Werner was too late to catch Pam as she fell. The yellow hat went bouncing away. He turned her over. After the first hard spurt, the blood was welling out of her chest like a pool overflowing. She tried to speak. Bubbles came out. He let her down. He wasn’t thinking of her at all, he was thinking about the money.
He clapped on her hard hat and automatically stopped being a cop and changed into a construction worker. He ran toward the cars, gesturing.
“They shot-killed-”
There were enough other things to look at so he got away with it. Other cars gathered. He doubled over and was sick in the dirt. It was real bile, real vomit. Very pale, his hand to his mouth, he turned his back to the confused scene and walked away. His rented car with the flasher would be left over when everything got sorted out. That would be hours from now. No one would make the connection.
He walked all the way through. Without looking to see who was watching, he crossed the access road and the highway. He made a wide detour through the tangled undergrowth, going into swamp water up to his knees, and circled back. A great irrigation conduit ran under the road at this point. He ducked down and went in, walking through a tiny sluggish trickle of water. The second half of the conduit had been tied in, but not yet covered with dirt.
He stopped several feet short of the mouth, in dark shadow. He could see the sand pile. The dump trucks were feeding the pile on the opposite side from the payloader.
Shayne, in the payloader cab, was a half mile from the action, his view partly obscured by the moving dust. He gave quiet instructions to the sheriff’s deputies. One police car, its blinker working, was on its way in from the highway. He was outside the cab, about to drop to the ground, when Benjamin called him back. He was in time to see the Honda and a pickup apparently collide. The Honda flipped and threw its rider. A sand truck crossed the highway, paused, and went on.
Shayne’s was the fourth car to reach the scene. DeLuca and the man he had imported to kill Canada had shot and killed each other, and the flag girl had been hit during the exchange. She was dying. The Styrofoam cooler was no longer strapped to the motorcycle.
These deaths were sheriff’s business, and the deputies had already begun the lengthy process of picking up. Shayne took the ranking deputy aside and asked for permission to search the pickup and the cars.
The man gave him a hard look. “This is your show, Mike. Go ahead, but you know we’re going to need a lot more than you’ve given us so far. Am I permitted to ask what you’re looking for?”
“The Styrofoam cooler that was on the back of the Honda.”
“A beer cooler? Three people are dead here, Mike. They weren’t arguing about beer.”
“Probably not,” Shayne agreed.
Two feet by one foot by a foot and a half, the cooler would be a hard thing to conceal. By the time Frieda arrived, Shayne had decided it must have bounced off the carrier during the jolting ride. But Frieda was sure it had still been on the motorcycle when it sheared away from the pickup and went down.
“We were facing the wrong way, with the bucket up. I lost track of him when he went under the belts. When he came out in the open again, the first thing I looked for was the cooler. It was definitely there, Mike.”
Shayne looked at the tire tracks again. Squatting, he drew a diagram in the dirt. The only vehicle he couldn’t account for was the sand truck, one in the long anonymous succession of trucks feeding the piles. He thought for a moment, rubbing his sandpapery jaw.
“It’s a longshot, but we might as well try it.”
He drove back to the payloader. The mixing tank, at the center of the great spiderweb, continued to be fed, to revolve, to disgorge. The landscaping and finishing crews were coming in to park their working vehicles and go home. The hot plant would go on working as long as it had daylight. A new load of sand was being dumped at the far side of the pile.
Climbing into the cab, Shayne told Benjamin, “Let’s rotate. Get some of the new sand that’s come in in the last half hour.”
In the mouth of the culvert, Werner was making plans. The police had two dead men and a dead girl. That would keep them busy for hours. But they wouldn’t be here all night. Werner was more worried about Benjamin and Vaughan. And he was worried about Downey. He could see Downey’s car outside the control trailer, but Downey himself must be off with the other cops, trying to make sense of the multiple shootings. Like Benjamin and Vaughan, he would be looking for two things-a Styrofoam box and Werner.
Werner was lying almost in the water, so he wouldn’t show up if anybody looked in the opposite end. The plan he settled on finally was to wait until just before daylight, if he could hold still that long. The lights would be on tonight, but they wouldn’t reach to the far side of the sand pile. He had been counting loads. Only one more load had been dropped on top of the cooler. It would be easy digging. He couldn’t hope to get home with the money tonight. He had to do it in stages. He would take it out through the culvert, bury it in the woods, marking the spot well, and come back for it later.
Downey would be just as baffled by these events as everybody else. Werner now knew that in smartness and toughness he was Downey’s equal, if not his superior. All he lacked was experience, and he was getting that fast. With Pam dead-
And it really hit him for the first time. She actually was dead, all over, from the crown of her head to her toes. They had made love for the last time. They had been antagonists all along, even more so at the end. They had both changed under pressure. It would have been interesting to see which one ended up with the money.
He thought it would be safe now to doze a little. He was starting a long, hard period of waiting. The rhythmic clanking was more and more soothing. The payloader lunged, swung, tipped, and came back. Suddenly Werner snapped awake. It was changing position.
It maneuvered around the circle, where it seemed to hesitate for an instant; then it attacked. Instead of starting at shoulder level, the bucket dropped to the ground and made its first gouge there. It came up and around. Werner watched, more and more appalled. He had lined up the spot carefully so he would know where to dig. And it had planted itself at that exact spot.
His head whirling, he put on the yellow hat and dropped from the culvert. If the money didn’t come out in the first bite, it was sure to come in the second or third, and he knew one thing for certain-he couldn’t just sit there and watch. He had to do something. At the hot plant, sand from the bin drained steadily onto the bottom-most scoops of the belt. He had no idea how long the bin took to empty. He had to be there when the cooler dropped out. There was enough confused movement around and beneath the mixer so that he might be able to knock it off the belt without being seen.
As long as he was moving, he had a place in the pattern. He would become conspicuous the instant he stopped. He slowed down, and he was fifteen feet from the belt when there was an interruption in the smooth flow of sand. The cooler broke out of the mouth of the hopper.
Each segment of the belt slanted in toward the center to hold the sand. The cooler rode upward serenely, moving surprisingly fast. Werner had started running, but by the time he was in position, it was already inches out of reach.
The aperture in the tank’s face was twenty-five feet from the ground. Without stopping to think, Werner leaped on the belt and scrambled up on all fours, pedaling hard. He gained a yard, slipped, and lost it again. He clawed upward, touching the cooler for an instant and knocking it off center. The dolphin on the lid seemed to be sneering at him. He drove again, and his foot went through the sand and caught between two of the V-shaped segments.
He tried to kick free, losing more ground. There were less than three feet to go now. He reached out desperately, and his fingers again grazed the Styrofoam. But it was firmly lodged, and it rode on to the top, tilted, and went in.
Werner’s car was still there, near the pickup and the bodies, but no Werner. Downey looked for Benjamin and found him where he was supposed to be, up in his payloader. Mike Shayne was with him! Downey tried to find out from the sheriff’s people what the idea was, what they were trying to do, but they didn’t know much. Somebody thought there had been a kidnapping; that was the rumor that was going around. Downey’s own status was a trifle uncertain. True, Larry Canada was one of his specialties, but he hadn’t cleared it with anybody, and about all he
