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weeks apart, the Kellys’ reunion that evening was hardly a warm, fuzzy moment. As Geralene recalled, “[Kathryn] went up to [Kelly] and said, ‘I don’t know whether to kill you or kiss you.’”12 Cass Coleman later told the FBI: “As soon as she got there Kathryn told George he was a damned fool, and should have had better sense than to go off to Mississippi where she couldn’t get in touch with him, as he knew she needed money, and that he had just gone down there chasing after [some] woman. He said he was just trying to take care of himself until he could get in touch with her. Kathryn called him a damned liar, and he called her another damned liar.”

The squabbling Kellys climbed into Kathryn’s pickup and drove back to San Antonio, where Kathryn had rented a five-room furnished bungalow. Flossie Mae and little Geralene listened as the Kellys debated their next move. Kelly wanted to head east, to Chicago or New York, where he felt they could hide for months. But Kathryn insisted on doing something to free her mother. She told Kelly he should surrender to the FBI in return for a deal that would enable her mother to go free. To Kathryn’s surprise, Kelly agreed.

“Go ahead and make your dicker and when you get it made, let me know,” Kelly said. “I’m willing to go, but you know I can’t go to them and do any dickering [myself ].”13

The next day, Tuesday, September 12, Luther Arnold arrived in San Antonio, brimming with details of his trip to Oklahoma City and completely oblivious to how close he had come to being arrested. Kathryn gave him more money to pay her mother’s attorneys. The next day Arnold returned north, stopping en route in Fort Worth, where he tarried for a night of barhopping. When he finished he was so drunk he hired a young man to drive him on to Oklahoma City. Arnold had barely stepped into the Skirvin hotel the following afternoon, Wednesday, September 14, when Gus Jones’s men arrested him.

By now the FBI men were losing patience. According to one internal report, agents employed “vigorous but appropriate” methods to persuade Arnold to talk (this term would later emerge as Bureau shorthand for roughing up a subject). Arnold broke quickly.14 Gus Jones telephoned San Antonio. Within hours agents there led a squad of San Antonio police to the Kellys’ bungalow. Bursting through the front door, they found only a flustered Flossie Mae Arnold. The Kellys had left the day before, she said, heading back to Cass Coleman’s ranch. Flossie Mae was frightened. The Kellys had taken her daughter, Geralene, with them.

The Dallas office had several agents in West Texas that night, and all converged on Coleman in search of the Kellys. One agent was already in town when the Kellys, with Geralene in tow, arrived just hours before the San Antonio raid. For the moment, the couple’s luck held. One of Cass Coleman’s neighbors, Clarence Durham, returned home from work that day to find the Kellys lying on a bed on his front porch. Durham demanded that they leave immediately.

The moment the Kellys drove off, Durham headed to the sheriff’s office and told him everything.15 By the next day, every sheriff’s office in West Texas was on high alert. Sightings of the Kellys came in from Abilene, San Angelo, and a series of towns leading toward Wichita Falls, which suggested they were making for Oklahoma. Highway Patrol officers were placed on the Red River bridges, but they were too late. The Kellys crossed into Oklahoma early that day, speeding north.

Hungry and tired, they reached Chicago on Sunday, September 17. In search of a new and untraceable car, Kelly stopped at a pay phone and tried in vain to reach a Cicero garage owner; at that very moment, the man was completing a special armor-plated car for the Federal Reserve raid Alvin Karpis and the Barkers planned. The Kellys drove downtown, rented an apartment, and, after unpacking their luggage, trudged out to a diner to eat.

Over dinner, Kelly grew nervous when a pair of diners seemed to stare at him. Afterward, fearing they had been spotted, he and Kathryn took Geralene and drove downtown