This started out as part of a time traveling story, hence the 1930's setting.
Would love feedback on whether this idea is worth pursuing.
Of all the Bonnie and Clydes bank robberies, this is not one of the more famous. Well not famous anywhere but here, in my hometown. Here, it is plenty famous, and not so much because of Bonnie and Clyde, but because of the humiliations that were perpetrated on me.
I am the bank manager of the Springfield Bank and it was my bank that was robbed.
It had been daddy's bank, but he had been dead going on three years and so it fell to me to run things.
Daddy had been a hard man and while he was respected, he was not well liked.
I was following in his footsteps.
I remember when he sent me off to college, he told me, "learn the rules so you know how best to break them."
And that I did.
I came back home with all kind of schemes that made us richer and the rest of the town a little poorer.
Not too soon after daddy died I got married to Nora, the prettiest girl in town, of course.
It was a marriage of convenience. I needed a pretty young thing on my arm and Nora, well Nora needed the bank not to foreclose on her parents home.
We moved into the house I grew up in, the largest house in town.
Nora was abashed when I moved Momma into the guest room so that we could have the larger bedroom. She kept apologizing to Momma, but I would not be moved. She even tried to convince me to at least let her have my old bedroom, but I wanted to turn that into my study, and I did, so Momma was moved into the guest room.
It all worked out fine until Momma's sister came down from the city to visit one time. Momma insisted that her sister was used to the finer things, so she gave up her room and slept in the maid's quarters on that occasion. I still laugh when I think about it.
As I said, I had modernized the bank and instituted measures to make sure that it was as profitable as possible. One way I did this, and it was very modern for its time, was to have an all female compliment of tellers. In this way, I cut my payroll in half.
I also installed an alarm system, basically a glorified telegraph machine that could be used to tap out an SOS over at the Sheriff's station should we ever need him.
I tested it out one time just to ensure it worked.
It did.
Once the sheriff caught his breath after racing over, he lectured me severely. I replied he might want to start an exercise regimen as he seemed overly winded from the short run. That did not go over too well.
Not too long before the robbery, Mike, the butcher, who had his shop directly across the plaza, had come in to try and renegotiate his loan. Mike had done some research and found that our interest rates were higher than banks in surrounding areas. I did a lot of fast talking about the length of the loan, how our loans included insurance and a bunch of other gobbledygook that I hoped would appease him. It did not, and soon thereafter I was getting some sideways glances from other loan holders.
It was late on a Friday afternoon, just before we were set to close up.
I had Agnes and Betsy at their teller stations, each with about six people in line.
This was not unusual as Friday meant payday for a lot of people and they liked to get their money deposited so they didn't have it lying around at home over the weekend.
A stranger walked in and I immediately perked up. A stranger could mean a new customer. If he was moving here, that could mean a new house, a new business, perhaps both.
As I rose from my chair to greet him, he was suddenly shoved to the floor by a man who came in right behind him. This man was followed by a women, both wearing bandanas across the lower part of their faces.
"Everyone down on the floor," the man yelled. "This is a robbery!"
He then went over to Ike, my enfeebled security guard and said "you too old man" as he relieved him of his pistol.
As everyone went down, I quickly tapped out an SOS.
"Hey, what are you doing?" the woman yelled.
She ran over and knocked me to the floor using the back of her hand that held her pistol.
I was grateful she hadn't pistol whipped me or worse!
So their little robbery had gone south before it had even started.
In short order, the sherif and his deputy were stationed across the street, rifles pointed at the front door. The sheriff used a megaphone to announce that the bank was surrounded and that whoever was in there needed to give themselves up.
Hardly surrounded. You had the Sheriff and his deputy out front and a part time deputy out back to cover the rear exit. They needn't have bothered as I kept it illegally locked to keep my girls from taking furtive smoke breaks.
Oddly enough, the two robbers proceeded with the robbery as if nothing had happened.
When I questioned them on this, the man turned to the woman and said "oh we've gotten out of worse scrapes than this, haven't we Bonnie?"
Well, hearing the name Bonnie set the room a buzzing.
"Okay, here's what we are going to do," said Bonnie, taking charge as she stuffed the cash from the teller drawers into a small bag.
"Ladies stay here in the lobby and the menfolk head into that office over there."
I was surprised when Clyde did not immediately follow us in leaving us alone to plot our escape.
We started talking all at once, weighing our options. I had just about convinced the other gentlemen to rush Clyde when he came back in, figuring he could probably only get one of them before he was overwhelmed. I, of course, would hang back.
But then the stranger spoke up. "Even if you do take him, Bonnie still has a gun and I hear she is a crack shot."
Well that cooled the room down.
"I reckon they'll come for you in a minute," the man said pointing at me. "You've already pissed 'em off once, you better be straight with them or I reckon they won't hesitate to put a bullet in your skull."
Sure enough, a few minutes later Clyde opened the door and said "Banker, come with me!"
Clyde walked me into the vault and asked me where the rest of the money was. I explained that it was all out in the tills.
"We bring it out every morning and put it back every night."
He raised the gun to my head and said, "I know there's more somewhere."
Before I could lie that that was everything, Agnes called out, "he keeps a strongbox in that desk over there," pointing to where I had been sitting when they came in.
Clyde strode over and pulled the drawer open and smiled. He reached down and emptied the box of it's contents.
I shot Agnes a look that I hoped conveyed "your fired."
"Don't look at her like that," Bonnie scolded, "she may well of just saved your life."
"As a matter of fact," Clyde said holding up the large wad of bills he'd just liberated, "thanks to Agnes here, we will let you ladies keep the money you walked in here with."
Everyone gasped with delight except old Miss Henderson. She wrung her hands and pulled her shawl tight as she moaned that she hadn't come in with anything, in fact she was desperate to withdraw five dollars.
Clyde winked at me and said, "what do you think banker, can we give her five on the house?"
"You can give it to her," I said, "but I will deduct it from her account."
Everyone groaned at this and then Agnes spoke up again. "He's probably got that in his vest pocket."
"Oh really" said Clyde. He strode over to me and placed two fingers into my vest pocket and pulled out six dollars.
If anyone would know there would be money in that pocket, it would be Agnes.
"How did you know that money would be there Agnes?" asked Bonnie.
Agnes didn't answer. She just gave me a hard stare.
