“If only I’d have met you in Indiana,” Dillinger said.
“If you’d met me in Indiana, you’d have taken no notice of me,” Rose replied.
“I’d have noticed you anywhere,” he said.
When they reached the border, a desolate place with cactus and bramble, Dillinger pulled over, took Rose by her shoulders, and said, “Please come with me.”
“I love you, Johnny,” she said. “But I cannot go with a man who doesn’t know where he is going.”
And so he offered her his white Chevrolet as a gift. “This way,” he said, “you’ll know I’ll come back.”
“Because you love the car.”
“Because I love you both. Put Mexican plates on it, have it painted black or red, and nobody’ll ever bother you.”
“You forget,” Rose said. “I can’t drive.”
Dillinger looked at Nachita on his horse. He didn’t drive either.
And so he said his good-byes to both of them. “You know what you need here in Mexico? More banks.”
Without looking back, Dillinger drove across the invisible line that separated Mexico from home. As quickly as he could, he got onto a good road, and then came to a place in New Mexico called Las Cruces, by which time he had decided that he couldn’t go on driving a car that the FBI and God knows how many policemen were on the lookout for.
On the side street he spotted a black Ford roadster that looked like a thousand other black Ford roadsters. He parked the white convertible right behind it, and within minutes had wired the Ford to start without a key. Nobody was looking, so he transferred the suitcases containing his gold and the Thompson and some extra clothes and the picture of Rose she had given him that was too big to put in his wallet.
As he drove the Ford away, he looked once in the rearview mirror. That white convertible was one helluva car.
He parked in the business district, and asked a policeman if there was a nearby ice cream parlor.
“Yes, sir,” the cop said. “Right around the corner.”
Dillinger saluted the cop in thanks.
There were four teenagers at the counter, drinking ice cream sodas. When the soda jerk came over, Dillinger said, “I’ll have a black and white.”
The chocolate soda with vanilla ice cream tasted like all of his childhood memories together.
“Ten cents,” said the soda jerk.
“That,” said Dillinger, “was the best ice cream soda I’ve had in a long, long time.”
The soda jerk beamed. “Those kids,” he said, pointing to the teenagers, “never say nothing nice about my sodas.”
Dillinger put two bits on the counter. “Keep the change.”
“Gee, thanks,” the soda jerk said, hoping the stranger would become a steady customer.
But the stranger hit the road like there was no tomorrow, driving through Roswell, Portales, Clovis, and then into Texas, through Amarillo and Phillips and Perryton into Oklahoma, past Hooker and into Kansas, where he pulled up at a gas station in Meade, and used the public phone booth to make the one call he had to make.
The secretary said, “Mr. Hoover, there’s a collect call from John Dillinger. Shall I accept?”
J. Edgar Hoover nodded, because you didn’t need to put a tracer on a collect call. The operator could tell you where the call was made from. He got on the line and motioned the secretary to pick up the extension so she could write down what was said.
“Mr. Hoover,” Dillinger said. “You can find that white Chevy convertible you’re looking for in a town called Las Cruces in New Mexico. I don’t want you to say I’ve never been helpful to you.”
Hoover thought Dillinger was very helpful because a line could be drawn from Las Cruces to wherever he was calling from now and they’d know which direction he was headed in.
“Thank you,” Mr. Hoover said.
“Don’t hang up,” Dillinger said. “I’m not finished.”
“Good-bye,” Hoover said, thinking, You are finished.
“Don’t hang up, you son-of-a-bitch,” Dillinger yelled. “I’m the best thing that ever happened to you.”
But the line was dead.
Three months later, on Sunday, July 22, 1934, John Dillinger was shot dead outside the Biograph Movie Theater in Chicago by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was betrayed by a woman.