Wanting to put as much road between themselves and the Joplin robbery, Emmett and the gang headed down US 54 to St. Louis. The air was turning colder. Halloween was about a week away, and the wind had picked up tremendously. It looked as though it might snow at any moment.
Emmett and Jimmy had scouted the bank while Tom stayed back in the room and read through the Bible as he was trying to become better friends with God “on account of how we might be seeing him soon.” This irked Emmett a bit. Not just that Tom was implying they might be shot and killed any day, but also that he now talked about nothing else but God. The thing that made such conversations with Tom interesting was that he always laced each sentence about Christianity with profanity of some sort. His heart was in the right p
