Outlaws (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) Read online

  FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EBOOK EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2012

  Copyright © 1987 by George V. Higgins

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company, New York, in 1987.

  Vintage Crime is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Cardon Phillip Webb

  eISBN: 978-0-345-80466-2

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1_r1

  GEORGE V. HIGGINS

  George V. Higgins was the author of more than twenty novels, including the bestsellers The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Cogan’s Trade, The Rat on Fire, and The Digger’s Game. He was a reporter for the Providence Journal and the Associated Press before obtaining a law degree from Boston College Law School in 1967. He was an Assistant Attorney General and then an Assistant United States Attorney in Boston from 1969 to 1973. He later taught Creative Writing at Boston University. He died in 1999.

  ALSO BY GEORGE V. HIGGINS

  The Friends of Eddie Coyle

  Cogan’s Trade

  A City on a Hill

  The Friends of Richard Nixon

  The Judgment of Deke Hunter

  Dreamland

  A Year or So with Edgar

  Kennedy for the Defense

  The Rat on Fire

  The Patriot Came

  A Choice of Enemies

  Style Versus Substance

  Penance for Jerry Kennedy

  Imposters

  Outlaws

  The Sins of the Fathers

  Wonderful Years, Wonderful Years

  The Progress of the Seasons

  Trust

  On Writing

  Victories

  The Mandeville Talent

  Defending Billy Ryan

  Bomber’s Law

  Swan Boats at Four

  Sandra Nichols Found Dead

  A Change of Gravity

  The Agent

  At End of Day

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Two Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Three Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  ONE

  AUGUST 4, 1970

  1

  At about 9:50 in the morning the Brinks armored truck carrying its driver and two guards, all in uniform and armed with Smith and Wesson .38 caliber revolvers, arrived at the Danvers Mall branch office of the Essex Bank and Trust Co. The cargo consisted of forty thousand dollars in small bills and coins. A light mist was falling. The driver parked the truck in front of the free-standing brick building that housed the bank on the westerly side of Route 128, apart from the stores in the mall. The guard in the passenger seat of the cab was Harold McMenamy, 48, of Brighton. He emerged and locked the door. He unsnapped the protective strap on his holster and scanned the parking lot. He walked quickly to the glass door of the bank. He rang the night bell on its frame. A woman in her early fifties parted beige curtains on the inside door and peered out at him. He nodded. She grinned and unlocked the inner door.

  McMenamy returned to the truck. He knocked twice, then once, on the rear door. Inside the truck Donald Fish, 39, of Bridgewater, unlocked the door and opened it. He gave McMenamy a red two-wheeled handcart and unsnapped the protective strap on his holster. McMenamy put the cart on the ground. Fish handed him two grey bags of currency and four grey bags of coins. McMenamy stacked the bags on the cart. Fish emerged from the truck and locked the door behind him. As McMenamy pushed the cart to the outside door of the bank, Fish followed, scanning the parking lot. The woman inside opened the door with a key and admitted McMenamy. Fish stood outside the door watching the parking lot, while she locked it behind McMenamy.

  At approximately 9:55, the woman unlocked the inner door and then the outer door of the bank. McMenamy followed her with the cart, his body bent to exert the force he needed to push a cargo of twelve grey bags. The woman locked the doors behind him. Fish walked beside him as he grunted against the load. “Hell is this?” Fish said.

  “Goddamned sale,” McMenamy said. “Asked her the same question. Some bright-eyed bastard inna mall had this great idea: Have the back-to-school sale two weeks before everybody else does, and get all the people’s money. Run a goddamned raffle, so that everyone, gets lucky when they ring up fifty bucks, gets everything he bought free, plus a brand-new fifty, too. And damned if it didn’t work. Four hundred thirty-three large.”

  The green Chevrolet Impala sedan entered the parking lot from Route 128 at moderate speed; it veered toward the front of the truck when the Ford Country Squire station wagon came from the northwest back corner of the lot, appeared at the southwest corner of the bank and stopped behind the truck.

  The passenger from the front seat of the Squire had an M3 .30-caliber grease gun. He spattered a six-shot burst off the back of the truck. “It’s loaded,” he said.

  The female passenger from the left rear seat of the Country Squire had an M16. “So’s hers,” the man said.

  The male passenger from the right rear seat of the Country Squire had a sawed-off shotgun. The male passenger from the right front seat of the Impala pointed an M79 grenade launcher at the windshield of the truck.

  Fish and McMenamy clasped their hands on their heads.

  The male with the sawed-off shotgun stuck it through his belt and went to the cart. He took it from McMenamy and wheeled it to the back of the Country Squire. He threw each of the twelve bags through the open back window. He returned to the car. “Set,” he said.

