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. The 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.
