When the trailer’s bumper dug into their rear door panel, crumpling it inward, the throw was already underway. Nick started back in horror as a ball of fire exploded directly in front of his eyes.
The bottle had shattered on the edge of the window frame, breaking a pane and sending some of the blazing fluid into the trailer. But much of the explosion came back into the Ford. Nick yelled in astonishment, swinging his arms like a man attacked by hornets.
“Stop! Stop!”
Greco was fighting the wheel. He swerved back across both lanes and finally brought the car to a shuddering stop in the dirt.
Nick fell out, uttering sharp, high-pitched screams. His loose shirt was on fire. He whipped it over his head, setting fire to his hair. Greco embraced him roughly and put out the flames with his hands.
Nick’s thin screams subsided to moans. “It hurts, Greco, it hurts.”
Greco’s hands were hurting, too, but that didn’t mean they could stand there feeling sorry for themselves. Their good plan had gone sour for reasons Greco was unable to understand. That trailer had behaved as though King Kong or somebody had given it a push. It was already out of sight down the road. The gas Nick had slopped around when he was filling the bottle had caught fire with a whoosh, and the Ford’s front-seat compartment was burning fiercely. Greco backed away. This was a fire nobody would put out with his hands.
Headlights were coming toward them. It was the same Dodge van he had seen coming out of the trailer park. When Greco saw that they didn’t intend to stop, he leaped out, waving both arms and yelling.
The van swung to the right, trying to get by on the inside. Greco snatched out his gun and popped a shot through the windshield. It was done without aiming, but he aimed the next one, and when the driver realized what Greco was aiming at, and at that range was unlikely to miss, he put on his brakes and came skidding up to within a couple of feet of the blazing Ford.
Greco was so mad at this guy for his lack of concern for a fellow motorist in trouble that he was ready to shoot him out if he didn’t get out of his own free will. He must have conveyed that purpose, and the driver, a tall skinny fellow in glasses, slid to the ground, vibrating.
“What the hell is the gun for? I’ll drive you.”
“Get over there,” Greco snarled.
Doing what the gun told him, the thin man moved out in the weeds. Greco yelled for Nick, who was standing on the roadside, not in too great shape. Another yell brought him out of it. He looked for his gun. It was probably still in the burning car. Greco really yelled the next time, and Nick started toward him. They needed both guns, but the way Greco felt now, he was willing to take on the whole outfit with only his teeth and his fingernails.
Chapter 13
The curtains blazed up. The gas had splashed as far as the opposite wall. The stolen equipment from the construction site, along with everything else, had been tumbled about by the collision. There had to be a fire extinguisher somewhere, but there was no time to find it.
The great tire blocked them off from the worst corner, and it was firmly lodged. The wall-to-wall carpet would be the worst problem. Frieda was wielding a heavy drape. The fire retreated after each swing, but instantly recovered. The sofa caught. Now they were blocked from the door.
As long as they continued to move at the same speed, they could hold the fire in this room. The instant they stopped, the whole thing would go up. Using the butt of his pistol, Shayne hammered the glass out of the bedroom window beside the pillows he had arranged to look like an unconscious man. Then he punched the talk button on the two-way phone.
“Your trailer’s on fire. Pull over.”
He knew at once from the deadness of the sound that the trailer’s swing had snapped the connection. There had to be some way to get the attention of the people in the cab. If he and Frieda came through opposite windows at the same time, they still might be able to make the capture.
He was looking for something to throw. The first thing he considered was the oxygen tank of a welding outfit. Another possibility hit him. He remembered throwing a torch into the payloader bucket. If he could find that, he could cut their way out and climb through into the pickup.
Frieda was pushing furniture into the fire, trying to make a firebreak. It wasn’t working.
“Hold it three minutes?” Shayne shouted.
“Try.”
He spotted the torch. He found the acetylene and made his connections in a hurry. Pushing too hard, he broke his last match. He tore a page from a cookbook, twisted it into a long spill, and lit it at the fire. In another moment, the torch was spitting. He adjusted the mixture, modulating the flame from orange to a hot, hard blue.
Kicking everything out of his way, he began work on the wall. The flame went through the thin sheet metal like a knife through ice cream, leaving a charred line from floor to ceiling. Frieda retreated down the passageway, using her drape as a flail, while he completed a crude door. As the cuts joined, the metal section fell inward.
“Frieda.”
She had lost her cap. Her hair had come loose, and her face was smeared with soot. She looked marvelous, as always.
Holding on with one hand, he reached across to the pickup and opened the back door. He stayed there, straddling the gap, while Frieda squeezed past. A sudden change of direction would have spilled them both on the highway, but the engineers who designed the highway had believed that the straightest road is the shortest and fastest and therefore the best. Flames filled the kitchen and one bedroom. Frieda shifted her grip from the jagged metal edge to Shayne’s shoulder, then to the roof of the pickup, and swung on in.
Shayne followed her across. Their speed had dropped to thirty and was still dropping. Perhaps the driver had realized finally that something unusual was taking place behind him.
