Win Some, Lose Some

Chapter 3

Downey logged a few hundred miles following Eddie Maye and learning his schedule. They decided on a price of $125,000. Eddie wouldn’t have that much lying around probably, but he had been part of Larry Canada’s organization a long time, and there would be no problem about raising it. Maye lived normally, taking no unusual precautions. He had been picked up several times for one infraction or another, and he had never been caught carrying a gun. Werner liked hearing that. Eddie did things at regular times. He had an easy disposition and never yelled or jumped up and down at the races. Never angry, never in a hurry, he would give them no trouble.

Every Tuesday night, regularly, he visited a woman in Miami Springs. The set-up there was ideal, an attached two-car garage nearly as wide as the house itself, on a narrow lot. One of the garage doors would be left open for Maye’s VW, a weather-beaten red beetle with a joke bumper sticker: “Mafia Staff Car, Keep Ya Mitts Off.” Some sense of humor! Eddie followed an unvarying procedure. He drove in, closed the garage door, entered the house through the kitchen, stayed about an hour and a half, and went home. They decided to be in the garage waiting, Werner and Pam-with Downey in reserve in case anything went wrong and they needed a lift getting away. But what could go wrong?

On the Tuesday night they had fixed for the action, Downey was behind Eddie as usual. All of a sudden, the VW turned off abruptly without making a signal, darted into the exit from a shopping-center parking lot, ran through a stop sign on the way out, and was gone by the time Downey recovered. Downey drove straight to the Springs, parked at the curb four spaces down from the woman’s house, and waited to see if Eddie would keep his usual Tuesday night date. The garage door was up. The night before, cruising past very late, Downey had shot out the streetlight. In this sort of neighborhood, the sidewalks were never used. He slid low in the seat and started a cigarette.

Inside the garage, Pam and Werner were leaning against the second car, a medium-priced Chevy. They wore loose-fitting sweat shirts and hockey goalkeepers masks, very spooky, with slitted eyes and savage faces. Werner’s long hair, like Pam’s, was tucked up in a stocking cap. The props were ready. This was going to be quiet and painless. They had told each other that so often that they nearly believed it.

The TV was running in the house. In the garage, they could hear only an occasional gunshot and the scream of tires. Werner reached out, and his fingers grazed an unfamiliar object: she had wrapped strips of a torn sheet around her chest to alter her silhouette.

“Pretty soon now,” he whispered.

“It better be soon.”

He followed her arm upward and stopped with his thumb on the pulse in her throat. It was quicker than usual. She shook off his hand as a pair of headlights turned into the driveway.

They ducked out of sight. Werner shook chloroform onto the pad in his hand. The little car entered the garage, flooding the wall with light. The motor went off, then the lights.

Werner moved to the front of the Chevy. They had rehearsed these moves while they were alone. Any small noises would be covered by the sounds made by Maye getting out of the car. But Maye held up after opening the door. Werner’s receptors were quivering, and he heard a slight clicking sound from Pam. Her teeth had come together.

“Oh, God,” Maye said heavily from the VW, “I don’t think I can make it.”

He came out. Werner moved, and the garage door slammed down.

The plan was for Pam to throw the light switch, and while Eddie was immobilized by the sight of her terrifying mask, Werner would come in from behind and clap the chloroformed cloth over his mouth. But when the light flashed on, Maye was coming back in the space between the two cars, and that little change threw them completely off.

Maye was removing his glasses. He was a plump man with a ruddy face, usually smiling. Werner knew Maye had to be seared, but instead of standing shocked and motionless, permitting himself to be mugged, he went into a flurry of violent motion.

He threw the glasses at Werner and came straight at him, striking him in the face with an extended hand. Werner went backward, and Eddie literally ran right over him. Werner’s head made contact with the hard floor. For an instant, things were fuzzy and confused. He managed to roll.

