Win Some, Lose Some

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 snapped the shutter, its eye would be all the way open.

The siren had been engineered to penetrate traffic noises and scare slower cars to the side of the road. It was heart-attack music. It didn’t quite get to Shayne, who had been expecting something like it, but it worked well on the two men in the trailer, who must have been already considerably on edge. The door flew open, spilling light. One of the men jumped out. It was Gold, the Commissioner. He had a dispatch case swinging in one hand. Shayne snapped a picture, advanced the film, and snapped another as Gold stumbled and went sprawling.

Canada, inside, was standing at the control console, his head cocked. He felt in one drawer, then another, and brought out a gun.

Shayne tried for another picture with both men in it, but he wasn’t in time. The light went off.

The man on the ground retrieved his dispatch case and ran to the parked Chrysler. The engine sprang to life. As the car came around, the headlights swept across the trailer and showed Canada in the doorway. Shayne got a shot of that, for what it was worth.

Gold’s driving reflexes were ahead of the automatic shift. As the car rocketed away, its rear wheels kicked out a cascade of dirt and gravel. Shayne brought the glasses to bear on the area in front of the trailer. The big man was running, seeming to flutter all over inside his loose clothes. The bullhorn continued to clamor. Canada wrenched open the car door. Something stopped him. Sensing someone’s presence in the car or warned by the fact that the overhead light didn’t blink on, he stepped quickly to one side.

Hearing the Cadillac door open, Pam thought for an instant that their plan was working. One shift of weight, and the trap would close.

But Canada was wary. Gold’s headlights were sliding rapidly north. In another moment, the Chrysler would rejoin the anonymous stream of traffic on the Interstate. So that danger, the danger of being caught here together, was nearly over.

Now it was up to Downey, who claimed to be an expert on persuading criminals to surrender. This they hadn’t rehearsed. The siren closed off abruptly. Pam stood absolutely still, listening for movement. She had the impression, without hearing it happen, that Werner had slipped out of the Cadillac.

“Mr. Canada,” Downey called on the bullhorn, his tone slightly mocking. “Larry Canada. We saw your Cadillac drive in. If you’re here, say something.”

There was no answering sound.

“We could shoot you, Mr. Canada. We don’t want to do that. We’ve got a group of professionals here, and just so you’ll know I’m not shitting you, I want my people to make some noise.”

Pam struck her gun against the bucket. Werner, some distance away, mooed like a cow.

Downey had moved. “You remember Eddie Maye. We did that, Mr. Canada, so you’d know we’re serious people. You’re the man with the real dough. We wouldn’t hurt you for the world.”

In the silence that followed, Werner remarked in an almost conversational tone, “Watch out, he’s got a gun.”

“But so have we, don’t we? If we have to shoot him, make it a flesh wound. Plenty of flesh there to choose from.”

Suddenly the mercury lights flashed on. Downey’s masked figure stood at the foot of one of the light poles, his hand on the master switch. Werner was out in the open, in front of the Cadillac. He jumped for cover as the fat man, backed up against one of the conveyor belts, fired at him. The lights went off.

“No,” Downey called from a new place. “No, no, Mr. Canada. That was foolish, because we’re jumpy, you know? We could make a mistake. Think about it a minute. How did we know you’d be out here? We’ve been getting this ready a long time. We’ve got a good place to take you. We laid in a lot of steak and bourbon. We know you like lime pies. We got three in the freezer. What the hell, all we want is money. We’re going to weigh you, and go for about three thousand bucks a pound. Tell you what I want you to do. I’m going to roll my flashlight out in the open. Toss the gun out where we can see it. You know that’s the smart thing to do, the only thing.”

A lighted flashlight rolled across the dirt. The spill from its beam showed Werner, to Pam’s surprise, on the conveyor belt above Canada, the chloroformed cloth in one hand. Canada whirled and fired, and in two jumps was at the door of the trailer and inside.

“Use your head,” the bullhorn shouted. “There’s a phone in there, but what good’s it going to do you?”

Suddenly there was a thunderclap, a whistle, an immense sigh, and with a tremendous groaning and clanking the big mixer came alive and began to revolve. The belts ran up to the loading hatches empty, and came back empty. It didn’t change Canada’s situation inside the trailer, but it was a loud announcement that he didn’t intend to surrender.

Pam didn’t hear Downey approach. He touched her, and a spark jumped between them.

“Cover the door. Shoot him in the leg if he comes out. Keep it low-take your time.”

He ripped off his sweat shirt and wadded it into a ball. There was a gas pump several vehicles away. He felt his way to it, gave the sweat shirt a good soaking, then circled to the trailer, keeping low. He smashed a window. A match flared. When the sweat shirt caught, he scooped it up on his gun barrel and threw it in.

Inside, Canada could be seen, his back to the console. Downey yelled, “Go on being stupid. We’ll set the trailer on fire, you’ll really be cooked. We want to be nice to you. Girls, anything you want, name it.”

Nothing else in the trailer had caught, and the blaze was already beginning to die.

“We’ll give you a short count,” Downey called. “Throw your gun out first. At the count of three, I’m going to strike the Goddamn match.”

Canada shook himself and made a placating palms-out gesture. The pistol came spinning into the light. Then the huge figure loomed in the doorway, turned sideward to get down the steps. As he reached the ground, Werner moved in with the chloroform.