She’d liked his gray hair, his tailored navy suit and crushed-felt hat, and his jokes at the hotel when they’d finished up the first time and he’d hummed “I’ve Got the World on a String” as they cooled down under the sheets.

At the diner, he handed the gal some bus fare, patted her backside, and she was gone, the girl knowing the score as much as he did. Harvey moved onto a stool close to Miller and smiled as a goofy-looking fella in a paper hat refilled their coffee and seemed to be real impressed that Jean Harlow was in town, asking if they knew she was a hometown girl.

Miller just looked up from his coffee, and the boy shut his mouth and headed back to the kitchen.

“You sure know how to make friends.”

Miller shrugged.

Harvey had known Miller for years. He was a retired bootlegger, a part-time bank robber, and a full-time button man for the Nitti Syndicate in Chicago and the Jew Outfit in New York. Miller had been a war hero who’d come home from the trenches to be elected sheriff somewhere in South Dakota. And then he decided to take a nice cut of the county purse for himself and was run from town. Harvey met him after all that, when they’d been running whiskey down from Canada into Minnesota.

He was blond-haired and gray-eyed, movie-star handsome, a stone-cold killer who hated foul language-most of all when you used the Lord’s name in vain.

“Goddamn, it’s good to see you,” Harvey said.

Miller shifted his eyes to him. He’d yet to take off his gray hat.

The two men sat in front of the plate glass of the diner, the small space feeling like a fishbowl, brightly lit in the middle of the night. Miller shuffled out a cigarette from his pack of Camels and tossed the rest to Harvey.

“So what’s the score?”

“They got Jelly in Hot Springs at Dick Galatas’s place,” Miller said.

“That was kinda showy, wasn’t it? Prancing around Hot Springs like nobody would see him.”

Miller shrugged. “Two federal agents and some old sheriff.”

“What time?”

“Seven.”

“Who’s meeting them at the station?”

“Guess we’ll find out.”

“You got guns.”

“I got guns.”

“We got help?” Harvey asked.

“Working on it.”

“How’s it looking?”

Miller shrugged.

“Goddamn.”

“I don’t like that kind of talk, Harvey.”

“I got a gun,” Harvey said. “A helluva gun that was supposed to help with some bank work, make some dough, and get me out of this lousy racket.”

“I can handle a Thompson.”

“I don’t want trouble,” Harvey said. “I don’t want any trouble. This can be as smooth and easy as we like.”

“I don’t like trouble,” Miller said, squashing out his cigarette. “I hate it.”

“Jesus, I just wanted to make a little dough and cash out,” Harvey said. “And this doesn’t do nothing but turn up the heat on all us.”

“It’s a square deal.”

“Am I arguing?”

THE MISSOURI PACIFIC STOPPED ONCE IN COFFEY VILLE AND rolled on through Roper and Garnett, curving east to Osawatomie and Leeds. The gray morning light hit the side of unpainted barns leaning hard into the wind and brushed across the windows of the train car. Jones watched Frank Nash startle himself with a hard snore and come alive with a start, reaching for a gun-like a man on the run was apt to do-but only getting a few inches and finding bound wrists.

He looked up at Jones, and Jones winked back.

Jones fingered bullets into the cylinder of his.45, spinning the wheel and clicking it back into frame. Joe Lackey was in the washroom shaving with a straight razor he’d bought from the negro porter.

“How ’bout some breakfast?” Nash asked.

“I hear they make a mean slop of grits in Leavenworth,” Sheriff Otto Reed said. Reed was a pleasant man with a stomach large enough to provide a good rest for crossed arms. He chuckled a bit at his own joke, and Jones smiled back at him.

Nash said, “Otto, sometimes you can be a true, authentic asshole.”

“Think of me when you’re being cornholed, Jellybean.”

Nash looked like he’d sucked a lemon.

The light turned gold and hot, shining over endless rows of green cornstalks about to ripen in the high summer. Nash began to complain about the manacles hurting his wrists and asked if he could please put his hairpiece back on because he knew the Star and Associated Press would be waiting when he got off the train.

“Come again?” Jones asked.

“You know, that reporter fella who chatted you all up in the station and knew who I was and where we’re going? Yes, sir, I bet my story is all across the wire.”

Jones looked over at Sheriff Reed, and Reed said he didn’t know what he was talking about. Lackey came out of the head, drying off his face with a little towel and then sliding back into a wrinkled shirt, knotting his tie high at the throat.

“Did I miss something?” Lackey asked.

KANSAS CITY UNION STATION WAS A BIG, FAT STONE CATHEDRAL with a sloping roof and Greek columns, a weigh station, a purgatorial crossroads where tracks from all over creation mishmashed and met and then bent and whipped out to the next turn, the following bend. Big, wide schedule boards, shoeshine stands, soda fountains, and fancy clocks, and even a Harvey House restaurant that Harvey had always liked because of the name.

They could turn right back around, head out of the city, and rob a dozen banks, fattening their rolls and leaving Jelly Nash to his own mire of shit. Sure he’d been a good egg and come through with those.38s, but sending along some guns while you sit back and read the newspapers on the crapper ain’t the same as putting yourself out there, waiting outside a train station, sweating from worry, with barrels aimed at detectives and federal agents. Harvey wasn’t so sure that Nash would go that far, truth be told.

“Where’d you get the Chevy?” Harvey asked.

“Does it matter?”

“Gonna be tough with just two,” Harvey said, spotting the entrance where they’d watch and wait, windows down in all this heat.

“Says who?” Miller asked. “That Thompson’s a beaut.”

“Belongs to George Kelly,” Harvey said. “Kit bought it as an anniversary gift.”

“And he let you borrow it?”

“Hell, I said I’d give it back.”

“George Kelly,” Miller said, smiling as much as Verne Miller ever smiled. “ ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly.”

“I know, I know,” Harvey said. “You remember that little bank in Ottumwa? He got so scared he puked all over himself.”

“He’s getting a name.”

“I don’t want a name. Gettin’ a name gets you killed. If I hadn’t been so damn stupid carrying those bonds with me, I’d never been pinched.”

“Next time don’t play golf with Keating and Holden.”

Harvey slid into a parking space by the entrance and killed the engine. Two black sedans pulled by the doors, four men gathered and talked. Two of them held shotguns. One showed a badge to a porter when the porter gave some back talk.

“We take ’em after they got Nash,” Miller said.

“Frank Nash ain’t worth this, brother.”

“ Lansing must’ve been a special place.”

Harvey leaned into the driver’s seat and lit another cigarette. He’d burn through three more before he’d see those boys leading Frank Nash out in handcuffs. “Verne, you are the most honorable bastard I ever met.”

THE TRAIN BACKED INTO PLATFORM 12 A LITTLE AFTER SEVEN.

Jones and Joe Lackey were on their feet. Sheriff Reed unlocked Nash’s handcuffs, let him affix the curly brown toupee back on his head, and then locked the cuffs back in front of him.

“How do I look?” Nash asked.

“Like some squirrel crawled onto your head and died,” Lackey said.

Nash ignored him and lifted his hands to use a little finger to smooth down a thin mustache while Lackey walked out first. From the window, Jones could make out a handshake with a clean-shaven young man in a blue suit and neat tie, the kind of style that mirrored all those endless memos from J. Edgar himself. Jones eased up a bit, still feeling good with the gun under his arm.