Shayne crouched to disengage the hitch. He unhooked the chains and snapped the latch. The ball still rode snugly in its socket. Getting a good grip, he jumped hard on the bumper, and the burning trailer pulled free.
They would be changing vehicles in another ten miles. When Downey saw the headlights closing with him-an ordinary black Ford or Chevy, nothing to worry about, except that, being in charge, he was the one who had to worry about everything-be picked the dark glasses off his knee. He had killed the dashboard lights earlier. Pam was about to start a cigarette. He told her to wait till the car was past.
“In fact,” he said, watching the mirror, “get down on the floor. A pickup and trailer, two men and a girl. You never know, they might just remember.”
Pam slid to the floor and tugged at Werner’s pants until he followed, with a sigh of protest. The headlights came closer, much too slowly. Downey decided to brake as soon as they were alongside, timing it so they wouldn’t notice his brake lights, and let them scoot past. But it was the other car that braked and fell back.
Pam, on the floor, could tell something was wrong. “Jack?”
“Somebody wants to play games.”
The overhead mirror was blocked by the camper body. He was driving with the two big side mirrors. Their lights stayed in his eyes.
“Creeping paranoia,” Werner remarked. “Poor Jack, everybody’s chasing him.”
“If they want to pass, why don’t they pass? We’re only doing forty-five. Here that’s crawling.”
The lights came at him again even more slowly. Downey had an impulse to hog the center line until the next exit, and if they followed him off, he would know they were hostile. But with that enormous trailer behind him, he had to play it conservative. He wasn’t used to driving this much vehicle. He felt slow and unwieldy, like a pro basketball center in a room with ordinary people.
He glanced at the speedometer, wanting to see what they did if he dropped his road speed again. He felt a distinct jar, and his eyes jumped to the mirror.
“He cut in on me!”
The trailer was swinging. It swung away, back, away again.
“They’re on fire!”
The car
behind them drifted out on the shoulder, definitely burning. Flames showed through the windshield. The others scrambled back on the seat, and Werner put his head out the window.
“What happened?” Pam said in the middle. “Tell me what happened.”
The burning car pulled over, and two figures jumped out, one of them ablaze. Downey came down on the gas. He wasn’t about to back up and help. Let the fuckers burn. Some kind of freak accident that couldn’t happen again in a hundred years. Brakes probably. They were driving with their emergency on, which was why the car had seemed slow to respond. When flames came up through the floorboards, the driver had been so startled that he jerked over and rammed Downey’s trailer. Drunk? Undoubtedly.
Werner said, “Man, they’re burning.”
“That’s their problem. How about our back lights? Are they on?”
Werner craned all the way out. “No,” he reported. “So if we pass a cop, we can expect to hear sirens.”
“Not for the first time tonight,” Pam put in.
“Nobody cruises this late,” Downey told them. “We’re going to do the last stretch on a side road, if I can get that son of a bitch to start tracking.”
He maintained a hard foot on the gas, but the trailer continued to wander. He was getting a bumping, an irregular oscillation. Perhaps the jolt had broken something loose, and it was rolling around in there. He could still see the glow from the burning car, and he decided against stopping until they had left the four-lane. The next exit was a quarter of a mile ahead, then presently an eighth of a mile. He shifted down for the ramp.
Suddenly his front wheels bucked, as though they had struck a speed bump like those in the trailer camp. But on the Interstate? He continued the turn, and the feel of everything changed. They were no longer pulling a load. The ramp curved away. Without quite believing it, he saw their unattached trailer, still on the main highway, continuing south. And it, too, was on fire!
That was the worst thing yet on a bad night. Some supernatural force must be working against them. Downey straightened the wheel in time to keep from leaving the ramp. The pickup was enjoying its freedom.
“There goes our million bucks,” Werner observed.
What was he talking about? The only million-dollar object around here-and then it came to him. A vise seemed to close on his head. Canada was inside that trailer, tied to a bed.
The trailer continued to pick up speed, coming down from the overpass. It was beginning to drift. Soon its outside wheels were off on the shoulder. It ran down a slight embankment, hit the fence, and kept going into a cultivated field. A million dollars. No chance of getting anybody out of that fire. It was out of control.
Pam clawed at his shoulder and pointed. He saw it, a big irrigation wagon standing all by itself well out in the field. He understood what she was shouting. But the way their luck seemed to be running, the wagon had to be empty. If there was water in it, there was no way to bring it to bear on the fire.
The trailer changed direction, moving less rapidly on the uneven ground, and headed straight for the water wagon like a camel smelling a well.
Downey cut so hard that he jumped the ramp at the bottom. The fence protected only the ramps and the big highway itself. He went straight in across country, dropping into the pickup’s bottom range. The field was in snap beans, nearly ready for the pickers. His rear wheels kicked out torn plants and soft dirt.
The trailer stayed upright, stopping only fifty feet from the wagon. He dropped Werner, who ran ahead. Downey came swerving in and stopped with the trailer in his lights. Inside, the fire was crackling nicely, but it was giving off little heat. He was able to get almost to the bedroom window, through which earlier he had seen the kidnapped man on the bed. This was the one room not ablaze. There still might be time.
