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Mrs. Francis, carrying her baby, got out of the car as Dillinger helped Hamilton into the backseat. As he did, Van Meter was apparently struck by a pang of envy. “What do you do?” he asked Francis.

“I work at the power company,” Francis said.

“You’re lucky to have a nice job and family,” Van Meter said.

Before leaving, Dillinger patted the baby on the head. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we like kids.” After a few minutes, Van Meter and Dillinger drove both cars away. The Francis family walked two miles to a service station and called for help.

Hamilton was in excruciating pain as they hid the stolen coupe on a side road and transferred the guns to the Francis car. The shooting meant St. Paul would soon be crawling with FBI agents. Dillinger decided to head to Chicago, with a dying man in the backseat.

Lac Du Flambeau Indian Reservation, Wisconsin 2:00 P.M.

Outside a tarpaper shack deep in the north woods, a fifteen-year-old girl named Dorothy Schroeder was pinning up clothes to dry when she saw the man tromping through the brush toward her. His green fedora, tie, brown suede jacket, and gray slacks marked him as a stranger.

“Where is Woodruff from here?” the man called out as he approached. The man was clearly lost. Dorothy went and got her mother. The man was standing in the yard when Mrs. Schroeder walked out.

“Can I buy a cup of coffee?” Baby Face Nelson asked.

The FBI car Nelson had stolen had thrown a rod that morning, barely an hour’s drive west of Little Bohemia. Rather than raise suspicion by hailing a ride, Nelson had struck off across country. He’d walked twenty miles into the woods before he stumbled onto the shack.

In the kitchen Mrs. Schroeder handed him a cup of coffee and a slice of buttered bread; he thrust three dollar bills at her over her objections. Nelson was sipping the coffee a few minutes later when Mrs. Schroeder’s aunt and uncle, Ole “Ollie” Catfish and his wife, Maggie, walked up. Catfish, a weathered sixty-seven-year-old Chippewa who spoke broken English, used the shack to tap maple trees. He and his wife had walked the seven miles from their home outside the town of Lac Du Flambeau. Nelson explained that he was a game warden and would need to stay with them two or three days. Catfish didn’t object. That night Nelson slept in the Catfishes’ bedroom, on a bed beside the elderly couple. Chicago was a long way off. He had no idea how he would get there.

While the nation remained transfixed by the unfolding story of the FBI’s pursuit of Dillinger, the Barker-Karpis Gang’s days of relative anonymity were drawing to a close. While most of its members hid in Toledo, Dock Barker had remained behind in Chicago with his old Tulsa pal, Volney Davis. Both men chafed at the gang’s inability to launder the Bremer ransom; fences in Reno and St. Paul had declined to take it, saying it was simply too hot.

In early April, running low on money, Dock drove to Toledo to sit down with Karpis and his brother Fred. He had been talking with Dr. Moran, the drunken abortionist who performed their cosmetic surgeries. Moran insisted he could launder the Bremer ransom, and Dock wanted to try it. Against their better judgment, Karpis and Fred agreed.

Dr. Moran was almost giddy when Dock Barker came to his office in the Irving Park Hotel on April 15 and handed him $10,000 wrapped in a newspaper; the gang agreed to pay 6.25 percent for every dollar he exchanged at local banks. Moran gathered a motley assortment of his underworld clients, including one of Dock’s Oklahoma pals, a gonorrhea case named Russell Gibson, also known as Slim Gray; a neuralgia case, an old prison pal of Moran’s named Izzy Berg; and a diabetes case, an aging former state legislator named “Boss” John McLaughlin. McLaughlin brought in more men, including his chauffeur, his seventeen-year-old son Jack, and a thirty-four-year-old bookie runner named William Vidler.

While his assistant Jimmy Wilson tended their patients, Moran closeted himself