The Name of the Game is Death by Dan Marlowe

the jumps. Put in time on the job every so often. Keep a name clean to work under, because when a judge hears no visible means of support, you're gone.
    I'd been that route, so I knew he was right. I had an even better reason for listening to him, though. Barney Pope had hidden the swag from the bank job before we'd been funneled to the farmhouse, and it had never been recovered. I knew where it was, and Barney knew where it was. Nobody else. The cops had never found it, at least not publicly. A cop working alone could have tapped the till. A man never knows about that until he gets back for a look.
    I knew they'd never found it officially because every three months I had a visit from the FBI. They came in pairs, always. Sharp boys, smooth dressers, with faces like, polished steel. I used to wonder if they came in pairs to eliminate the chance of my splitting with a single man after making a deal.
    Each time they came we'd go over the same old tired routine about the whereabouts of the boodle. I always insisted I was an innocent hitchhiker caught up in the middle of a police-bank robber gunfight. They knew better, but they couldn't crack me.
    I found out Doc was right the first time they came back after I was eligible for parole. They turned me upside down about why I hadn't applied. I told them I liked it where I was. That moved me up a few notches on their list.
    Anyway, I did the bit. The day I walked out of that stinking hole I didn't have to say, "Mister" to any man. And I'd made up my mind: I wasn't going back. Regardless of what it took, I wasn't ever going back.
    The day I left an FBI tail picked me up at the front gate. I rode with it until he got to thinking it was a breeze. The second day I triple-doored him in a hotel lobby and lost him. I thought that was that, but give the devil his due. They located me at my first two jobs. I wasn't on parole, but I lost the jobs. I had to figure they didn't want me working so I'd be driven back to the swag.
    I finally shook them by traveling up into the Pacific Northwest and hooking on in a lumber camp. I never saw street lights for a year and a half. The work damn near killed me at first, but I got to enjoy it. And I practiced with a handgun almost every day. When I came out of there, I could handle a crosscut saw and a double-bitted ax with the best of them, and with a gun I could do things people pay to see.
    I drifted into tree work later on. It seemed a natural for part-time work. It helped in getting a closeup look at places I was interested in, like banks. When I worked, I worked hard. I had no trouble catching on with a tree crew anytime I wanted a job.
    I waited three years before I went back for the Massilon loot I didn't need the money—I'd had two good popovers bat k to hack but it seemed about time. The farmhouse was pair and the farm cut up into a subdivision. I had to buy a lot to do it, but I got the swag. The deed to the lot is still in a safety deposit box in the Riverman's Trust Company in ('Cincinnati.
    Long before that I'd arranged with a shyster lawyer to send Barney Pope fifty a month, supposedly from an inheritance. Fifty a month is all a man is allowed to spend in a federal pen. Once I learned via the grapevine that the lawyer had missed sending it three months in a row. I made a flying trip cross-country to see him, and he never missed again.
    In jail I used to read nights before lights-out. It was at Doc's insistence at first. Learn something, you stupid lunkhead, Doc would say to me. He had two gods, the dictionary and the encyclopedia. I read aloud to him from both because he had incipient cataracts. He could have had them operated on, but I think he was afraid to let them work on him while he had any light left.
    An encyclopedia article would start him talking. He'd been everywhere and seen everything, twice. There was no degree from the school I attended, but I'd have had to be a complete jerk not to learn.
    Doc had been a bank man himself. A