Win Some, Lose Some

by Brett Halliday

  Now there were various ways they could do this. Using the outside booth near the office, he called the nearest barracks, who wanted to know who was calling so they could write it down. He told them to forget that, he didn’t want to end up in the bay with his feet in concrete. What he had for them was this. Certain people at the Leisure City trailer park had picked up a shipment of high-quality Venezuelan brown in Key West. They had already disposed of much of it, but there was enough left to make a nice seizure for somebody. If they were willing to invest the time, he was willing to give them names and the license plate of their camper because he had been stiffed out of his share of what should have been a lucrative deal.

  Earlier, Downey had drawn on his personal cache for the negotiation with Simpson. He had a horror of the stuff personally, but sometimes it was the only way to get information. He had another three ounces in a manila envelope in his car. Benjamin and Vaughan had left the pickup unlocked. Downey sneaked past and stuck the manila envelope on the floor under the front seat, the first place a cop looks when he is searching a vehicle.

  They left DeLuca in Miami. Greco didn’t expect a man like DeLuca to involve himself on the point-and-shoot level, but considering that they were strangers in town, it would have been helpful to come along and make sure they were going the right way on the Interstate. The arrows got confusing as hell out by the airport, and Greco wasted an hour before he could get himself straightened out. Nick slept through it all. He was in a terrible mood when he woke up, depressed and paranoid, and Greco had to give him a real locker-room talk—don’t let your friends down, so on and so forth—and tell him how easy it was going to be. It had to be easy, in fact, or they would go back to the girls, and tell DeLuca they hadn’t been able to find the fat man.

  According to DeLuca, Canada had been kidnapped, not by professionals who knew what they were doing, but by a couple of two-bit boppers. Their target would be immobilized, without bodyguards, pinpointed, an easy knock-over. It would seem that the kidnappers had killed him, and there would be less heat. Canada’s loyal followers wouldn’t be thinking in terms of revenge, and the transition would go smoothly. There would be rumors that DeLuca had masterminded it, but that was O.K. It would show he was capable of using his head. If he saw a chance of avoiding trouble for himself and his people, he took it.

  Greco was used to parking lots, but this one, plunked down in the middle of unfriendly countryside, was ridiculous. He thought at first it was going to be like looking for one particular car at Shea Stadium during a Mets double-header, in short, impossible. They were looking for a white pickup with a camper body over the cab. It turned out that there weren’t too many of those. They drove up and down the streets until they found it. Now what to do? As far as he could tell, only one road connected the parked trailers with the highway. That could be blocked by a single car. Whenever Greco went into a restaurant, he looked around for the exits before sitting down because he wanted to have a choice of directions. He decided there was only one thing to do here—leave the car on the highway and walk in. He drove back, found a grassy place where he could pull over, then raised the hood when he left, to indicate engine trouble in case anyone wondered.

  Nick didn’t like it. His platform shoes were designed for walking across carpets, not ground. Greco explained it: if they got caught in there, with their car on the wrong side of a barricade, they were in trouble. There were no subway stations in this part of the world. They needed wheels.

  Nick continued to grumble. He tried walking in stocking feet. That wasn’t much better. Strange noises came from the vegetation. He was hobbling badly by the time they came in. Greco immediately saw one defect in his plan. In here, nobody walked. On their own two feet, they stood out, especially in their Miami Beach clothes. So he picked up a gas can from beside one of the dark trailers. Now if anybody saw them, they were going for gas.

  “I didn’t think it would be like this,” Nick complained.

  Neither had Greco. Having lived his whole life in a city, he would have preferred a city location. To date, he had killed two people. The first time, he had been angry. The guy had lied to him and tricked him, and he deserved what he got. Greco was surprised at how little it affected him. He had thought it would be more of a high. The next time, he was driven to a bar in the South Bronx. His man didn’t know him, but he saw something in Greco’s manner. He had a reddish face, with a little map of the circulatory system on his cheeks, and in one second he turned as white as a piece of paper. He shrank back, holding up one hand. That had been nice.

