Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [38]
As bullets whizzed through the cabins, Buck and Blanche found themselves trapped; there was no entrance to the garage from their cabin. They decided to run for it. Hoisting a mattress in front of them, they walked out their front door and began to step toward the garage.5 The mattress was too bulky, however, and they dropped it. Buck had taken only a step or two when he stumbled, his automatic rifle firing wildly as he fell; a .45 caliber bullet struck him flush in the left temple, boring a hole through his skull and exiting out his forehead. Blanche screamed for Clyde to open the garage door as she helped Buck to his feet; he was alive.
Braving the hail of bullets, Clyde opened the doors and helped the couple inside. They shoved Buck into the Ford, where he joined Bonnie, who had limped in unaided. Clyde jumped into the car and backed out of the garage into the storm of gunfire. A bullet fragment struck Blanche in the forehead; a glass shard struck her in the left eye.
“Oh my God!” she screamed. “I’m blinded!”
Standing on the running board, W.D. opened up with one of the Brownings as Clyde ran the gauntlet of gunfire, bullets hitting the car from all directions. The Ford barreled through the yard, vaulting over a ditch before hitting the highway. Behind it, the deputies and highway patrolmen raced for telephones to arrange pursuit. Three had suffered minor bullet wounds. As the gang drove north, Blanche begged Clyde to stop the car to minister to Buck, who was dying. “No,” Clyde said. “We ain’t stoppin’. Shut up about it.”
After a whirlwind trip to the World’s Fair, John Dillinger had returned to Indianapolis on July 7, intent on quickening the pace of his crime spree. For the first time he explained his plans for a prison breakout to his teenage partner William Shaw. Together the two men bought Dillinger his first car, a maroon 1928 Chevrolet sports coupe. Dillinger didn’t know how to drive, so Shaw taught him.
Impatient for a major score, Dillinger began casing a downtown bank Shaw had mentioned, the Massachusetts Avenue State Bank. While he did, Shaw disappeared. A few days later, Dillinger received a message Shaw had decamped to Muncie, fifty miles east, after learning police were looking for him in connection with a robbery pulled while Dillinger was still in prison.
Dillinger drove to Muncie on Friday, July 14, and found Shaw and a group of friends lying around an apartment on South Council Street. The apartment’s other occupant was a hard-drinking ex-con named Harry Copeland, a dim bulb Dillinger would use on a number of later bank jobs. That afternoon they took Copeland and drove ten miles west to the farm town of Dalesville, whose bank Dillinger had scouted; they agreed to rob it on Monday.
For some reason, probably because they were low on cash, they decided to rob a Muncie roadhouse, the Bide-a-Wee Tavern, that same night. A few minutes after midnight, Dillinger and a partner walked in, guns drawn, handkerchiefs over their faces, and within minutes backed out of the bar with about $70. On the way out the front door, Dillinger encountered a couple coming in. With a grin he pinched the woman’s bottom; when her male friend objected, Dillinger slugged him.6
Robbing the tavern turned out to be a mistake. The next morning, a Saturday, Dillinger and Copeland had just left the boardinghouse to move Dillinger’s car into the rear garage when they heard someone yell, “Hands up!” It was a pair of Muncie detectives, backed by two patrolmen, who had guns trained on Shaw and the others in an alley behind the house. The detectives, following up on the previous night’s robbery, had easily traced Copeland’s car,