The light went off. A gun banged in the wrong part of the garage. Maye wasn’t supposed to be carrying a gun. Downey had practically guaranteed. Maye was at the door now, trying to wrench it open. As Werner came to his knees, his hand closed on something metallic. He had no idea what it was, but it was small enough to throw and he threw it. Another shot from Maye went into one of the cars.

Pam, moving, kicked something over. The garage door went up on its overhead tracks. Werner, suddenly furious at this mild-looking man who ought to be surrendering to them quietly, went over the top of the Volkswagen, leaping on Maye from behind before he could get through the door. He had lost the chloroformed pad. He grappled with Maye, who was trying to bring the gun over his shoulder to shoot Werner loose. They came back hard against the Chevy’s fender. Werner shifted his grip. Pam was hitting at Maye’s arm with her gun. They would have him in another moment.

Then Downey, in a mask like a skull, stepped in and chopped at Maye’s head. The impact was sickening. The taut body went limp in Werner’s embrace.

Downey snapped, “Put him in.”

In the narrow space between the cars, it wasn’t easy. Downey had to do most of it, grunting and swearing.

“We’ve got about ten more seconds here.”

Pam came in the opposite door, and together they wrestled the unconscious loan shark into the narrow space behind the tipped-forward seat. Werner and Downey crammed themselves in. Werner ended up on the driver’s side. He fumbled with the switches, and when he had the motor started, he backed out fast. In spite of the shots and the clatter, the neighborhood seemed unchanged.

“Jesus,” Downey said with feeling. “Did you fuck that up!”

“He wasn’t supposed to have a gun,” Werner said.

“You mean it was Eddie doing that shooting? That’s funny.”

“Funny? I’m laughing.”

“Well, we’ve got the bastard. Take off the masks now.”

He stripped off his skull, changing back into Jack Downey, the leathery veteran of twenty-five years in the Miami Police Department.

“So the son of a bitch was carrying a gun. That’s going to cost him another twenty-five G’s. I didn’t even want to be out here, but it’s lucky I came. You’d be dead now. If he got out of there, he would have picked you off one at a time.”

As a matter of fact, Werner thought they had been doing well without help. The shooting was over by the time Downey got there. But Downey needed to take credit, and that was fine with Werner as long as he was out of their lives at the end of twenty-four hours.

“Stop here,” Downey said. “I’ll walk back and get my car. If he’s too heavy for you, wait for me and I’ll help carry him in. Give me about fifteen minutes.”

He fixed the dome light so it wouldn’t come on when the door opened, got out, and walked away. On the back seat, Maye groaned and flung out an arm.

“We’d better give him the Demerol,” Werner said.

Pam rolled back Maye’s sleeve. Werner had the loaded hypodermic in a toothbrush box. He tapped Maye’s arm smartly with the needle and emptied the syringe. Maye subsided.

“Now we relax and collect the money,” Werner said.

They had rented a house in Hialeah, on the other side of Okeechobee Road. Here, too, the garage was attached, but it only had room for one car. There were several “For Sale” signs on the block, and the lawns were baked out and unappealing. Werner was learning that there was no possible way they could foresee everything, and as he got out to open the garage door, a black Labrador frolicked up to pee on the rear wheel.

Werner had trouble making the key work, and before he could get back in the car, the Lab’s owner, a middle-aged woman with her hair in curlers, came out of the shadows.

“Alice! Don’t do that. You baaaad dog.”

The dog leaped on Werner and tried to lick him, glad to find a playmate this late at night. Her mistress scolded her, but so lovingly that she continued to sniff at Werner and slaver on his pants. Werner batted the wet muzzle away.

“Alice, the man doesn’t like that. Stop it this minute.” The woman pounced and, captured the leash. “That’s a cute bumper sticker,” she said, backing off. “Welcome to Hialeah. I didn’t know this place had been rented. It’s been empty for weeks.”

“Yeah, well,” Werner said, trying to conceal how badly the dog had rattled him. “It’s a little far out, but one of the nice things, you can keep a dog. That’s a Lab, isn’t it?”