  Now, if he did well on this, it could lead to something else. The word gets around: Greco isn’t only a short-range bar shooter, he’s a boy who can hit the good curve. Anybody could do that Bronx job. But to go after somebody in a strange environment with an inexperienced partner, come through, and get away clean, for that kind of out-of-the-ordinary thing you can name your own price.

  “You’ve still got the gun.”

  “Mother of God,” Nick exclaimed, clapping his stomach. Then he gave his goofy laugh. “Sure I got it. Stop pissing your pants.”

  It was his first joke in an hour, which meant he was feeling better. Greco was sharp and ready. Simpson, the scared junky, had said there were two vehicles parked separately, the trailer with the stolen stuff in it and their own pickup. A gun to their head. “Where’s the fucking trailer?” No point in a massacre; tie the jerks up after they told him would be good enough. Then Canada. Strangulation would be quieter, neater.

  At the pickup camper, he whispered directions to Nick. They took out their guns. But out of the corner of his eye, he saw a police car blinking its way in from the highway. It couldn’t have anything to do with them, Greco and Nick, because as far as they were concerned they hadn’t done anything yet.

  “What’s the matter, what’s the matter?” Nick whispered.

  One more difference between a trailer park and an ordinary parking lot is that most of the vehicles are too tall to see over. The police car came on, appearing and disappearing. When it turned into their street, Greco hit Nick on the shoulder, and they got down out of sight, wriggling well in. It was a trailer on blocks, far enough off the ground so Greco didn’t think they would get too much oil on their clothes.

  The patrol car stopped beside the Benjamin-Vaughan pickup, and the cops came boiling out.

  “Shake it down,” a voice said.

  The two guys inside were awakened roughly and made to step out while the truck was searched. When something was found under the front seat, the cops were extremely pleased, the guys were surprised and indignant. A search warrant was mentioned. The cops had one, as it happened, for precisely this pickup, with the right marker number. It was a dope thing, as far as Greco could figure. There was a lot of loud talk. Lights went on, and the people in the trailer above them began moving around. Greco put a hand on the small of Nick’s back to keep him from shaking and transmitting his shakes to the trailer floor. One of the cops crawled part way under the pickup with a flashlight. Greco and Nick, only one vehicle away, lay absolutely still, hoping to be mistaken for unevenness in the ground.

  It was over finally, and the area began to settle down. Above them, the man wanted some sex before he went back to sleep. The woman didn’t, and she prevailed. The quarrel was clearly audible through the floor. Time went slowly for the two New Yorkers. Was there anything they could do now but go home? They couldn’t break into every unattached trailer on the grounds, looking for the one that held Canada. DeLuca would understand that.

  Still, Greco wasn’t quite ready to give up. When the guys said they’d never seen that envelope, it had sounded sincere. And if they were out robbing in Homestead, they couldn’t be down in Key West picking up shit, could they? So if somebody wanted them out of the way, it would have been easy to walk by and drop an envelope in the truck. It would do no harm to stick around a few minutes and find out.

  Nick had to piss. Greco told him, for God’s sake, to roll over and piss. T
he stream was cut off abruptly as footsteps approached.

  Two men and a woman stopped beside the pickup. One of the men said, “There’s a handle on the hitch jack. When the ball and the socket come together, you snap the top half over and hook on the chains. Snap in the electric. I want to do it in one pass if I can, get out of here fast.”

  The woman said nervously, “Are you really sure Canada is in there? I think we ought to check, break in.”

  “Too many people still awake. Didn’t I see him? If that wasn’t Canada, what was he doing tied to the bed?”

  “Laundry or something?” the other male voice suggested.

  “I saw him breathing, I tell you.”

  Chapter 12

  Inside the baited trailer, Shayne heard a truck go by, brake, and come back. Frieda was sleeping. She awakened instantly at his touch.

  The driver of the pickup either had a good eye or he was getting good directions; he made the hitch in one move. Somebody spoke sharply. It sounded to Shayne like the voice that had shouted commands at Canada over the bullhorn.

