Mad River

and as he rolled along the street, which he’d done probably three thousand times before, without ever having witnessed a single crime of any kind, he realized that one of the cars parked in front of the Oxford Credit Union looked right. It would only have been about the twentieth big SUV he’d looked at that day, but as he got closer, he realized it was the right color, and though he wasn’t much interested in cars, he knew enough to know, when he was a block out, that it sorta looked like a Tahoe. He couldn’t see the plates, but they looked like Minnesota plates, which was to be expected . . . but they were another point.
    He picked up his microphone and said, “I have a Tahoe at the credit union in Oxford.”
    The dispatcher came back with, “You got the plates?”
    “Not yet. I’m just coming up.”
    “Let us know,” she said, sounding bored. Probably the two-hundredth Tahoe call she’d taken that day.
    As he got closer, he could see that the plates weren’t the ones he was looking for. He stopped, and said, “I got a plate for you. Could you run this?”
    He read off the plate, and then got out of the patrol car. He could see somebody in the driver’s seat, sitting there, but looking at him in her mirror. That was nothing new; everybody did that; but the car’s engine was running. That wasn’t quite right, not when gas was $3.50 a gallon and rising.
    Card left his door open so he could hear the dispatcher, and loosened the gun on his belt; the excited dispatcher came back, her voice urgent: “Dan, those plates go to a Ford F150 so there’s something wrong there—”
    And at that moment Jimmy and Tom, with the masks on their faces, burst through the front door of the bank and out into the street, carrying grocery bags in which they’d put the stolen currency.
    •   •   •
    THE FIRST PART of the robbery had gone just fine. They’d crashed through the front door, found three women inside, one behind the counter and two more in a side office, gossiping; there were no customers. Jimmy pulled down the women in the office while Tom pointed his gun around aimlessly and thought about shooting Jimmy in the back, but Jimmy was so on top of everything, so manic, that Tom chickened out and wound up waving his pistol at the mousy-looking woman behind the counter.
    Jimmy shouted, “Get the money, get the money, get the money . . .”
    They’d both brought paper grocery sacks inside with them, and Tom ran around behind the counter and started scooping money out of the cash drawers and into his sack, and Jimmy shouted at the boss woman in the office, “Open the safe, open the safe”—he pointed the rifle at the other woman’s head—“or I’ll shoot this woman right here, right now.”
    The boss woman scurried into a back room that had a two-foot-by-two-foot safe built into a concrete wall. She fumbled with the combination a couple of times, then got it. There were stacks of money on small shelves inside. Jimmy, though disappointed by the small size of the safe, scraped the money into his bag and then shouted at Tom, “Let’s go. Let’s go.”
    He didn’t shoot anybody, because this was a robbery, not a killing. The two lines didn’t cross in his mind. Jimmy held the gun on the women until Tom got to the lobby, and they both burst into the sunshine at the same instant.
    The cop was a complete surprise.
    •   •   •
    THE COP WAS STANDING THERE, just down the street, and was pulling his pistol from his holster. Jimmy and Tom burst through the door and, when they saw him, came to a stumbling halt, and then Jimmy shouted at Tom, “Go,” and he fired a shot at the cop, missing, and they both ran. The cop started shooting at them, missing three times, and then just as Jimmy got to the car, fired a fourth shot that hit Jimmy on the back of the thigh and knocked him down.
    Tom went down at the same time, frightened by the gunfire, did a squirming turn on his stomach, and started pulling the trigger on his 9-millimeter. He was firing purely out of panic, hardly knowing where the cop was. Card had ducked behind his car door and, as luck would have it, raised his head behind the window glass just in time to catch one of Tom’s panicky 9-millimeters.
    The slug punched through the glass and then through the frontal bone of Card’s forehead, through his brain, to the parietal bone at the back of his head. By the time it got to the parietal bone it had shed so much mass that