“Oh, it’s a long story, Vera. Let’s let it go at that. Anyway, you take this money. You have my name and address on the paper I gave you. Repay me whenever you can. You can go to your hotel now and I’ll go to mine.” Sughrue paid both their checks and the two stood. The man named Sughrue helped Vera into her coat and put on his. The two wrapped themselves in their scarves, pushed down their hats, and walked out of the bar and onto the pavement outside. Vera was still bitterly disappointed at the loss of her wallet. All that cash she had squirreled away for months and months was now gone forever. On the other hand, she was thrilled with her new attachment to the handsome young man named John J. Sughrue.

The weather outside was frightful. The storm had become much worse. It was now an honest-to-God blizzard, one with enough force to surprise Sughrue, a hardened New Yorker. There wasn’t a vehicle or a human being anywhere to be seen on the street or pavement. Just Vera Bundle and John J. Sughrue under the Essex House Hotel marquee.

Rasheed Jamal left Probation Officer Lester Bodkin’s office, took the flight of stairs down to the street, and stepped out into the Manhattan sunshine.

I got things to do, he told himself.

There were crowds of people walking back and forth on Fifty-ninth Street and a lot of traffic on the street. There was construction too, guys working under tents in the middle of the street. Con Edison was the name of the company on the workmen’s truck. From where the imam was standing, if you walked a straight line across the street, you ran smack into a branch of the Chase bank. And not far away from the bank was a subway entrance.

The imam walked that straight line from the door of the PO’s building, across the street, and into the Chase bank. He robbed it just as he was taught to do by his prison associates.

No gun.

Just nerves.

When Jamal arrived at the teller’s window, he pulled a note out of his jacket pocket he had printed in big black letters before he left jail. It read:

I’M DESPERATE.

I’ve got nine sticks of dynamite

strapped around my waist. I will

kill you AND me unless you hand

over all the cash you have.

The terrified bank teller passed wrapped packages of money to Jamal. He stuffed the money into a large leather carry-all. It was the same carry-all he had used when he was arrested for manslaughter ten years ago.

Jamal literally ran to the subway entrance on the corner not fifty feet away from the bank. He stepped onto the first train out of the Fifty-ninth Street station and left the vicinity. The imam surfaced in Forest Hills on Continental Avenue. He took a taxi to the nearest automobile showroom and bought the cheapest used car he could find with his stolen money. The sleazy used car salesman said nothing about the suspicious cash that came out of the cheap old carry-all.