Free The Name of the Game is Death by Dan Marlowe Page B

farmhouse. Clem Powers was killed. Barney Pope and I were bagged.
    Barney was an old lag. He knew he'd have long white whiskers before he made it outside again, if he ever made It. Go for yourself, kid, he said to me as we stood in the farmyard with our hands in the air. I'll back your play.
    I'd left my gun inside beside Clem's body. That scored the deputy to Clem. I told the mob scene that surrounded us that I was a hitchhiker who'd been sleeping in the barn when the bankrobbers took over, and I stuck to it. True to his word, Barney backed me up. The police didn't believe It, but the jury came close. Identification putting me inside the bank was fuzzy. The guilty verdict was lukewarm.
    Even the judge was leaning. I had no rap sheet. They'd checked my prints from Hell to Hoboken, and they couldn't come up with even a speeding charge. Two things licked me with the judge, finally. I wasn't using my family name, of course, and the probation officer couldn't get a line on me. The judge refused to believe I'd sprung fullblown from the earth at age twenty-three without previous documentation of some kind. Also—and fatally—I could produce no visible means of support.
    The judge cleared his throat and said three-to-five. I think he'd been considering probation. Barney Pope drew twenty-to-life. We weren't tried for the deputy. There was a double-barreled question of jurisdiction and identification. The local DA didn't want to give up his headlines by letting us face the murder charge. They wrote off the deputy to Clem.
    I hadn't graduated overnight to a five-man bank detail. I'd come up the ladder—filling stations, theater box offices, liquor stores—the whole bit. I worked alone until I met Nig Rosen. Nig talked me into the Massillon job. I guess I was flattered. I was by far the youngest of the five.
    We worked four months on the job. I kept my mouth shut and listened. Parts of it I didn't like, instinctively it seemed. Afterward I knew I was right. Complicated action with a bunch of hot sparks was no good. Even before we were hit I'd decided what I wanted in the future was a deal I could control myself.
    I had plenty of time in the gow to figure how it was going to be the next time. Doc Essegian was my cellmate from the middle of my second year ©n. Everyone called him The Doctor, maybe because he was such a wise old owl. He was certainly no medical doctor.
    The first three months Doc never even said good morning to me. Then I had a little trouble with one of the screws. When I came back from solitary, Doc laughed at me. "Don't let it burn a hole in your gut, kid," he advised me. "You're a better hater than me, even, and that's saying something."
    After that he kind of took me over. "Life is the big machine, kid," he'd growl at me in his after-lights-out rasp. "It chews you up and it spits you out. Don't ever forget it."
    He had the most completely acid outlook on life I'd ever encountered. He really knew the score. He was consumptive to his toenails, but over the years he'd given them so much trouble inside they wouldn't certify him to the federal prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri. Each day he systematically coughed up a little more of his lungs while grinning and thumbing his nose. Don't bother telling me it's impossible for our pure-minded prison authorities to function in such a cold-blooded manner. I was there.
    I'd have applied for parole when I was eligible if it hadn't been for Doc. Go ahead, if you can't tough it out, he told me. But remember this: the minute you do it you're the yo-yo on the end of the string. The least little thing you do they don't like, they'll twitch the string and back you come. Do the bit, he urged me. Go out clean. Spit in their eye. Get a decent job, something you can't do with a parole officer checking on you every time you turn around.
    You're young, Doc said. Develop something you can work at once in a while and show as a means of a support when a prosecutor wants to put you over