DISCLAIMER: ALL ORIGINAL CONTENT OF THIS STORY, INCLUDING MY OWN CREATED FANON, CHARACTERS OR OTHER SPECIFIC DETAILS UNIQUE TO MY WORK IS THE SOLE PROPERTY OF BAMBOOZLEPIG AND MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT MY PERMISSION.The cover used for this story came from my own collection. It was in a book that had long ago fallen apart and that picture of the real-life John Dillinger was one of the few pages I was able to save. Unfortunately, I can't remember the title or author of the book, other than it was a history of the Great Depression and Dillinger's picture was included as part of the chapter about bankrobbers.

This piece is a throwback to the stories I used to write in high school about John Dillinger and other Depression-era gangsters. Admittedly, it's been slightly strange to revisit someone I haven't written about in at least 25 years, but the idea for this story came to me when that opening line popped into my mind and I decided it made for a good Dillinger tale. I have intentionally kept the story short and the prose on the terse side in order to keep in tune with Dillinger's real life character, for I doubt he'd engage in lengthy soliloquy or overly gushing discourse. While this has roots in the various Dillinger movies, this is based mostly on a theory offered by true-crime writer, Jay Robert Nash, in his book The Dillinger Dossier. Feedback is always welcomed and thank you for reading!

WE ALWAYS DIE IN THE END

Stranger, stop and wish me well,

Say a prayer for my soul in hell.

I was a good fellow, most people said,

Betrayed by a woman all dressed in red.

—poem that circulated after Dillinger's death, author unknown

I've always hated gangster movies.

Not because of the violence or gore, not because of the often inaccurate depictions of heroic G-men and vicious mobsters, not because of the preachy "crime doesn't pay" message in all of them…all that shit I can swallow with amused distaste.

No, I've always hated those movies because the gangsters almost always die in the end, they're never allowed to have the same happy ending promised to us by a dancing Fred and Ginger or a starry-eyed Joan Blondell or a cutesy-wootsy Shirley Temple or a dashing Douglas Fairbanks. A film gangster's coda is usually bloody and messy and violent—a mob rubout or a blaze of glory shootout with the cops—or else they sit down in that electric chair and wait for the thousands of volts of electricity to surge through their bodies, or they climb the steps to the gallows and let the hangman slip the noose about their necks, the trapdoor beneath their feet opening and dropping them to their deaths.

It's kind of like how they meet their end in real life—life imitates art, as they say.

But brother, lemme tell you, those stories that play out before the violent ending comes, they're something else—amazing feats of derring-do, of excitement, of beautiful gun molls and great escapes and fast cars and whizzing bullets…danger.

And danger is a great aphrodisiac…hell, sex is great, but it can't even compare to the coolly electric thrill you get from leaping the teller counter at a bank, citizens watching you with wide-eyed admiration as you jauntily stroll away with all that cold, hard cash—never the citizens' cash, always the bank's cash, the government's cash, because sometimes even the bad guys can be heroes, stealing from the same assholes who steal from the poor, foreclosing on farms and homes and businesses without any hesitation, sending everyone to beg in the breadlines, hats in hand, pride in the gutter.

Those hero-anti-heroes all had names...there was Charlie and George, Homer and Harry, Freddie and Doc and Alvin, and of course, Johnny, there was always Johnny. Good names, solid names, names right out of the Midwest and the Ozarks and the Cookson Hills where they were born. Not that they were ever known to anyone but their mothers and their fathers and their sisters and their brothers by those names, for the newspapers gave them nicknames…Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Creepy Karpis, Handsome Harry Pierpont, the Bloody Barkers, Vicious Van Meter.

All except Johnny. He didn't get a nickname.

Unless you want to count J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Idiots calling him Public Enemy Number One.

Johnny had been the biggest hero-anti-hero of them all, that smirking young man from Indiana who was as dashing as Douglas Fairbanks and as daring as Jimmy Cagney—you've probably seen his movies as they played out in the newsreels and were screamed loudly from the same headlines that also screamed about the breadlines, about the Depression; you've probably heard about his breakout from the Lima jail, all the robbed banks, the capture in Tucson, the wooden gun escape from the escape proof Crown Point jail, the bloody and violent shootout at Little Bohemia, J. Edgar Hoover's special hoodlum squad formed specifically to bring Johnny down, headed by Hoover's handpicked pet G-man, Melvin Purvis, the same little fuckup who was behind the Little Bohemia fiasco.

Which was the beginning of the end.

Johnny was smart, he knew that his time was coming, that much was written in the bullet-ridden car and shattered bodies of Bonnie and Clyde, gunned down like the mad dogs they were in gory, violent deaths in backwoods Lousiana.

