How to Rob Banks
by Jack Smiles
March 1951, somewhere in the Midwest:
*There’s only one way to rob banks — rob the damn banks. You don’t go in there and pass some wimpy this-is-a-robbery note with a peashooter in your pocket. If it’s a fucking robbery, then rob. When that hippy kid with the ponytail or the granny with the glasses on the end of her nose looks down at your note she’s gonna look up, put her hand to her throat and hysterically scream oh-my-god-are-you-kidding. Well, if that’s what you’re doing, you are.
Note shit takes time and you ain’t got time. You run in with sunglasses, a turtle mask, and a big scary gun. Point it at tellers and yell “open your drawers and take three steps back now” point at the customers and yell “all you raise your arms and don’t move.”
Vault the wall or kick your way through the teller door. Go down the line, empty the till drawers into a briefcase and get the hell out. Don’t hold a gun to some manager’s head to get the vault open, this ain’t the fucking movies. Take the tills and get the hell out.*
Kellertown cop Ronald Hall collapsed into his chair and groaned. He looked over at officer Bill Boyler and said, “Bank robbery in broad daylight an’ we got nothing. Ten people must have seen him, but their stories and descriptions are all over the yard. He scared the shit out them, got in and out so damn fast all they can do is babble.”
“Yeah,” said Boyle “they can’t agree if he was tall or short, fat or thin, white or black, an earthling or a fucking spaceman.”
“Why here? Why Kellertown,” Hall thought aloud. “He’s lucky he got two grand.”
*Pick a string of tiny crossroads farming towns a couple miles apart along a rural main drag. Hit three, one every other day. You ain’t gonna get 20 large or anything like that. But it’ll add up.*
“He pulls the jobs by himself, but he’s got to have an accomplice. A driver,” Hall said
Boyler answered, “You’d think so, but nobody we talked to saw him or noticed a cruising or idling car.”
*Work alone. No driver. As you walk out take off the glasses, put the brief over your shoulder, pull the turtle neck down, open your overcoat to show your suit jacket, get the sandwich out of your pocket and eat it as you walk, fast, but not running, to your van on a side street a couple blocks away.*
“Another bank job. That’s the third call this week,” state detective Wills said as he put the phone down after talking to Kellertown cop Bill Boyler. “By the time we investigate every scene he’ll be long gone. And we got no starting point. None of those local yokels even got a description of his car.”
“We checked every boarding house and motel,” said his partner. “So I’m stuck on where the hell was he between the jobs.”
*Drive a street legal van you can sleep in. Do a little homework on campgrounds? Nobody going to suspect a fucking camper to be robbing banks. Stay a few nights. Do some fishing, hiking. Then move on to the another area with a string of small towns, Barney Fife cops and lots of farms and do it again.*
“Hey look at this,” said the detective Wills said a month later, when they got back to the office after an accident call. “Note from dispatch. Police up in Treverton called. Bank job up there. Identical.”
“I’ll give ‘em a call and I think we should call the Feds,” his partner said.
*These are federal notes being stole and eventually the news will filter up to the FBI. J. Edgar’s boys aren’t going to love a six-little-farm-banks-investigation 75 miles away. They got bigger fish to fry. They’re not gonna go in all Elliot Ness.*
“Can’t the local and state out there handle this? Nobody got hurt,”said FBI agent Tobinski with his feet on his desk in the Ames field office.
“I don’t know, they’re crying poverty,” said his rookie partner.
“Ok, so what do we know.”
“Hits local independents in different towns mid-mornings. First spree was around Kellertown. Then three more up around Treverton, that’s 60 miles north. He doesn’t make them open safes. His takes aren’t huge, but he hits three in six days and then three more a month later and it beats working. Does ‘em early in the week. Never on a Friday.”
“I guess he likes long weekends.”
*Go in when it’s quiet like Tuesday or Wednesday about 10 - 10:30. Yeah, the banks are chunked on Friday but there’s always money, that’s why they call them banks. There’s some mining towns in Montana ripe for pickin. But for now it’s time to rest. Time to take a nice long weekend.*
Jack Smiles is a former newspaper feature writer collecting fiction rejections for a hobby in retirement.