Win Some, Lose Some ms-69

by Brett Halliday

  As he went up the westbound ramp of the East-West Expressway, he saw his man Greco swing into place behind him. Greco was driving a Honda 750, a machine he claimed to know intimately, and DeLuca hoped this wasn’t more of his New York bullshit. He was concealed behind dark glasses and a wraparound crash helmet. Only his nose showed. He was wearing a black leather jacket studded with rivets and emblems. DeLuca knew he would be followed and watched. Any kind of automobile escort would be spotted at once. But except to motorcycle lovers, all motorcycles look more or less alike. Under the black jacket, Greco wore another that was white and silver, the on-the-road uniform of a club that called itself Ghouls on Wheels. At some stopping point he could discard the top jacket and become a new person. Later, if necessary, he could throw that jacket away and ride in a striped tank shirt-still another identity.

  At forty everybody was passing DeLuca. Greco zoomed by without a look, then throttled back and stayed within sight.

  The frying noise stopped. A voice said abruptly, “DeLuca. If you can hear me, blink your lights.”

  The dashboard radio had no transmitter. Apparently they didn’t want to be bothered with stupid questions. He snapped the lights on and off. The voice told him to hold his speed and turn south at the interchange.

  He signaled in plenty of time. Greco went down first, pulling off at the bottom to look at a road map. By the time he showed up in DeLuca’s mirror again, DeLuca was beginning to miss him. He was no longer an Angel, and was now a Ghoul on Wheels. He kept a good interval.

  Twenty minutes went by. They were approaching Homestead. The voice said suddenly, “DeLuca. Pull off the highway. Set your blinkers.”

  Startled, DeLuca signaled and pulled over. The traffic streamed by-two Detroit sedans, a big Dodge Sportsman with a bike mounted behind, the white and silver Ghoul on his Honda.

  “There’s a cooler in back,” the radio said. “Bring it up in the cab. Do that right now.”

  The cooler was a battered Styrofoam box with a centered handle and a clamp at each end. There were two stickers on it, one a playful leaping dolphin, the identifying emblem of the Miami football team. The other sticker had been there a long time and had partially eroded: “-allace for President.”

  “DeLuca. You know what we want you to do now. Transfer the money. Then get going.”

  DeLuca unclamped the lid. Several loose cans stood in a shallow drawerlike compartment. He lifted that out and stacked the money in the body of the cooler. He hesitated for a fraction of a second, holding the last two packages of hundreds. Would they call everything off if the count was a little short? Probably not, but what the hell. He tossed them in.

  He clamped the lid on and returned to the highway, shifting up fast because he didn’t want Greco to get too far ahead of him.

  The voice said, “DeLuca. Pull off at the rest area. You’ll see a beat-up Pontiac with the door open. Don’t be in a rush. Plenty of time. When there’s nobody around, put the cooler in. Drive to the next exit, come back the opposite way, stop at the rest area on that side. Next exit, come back, first rest area. We’ll contact you if we get the right total. Turn on your lights if you understand. Flick them on and off if you want the instructions repeated.”

  DeLuca put on his lights and left them on. Now if the kid had had the sense to pull over and wait-

  It was early for supper stops, and there were only three or four trucks at the rest area, one or two cars, the van that had passed DeLuca on the road, Greco’s motorcycle. Greco had his tool kit open and was pretending to make some minor repair. The parking strip was a long arc going in among trees, with barbecue grills and picnic tables, a few strange-looking pieces of sculpture. The comfort station, at the high point of the arc, was a glazed brick structure with a map of southern Florida’s points of interest on the wall of the entryway.

  DeLuca took the cooler to the nearest picnic table and opened a beer. As soon as he was sure that only Greco was watching, he put the cooler in the Pontiac and jumped into the pickup. He scrawled a quick note: “Kill five minutes. First rest area, northbound.” He took off.