Crime, after all, never pays.

And he was at the point where he wanted out because despite the thrill of jumping those teller counters and boldly stealing money from the banks, he'd seen far too many friends die, he'd seen far too many innocent people be killed, he'd been shot and wounded himself, he was getting tired of worrying about whose palms to grease in order to find a safe place to hole up for a bit.

Dangerous living exacts a heavy price in the end.

So there was a setup—there's always a setup—and it didn't matter the whos and the whys and the whats of how it was all going to go down; all he knew was that it supposed to get him out of that life and into another one, one where his face wasn't plastered from here to hell, one where there wasn't a shoot-to-kill order and a ten thousand dollar price on his head, one where he wasn't Public Enemy Number One.

And it was a simple setup...he would be me, I would be him. Johnny meet Jimmy, Jimmy meet Johnny. We looked enough alike for it to work.

Which is why tonight he sits in that air-cooled Biograph Theater, one stupid little whore on one side of him, one cagey madam on the other side of him, the three of them watching on the big screen as Clark Gable goes to the electric chair in the gangster flick Manhattan Melodrama. I watch him from a few rows back—if he is aware of any of the irony of his real-life fabled presence before a Hollywood-fake one, he doesn't show it, tilting his head back and yawning a few times in boredom.

Of course, the real movie is going to start when the theater lets out.

But I'm not gonna tell him that.

It'd spoil the ending.

I watch as he exits the Biograph into that sultry July night, traitorous madam Anna Sage on one arm, dumb little whore Polly Hamilton on the other, the three of them following the slowly dispersing crowd of fellow moviegoers who temporarily escaped the heat of the city streets by taking in a flick, all of them unaware of the real life show about to play out in front of them in the next few seconds.

I watch as little Melvin Purvis spots him in the crowd, his hands shaking as he lights his cigar in a pre-arranged signal, flop sweat beading his face, his dark eyes ashes in his pale face he tracks his quarry like a nervous bird dog. This is the moment Purvis has likely waited for ever since he got his ass handed to him on a platter for the Little Bohemia debacle, shouldering J. Edgar's ire over the feds accidentally shooting and killing a few innocent citizens they mistook for members of Dillinger's gang. Purvis probably figures he is owed this death, this blood, drop by drop, one for every strip of hide that Hoover tore from his backside.

I watch as a couple of cops—East Chicago boys, not Chicago or feds—step out of the shadows, guns drawn, voices growling low and heavy with hatred and hunger for that ten grand bounty…Stick 'em up, Johnny, we've got you surrounded!

I watch as he runs into the dark little alleyway next to the Biograph like a startled rabbit going to ground, his hand reaching for the gun in his pocket, his eyes wide and darting as he looks to escape once more, because isn't that what he always does, escape?

And I watch as the cops open up on him, cutting him down in a hail of bullets, his body dropping like a sack of wet cement to the pavement, women screaming and men yelling in panic, in glee—they got him, they got John Dillinger!

They got John Dillinger.

Public Enemy Number One is just a bag of bloodied, broken bones lying crumpled in that filthy little alleyway, never more to rob banks or shoot it out with the cops, never more to make the headlines and the newsreels with that grinning smirk and feats of wild derring-do, of amazing escapes.

Unless you want to consider this escape the most amazing of them all.

He did, after all, get out of that old life and into another one.

And as crowds pack that alley, the irony is as rich as the scavengers who dip their hankies into the blood pooled around his body because around the corner from his death, the theater marquee continues to advertise Gable's gangster flick.

Remember kiddies, crime doesn't pay.

Just ask the man lying dead in the alleyway.

As I pass by little Melvin Purvis, he looks a bit lost, like a kid whose had his marbles taken away from him by a bunch of bigger kids, and so I decide to bolster the confidence of J. Edgar's specially handpicked G-man, bumping him and whispering, "You did a good job, Mel," in his ear. He jumps in startlement and whips around to face me, but by that time, I've already melted into the crowd.

But I can't help risking a backwards glance at him, his face still pale and sheened with sweat beneath the streetlights, his eyes opened nearly as wide as his mouth because he's looking at a fucking ghost.

Because if I lie dead on the pavement, how in the hell could I be walking past him?

Yeah, I've always hated gangster movies.

We always die in the end.

Except for tonight.

Tonight a guy named Jimmy Lawrence died in that alleyway as John Dillinger and John Dillinger…

Well.

Let's just say I was the one who got away.

And if that isn't a happy ending, then what is?