The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. Thomas Mullen

was hardly easy to hold on to the side of the Buick like this, as it sped along at God only knew how many miles per hour. But my word this was fun.

      The man across from her vomited on the roof of the Buick. That was unfortunate. There were four of them, a man and a woman on each side, positioned there by the bank robbers as a human shield. And they did their job well—the police hadn’t fired a single shot. Darcy was in front on the passenger side, and she wished she could have bent down to peer inside. She wanted another glimpse of the gang leader, the man in that fabulous suit, the man who had winked at her so absurdly that she had laughed. Laughed out loud, her voice echoing off the marble walls of the very, very silent bank. She had been sitting with one of the clerks, arranging to pick up some money she’d wired from her hometown bank in Chicago to sustain an extended visit at the home of her cousins here in the country, when the gang leader had entered with his suit and his large gun. After informing everyone of the rules and procedures, he had passed the teller stalls and was maneuvering through the various desks and chairs in search of the bank president, who was cowering behind a desk.

      After she’d laughed at the leader’s wink, he had smiled a bit, bemused. He hadn’t expected that response. But then he had walked past her, toward the bank president. As she watched him move, she caught sight of the clerk sitting opposite her, who silently moved his mouth to ask her, quite accusingly, if she was crazy.

      Yes, she wanted to answer, minutes later, as October recklessly flew through her hair. Clearly. The faces of the other three hostages were all white, their jaws as clenched as their knuckles on the roof rails, and one woman prayed, not loudly enough for Darcy to hear distinct words over the engines and the sirens and the dirt road crunching beneath the tires, but the pleading tone was still recognizable.

      She had never been one to scare easily. Though her twenty years on this earth had been financially comfortable, her life story had contained enough ominous chapters and dangerous cliffhangers for her to be rather unfazed by the introduction of new threats. She had learned about the suddenness of death at a tender age, and had learned that she could survive great damage—self-inflicted and otherwise—with her sense of humor intact, though it was a bit darker than it used to be. Perhaps that was why, when she later reflected upon the bank robbery itself, she realized she had never been concerned about the possibility of her own death. She had no husband to leave behind, no children to orphan, no mother to damn into endless grief.

      It had happened so quickly, she was really quite impressed. And with such subterfuge that she wasn’t at all sure how many of them there were. The one who had winked, obviously. The one who stood guarding the door, holding a gun identical to the leader’s. But different people kept emerging and it was difficult for her to keep up.

      And about this leader. He was tall, he had a jaw sharp enough to etch diamond, and the moment she heard his voice she was convinced. Convinced of what, she wasn’t sure. Just convinced. He could have read the most outlandish children’s story and she would have believed him. He could have announced that he was here to rustle up recruits for a new communist army bent on unseating Roosevelt and she would have been convinced it was so, and convinced it was just. He could have told her that this entire, impressively choreographed, painstakingly timed, undoubtedly risky endeavor was all a ruse to win her heart, and she would have been convinced. Her only disappointment was that he spoke so little.

      As the gang leader strode past the tellers, Darcy saw him notice a customer at another desk slowly pulling his hands away from a small stack of bills. The poor man looked like an old farmhand, and the expression on his face, Darcy saw, was not crestfallen but placid, as if he was so accustomed to weathering disasters that a gun-wielding bandit was well within the realm of the expected.

      “You can pick that back up, sir,” the leader had told the farmer as he walked past. “We’re not here for your money, just the bank’s. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience anyone.”

      What else had he said? She tried to remember as the dirt road became a bit less accommodating and she tightened her grip. “I’m going to have to ask you for that combination, Mr. President.” And “All righty, boys, we’re down to a minute” and “I really like those shoes, did you buy them in town?” and “Get a chair for that lady over there, she looks faint” and, finally, joyously, “All righty, you and you and you and”—the finger pretending to pick her arbitrarily, even though the slight grin belied any such thing—“you, you’ll need to step outside with us.” Darcy knew the difference between fate and desire, thank you.

      But that was all he’d said. How many words was that in total? Fifty? Seventy, perhaps? She wondered how many thousands of dollars they had taken with them in those Gladstone bags, how many bills each of his words had brought in. A man like that could talk in gold. She only wanted to hear him say something more.

      The robbers had silently corralled the hostages in the front of the bank lobby and marched them outside, where Darcy noticed the phalanx of police officers standing helplessly on the sidewalk. This was when she first realized that she was in some modicum of danger. Not from this dapper robber and his assistants—the man positively exuded calm—but from the surely terrified police and their weapons. Her stomach tightened.

      She was standing on the Buick’s running board when one of the officers called upon the robbers to halt and surrender. The thieves laughed and informed him that any attempt to intervene could cost the lives of these nice hostages. Alarming words indeed, but she looked at the officers and saw their meek expressions, as if they knew there was no point in trying to stop the crooks and had spoken up only for appearance’s sake.

      “They’re going to kill us!” the man who had vomited now screamed to his fellow hostages as they rocketed through the woods west of town. The police Fords were long gone, left behind by the speeding Buick. Given her background, Darcy knew enough about cars to be certain that this did not have a typical Buick engine beneath its hood. And she of course had noticed when one of the robbers in the backseat rolled down a window and threw what looked like tacks and roofing nails onto the road to delay their pursuers. She didn’t know how long they’d been driving—one minute? ten? so hard to judge when the pace of your heart has changed—but it was long enough to exhaust the police. Initially, there had been two cars full of bank robbers (the other, also a Buick, had been similarly upholstered with four hostages); she didn’t know if the second had been apprehended or if it had fled in a different direction.

      The dirt road smoothed out again, and the bandits decreased their speed from reckless to very fast. They had been driving through woods—the multicolored confetti of oaks and elms showering them as acorns skittered beneath the wheels—but now the forest opened before them, revealing wide green fields interspersed with farmland. Against these colors the clear sky looked richer than usual.

      “They’re going to kill us!” the man repeated. His heavy beard and mustache were greasy, Darcy remembered. “We’ve seen their faces! They won’t let us live!”

      “We all saw their faces!” Darcy shut him up. Really. “The bank was full of people, and they didn’t kill any of them!” Indeed, the thieves hadn’t hurt anyone, hadn’t pulled a trigger.

      “I know how these things work!” the man insisted. “There was a bank robbery in South Bend a month ago, and they killed the two people they took with them! I say we let go now and take our chances in the woods!”

      The prayer’s voice had only grown louder.

      “That wasn’t the Firefly Brothers in South Bend!” replied the man behind Darcy. “That was some other gang! And I’m not letting go at this speed!”

      As if on cue, the Buick began to slow down as it approached a crossing with another country road, where an empty car was waiting. The landscape was flat and deserted, occasional silos the only dark scratches on the horizon.

      “I’m going to let go and run for it!” the man said, shifting his gaze among the three of them to enlist their participation. Then his fingers uncoiled and he was gone. Darcy turned and saw his body rolling on the ground, dirt and pebbles rising in a cloud.

      The Buick parked beside the other car.