Chapter 18: Hands Up – If You Don’t Mind

At shortly after nine o’clock on a cold, overcast Saturday morning, Pete Weeble was standing on the boardwalk outside the Mercantile Bank in a small Idaho town. He’d stood at the same spot at the same time on the two immediately preceding Saturdays and had noted that apart from him, the street had been deserted, as it was now. There wouldn’t be a better time for what he intended to do.

Swiftly fastening a neckerchief over his lower face, Pete pulled a handgun from a coat pocket and burst into the bank. Directly in front of him, at a distance of fifteen feet, the teller stood behind the counter. In his early sixties, of medium height and slim build, he was a permanently irritable fellow. Twenty feet behind him, the manager sat at a battered desk, totting up figures in a huge ledger. He was about the same age and height as the teller, but considerably bulkier and, except when dealing with a questionable loan application, marginally less peppery. There were no other staff members and no customers.

Pete took two strides towards the counter, waggled his gun and started to speak, then nature took over. “Stick ... sti ... st ... atishoo!” was what came out of him. A major sneeze expels air from a human body at great speed. On this occasion the blast was accompanied by morsels of breakfast. Pete was momentarily incapacitated. Among other things, the gust that rushed from him blew his neckerchief up almost to the horizontal, so that nearly all of his face was briefly revealed.

When Pete recovered such poise as he could, he saw that the teller was staring at him and sneering. “If you were about to say ‘stick ‘em up’”, he said, “I’ve no intention of doing that.”

“Oh, and what about this?” Pete retorted, brandishing his weapon.

“Son,” said the teller, “if you want to hit anything intentionally, you’ll need to get the kink out of your gun barrel. You could shoot around corners with that thing.”

Still discomfited by being shaken from top to bottom, Pete was further put out by the surprising comment. He looked down to inspect the perfectly straight barrel of his .44. “There’s nothing wrong with my shooter,” he snapped.

“Nothing wrong with mine, either,” replied the teller, who had used the intentional distraction to whip out a shotgun from under the counter.

Pete’s weapon wavered in his unsteady hand. “Seems we have a stand-off,” he said, his quavering tone failing to convince himself, let alone the teller.

“No we haven’t. Evidently you don’t know much about this kind of thing. Pistols aren’t much good except at very close range. Even if you could hold that one straight, you’d have a less than even chance of hitting me from where you stand, whereas I could hardly miss you with this cannon. By the way, I see you’re the Weeble boy from Loonyville.”

“No I ain’t. I’m the Cottonwood Kid. And don’t call my hometown Loonyville. It’s Birch Creek.”

“There you go. You’ve pretty well admitted it. Not that you needed to. Seeing your face wasn’t really necessary. That squawky voice of yours would have been enough. And don’t say ‘ain’t’. I’m sure you were brought up to know better than that.” Keeping his eyes fixed on Pete, he shouted to the manager, who had been too preoccupied with his arithmetic to notice what was happening. “A lad here wants to rob us, boss. What would you like me to do with him?”

“Damn,” said the manager, “I was nearly at the bottom of this column. Now I’ll have to go over it again. Er ... inform him that we’re not in the market for any robberies today and tell him to go away.”