the back of his throat, sagged, weaved, and the indistinct figure in front of him swung again. This time he saw the pipe a fraction of an inch in front of his eyes, coming with the speed of fury.
Five
MIKE CARLOW wasn’t entirely sure which he liked least, Mainzer or this cruddy truck, but he thought it was probably the truck. He hadn’t liked it when he first saw it, covered with canvas, in the backyard of Lebatard’s house, and he’d liked it even less after he and that bastard Mainzer had taken the canvas off, and he’d begun to really despise it once he was behind the wheel and had the rotten thing in some kind of motion. He didn’t like the transmission, he didn’t like the engine, he didn’t like the springs, he didn’t like the seat or the steering wheel or the tires, and most of all he didn’t like the idea of pushing this orange lemon around the city streets with a million dollars’ worth of hot coins stowed away in the back.
A vehicle, to Mike Carlow, was something that got you from point A to point B in one second flat, regardless of the distance between. This was the ideal, not yet attained either in Detroit or Europe, and Carlow judged everything with wheels and an engine on how close it came to reaching the ideal. And this truck Parker had given him to drive was the bottom of the barrel, was further from the ideal than anything else he could think of, with the possible exception of a power lawn mower.
Carlow was a racing driver, and in his high-school days had pushed a lot of clunkers around a lot of stock-car tracks. While still a teenager he’d designed a racing car with a center of gravity guaranteed to be unaffected by the amount of gasoline in the gas tank, because there wasn’t any gas tank; the car was built around a frame of hollow aluminum tubing, which would hold the fuel supply. When someone he showed the idea to objected that it might be insanely dangerous to build a car in which the driver vi was completely surrounded by gasoline, he’d said, “So what?” And had lived his life from the same point of view ever since.
If racing cars didn’t cost so damn much to design and build and care for Mike Carlow wouldn’t from time to time be reduced to driving abortions like this stinking truck. He worked on jobs like this maybe once a year, less if he could afford it, and only to raise enough cash to support his automobiles. Sure, he could sell out to one of the big companies, be in essence nothing more than a test pilot for them, trying their engineers’ bright new ideas in racing cars financed by them, owned by them, and merely driven by him, but that wasn’t his idea of racing. Any car he drove had to be his car, and his designs were still as wild as the track officials would permit. Because of this, and because he was one of the most aggressive drivers in the business, he had racked up more than his share of cars, leaving himself with marks of his occupation all over his body. More important, to his way of thinking, he’d also occasionally reduced thousands of dollars’ worth of automobile to a hundred dollars’ worth of scrap, and every time that happened he either had to dip into the kitty if there was one or hire himself out to people like Parker and Lempke again, to take them safely and quickly away from the scene of a score. Or to drive some piece of garbage like this improbable truck.
As for Otto Mainzer, the bastard was a bastard, that was all there was to say about him. As long as Mainzer kept his rotten personality within bounds Carlow would control himself, but once this job was over if Mainzer wanted to go on being cute Carlow would be happy to bend a tire iron over his head. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d stretched out a bruiser who thought he could have it over Carlow because of the difference in their sizes, and it might not be the last, but Carlow thought it would probably be the one he’d enjoy the most.
In the meantime, tonight’s work was mostly dull. The highlight had been watching Parker’s woman cross her legs; from then on, the night had been downhill. All he had to do was stand around behind the truck a lot, looking into the open manhole and making believe he was a power-and-light worker, and when Mainzer brought him more of the boodle he had to go into the truck and stash it.
Only once in the last hour had he seen a police car, and that had gone on by him without a glance. Other than that, traffic had been so light as to be almost nonexistent, and pedestrians going by on the sidewalk were as rare as dodo eggs. Occasionally Mainzer had to wait out of sight in the doorway while groups of conventioneers, most of them carrying cargoes of alcohol, straggled by and into the hotel, but these delays were never long. Carlow did his work methodically, spent most of his free time thinking about his tentative plans for the next car he wanted to build, and when at ten minutes to three the man in the topcoat and hat walked over and stood in front of him Carlow at first didn’t even see the gun in his hand. He said, “What’s up, buddy?” thinking the guy was going to ask directions or something like that.
But the guy said, “You are. Let’s take a walk.” And motioned with the gun.
Then Carlow saw it, and a feeling like ice water ran down the middle of his back. He looked at the guy’s face again, and he just didn’t look like law. Carlow said, “I’m easy. No need to get excited.” And moved his arms out from his sides, so he wouldn’t look as though he was reaching for anything.
“That’s the way to be, all right,” said the other. “Let’s go inside.”
“Sure.”
The guy wanted him to go into the office building. Carlow left the truck and walked across the sidewalk and pushed open the door, the man with the gun coming along behind him.
Inside, Carlow saw the dim form of Mainzer lying on the floor near the foot of the stairs. I’m going to get it, too, he thought, and then pain came curving in a bright hard flash around both sides of his head and turned the world to white darkness.
Six
BILLY LEBATARD felt like Judas Iscariot. He stood there in the brightly lighted bourse room, packing coins into case after case, and though in a small way he did feel the excitement and the thrill that he thought natural to a scene like this, what he mostly felt was sick and rotten and miserable and the worst kind of Benedict Arnold.
Because this was much worse than the other times, the two or three times when money had been short and he had helped professional criminals to rob coin dealers. Well, not helped exactly. He’d merely pointed out in each case a good subject, and told the robbers what they needed to know about their victim’s movements, and then afterward he’d brought the stolen coins for something less than half of their retail value.
Of course, no matter how you looked at it, those times had been just the same as this one, just as bad, just as crooked. But this one felt worse. Mostly, probably, it was because those other times the victims had been individual dealers he hadn’t really known all that well, men he’d only met a few times around the convention circuit, and this time the primary victims were going to be the members of the Indianapolis Coin Association, the host club for this convention. And they were people Billy had known for years, people who had befriended him, had invited him to their homes, had accepted him and welcomed him and thought of him as their friend.
Billy Lebatard well knew the value of friendship. He’d been a shy and lonely child, and at times it had seemed as though his entire life would be lonely, and numismatics had saved him. Fellow hobbyists share something important to them which the outside world considers unimportant and frivolous, so that in a small way all hobbyists are social outcasts; a true social outcast can become less noticeable in their midst.