She said it was, a damn rambunctious one, only a puppy still. Werner said “Well-” again, and backed into the car. Had she noticed the man on the back seat? Maybe, maybe not. He might, of course, be sleeping or drunk.

“Jesus,” Werner said when the garage door was down. “What was that crack about a bumper sticker?” He went behind the car and read: “Mafia Staff Car, Keep Ya Mitts Off.”

“She’ll remember that,” Pam said.

“Now why will she? Nobody’s going to hear about this except the people who pay us the money. She won’t even know a crime has been committed.”

Pam closed with him hard. He felt the gun in her waistband between them and the strange ridges of overlapping cloth under the sweat shirt.

“O.K.,” he said, rubbing her shoulder. “Everything’s under control.”

She whispered, “Werner, let’s walk away. It isn’t our kind of thing. It can’t work for us. Something bad is bound to happen, I feel it.”

He pulled back. “Old man Downey wouldn’t like that.”

“He said there wouldn’t be any shooting. He was wrong, wasn’t he? I don’t trust him. Let’s take the car and leave it somewhere. Keep ya mitts off. That’s good advice.”

He held her so she had to look at him. “You don’t mean it.”

“I do. I do. Let’s get out of this town before we turn into Downey.”

“No chance. But if you want to walk out, go ahead and walk. We’ll go halves instead of thirds. I’m looking forward to having some money for a change. The hard part is over.”

He tipped the Volkswagen seat and began working Maye out. She watched for a moment, then came to help. A dead weight, Maye was hard to manage. They dragged him into the kitchen and on to the back bedroom. There was a mattress here, another in the second bedroom, two folding chairs and a card table in the living room. Maye was breathing harshly, his mouth open. There was a reddish bulge on his forehead where Downey had clubbed him with his gun. Werner tore off a strip of adhesive tape and taped his mouth, then his wrists and ankles.

“He won’t feel so hot when he wakes up, but he’ll be glad to find out he’s still alive. A little poorer, that’s all.”

When they moved the furniture in, Werner had installed a hasp and staple on the door of this bedroom. He secured it with a padlock.

“Now for a drink,” Pam said grimly.

“I still have to drive into town and mail the letter. But save some for me, please. And this may be the time to tell you about a small variation.”

They had brought sandwiches and a bottle of scotch. Pam tried to open the bottle, but her fingers were trembling too badly. Werner opened it for her and poured some into a plastic glass. She drank it in two pulls, standing, filled the glass again, and sat down at the folding table.

“What kind of a variation? Jack won’t like it unless you cleared it with him.”

“Jack is the point, and I didn’t clear it with him.”

The envelope addressed to Maye’s wife was ready to go, but unsealed. Werner was going to post it in the box in front of the main post office, all the way downtown on Fourth Street. It carried a special-handling stamp and would be delivered in the morning. Werner took out the letter and gave it to Pam.

She looked up after a moment. “It says seven o’clock instead of eight.”

“Remember the story of the Three Little Pigs? The smart little pig made a date with the wolf to pick apples in the morning, and he showed up an hour early. Jack’s a professional wolf. Every now and then, I catch a faint glint. Maybe he thinks he can eat us for breakfast. Maybe he begins to wonder if three-thirds might be a rounder figure than one-third. Haven’t you seen some of that?”

“Werner,” she said pleadingly, “why don’t we call it off?”

“That won’t be necessary.” He took the letter back, refolded it carefully, and licked the envelope. “He has a gun, and we both have guns, but that doesn’t make us equal. Neither one of us is a gun person. So we’ve got to look dumb and stay a step ahead of him. When we sit down at eight to count the money, I want our two-thirds to be somewhere else. That way we have a chance of hanging onto it.”

She was staring at him. “I thought for a minute you were going to do him out of his third.”

“Too risky. I’m willing to live up to the deal. I just don’t want to get screwed.”

After a moment, she laughed. “They say a crisis brings out a person’s real character. This is a crisis, and maybe this is your true character.”

She leaned across, took his face in both hands, gave it a quick shake, and kissed him hard on the mouth.