped and helped him into the car, grabbing the money satchel as well. Miraculously the two managed to dive into the car’s open door without further injury. As bullets pounded the getaway car, the driver careened off down Chicago Avenue, eluding police pursuit. In minutes they were gone.

  Eyewitnesses made the identification, and the evening newspapers made it official: John Dillinger, the man who many in Indiana cheered for fighting greedy bankers, was now a murderer. For the rest of his life the killing clearly weighed on Dillinger’s mind. He would repeatedly deny shooting Detective O’Malley, to lawyers, lawmen, and friends. More than once, he volunteered this to complete strangers. His denials probably had less to do with the prospect of a murder conviction than with his own sense of self and his public image. At the heart of his appeal, Dillinger knew, was his joshing Robin Hood spirit, the sense people had that he was a regular guy making the best of hard times. Dillinger didn’t want to be the bad guy. He wanted to be someone people like his sister Audrey and her family could cheer.

  After murdering Detective O’Malley, Dillinger drove the badly wounded Hamilton to the hotel where Pat Cherrington was staying. Together they spent most of the evening locating a doctor to treat Hamilton’s wounds. One bullet had hit him in the stomach, at least one more in the left shoulder. For the next few weeks Hamilton remained in a Chicago apartment with Cherrington nursing him back to health.

  Dillinger, meanwhile, after splitting the $20,000 in proceeds with Hamilton, picked up Billie. They stayed in Chicago just long enough to visit a divorce attorney; as soon as Billie could end her marriage, she and Dillinger planned to wed. Afterward they drove south to St. Louis, where Dillinger wanted to visit a large auto show. There they bought a new V-8 Ford, checked into a downtown hotel, and spent an evening dancing in its roof garden. Then they struck out west on Route 66, looking forward to a vacation in the Arizona sunshine.

  East Texas, near Huntsville Tuesday, January 16 Dawn

  The morning after Dillinger’s East Chicago raid, a black Ford coupe bumped along rutted dirt roads through pine woods lining the Trinity River bottoms in a remote corner of East Texas. A thick fog rose from the river, making driving difficult. Behind the wheel sat Clyde Barrow, Bonnie beside him. In back sat a cadaverous forty-eight-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy Mullins. The car crossed a thin wooden bridge and came to a stop. Clyde got out, tucking a Browning automatic rifle beneath his arm. Mullins did the same. Leaving Bonnie in the car, they walked into the woods, disappearing into the mist.

  For six months Bonnie and Clyde had been alone, living out of their car on handouts from family and friends. Now that Bonnie’s leg had healed, Clyde wanted to get back to work. For that he needed a partner. Yet the couple’s notoriety had grown to the point where Clyde was unable to approach anyone he didn’t know. The only man he felt he could trust, his old partner Raymond Hamilton, was now being held at the Eastham Prison Farm. That morning Clyde planned to bust him out.

  It wasn’t Clyde’s idea; it was Hamilton’s. In early January, Hamilton had promised $1,000 to the unreliable Mullins, an eight-time loser about to be paroled, if he would find Clyde and arrange with him to smuggle guns into the prison farm. After his release, Mullins headed to Dallas and found Raymond’s brother Floyd. Floyd Hamilton was part of Bonnie and Clyde’s support network, ferrying food and other items to the couple every few nights outside the city. He took Mullins to see Clyde, at a roadside clearing outside Irving, ten miles west of Dallas.

  Mullins recognized Clyde from prison. Bonnie’s appearance surprised him. She was dirty and appeared to weigh no more than eighty pounds. Her leg remained bandaged. She limped. Sitting in his car in the darkness, Clyde listened to Mullins’s plan. The appeal of working alongside Raymond Hamilton was strong; with Hamilton as his partner he could be a bank robber instead of a beggar. But Clyde didn’t trust Mullins. The Hamilton brothers wanted the guns smuggled in Sunday night. Fearing a trap, Clyde said they would do it Saturday night. He told Floyd Hamilton to stay with Mullins every minute until they left.

  The next evening, after buying a pistol at a pawnshop, Hamilton and Mullins met Bonnie and Clyde on a highway east of Dallas. At sunset they drove south toward Madisonville, then turned onto the cat roads, hoping to find one that would lead them to the spot where the guns were to be planted. Around one-thirty A.M., they came to the edge of the prison farm. Mullins took the pistol, two clips of ammunition and one of Clyde’s .45s, wrapped them in an inner tube, and crept toward the prison buildings. About a hundred yards from Hamilton’s dormitory, Mullins slid the package beneath a culvert.

