Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [134]
Dillinger shoved Blunk through the kitchen door, surprising two guards and the jail’s chef, William Zieger. Zieger, a combative sort, took one look at Dillinger and his submachine gun and said, “I’ll take that thing away from you and shove it up your ass.”
Blunk blanched. “My God, Bill!” he said. “He means business!”
Zieger surrendered. Blunk stepped forward, and, on Dillinger’s orders, took one of the guards’ pistols and laid it on a table. Dillinger grabbed it. He then opened a closet, took out a raincoat and hat, and walked out the kitchen door into the rain. Behind him came a curious procession, Youngblood training his gun on Blunk, then the chef and the two guards, followed by three more prisoners who wanted to escape. None of the last six men had a gun trained on them.
Dillinger trotted down the side of the red-brick jail until he reached a side door to its garage at the rear. A trustee named John Hudak was hunched over the engine of a 1927 Nash—Sheriff Holley’s car—when he felt something hard shoved into his back. He turned to see Dillinger. “Get in and drive,” Dillinger said.
“I, I don’t have the keys,” Hudak stammered.
“Where are they?” Dillinger asked.
“In the warden’s office, I think.”
Dillinger shoved Blunk toward the car and asked him to check for the keys. Blunk looked inside and said, “No keys.”
“That son of a bitch Baker, he lied to me,” Dillinger said. “I ought to kill him.”
For a moment Dillinger pondered his next move. He needed the car keys. Leaving Youngblood to guard the crowd in the garage, Dillinger led Blunk and Hudak back outside to the kitchen door. Inside, they surprised a National Guardsman and three other men. Blunk took their guns and Dillinger locked them in the receiving room. Hudak, meanwhile, was unable to find the sheriff’s car keys. “I gotta steal a car,” Dillinger said to Blunk. “Where’s the nearest garage?”
By the time Dillinger stalked back outside toward the jail’s garage, Warden Baker and the other hostages had freed themselves from the cells upstairs. Still locked inside the cell block, Baker went to a secret peephole that led into a closet in his residence. He banged on the wall. A moment later his wife’s eyeball appeared at the peephole.
“Irene,” he said. “Has the car left the garage?”
She didn’t understand.
“Call for help,” Baker said. “John Dillinger is out!”
Mrs. Baker wasn’t sure what to do. She picked up the phone, but for some reason the line was dead. She opened a window, spied a passing postman, and shouted “My God! John Dillinger is out!” The postman just stared. At wit’s end, Mrs. Baker hurried out of the apartment and down a flight of interior stairs to the garage. Bursting inside, she found Ernest Blunk standing with a man she didn’t recognize.
“John Dillinger is out!” she exclaimed.
The man stepped toward her. Suddenly she noticed the submachine gun in his hand, the two pistols jammed into his belt, and the two other pistols in his front pockets.
“Oh, no,” she said. “You’re not Dillinger.”
Dillinger smiled and took her by the arm. “Mrs. Baker,” Blunk said, “you do as he tells you and no one will get hurt.”
Dillinger locked the whole crowd, now numbering more than ten people, in a side room and got ready to leave. Shoving Blunk in front of them, they walked out the side door and circled behind the jail and the Criminal Courts Building. Dillinger’s luck held. There were no guardsmen or deputies in back that morning.
Next to the Criminal Courts Building stood a squat brick building, the Main Street Garage. The three men jogged through the rain to its back entrance. Inside, they walked through the garage toward the front. Two mechanics saw them, shrugged,