Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [287]
Karpis hated this, hated driving through streets he didn’t know and hadn’t mapped. It was careless. The first street he turned into was a dead end at the boardwalk. He looked back and saw policemen running around the corner behind them. They were trapped. Karpis wheeled the car into a 180-degree turn and drove straight at the officers. “We’ll run right through!” he told Campbell. “Get the gun ready!”
At that moment Karpis spied an alley. As the police opened fire, he swung the steering wheel to the right and the car skidded into the alley. The Pontiac shot down the narrow space between buildings. One exit was blocked by a mail truck. More shots echoed behind them. Karpis tried another exit and emerged onto a side street, then took several more random turns. To his surprise, he found himself in the alley where they had left the women. The women weren’t there.
“Maybe the cops got ’em,” Campbell said. In fact, the girls, cold and frightened, had returned to their rooms, where Delaney got back in bed and Burdette called her a doctor.
“They’ll get us if we hang around here,” Campbell said.
Karpis was torn. But not that torn. He mashed the accelerator, and the Pontiac shot forward. He never saw Delores Delaney again.
19
PAS DE DEUX
January 1935 Until . . .
I made Hoover’s reputation as a fearless lawman. It’s a reputation he doesn’t deserve . . . I made that son of a bitch.
—ALVIN IN KARPIS
Karpis steered the Pontiac toward the Atlantic City causeway, expecting to find a roadblock. Instead he spotted a car full of police parked at the roadside. As they sped by, Campbell aimed the tommy gun. The cops either failed to notice or lost their nerve; they ignored them. Once across the causeway Karpis turned onto a dirt road, then bumped along a set of train tracks until he found a glade where they waited, hungry and cold, till nightfall.
Rain was falling that night when they inched back onto the highway. Spying no roadblocks, they drove west until they reached a gas station at Camden. Karpis thought the attendant recognized them, but the man handed them a road map and said nothing. As the rain changed to snow they crossed into Pennsylvania, where they began looking for a new car. Outside Quakerstown Karpis spotted a Plymouth sedan and began to honk, waving for it to pull over. When the car, driven by a thirty-one-year-old Philadelphia psychiatrist named Horace Hunsicker, coasted to a stop, Karpis got out, pointed his machine gun at the doctor, and slid in back. Campbell got in front and told Hunsicker to drive.
It snowed heavily as the startled Dr. Hunsicker guided the Plymouth west across Pennsylvania. They drove all night and the next day, keeping to slippery back roads, stopping only for gasoline; Hunsicker was too frightened to attempt an escape. Karpis and Campbell said little, keeping their comments to the roads. They crossed into Ohio on a dirt road and at 9:30 that night stopped in the town of Guilford Center, outside Akron, where they led Hunsicker into a vacant Grange Hall and used a pair of pajamas to tie him to a radiator. Hunsicker struggled free twenty minutes later and walked to a farmhouse. Within an hour an alert was broadcast for his stolen car.
The fugitives continued west, passing Toledo, then turned north into Michigan. Outside Monroe, south of Detroit, they stopped at a filling station, and Karpis called their old hangout, Toledo’s Casino Club, where he spoke to a friend named Coolie Monroe. Monroe arrived with a cab driver about two-thirty the next morning. Karpis and Campbell, collars turned up, hats tugged low, tossed their guns into the backseat and abandoned their car, its headlights still on and its engine running; Karpis hoped police would guess he was heading for Canada.