Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [20]
“I can travel,” Bonnie murmured. “It’ll hurt for sure. But we can’t stay here.”
A few minutes later, headlights flashed through the woods in front of the house. “Everybody get on the floor,” Clyde ordered. He and W.D. skipped outside and disappeared into the bushes.
A car drove up to the house. Into the night air stepped the Collingsworth County Sheriff, George Corry. With him was Tom Hardy, the Wellington town marshal. Lonzo Cartwright had driven to the jail and told them of the scene at the house. The two lawmen figured they had a trio of drunken teenagers to deal with.
Clyde stepped from behind the bushes, his Browning automatic rifle trained on the two lawmen. “Raise your hands,” he shouted. He and W.D. disarmed the two men and used their handcuffs to bind them together. As they did, W.D. noticed a movement inside the house. Glancing through a kitchen window, he saw Gladys Cartwright, her four-month-old son on her hip, reaching for the backdoor. Thinking she was trying to escape, he fired his shotgun, hitting her in the hand.
As her family rushed to apply bandages to the wound—Mrs. Cartwright’s thumb would later be amputated—W.D. stalked back to the car. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. He glanced over at an old car in the weeds and proceeded to shoot out all four of its tires. Clyde walked into the farmhouse and returned to the patrol car with Bonnie in his arms. He carefully laid her on the backseat. He and W.D. shoved the officers in beside her and without another word drove off.
They drove through the Texas darkness in silence, the only sounds Bonnie’s moans from the backseat. Clyde glanced in the rearview mirror and was pleased to see the marshal, Tom Hardy, stroking her hair, trying to comfort her. After a while she seemed to stabilize. Clyde lightened up and began talking. “Did you coppers ever hear much about the two Barrow brothers?” he asked at one point.
“No, I can’t say that I have,” Hardy answered, not wanting to anger Clyde. “We have no record of them in the office,” Corry added.
“Don’t you mugs ever read the papers?” Bonnie whispered.
At a bridge six miles west of the town of Sayre, Clyde stopped and honked the horn. “Everybody out of the car,” W.D. ordered. The officers lined up against a bridge rail. Clyde covered the men while W.D. walked to the far end of the bridge and talked to someone in a car parked in the shadows. By and by he returned with the lethargic Buck Barrow at his side. “When do we get going?” Buck asked.
“What we gonna do with these coppers?” W.D. asked.
Clyde thought a moment. “Let’s march ’em down the river a piece and tie ’em up.” Buck and Clyde herded the two lawmen down toward the river. At the water’s edge Clyde ordered them to stop.
“What would you do if we turned you loose?” he asked.
Hardy said they would head straight home. He tried to look brave. He would not beg for his life.
“Yeah, I know,” Clyde said, his voice heavy and tired. “You’d run your legs off getting to a phone.”
“What’re you gonna do with ’em?” Buck asked. “Want ’em tended to?” He raised his rifle.
Clyde pondered the two men. “You get a bunch of wire off that fence,” he told Buck, motioning toward a string of barbed wire. “Yeah, they’ve been pretty decent cops. But I’ve said I’d never take a cop for a ride and let him live to squeal his head off.”
Buck brought the barbed wire, and together they tied the men to a tree. They stood before the two lawmen a minute, then started back up the slope. After a moment Buck stopped and turned, his rifle pointed at Hardy. There was a long moment of silence.
“Come on,” Clyde finally said. “Let’s get going.”
They let the men live.
Clyde’s elusiveness always owed more to his skill with cars than with guns; he thought nothing of driving a thousand miles in a day, if that’s what it took to outdistance the law. That night he drove the length of Oklahoma, reaching Arkansas around dawn. Bonnie deteriorated,