of the bank.
They climbed in the back.
"Drive," Dion said.
A tall, bald guy with a gray shirt and black suspenders came out of the bank, armed with a club. A club wasn't a gun, but it could still cause trouble if the guy got close enough.
Joe rammed the gearshift into first with the heel of his hand and hit the gas, but the car went backward instead of forward. Fifteen feet backward. The eyes of the guy with the club popped in surprise.
Dion shouted, "Whoa! Whoa!"
Joe stomped the brake and the clutch. He rammed the shift out of reverse and into first, but they still hit the lamppost. The impact wasn't bad, just embarrassing. The yokel with the suspenders would tell his wife and friends for the rest of his life how he'd scared three gun thugs so bad they'd reversed a getaway car to get away from him.
When the car lurched forward, the tires kicked dust and small rocks off the dirt road and into the face of the man with the club. By now, another guy stood in front of the bank. He wore a white shirt and brown pants. He extended his arm. Joe saw the guy in the rearview mirror, his arm jumping. For a moment, Joe couldn't comprehend why, and then he understood. He said, "Get down," and Dion and Paolo dropped in the backseat. The guy's arm jerked up again, then jerked a third or fourth time, and the side-view mirror shattered and the glass fell to the dirt street.
Joe turned onto East Street and found the alley they'd scouted last week, banged a left into it, and stood on the gas pedal. For several blocks he drove parallel to the railroad tracks that ran behind the mills. By now they could assume the police were involved, not enough so that they were setting up roadblocks or anything, but enough that they could follow tire tracks off the dirt road by the bank, know the general direction in which they'd headed.
They'd stolen three cars that morning, all in Chicopee, about sixty miles south. They'd picked up the Auburn they were in now, as well as a black Cole with bald tires and a '24 Essex Coach with a raspy engine.
Joe crossed the railroad tracks and drove another mile along Silver Lake to a foundry that had burned down some years before, the black shell of it listing to the right in a field of weeds and cattails. Both cars were waiting for them when Joe pulled into the back of the building, where the wall was long gone, and they parked beside the Cole and got out of the Auburn.
Dion lifted Joe by his overcoat lapels and pushed him against the Auburn's hood. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"
"It was a mistake," Joe said.
"Last week it was a mistake," Dion said. "This week it's a fucking pattern."
Joe couldn't argue. But he still said, "Take your hands off me."
Dion let go of Joe's lapels. He breathed heavily through his nostrils and pointed a stiff finger at Joe. "You're fucking up."
Joe took the hats and the kerchiefs and the guns and put them in a bag with the money. He put the bag in the back of the Essex Coach. "I know it."
Dion held out his fat hands. "We've been partners since we were little fucking kids, but this is bad."
"Yeah." Joe agreed because he didn't see the point in lying about the obvious.
The police cars - four of them - came through a wall of brown weeds on the edge of the field behind the foundry. The weeds were the color of a riverbed and stood six or seven feet tall. The cruisers flattened them and revealed a small tent community behind them. A woman in a gray shawl and her baby leaned over a recently doused campfire, trying to scoop whatever heat was left into their coats.
Joe jumped into the Essex and drove out of the foundry. The Bartolo brothers drove past him in their Cole, the back end sliding away from them as they hit a patch of dry red dirt. The dirt spewed onto Joe's windshield and covered it. He leaned out the window and wiped at the dirt with his left arm while he drove with his right. The Essex bounced high off the uneven ground and something took a bite out of Joe's ear. When he pulled his head back in, he could see a lot better, but blood poured