By Reason of Insanity Read Online Free PDF Page A

truck together.
    By ten o’clock they had made twenty-one stops and were beginning to feel bored and irritable. Rain still beat rhythmically on the steel roof. Roy Druski, the driver, wished that he were home in bed. Or better yet, with his girlfriend home in her bed. A lewd thought crossed his mind and he laughed.
    Druski had never encountered trouble on the job; he didn’t really believe that anyone would be dumb enough to try a hijack on his truck. After five years with Overland he didn’t think about the money anymore; it could as easily have been toilet tissue. His partner, Fred Stubb, younger and with the company only a year, liked the job and liked the guns. He just wished somebody would try something.
    Their twenty-second stop was a shopping center a mile away. Pulling into the lot, the armored car handling ponderously as a Sherman tank, Druski braked it to a squealing halt in front of a long low building. With exaggerated thoroughness he inched it backward and forward until the vehicle was up against the entrance. Satisfied, he shut off the motor. Stubb, unmindful of the breach of regulations, stepped out of the rear and checked both ways for signs of trouble. Finding none, he scurried into the building and disappeared.
    In the black sedan that had been waiting for the Overland truck to show, two men peered intently through the rain. The driver, a big man wearing a brown jacket over a service revolver, noted the sudden lack of exhaust fumes from the truck. He shook his head in disgust. The man beside him kept his eyes on the vast parking lot and on each car that splashed by. Without words, they sat there tense and watchful. They were an Overland security team on backup surveillance.
    Stubb soon emerged with the store’s deposit, two full bags, which he carried past the cab to the rear. Nothing happened. Cursing, he banged on the door until it finally opened. His cursing continued inside. Another moment and the engine roared to life. With heavy gears meshing noisily, Druski pulled away from the entrance, turned left into an exit lane and continued to the roadway, where he turned right. The black sedan followed. It was 10:15 Pacific Coast time.
    Eight minutes later, after a frustrating string of red lights, Druski pulled around the rear of a huge supermarket in Highland Park, a suburb of Los Angeles. Again he shut the motor, because he wanted to continue reading the newspaper while Stubb went in for the money—still another breach of company regulations. He was going to take his girl to the movies that evening and he wished to see if a good cops-and-robbers picture was playing anywhere. If not, he told himself, he could always show her his own gun. He laughed again.
    Twenty yards away three silent men sat in a stolen Buick watching Stubb enter the hallway behind the market. Business was good even on this rainy day, and the car was lost among hundreds of others in the sprawling shopping center. Inside, the men waited impatiently, knowing that very soon they would be rich. The plan, remarkably simple, was for two members of the group to overpower the guard in the building and hold him while a third put on his jacket, tie and cap and walked out with the money. In the rain the driver wouldn’t notice the difference. When the rear door opened, the other two would quickly bring out the guard and jump in the truck. Threatening to kill the guard, they would force the driver to open the compartment door, and Harry Owens would then leap in the cab and drive away. The men in the car would cover the hijack in case of trouble, following it to a barn a mile away, where they would quickly divide the money and disappear in two waiting cars. They had the plan and they had the rain; now all they needed was a little luck.
    Carl Hansun, age thirtysix, nervously gripped the steering wheel. He was tall, with iron-gray hair already thinning. A native of Washington, he had worked as a lumberjack until the war took him to a dozen Pacific