  Frieda was on her feet, the gun in her hand. “Take them now?” she whispered. Shayne shook his head. This time he was armed, but he wanted if possible to do it without shooting. There were too many people sleeping around them. Rourke would follow when they moved out. If they were too badly outnumbered, he could call for help on the van’s phone.

  They got away with a jerk. The wide road had been ditched with a succession of shallow speed bumps. They took the first of these too fast, and the jolt caused the big payloader tire to waver out from the wall. Shayne wedged it back. On his first inspection, he had noticed a two-way phone system in the little kitchen. Usually these things were designed so only one end had a talk button. The other end never stopped transmitting. Using his flashlight, he found the instrument and turned up the volume.

  “Stop bitching,” a voice said, and another voice answered, too faint to be heard.

  The first voice: “Oh, that went beautiful. Smooth as silk. Show these country slobs a couple of ounces of real H and they go out of their skulls. A little confusion right now is all to the good. Muddy the waters, you know? The thing of it is, we’re completely anonymous.”

  “I’ll sell you my share right now for sixty thousand.”

  “If I had sixty thousand, I’d take you up on that, boy. I think Larry would like to set a record, don’t you? Help the image. All this extra trouble, we ought to revise the numbers. How does a million and a quarter sound?” After a moment: “Well, hell, a straight million. It’s easier to take in.”

  “Will everybody please keep quiet for a minute?”

  It was a woman’s voice.

  The long wait under the trailer had made Greco sluggish. They had to be back in their rented car by the time the pickup and the thieves’ trailer pulled out of the park. He was trying to think ahead to their next move.

  And then he had a truly sensational idea, the best idea so far. Explosion and fire! Earlier he had ripped off somebody’s gas can to have something to carry. Now he ran back to get it. Nick wanted to know what he was doing.

  “Tell you in a minute.”

  Pam, sitting between the two men in the cab of the pickup, had a different kind of pressure coming at her from opposite sides. That strength and certainty of Downey’s, she was beginning to see, masked a kind of obtuseness. What made people take the police exam in the first place? Whatever it was, Downey had it in excess. In that threesome, he was the man of experience. When he spoke, everything about his tone and manner declared that he knew what he was talking about. Events frequently proved that he didn’t. It never fazed him a bit. His ego was iron-bound. He wanted more than compliance, he wanted admiration.

  As he drove, his hand dropped to its usual place on the inside of her thigh. Perhaps he had forgotten Werner. Perhaps this was merely an announcement of how things were going to be from then on. It was impossible to tell what Werner was thinking.

  Downey had decided to drive to the truck stop where they had left Werner’s car, and put Canada into that for the rest of the journey. It wouldn’t be easy, maneuvering that dead weight between vehicles, but when they got to Miami Heights they could off-load in the garage with the door down. The trailer wouldn’t be seen entering their driveway. They could sort out the cars afterward.

  The great field was between crops at the moment. A certain amount of vegetable litter had been left lying around, but absolutely nothing was growing in the poisoned soil. Nick was carrying his shoes. They moved at a pace between a walk and a shambling run. There had been clouds earlier. Now there were stars, and it seemed to Greco that whenever he looked up he saw a meteor. On the way in, they had aimed at the lights of the camp. Now there was nothing but stars, and even they didn’t seem to want to hold still.

  Nick was swearing a steady stream. Every time he stepped on something sharp, he hated Greco more. He thought it had been stupid to leave the car so far away. That trailer would haul-ass out in a minute, and if they weren’t in their own car by then, they couldn’t hope to overtake it. It was Greco’s fault, but they would both be blamed.

  “DeLuca won’t listen to alibis. He’ll cut off our balls.”

  “Or give us a medal, one.”

  The gas can kept banging against Greco’s leg, and he was tempted to throw it away. But he hung onto it. They still had a way to go when the pickup and trailer combination came under the lighted sign.

  “We won’t make it,” Nick gasped.

