Chapter 19
Greco had played playground basketball as a lad, before he stopped growing, and he could remember days when he knew he couldn’t be stopped. Everything he threw toward the basket had to go in. When you felt that way, he discovered, it had generally happened. You could make impossible shots.
He hadn’t liked the idea when he first heard it from DeLuca, but now, after looking it over, it almost seemed to be arranged with the hit-man in mind. The toilet was surprisingly private. Noisy, DeLuca had said. The place was so noisy he could have got away without using the silencer. One quick look had shown him six possible exits. Bang, bang, bang. And when DeLuca showed up with the cops, they would find that the kidnappers had tricked them. Not wanting to take any chances, the bastards had drilled Canada after making him dictate the tape.
All the same, Greco intended to take full credit for this. By then DeLuca would be established. He wouldn’t be hurt by rumors.
Greco was carrying the gun in one of the gauntlets, the long barrel poking into the middle finger. He eased it out to be sure the silencer hadn’t caught. Then he noticed the Pontiac. Greco had a good eye for the different makes and models, and he knew at once that this was the car that had picked up the money. He sauntered in that direction. Sure enough, there was the white Styrofoam box on the front seat, sitting there right out in the open, looking so tempting, with the familiar friendly dolphin on the lid. The car would be locked, probably? Yes, the windows were closed, the lock buttons were down.
The dust got to him all at once. He was having difficulty breathing. What did they expect him to do, leave it for somebody else? That wouldn’t be human nature. He owed it to Nick, who had done so well in the night. It would give his death some meaning. DeLuca would be so delighted to see it again, he might be willing to split it down the middle, half to DeLuca, half to Greco.
He decided to do it. He’d feel like such a schmuck if he didn’t. Of course, he had to shoot up the toilet first. When he started something, he finished.
After looking around again, he moved to the tall portable box. He distinctly heard movement inside, breathing, a muffled moan. After reading the notice on the door, he put on a little act for anybody who might be watching, as though he had to take a leak and couldn’t hold it any longer. He went behind the toilet and took out his whang, which was a little shriveled from all the excitement.
He waited for the flow to commence before firing. Through the thin metal, he heard impact, a grunt: a hit on the first shot. DeLuca had wanted all eight. Greco gave him all eight, stitching a random pattern inside the strike zone, a rectangle between two feet and five feet from the floor. High and inside, high and outside, a slider low and away. That man was now dead.
He finished his piss, snapped in a new clip, and put everything away, the gun and his cock. The payloaders were still going, the trucks going and coming. Returning to the Pontiac, he smashed a window, unlocked the door, and lifted out the cooler. It was pleasantly heavy. He strapped it on his rear rack.
The basketball feeling was now extremely intense. He kicked off. Instead of using one of the traveled paths, he went over a bank, swerved at the bottom, recovered, and headed for the south road.
The motorcycle gave him a dreamlike feeling of power. It was a real brute. He could fly from the fastest cars. But first he had to get out in the open, and one of the payloaders was rolling at him. Seeing no way to get through, he spun all the way around, hitting the ground with one foot. They didn’t like outsiders, was the only explanation. They couldn’t be after him yet. He saw an opening and went under one of the belts at the hot plant, between the belt and the gears. He gave a high, crazy laugh and a wave. Who was he? One of those nutty bikers from Miami out to bug the straight people, run a few obstacles, and be on his way. He got a wry shake of the head from one of the truck drivers, who had to respect machismo even in this freakish form.
Now he had a straight run to the highway, but to continue the show, he dodged between trucks and then, taking what he realized immediately afterward was one hell of a chance, rode through a loose section of culvert lying around waiting to be laid.
He saw DeLuca’s pickup coming in. He wouldn’t stop to talk, but he wanted to convey a message: Canada was dead, Greco had recovered the money. He detoured so DeLuca would be sure to see the box on the back of the bike. Light flashed from the pickup’s windshield. He couldn’t see DeLuca’s face, but the look of the truck itself told him he was being naive. Pickups are plain and practical. For DeLuca the practical thing to do would be to take the cooler and tell Greco to go screw himself, here’s five hundred, buy yourself a drink. Down the middle? Don’t be silly. And for the first time Greco realized that the Styrofoam box an inch from his ass was filled with real money, which anybody could spend. You could be any age, at any level. Your name could be Greco.
He headed straight between the truck’s headlights. He saw the truck’s brakes take hold, and he spun out and around. DeLuca shouted a question. Greco pushed the leather glove into the open window. DeLuca reached, thinking Greco was giving him something. And Greco was. He was giving him death. He fired through the finger. The upward shot shattered the lower half of DeLuca’s face.
Greco was past, a rich man. He gave another wild hoot and wound into the next higher gear.
Nothing was ahead but a truck road and the flag girl. For no rational reason, merely to show her authority, she was waving her flag at him. She thought she could stop him with that puny flag? He decided to make her jump. Nice-looking cunt. Greco liked long hair on a girl, those skinny flanks. She pointed her flag, and he was struck a powerful blow on the chest, which knocked him backward out of his seat. One foot caught, and he stayed with the motorcycle. The heavy machine, no longer a friend, whipped around and came over on top of him. His scream rang back and forth inside the helmet like the screaming of more than one person. They slid twenty feet together, Greco and the Honda, through rising dust. When they came to rest, he was looking straight at the sun, but he was unable to close his eyes.
When Werner saw the motorcycle stop near the Pontiac, he started his motor and turned on the rooftop flasher. Of course, the kidnappers could have told somebody to come and pick up the cooler, but why would they do that when it could leave unobtrusively with Benjamin himself at the end of the day?
One of the payloaders was moving erratically. Suddenly the motorcycle burst out of the dust, with the cooler strapped to the rack. It disappeared and appeared again, playing games near the hot plant. Werner was moving. The motorcycle broke free, nearly colliding with a pickup- the pickup, he realized-then seemed to hit an obstruction at a bad angle and flipped. Werner drove up. Pam whirled.
“He’s got the money!”
Werner jumped out and quickly broke open the buckles. The dust from the spill was still in the air around him. Straightening, he took one step toward his car. Cars were moving out from the hot plant. A sand truck was coming in to cross. Werner had come in a police car and so was obviously a cop. But a real cop wouldn’t take off again an instant after arriving at the scene of an accident this bad. He couldn’t make up his mind. And he was still standing there, holding the cooler, being pulled in several directions at once, when the sand track came up. The driver looked at the fallen motorcycle. The front wheel was folded. The biker, covered with blood, looked almost as battered as his machine and considerably more fragile.
“Jesus Christ,” the truck driver said. “I’ve got a kid myself who wants one of those Hondas. Not with my money! Anything I can do?”
“We’ll take care of it,” Werner told him.
The truck pulled past, and Werner swung the cooler over the tailgate into the sand. It slid down the cone- shaped pile, out of sight from below.
Pam was trembling badly. Werner’s move with the cooler-whether that was smart or dumb, there was no way to call it back now-had caused him to unfreeze. He looked into the pickup. What he saw there drove him back several steps. Before he could freeze again, he snatched Pam’s gun and threw it into the front seat beside the dead man.
“Don’t tell Downey,” he said. “Half million for you. Half million for me. Fuck him. You don’t know a thing!”
Pam began shuddering, taking deep breaths and letting them out on a rising note. That was all right. She had witnessed a double shooting, and nobody would be surprised if she came slightly unglued. And all at once her orange vest seemed to break open from inside. Blood spurted out. The motorcyclist on the ground was holding his long gun in both hands. The barrel wavered and fell back.