  The man with the grenade launcher hung on the door of the Impala until the Country Squire pulled out fast from the back of the Brinks truck and headed out of the parking lot, south on 128. Then he lurched back into the Impala, slamming the door, and it spun away fast, burning rubber, going north on 128.

  Harold McMenamy expressed his resentment in the same terms to police and reporters. “They were kids,” he said. “They were nothing but damned kids. The guy with the grease gun — Christ, I had a goddamned
grease gun once, and it wasn’t anywhere near as good’s a damned M-Three carbine. He was nothing but a damned kid. Got those crummy little granny glasses, and the hair all over the place, and naturally he looked like shit. You wanna know something? Even at my age, damnit, if he didn’t have that gun, I could take that little punk. I could take him myself. Looked like a goddamned hippie. Army jacket, jeans, the boots, all that friggin’ crap. And I’ll bet the little bastard didn’t weigh a hundred fifty, even with the gun.

  “And the other one,” McMenamy said, “the one with the sawed-off. Now he was a little bigger. He was big, in fact. Prolly twenny-five years old, maybe twenny-six, and I think he was a black guy. Looked like one to me. Got the Afro and the same clothes. And the broad. Same age. Looked like a filthy pig. I mean, what the hell is going on? What’s the story here? These people, they’re not robbers. They’re not dangerous. What’re they doing this stuff for? What the hell is going on?”

  On the evening of September 13, 1970, the Ipswich Ensemble presented an all-Mozart program in the main auditorium on the Anchorage campus of the University of Alaska. The event was reported in the Anchorage Times for the 14th.

  “The most striking thing for many in the large and attentive audience was not the complete professionalism of the musicians, but the realization that this internationally known orchestra is made up entirely of amateurs. Students, teachers, their husbands and wives, only a very few of whom stay with the group for more than one or two years.

  “ ‘We do have a small nucleus, a few people who’ve been with us since we began,’ Mrs. Claire Naisbitt said. With her husband, the Ensemble’s famed musical director, Prof. Neville Naisbitt of the mathematics department of Ipswich University, and co-founder of the group, she has been one of them. ‘But apart from providing continuity, you know, perhaps a sort of ballast for the younger people, that’s about all we do.’ Hard for the listener to believe, perhaps, after her thrilling soloist performance last night of the 17th piano concerto, but the gracious Mrs. Naisbitt does insist: ‘When Neville and I began this, twenty-five years ago next January, we did it to bring together students and teachers from Ipswich, interested in music, of course, with people like them from all around the world. That was our ambition, and any pride we feel, well, it is pride in them. For a year or two, three at the most, they’re able to indulge themselves almost entirely in their music, before setting out in their careers in science, or the arts. How many do you think,’ she said, ‘how many of our students otherwise would see Alaska? Ever see its beauty? How many would see California, Santa Fé, New Orleans? Very few, I think. But because of the Ensemble, they make their way to Ipswich, and we take them to the world, and bring the world to them.’

  “And, she might have added: How many young Alaskans like talented Fiona Campbell, formerly of Wasilla, would have had the opportunity to travel the world playing their music in Rome and Tel Aviv, and revisiting her home?

  “ ‘We lived here when I was growing up,’ Campbell said. ‘My father,’ Maj. Andrew D. Campbell, USAFR, ‘was in the Judge Advocate General’s office at Elmendorf. When he retired, and we moved back to New York for him to practice law,’ the lovely young Wellesley junior said, ‘I really didn’t know if I’d ever see Alaska again. But now, here I am.

  “ ‘It’s something I’ll remember all my life,’ Fiona said. ‘I hate to see it end. It’s good to come home again, nice to come back, and in some ways, I’d like never to leave again. But all of us, the ones from England, my friends from Florida and Kansas, all of us know that getting chosen for an Ensemble Year was the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to us. It’s really been wonderful.’

  “The Ensemble will play an all-Bach program tonight at the Anchorage campus before moving on to Seattle, first stop on its eleven-city itinerary through the Lower 48.”

  OCTOBER 5, 1972

  2

  Late in the morning, Det. Lt. Insp. John D. Richards, Massachusetts State Police, conducted an emergency meeting in the Brockton office of Ward Keane, the District Attorney of Plymouth County. Richards was forty-six years old. He weighed a hundred and sixty-five pounds, which he described as “the same numbers but a lot softer” than the weight he had carried as a sixteen-year-old misrepresenting his age in 1942 to join the Marines fighting in the Pacific. “But of course,” he would say, “back then I didn’t have any brains or judgment to speak of. I like to think that’s changed.” Heavy rain from a low grey sky blackened the dark grey roof of the old orange brick building, and the other five men in the conference room sat at the oval table like medieval monks praying through an eclipse, their shoulders hunched as though they had been exposed to the rain.