  They were back in Dallas by dawn. Sunday was visitors’ day at Eastham, and Floyd Hamilton drove down to tell Raymond the guns were in place. Clyde and Bonnie, meanwhile, returned to the edges of the prison farm. It took several hours, but they found the field where Hamilton’s work group was clearing brush that week. They took several more hours mapping their escape. It was raining and the roads were muddy. Twice they were forced to cut through fields, closing gates behind them.

  The escape was set for that Tuesday morning. At dawn, after leaving Bonnie in the car, Clyde and Mullins pushed through underbrush to the edge of the field, squatted behind a bush and waited. An hour later they were still waiting. If Hamilton’s escape was delayed, they had promised to be in place three straight mornings. They were about to leave when out of the fog they heard two shotgun blasts.

  Clyde strained to hear. Two shotgun blasts was the guards’ signal for help. A minute passed, then two. Worried, they headed back to the car. Suddenly they heard voices approaching through the mists. “Get something else!” someone yelled. It was Raymond Hamilton.

  “What?” Clyde hollered.

  He didn’t understand. Assuming Hamilton was being pursued by guards, Clyde raised his Browning and fired into the treetops. Mullins did the same. When the guns were empty, they handed them to Bonnie to reload. A moment later, four men emerged from the fog: Hamilton, a convicted murderer named Joe Palmer, and two prisoners who had run after them. All were breathing hard after running almost a mile.

  “Nobody but Raymond and Palmer can get in the car,” Mullins announced. “Everybody else go back.”

  “Shut your damn mouth, Mullins,” Clyde snapped. “This is my car. I’m handling this. Three of you can ride back there.” He motioned to the trunk. “Guess four of us can ride up here.”

  Within an hour roadblocks were being thrown up across the area. Sticking to the cat roads, Clyde drove north and west through the towns of Centerville, Jewett, Teague, Wortham, and Mexia before reaching Hillsboro, thirty miles north of Waco. At a gas station an old man approached the car. “Did you folks hear what Clyde Barrow pulled this morning?” he asked Clyde. The man rattled on for several minutes before Clyde had to ask him to please pump their gas.

  From Hillsboro, Clyde, worried that his old haunts in Dallas would be watched, drove the group south, to Houston. They made it back to Dallas three nights later, on January 20, meeting their families outside the city. There was much to tell—and much to plan. For the first time in seven months, Clyde Barrow had the makings of a gang.

  The man who headed the Texas prison system, Lee Simmons, was a lean, curt fifty-year-old, a member of the same generation of no-nonsense Lone Star lawmen as his FBI friend Gus Jones. He was at the state prison in Huntsville, forty miles south of Eastham, when he received a call about the raid at nine that morning. By ten he was at the farm. Two guards had been wounded in the escape, one of them, Major M. H. Crowson, seriously. The shooting had all been done by the fleeing inmates, but Simmons knew Clyde Barrow had done this. His instinct was confirmed the next day when one of the opportunistic escapees was recaptured.

  That night, after a day spent briefing reporters and orchestrating roadblocks, Simmons visited Major Crowson at the Huntsville hospital. He’d taken a bullet through the stomach and wasn’t expected to live. “Mr. Simmons, don’t think hard of me,” Crowson whispered. “I know I didn’t carry out your instructions. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t bother about it,” Simmons said. “Those fellows had their day. We’ll have ours. I promise you I won’t let them get away with it.” Crowson died the next day, and Lee Simmons swore an oath. No matter what it took, he would have Clyde Barrow brought in, dead or alive. He stewed on the matter for several days. The more he thought about it, the more he was certain he knew the man who could do it.

  St. Paul, Minnesota Wednesday, January 17

  The morning after Clyde Barrow’s Eastham raid, the temperature hung near zero in St. Paul as Edward Bremer drove away from his mansion on North Mississippi River Boulevard, his daughter beside him in his black Lincoln sedan. A slender man of great wealth, Bremer had been born into the Twin Cities’ first family. His father, Adolph, had married the daughter of a German brewer named Jacob Schmidt in 1896 and had taken over management of the Jacob Schmidt Brewing Company after his father-in-law’s death. A friend and financial supporter of President Roosevelt, Adolph Bremer had weathered Prohibition by producing soft drinks and “near beer,” and by diversifying into financial investments. Edward ran the family’s largest bank, the Commercial State Bank at Washington and Sixth.