  Greco appeared in the mirror before he reached the exit. Now that the money had been delivered, DeLuca didn’t think he would be watched so closely, but he went on being careful. At the bottom of the exit ramp, he let the note flutter out of the window and made the turns that started him back to Miami.

  Both rest areas were in the same general vicinity, but not directly across the highway from each other. DeLuca parked. Now he would find out how efficient these people were. In the same suitcase in which he had carried the money, he had a long-barreled German Luger, equipped with a silencer, a killer’s weapon. He checked the load and put the pistol on the seat beside him.

  Greco pulled in. It was the same helmet, the same machine, but a different motorcyclist, in a striped sleeveless shirt. He put the bike on his kick stand and went inside to relieve himself.

  The radio continued to sputter without saying anything intelligible. The wait stretched to ten minutes, fifteen.

  Then the voice said, “DeLuca. On the button, give or take a few hundred. That’s lucky because we’ve been right on your taillights all the way. Now you’ll want to know where to find the fat man. Don’t worry, he’s fine. A little hungry, is all. He’ll give you a big wet kiss, and Miami can get back to normal. He’s seven miles south. Stay on the Interstate till you hit the construction. One-point-three miles after you go one-way, you’ll see a flag girl and truck access in on your left. There’s a lot of confusion, but here’s what you do. Go to the big mixing tank and face east. There are two portable toilets. You’ll see one right away to your left by the equipment trailer. That’s not the one. The other’s over behind the gravel. It’s padlocked. A sign says, ‘Out of Order, Do Not Use.’ Your man is inside, and that seat isn’t upholstered, DeLuca, so he’ll be happy to hear your voice. One last word, Lou. Thanks loads.” A portable toilet. Perfect. DeLuca’s pulse was banging in triple time. He already had his motor started, as though he were in a hurry, but of course he wasn’t in that much of a hurry because he wanted Greco to show up first. Greco kicked his machine to life and spun away. DeLuca stayed behind him. Approaching the exit, he used his blinker, and Greco made the turn first. Nobody followed them off. They stopped side by side in the underpass, directly under the big highway. DeLuca, watching the mirrors, repeated the instructions he had been given.

  “A good place for a clean hit. First make damn sure he’s in there. Then shoot through the wall. It’s noisy as hell, nobody’ll know nothing. Let’s do it right, use the whole clip.”

  He passed Greco the gun and two extra clips. “I want witnesses when I find him. I’ll stop for a couple of cops. You’ll have five minutes. Find the toilet, make sure he’s inside, shoot, then go.”

  “Won’t it be kind of out in the open?”

  “Back of the gravel pile, they said. They wouldn’t leave him there in front of everybody. Sort of lean down and camouflage it. And if you’re as good on that sickle as you say you are, nobody’s going to catch you.”

  Werner had pulled off near the southern exit, his Ford wearing the borrowed police flasher. It was a good place for a cop car, and nobody gave him a look. Traffic here funneled down to one lane and a crossover. For the next hour, while Werner sagged over the wheel in a half doze, knowing that Downey was totally out of his mind and nothing would happen, the trucks kept to their pattern and no private cars left the lot. Then a rusted-out Pontiac went by. Werner covered the lower half of his face. The man at the wheel was Benjamin!

  Benjamin’s payloader continued to gnaw at the gravel. He was sneaking out the back way so his absence wouldn’t be noticed. Downey had been right after all! It had been amateur night all around. They themselves were amateurs, and Benjamin and Vaughan were amateurs. They had stumbled all over each other.

  Werner began shaking suddenly. He got that under control by doing something no genuine cop ever does in public-bending over and touching his toes. He broke t
he suction holding the blinker to his roof, threw it in back, and slipped unobtrusively into the line of traffic.

  The Pontiac was taking no special precautions. It pulled into a rest area, and Werner followed it in. Benjamin was built like his own payloader-solid and chunky. In a hurry to get to the men’s room, he left one of the Pontiac’s doors open behind him. Werner, anticipating a long afternoon, had brought sandwiches and Coke. He took them to a picnic table.

