Trouble was, Benny was having more than a few drinks. Usually I don’t care how much one of my crew puts away, and it wouldn’t be smart to say anything about it if I did. But Benny worried me. He’d been away from women a long time and he was beginning to get that look about him. A widening of his nostrils and a deepset glow in his eyes. With a normal guy it wouldn’t have mattered. We had two hours till our train left, and two hours would do most men. But not Benny. If he went off the track he might stay off two or three days. I’d picked a saloon for our drinking that didn’t cater to women, and I was hoping for the best.
Then it happened.
I saw her push back the swinging doors and walk in. Part Indian, from the tall grace and the free-swinging stride of her. Young and supple and rounded enough to set a man’s blood racing, yet old enough to assure him he wouldn’t be wasting his time making a play for her. I turned my head and saw Benny looking at her, and his nostrils flared and the glow flamed in his eyes and he set his glass down on the bar slowly.
I put my hand on his forearm and said, “Hold everything, Benny. We’re catching a train in just two hours.”
I guess he didn’t hear me. He didn’t give any indication that he did. He was staring past my shoulder toward the girl, and from the look on his face I knew she was giving him the eye. God knows why. There were lots of other men there. But Benny had a way of telegraphing something to a woman like that. His upper lip tightened and twitched upward.
Walter Drake stood on the other side of Benny, their shoulders touching. He was turned away, saying something to Larry. He must have felt Benny’s muscles tense, because he broke off what he was saying and turned to look at the girl.
She took a few steps toward us and Walter switched his gaze to Benny’s face. I tightened my fingers on Benny’s arm. But Benny pushed away from us toward the girl. Walter shrugged and looked at a clock on the wall. “Still two hours before the train leaves. Maybe...”
“Nuts,” I said. “You know if Benny goes out that door we won’t see him until tomorrow.”
Benny and the girl already had their heads together and he was whispering to her. She nodded. Benny turned toward me with a grin.
“I’m going out for a few minutes.”
I said, “No, you’re not.”
He said, “The hell I’m not.”
I said, “We’ve got a job to do. We’re catching that midnight train.”
“Sure.” He tried to be placating. “I’ll be back like I said.”
People at the bar were watching us, grinning. I saw the killer turn in his chair to listen.
“Nothing doing, Benny,” I said. “If you walk out that door you needn’t come back.”
The grin went off of Benny’s face. He said, “If that’s the way you want it.”
“No, boss.” It was Walter Drake. He grabbed my shoulder and spun me around. “You can’t let the best rigger in the business go like that. My God! Maybe Benny could even follow us down tomorrow...”
I said, “Benny’ll never rig another hoist for me if he goes out that door.” I turned back to the bar and picked up my drink. My hand was shaking. I heard Benny and the girl walking out of the place together.
Walter and Larry both jumped me. I told them I couldn’t help it. If a dame meant more to Benny than sticking on the job, that was all right with me. We were all pretty sore and saying things we didn’t mean when a new voice horned in behind us.
It was the guy who had been sitting alone at the table. Lola’s murderer. He said, “If you can use a hightop rigger where you’re going, I’m it.”
We stopped arguing and looked at him. Walter and Larry looked at his cable-scarred hands first. Then at his face. Then at the gun-bulge under his coat. He was a little drunk. Just enough to sway on both feet as he stood there.
I said, “How do I know you’re a rigger?”
The man had loose lips. He pulled them away from yellow teeth in a smile, and he looked worse than when I’d first recognized him at the table.
“I can cut it, all right. White Construction for ten years. Top rigger on that big Rio job six years ago. My name is Smith.” He held out his hand.
I took it.
Walter Drake said roughly, “You were in Rio on another job six years ago, boss. If this mug was top rigger for White, you should’ve run into him.”
“I think maybe I did,” I said slowly. “Doesn’t seem like your name was Smith, though.”
“It’s Smith now. What’s this job all about?”
He pushed up to the bar with us and I gave it to him. I saw Walter looking at me speculatively, and later when the four of us were on the train together heading south, he sat beside me and said:
“I think I got it, boss. You knew Smith was a rigger when you told Benny off. Recognized him from Rio. That’s why you took a chance firing Benny. Smith looked like he’d jump at a job.”
I said, “Benny needed telling off.”
Walter nodded. I was still the boss and it wasn’t up to him to tell me how to run my crew. He said, “It’s taking a chance, though. Might be some fancy rigging waiting for us this time.”
I didn’t tell him how big a chance we were taking. The guy was a murderer and I was helping him make a getaway from Juarez where the police might have picked him up any time. I couldn’t tell Walter and Larry that. I couldn’t tell them about Lola and what had once been between us that caused me to give her killer a chance to escape from Juarez. Me, who always hated a killer.
The job didn’t look too tough when we reached the bridge site by truck about noon the next day. The Mexican side of the highway was subgraded all the way up to the jump-off, and there were some tents set up and a temporary field office. The graders and rollers were working half a mile back, with the surfacing pushing up on them.
The spot chosen to jump the Rio Grande was a wide depression in the cliffs that form the river canyon, and you could see it was flooded every year when the water got up. There was an eighteen-foot fill on the south side, and a corresponding fill about eighty-feet across on American soil. The sheer cliffs were limestone, and muddy water was rolling and leaping not more than twenty feet below the edge.
Two cables were strung across with buckets on pulleys and a steam winch on either side to drag men and supplies across. The resident engineer for the American end was waiting for us when we piled out of the truck. He was a mild-looking ginzo of about thirty, with tired eyes and lines of worry on his face. He introduced himself as Harry Blaine, and I liked him right off. I felt sorry for him when he explained that he was from the East and no one had bothered to warn him about the way the river flooded every spring and that was why he’d left the bridgework till the last.
The Mexican engineer was waiting for us outside the field office and took us in to look over the blueprints. He was slim and good-looking, with a little mustache and a lot of cocksureness. His attitude was one of polite regret about the whole matter, and a disposition to wash his hands of it. He blandly hinted that it was up to us and to fate, and that he planned to stand back on the sidelines.
The bridge design was orthodox. A single-arch span anchored in concrete abutments at each end. The steel was prefabricated and already on the site.
I took the blueprints and went out to see what we could figure out. There was a hot Mexican sun beating down, and the silence of the Border country broken only by the faraway sounds of road construction. My three men had slid off the fill and were grouped at the foot of it on the bank of the river. I went down toward them and saw that grouped wasn’t exactly the right word.