Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [157]
The two officers pulled up in front of Clyde’s car a few minutes after nine. Bonnie and Methvin were still asleep, but Clyde saw them coming, jumped behind the wheel of the Ford, and slammed it into reverse. Boyd and Campbell had just stepped out of their car when the Ford spun its wheels backward down the muddy road. Boyd began to run after it, but it outdistanced him. Clyde got only a hundred yards when the car slid into a ditch, its rear wheels sinking in the mud.
Boyd and Campbell were running back toward their car when Clyde leaped from the Ford, a Browning automatic rifle in his hands. “Look out, Percy!” Campbell yelled as Clyde opened fire. His first bullets whizzed over the lawmen’s heads; he may have been trying to frighten them off. Boyd and Campbell drew pistols and returned fire. Clyde hunched down and fired back at them. One of his bullets struck Boyd a glancing blow to the head, and he fell, dazed. Back in the car, Methvin awoke and grabbed a rifle. He scrambled out the passenger-side door, took aim at Campbell, and fired. One of his bullets hit Campbell square in the chest, tearing a bloody hole in his midsection. Campbell dropped to his knees, rose for a moment, then fell backward, dead.
“Bring ’em up,” Clyde said to Methvin.
Methvin walked toward the fallen Boyd, who was moaning in the mud. “Get up and come with me,” Methvin said.
Boyd rose, his hands in the air, and walked toward the Ford, Methvin behind him, covering him with the rifle. Together the three men tried to push the Ford out of the muddy ditch. It was no use. Clyde took his rifle, stood in the road, and began flagging down passing vehicles. He forced several drivers to help extricate his car.
“Boys,” he said at one point, covering the men with his rifle, “one good man has already been killed, and if you don’t obey orders, others are liable to be.” After ten minutes nearly a dozen men were pushing and pulling the Ford in the mud, but the car remained mired until Clyde stopped a truck and forced the driver to attach a chain to the Ford’s bumper. In a minute, the Ford was free. Clyde motioned for Chief Boyd to get in the back. He was going with them.
They drove north, eluding pursuit, and crossed into Kansas. Clyde struck up a conversation with the wounded Boyd, stopping at one point to bandage the chief’s head wound. At nightfall they stopped at a store in Fort Scott. Methvin hustled inside, emerging a few minutes later with four plates of food and an evening newspaper that blared headlines of the shoot-out. “I’m sorry about shooting the old man,” Clyde said quietly. After that he fell silent.
Just north of Fort Scott they let Boyd out on the roadside. Clyde handed Boyd a ten-dollar bill and shook his hand. “Take this for the bus and be sure to see a doctor,” he said.
“Bonnie,” Boyd said. “What do you want me to tell the press?”
Bonnie thought a moment. She had long been irked by the repeated tendency of Southwestern newspapers to reprint the infamous photo taken at Joplin the previous year of her posing with a cigar.
“Tell them I don’t smoke cigars.”
Dillinger had left St. Paul just hours before the FBI surrounded his hideaway. The bullet wound in his left leg bandaged, he drove Billie south into Iowa, then east across Illinois and on into central Indiana. A few hours after agents raided the apartment building at 1835 Park Avenue, Dillinger coasted to a stop in a field behind his father’s farm outside of Mooresville. It was a little after midnight on Friday, April 6, just