  Presently a red pickup pulled in and parked near the Pontiac. Werner disposed of his trash and went to look at the map at the entrance to the washrooms. It told him what roads to take to the Monkey jungle, Coral Reef State Park, the Serpentarium, the Miami Wax Museum, and Vizcaya. Meanwhile a dark, carefully dressed man, whose clothes didn’t go with the banged-up pickup, carried a cooler to a table and removed a beer. He drank it slowly. Then, instead of putting the cooler back in the pickup, he put it in the Pontiac-the money! — walked to the end of the paved strip, returned to the pickup, and drove off.

  Werner gave everybody a couple of minutes. Before following, he put the blinker back on.

  What would Benjamin do now? Count the money and return to work, obviously, take over the payloader, and finish out the day. He wouldn’t pass it to anybody. If they had another confederate, he would have been used to make the collection. So they had time to work something out, and this time their plan could be foolproof.

  Downey, in a police helicopter, followed the pickup all the way, crossing and recrossing in a loose weave. Approaching Homestead, there was considerable traffic from the air base, and it was possible to hang right behind. As soon as he saw the pattern take shape, he tapped the pilot’s shoulder and pointed to the ground. The pilot put him down in a field. He walked to his car.

  Shayne kept the payloader in action while Benjamin was gone. The Pontiac returned and parked at the high end of the lot near the locked toilet. Approaching the payloader, Benjamin took an exuberant little stutter step to show Shayne it had gone well.

  “Who saw you?” Shayne said when Benjamin climbed to the cab.

  “They all looked normal to me. Kid on a motorbike, couple of truck drivers.”

  Frieda was in the cab of a second payloader. Using a channel far down the band, Shayne told her the cooler was back. Benjamin had made a rough count, and it all seemed to be there. Tim Rourke, in Frieda’s van on the highway, had his citizen’s band set to the same channel, and Shayne told him to signal DeLuca that the count was acceptable and he could proceed to the toilet and free the prisoner. Still a fourth radio was part of this hook-up. It was inside the toilet, heavily muffled with rags.

  Frieda’s payloader moved. A haphazardly parked car, Shayne’s own, left only one exit from the parking lot, past the toilet, into the main cross-site road below Shayne’s payloader. A short lateral movement would close the trap. Six county cops waited in the command trailer.

  Shayne started the countdown. DeLuca was seven minutes away.

  “There’s a bike,” Benjamin said, craning. “A Honda! It’s the same-no, that guy was wearing a club jacket.”

  The motorcyclist, a short figure in a striped undershirt, came all the way through, then turned toward the parked cars.

  “Frieda?” Shayne called.

  “I see him. A motorcycle could be a problem.”

  Shayne called the cops in the trailer and directed them to move two cars to the highway.

  “Don’t shoot him. We want to ask him some questions.”

  The motorcycle, kicking gravel, went in among the cars, out the far side, and came back, to stop near the Pontiac after a short, tight skid. Usually a motorcyclist’s first move after dismounting is to take off his helmet. This one kept his on. Straddling his machine, he looked the site over deliberately, slapping his leg with a pair of driving gauntlets. He could only be seen from the payloaders, which continued to charge forward and draw back, forward and back. The hot plant was grinding slowly with a hideous clanking. Hot trucks moved out, carrying loads of freshly cooked asphalt to the paver, which was inching almost imperceptibly south. A heavy crane was swinging one of the big cross culverts into place. More trucks came and went continually with gravel and sand. Pickups darted about, seemingly at random. The afternoon sun slanted in through the haze.

  The motorcyclist moved to the toilet, as though to read the sign on the door. Shayne put his lips to the transmitter and groaned. Benjamin looked around in surprise. Shayne groaned again, then made muffled breathing sounds through his hand.

  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 outs
iders, 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.