This Storm

by James Ellroy

Wayne Frank imagined impossible shit and convinced himself that it was true. Wayne Frank developed this big gold-heist fixation. May ’31. A mint-train job. A Frisco-to-L.A. gold-transfer run. Gold bars. A small number. Triple-locked in a cage. Shackled passengers under guard. San Quentin convicts bound for retrials in L.A. Chaos attends a track switch in Monterey County. All eight cons escape. Seven men are hunted down. They’re shot on sight faaaaast. One man remains at large still. More grief. A downed-track snafu two hours south. Chaos atop chaos. Guards and crew succumb to frayed nerves. The heist occurs then. The heister or heisters are smart. Just one box’s worth of bars leaves the train. The train treks south. Santa Barbara’s a coal stop. The theft is discovered then. Suspicion falls on Leander Frechette. He’s the train’s odd-job man. He’s dim-witted, Negro, fucking-A strong. The Santa Barbara cops posit a single-o heister. He walked the bars off the train two or three at a clip. It had to be Frechette. Nobody else had the strength. Somebody bossed him. He was too dumb to concoct the plan himself. The Santa Barbara cops beat Frechette baaaaad. He refused to confess. A colored preacher with cop clout intervened. Frechette was released. The case fizzled out. It went to open-file status, stale bread. Wayne Frank hoarded news clips and treasure-magazine pieces. He studied the heist and worked himself up to fever pitch. Wayne Frank, the dreamer. Wayne Frank, the fantasist...