  “Oh, yes, we will,” Greco said grimly.

  Taking his partner’s arm, he ran with him until they went out of step and he had to let go. But the ground was smoother here, and all of a sudden they were on the road. The pickup began its turn, and Greco pulled Nick down so they wouldn’t be seen in the headlights. Another undignified move, and Greco, with his mouth full of dirt, was hoping it might be the last.

  He ran ahead, slammed the lifted hood of the car, and was back on pavement by the time Nick hobbled up. The trailer’s hind end, lit up like a Macy’s window, dwindled away. Another camping vehicle, this one a van—a Dodge, Greco thought—came out of the park.

  “What are we getting into here, a shoot-out?” Nick demanded. “Three people is already too many.”

  “Hell with them,” Greco said, having to smile. “No shooting. Were going to set the mother on fire.”

  “How, throw matches?”

  “Why do you think I lugged this Goddamn can? There’s gas sloshing around in there.”

  Dazed as he was, Nick took a moment to see it. “You mean give them a cocktail.”

  “That’s just what I mean. They won’t even know what happened. DeLuca will love it.”

  He was shifting up fast, getting all the acceleration out of the car that it was willing to give them. They had a bottle of rum in the back seat. Nick pissed it out the window as they went. When the bottle was empty, he gave Greco a nod. Greco stopped to let him pour. Without a funnel, he spilled quite a bit. When Greco was unable to find a rag, Nick contributed a sock, which he soaked in gas and twisted up tight to make a wick.

  Shayne, in the kitchen of the moving trailer, listened closely to the conversation in the cab. The driver continued to boast of how well he had read the scene at the hot plant. He was the one who had insisted they shouldn’t give up. And did they know why? Because he knew the criminal mentality.

  The woman was needling him more and more openly. He wasn’t getting it yet.

  “Mike.”

  Frieda gestured urgently from the doorway. Shayne jumped to join her.

  She had tilted the slats when she looked to be sure that Rourke, in the van, had followed them out. The van was an eighth of a mile back, ambling along at a comfortable forty-five, the minimum on this road. Now Shayne saw a black sedan beginning to pull out to pass them.

  Frieda whispered, “They came up before and dropped back. Two men. Something peculiar about them.”

  Shayne caught the license number as the car crept close
r. It was a rented Ford from the Hertz fleet. The driver, young and dark, was clutching the wheel as though about to go into a dangerous skidding turn, although the highway here ran as straight as a ruled line. The man beside him was fiddling with something on his lap.

  These couldn’t be cops. Canada’s men wouldn’t be driving a rented car. Nevertheless, it seemed to Shayne that a strange electricity was flickering in that front seat. His eye jumped to his .357. It was across the trailer, where they had arranged the lamps so their beams would converge on the door.

  For an instant, the second man in the Ford looked straight at the trailer window. His face was in eruption. His head bobbed at the end of a stalklike neck. His hands came up, and when Shayne saw the flame of a cigarette lighter, he came around fast. There was no time for the gun. He kicked a chair aside and dislodged the great payloader wheel. It started to move, and Shayne gave it a hard push as it passed. It came up hard against the back wall. The sudden weight shift caused the trailer to veer toward the Ford.

  The two windows were almost parallel when it happened, the window at Nick’s elbow and the trailer’s window. Greco was riding the brake, giving him plenty of time. It was an easy side-hand toss, but it had to shatter the glass and get through the blind.

  With a faint clash of metal, the vehicles kissed. Greco had seen the fishtail starting and instinctively twitched away. It was this more than the slight collision that threw Nick off. He couldn’t wait to make sure that the flame had taken hold. He had to touch it off and throw in the same motion, and he couldn’t afford to miss. If he missed and the flaming gas dribbled harmlessly onto the highway, Canada’s kidnappers would know they were under attack, and out would come the guns. Greco would have to pull alongside, and it would be Nick who would bear the brunt of the shooting. Three people, three guns, and nowadays women could shoot, too, you know.