Hunched and furtive, the masked figure continued along the Cadillac’s long flank. The door opened. He slipped inside.
Shayne’s mind was racing. A killing? No, a killer wouldn’t hide in the car. Then a kidnapping. Big Larry Canada would bring a far higher price than poor Eddie Maye. That meant there were others hidden in the darkness, waiting for the meeting to end. Other cars. Other guns.
Chapter 8
Downey had found a wrecker equipped with a siren. To make sure it was working, he flicked the switch on and off quickly, producing a spurt of noise. He had also carried in a regulation riot-control bullhorn. Together, these two noisemakers should put both Canada and the Tallahassee bureaucrat into a nice state of panic.
The trio had two hours to prepare. The mercury lights were burning, but a sweep through the site showed them that Downey had been right: the watchman had been told to get lost so Canada could have the place to himself.
Downey assigned roles, and they went through the whole thing twice. So what if Canada and Gold didn’t use a trailer, but talked in the car. It would be Canada’s car. One scream from that siren, and the Highway Commissioner would leap out and burn rubber getting away. If Canada had a gun, Downey would use the bullhorn and talk him into throwing it out.
“Good God, man,” he said when Werner continued to nip at his heels. “You’d think I never made an arrest. These people are realists. When they see they’re outnumbered, they come in quietly and call the lawyer.”
“But if he brings anybody with him-”
“Wernie, look,” Downey said, clearly suffering. “We control. If they come in three cars, we sit here and jack off and wait for some better time. Who’s in a hurry? For that much dough, I’m willing to make it a six-month project.”
And that was easy for Downey, Pam thought, because he was drawing a city salary. She and Werner had both left their jobs. They had decided not to ask Downey for an advance because that would really put him in charge. Her airplane ticket to New York was her ace in the hole. If she was really turned off by the way things were going, she could always pull out, and it gave her a dreamlike feeling. In dreams, she always escaped by sprouting wings and going straight up.
The hot plant, according to Downey, had been fixed as the meeting place. Downey was guessing that they would go into the superintendent’s trailer, a radio-equipped command post for the whole operation. Werner was posted near this trailer, leaning against the fender of a big oil truck. At the first sign of a car, he would drop to the ground and slide between the front wheels. If they were lucky, Canada would park directly across from him.
Downey and Pam were in the wrecker.
“That kid is beginning to get to me,” Downey said in a low voice. “You’d think he was doing us a Goddamn favor. I don’t like that la-di-da attitude.”
He fingered the siren switch. Pam was glad to see that even this hardened professional seemed nervous.
“Like to sound you out on something,” he said. “This Weiner’s our weak link, I mean afterward. Put him in a room with a light in his eyes, and he’s going to holler for Mommy. I know the type.”
“I think he may be tougher than you think.”
“Yeah? You, I’m not worried about. You’d spit in their eye, which is the only thing to do in those cases, and now I’m talking as a man who’s spent twenty-five years on the far side of the desk. Right now, I admit, we need him.”
He put his hand on the inside of her thigh, well up. “That movie tonight. Christ Jesus. I’ve heard they were raw, but wasn’t that something? There they are,” he said suddenly, leaning forward.
A car was coming through the forest of pillars. It jounced off the pavement onto rougher ground and headed straight at them, its headlights on fire.
Downey’s fingers tightened. “Down.”
They went down so fast that their heads bumped. The headlights swept past the windshield. After a moment, Downey lifted his head. A car door opened, the headlights went off. Pam didn’t like to be the female, crouching in terror and leaving the decisions to the man, and she forced herself to look out. She saw an immense bearded man in a wrinkled white suit, a shirt with a necktie. He walked to a switch box on one of the light poles. An instant later, the mercury-vapor lamps flickered and died.
“There now,” Downey breathed. “Didn’t I tell you he’d turn off the lights?”
A light came on in one of the trailers. Pam turned Downey’s wrist so she could see the watch face. It was three minutes to eleven. The Highway Commissioner had driven all the way from Tallahassee, but he arrived exactly on the tick of eleven. He came in another Detroit gas-eating monster. He wheeled it alongside the Cadillac and cut his lights before getting out. They saw him briefly as the trailer door opened. When he was inside, a Venetian blind slammed down, obliterating most of the light.
“Now, Werner, old buddy,” Downey said quietly, “don’t freeze up on me.”
Werner had been told to wait long enough to be sure neither man came back to get something he had forgotten. Minutes passed. In the blackness, it was impossible to tell if he had started or was still lying on his belly under the oil truck, fingernails digging into the dirt. Pam knew that feeling. She had experienced the same thing in Eddie Maye’s garage, had stayed in a frozen crouch, unable to move. Now, for some reason, she was anxious for things to happen.
Downey checked the time again and nudged her with an elbow. “Get out and give him a goose.” His hand came up hard between her legs. “Do this right and we’ll get plastered and have a high old time.”
He may have been trying to ease the tension, but it was extremely unsettling and annoying. She trailed her fingertips along the wrecker’s side and reached out, waving, until she touched the next truck. Almost at once, she whirled and felt her way back. Downey jumped as the door opened.
“Forgot my damn mask.”
She realized that Downey had yanked out his gun. He hadn’t fired, at least. She picked the mask off the seat and had her usual difficulty lining up the eye holes. She started off again, furious, sure that other things would be forgotten. Werner was right. There was no point putting themselves through this for a one-third share. One-third was too low.
Her way was strewn with huge obstacles which she had to find her way around. There was a blink of light as the Cadillac’s door opened. It blinked off at once. Pam stopped, touching some kind of machine with an enormous, smooth-sided bucket which was partly raised. Briefly there was a faint glow from the Cadillac. Werner was using a tiny flash to find the ignition wire. Then it went dark.
His next move now would be to set the dome-light switch so it wouldn’t flash on when the door opened, then soak the cloth pad with chloroform and get down. After that, the plan called for a four-minute wait. In the rehearsals, Downey had made them sit still in a darkened room to get an idea of how fantastically long four minutes can be when nothing is happening.
Now the seconds ticked by. This was ridiculous, Pam thought. Surely Downey had lost track and gone back to zero. Do it, she whispered fiercely. Now!
The siren’s scream, when it came, was so sudden and frightening that she had the sensation of being lifted clear of the ground. Her hands flew up, and her knuckles rang against the bucket.
Downey’s voice thundered from the bullhorn. “Robinson, you men block that exit right we’ve got them bottled up here be careful they may be armed they may be armed-”
There were two quick shots.
Holding the night glasses on the Cadillac, Shayne saw the masked figure slip into the back seat and crouch out of sight. Shayne was in a minority here. He had given Frieda his gun. All he could hope to do was keep them occupied until the cops showed up.
At first, when the siren blew, he thought he had misjudged distances and the cops had come by some shorter secondary road. He aimed the camera at the door of the trailer. It was loaded with sensitive film, and when he