He heard a yell from Werner. Turning, he saw a plume of water erupt from the tank and start a long sweep to the right and the left. Downey felt mist blow in his face. The main arc, however, was missing the trailer by twenty feet. Werner struggled with the short hose on the turret’s fixed arm. He managed to free it. It lashed around madly, spraying everything at random. He worked his hands toward the nozzle, brought it under control, and aimed the powerful stream at the fire. Perhaps by accident, he caught Downey in the chest and knocked him to the ground. Correcting his aim, he sent a cascade of water through the bedroom window.
The van Greco had appropriated proved to be unexpectedly agile. The brakes were so good that when he touched them lightly to get the feel the sudden check nearly sent him into the glass.
“This baby has power.”
The needle hit seventy in no time at all. Nick was worrying about what they would do when they overtook the trailer. They couldn’t attempt the same trick a second time because the gas can was empty.
“Bottle gas,” Greco said. “These things carry stoves. Look in back.”
“Bottle gas! That stuff can blow your ass off. I’ll drive this time. You throw.”
“No, it worked, it worked! Burning like a son of a bitch.”
In the fields to the right, they saw the burning trailer. So, after all, some of the improvised cocktail had taken effect. Greco stopped so they could watch the finish.
There was a noise in back, and somebody groaned. They looked at each other.
“We got company,” Greco said.
Then water jetted up out of a standing wagon and began to fall on the flames. The smoke changed color. Another minute or two and the fire would be out. They would transfer Canada to the pickup and be on their way. An attack on that crowd with only one gun was out of the question.
“Up and down all night,” Nick said. “Up and down. Let’s go back to the hotel.”
“No, listen, if we can keep them back from the fire-”
And he was out and running. He went through the break in the fence, going flat on his face after five steps. He saw two figures near the trailer, one more on the wagon. He brought out the gun. All he had to do was knock the man off the wagon, then pop off a shot or two to persuade the others to keep their heads down. The fire would take hold again, and soon nothing would be left of Canada but bones and charred flesh.
He was breathing hard from the run, and he couldn’t get the sights to hold steady. He fired anyway. The bullet hit the tank and went singing away, going nowhere. The guy dropped to the ground, but the nozzle was wedged in place, and water continued to splash into the trailer. Maybe Canada would swallow enough smoke so he wouldn’t wake up. Maybe not, too. It would be so nice to make sure.
Then he saw Nick running in a wide circle, heading for the wagon. Greco had to revise his opinion of the boy. He had been nothing but a drag so far, clowning when he wasn’t complaining, and then finally losing his gun. But even to think about climbing on that wagon, that took balls.
He came up on one knee. The minute Nick started his climb, he intended to waste a couple just for the hell of it. All Nick had to do was give the nozzle one swipe and then slide to the ground. In movies, people did things like that all the time.
And there the prick was, edging along the top of the tank. Greco kept swiveling, watching for movement. Sure enough, a head came up, but in an unexpected place. The guy had fooled him by wriggling between the bean rows. He fired at Nick, Nick fell forward against the nozzle. The stream’s force flung him off the tank, leaving the nozzle whipping about like something alive. At the trailer, flames appeared again almost at once amid the masses of smoke.
Everybody was out of sight again, and Greco dropped out of sight also. Now he would find out if any of those jokers was man enough to climb up the way Nick had done and redirect the hose. Greco was closer now, and he was feeling the heat. This was one shot he didn’t intend to miss.
The trailer was burning from one end to the other. Larry Canada was done for, and Greco and Nick could collect their money. Abruptly the hose stopped lashing around and hung down lankly, with only a dribble coming out. And then there was an immense bang from the trailer, sendi
ng a column of sparks and flame hundreds of feet in the air.
Chapter 14
The search for contraband drugs at the trailer park had left the interior of the pickup a tangled mess. The beds had been pulled apart. When the brakes went on hard, Shayne was thrown to the floor.
“There goes our million bucks,” a voice said in the cab.
The woman shouted something, and the pickup began bucking and plunging. It came to a stop, and everybody piled out, Shayne and Frieda moving more cautiously than the three in front. Shayne saw the burning trailer, the three running figures. In a moment, a new grouping took shape, and water began to fall on the fire.
“How are we going to do this?” Frieda said.
“Wait for Tim. We can pin them down here until he gets us some cops.”
On the highway, the big van slowed to a stop. Shayne blinked his flashlight twice, shielding the beam. A figure appeared, as though in response to the signal.
“It’s not Tim,” Frieda said.
Shayne looked around quickly. Whoever Frieda had seen had dropped out of sight.
Here was a new factor, and until Shayne could see how it fitted in, they would have to watch the action without taking part. They moved back from the truck. He heard a stealthy, animal-like movement behind him, and a figure passed within a few feet. It was the youth who had thrown the bomb. Now he was bare from the waist up-stick-figure arms, shoulder blades that stuck out like cleavers. There were two sides here, and both sides must believe Larry Canada was a prisoner in the trailer. Beyond that, Shayne had to wait and see.
Win Some, Lose Some ms-69 Page 11