  “This time,” Richards said, “this time at least the victims weren’t completely hysterical, so now there’s not as much question whether we’re dealing with things they actually saw, or things they might’ve dreamed. And, I’m happy to say, what the guards and the people in the bank told us this time pretty much squares with what we were able to get out of the Danvers people two years ago. Which is nice. Maybe we haven’t been able to find the bastards, but at least now we’re sure it’s the right bastards that we’re looking for. And pretty sure this is a gang that’s pretty cohesive, is following some kind of program — since so far’s we know yesterday’s was just the second one, two hold-ups in two years — and probably doesn’t have any connection at all with the individuals we’d ordinarily suspect.”

  “Can I ask a question here, John,” the District Attorney said. He was a short, thin man in his late forties. He had a small, sharp face that preserved the scars of adolescent acne, and his grey hair was crewcut.

  “Shoot, Ward,” Richards said, “ask anything you want. Don’t say I’ll have the answer here, but you just fire away.”

  “Have we got the exact take yet, what they got at Westgate yesterday?”

  “The best we can do,” Richards said, “since all of these transporters do the same thing and have their customers enclose the original tallies in the money bags themselves, and we’re only working from the pick-up sheets that they give to the guards, the best we can do is work on the assumption that what was in the bags matches what was on the sheets. Now if Wells Fargo goes to the trouble of recounting those deposits against the tally sheets in the bags, and you can bet your ass they do, the best we can assume is that if we could recover the loot intact, which I doubt we’re going to do, the total would match what the various customers told the men in the truck they were giving them.

  “Now,” Richards said, “if we assume also that none of those customers actually knew the truck was going to be knocked off yesterday, had advance knowledge so they could fill up a couple sacks with newspapers and then claim insured losses that they didn’t actually incur — and we don’t have any indication of that — then the total was five-sixty-five, seven-fifty.”

  “Wow,” the District Attorney said. The other four men at the table exchanged glances and small coughs.

  “Well,” Richards said, “yeah. It is a lot, and you combine it with the four-thirty-three plus they got in Danvers two years ago, same MO and some IDs, you can see why they don’t have to do it very often. These folks’ve scooped almost a million bucks. They aren’t doing this for thrills, and they’re not the kind of people like your usual robbers that go out and blow the loot in Vegas or someplace like that two weeks after they get it. These people are doing this as an occupation, and like everybody else, they don’t work any more often’n they absolutely have to.”

  “How many of them, John?” the DA said.

  “We think,” Richards said, “we think probably a total of eight. Which, if we’re right, is down one from two years ago. If what we got out of the witnesses then, if that was correct: that there were four people in the car that came up behind the truck there. This time there seems to’ve been three. You’ve got the two men and the woman in the car that takes the money. This time it was a Pontiac wagon they used, stolen in Middleboro Tuesday night. We’ve got a
partial on the plates, four of six digits we’re sure of, and if they’re the ones we think they are then they were stolen on Newbury Street in Boston sometime between ten and eleven last night. So anyway, that’s three in the car behind the truck.

  “You’ve got two more in the car that blocks the truck from the front,” he said. “This time they used a Buick Electra, stolen off a dealer’s lot in Maynard. Didn’t get a reading on the plates. Should have one by this afternoon. We’re assuming they were stolen too. Probably from some car at the airport or something, where the owner’s not back yet so he doesn’t know.

  “So,” he said, “we’ve got the three people in the Pontiac, and the woman and the guy riding shotgun with the woman in the Electra.”

  Capt. Ralph Fraley of the Brockton Police Department raised his left hand. “We are sure of that now, John?” he said. “We’re satisfied now that the second driver’s definitely a woman?”

  “Yup,” Richards said. “This truck driver’s certain. The guy in the Danvers job was so impressed with the grenade launcher it never really occurred to him to study the face of the driver. And of course there’s no guarantee that this was the same individual behind the wheel at Danvers. But this time, yeah, we’re sure. This is definitely a woman.” He paused. “An ugly woman,” he said, grinning. “ ‘Face like a potato,’ was what the trucker said, but definitely a woman.

  “So,” he said, “that gives you five at the scene. They leave, the two cars follow the same escape plan they used at Danvers. Go barrel-assing out onto Twenty-four, one goes north and one goes south, and all of us go apeshit, stepping on our own dicks and falling down a lot. So they get away. We found the Pontiac in Bridgewater, parked on a nice quiet lane and just as empty as could be.”

  “Prints?” Ward Keane said.

  “Nope,” Richards said. “We don’t think so, anyway. Oh, we’ll probably find latents of the rightful owners, mechanics, that kind of thing, if we look hard enough. But everything you could reasonably’ve expected the bastards to touch in the couple days since they’ve had it — rear bumper where they attached the plates, steering wheel, door handles, window cranks, all that kind of thing — is cleaner’n a nun’s imagination.