Smiling thinly, Travis cut the engine, got out of the cab.
“Is he dead?” White asked.
“You try it in there for fifteen minutes.”
“The crazy bastard.”
“Eh?”
“Any guy takes a job hauling that kind of dough... he’s bound to get it sooner or later.”
“Sure.”
For the next ten minutes the two men used the acetylene torches on the heavy armor plating of the rear door. When they had sliced through the locking mechanism, Travis stepped to one side, removed the .45 automatic from the belt of his trousers. Pulling the action back, he eased a bullet into firing position.
White looked at him, thinking the bastard wouldn’t take a chance on a three-cent lottery.
Nevertheless, White opened the door slowly, as if he were entering a nursery and was afraid of disturbing a sleeping child. The current of foul air hit him in the face. For a moment he hesitated. He flashed his light inside, ran the beam over the canvas money sacks, held it on the dark oblong of the guard sprawled like a ragdoll.
Then a strange thing happened.
White blinked his eyes in terror.
The guard raised his head slowly from the floor.
There was nothing White could do. He stepped back a pace. The sight of the guard’s face, staring at him through grotesque eyes that were like flower blossoms, shocked him. He opened his mouth to express some half-formed thought but before he could speak the guard shot him in the chest. The second shot caught White in the jaw, abruptly closing his still-open mouth, but failing to stifle the scream that reverberated through the van.
Julio’s visibility was hampered by the flat eyepieces of the gasmask. It was the thing that cost him his life. He had to turn his head slightly to bring the gun to bear on Travis. Before he could fire again, before he could take aim, Travis shot him. The bullet went through the center of the gasmask, between the anonymous eyepieces, into the brain.
Silvera managed to fire one more shot. But he was already dead, the tightening of his finger a reflex, sending the bullet thudding into a money sack.
Travis pumped another bullet in, just to make sure, then stood looking down at White.
“I kept trying to tell you,” he said aloud. “Carelessness can mean the difference between living and dying. You should have listened. You should have paid attention to what I told you...” Then a startled expression came to Travis’ eyes. He coughed spasmodically.
20
Gradually, as she sat waiting in the Thunderbird at the junction of Route 77 and Highway 80, a lot of things came clear to Lila. Actually, her feelings had been crystalizing over the past few weeks. But it was during those precise moments, while she waited for the big van to appear over a low hill, that she realized with certain finality that everything was wrong. All of it. This impossible robbery, her life with Sammy, all of it wrong.
Before her, so deep that she could not see the bottom of it, was a black abyss. She could no longer ignore it. There was still time for her to turn her back, to walk away, but she knew now that she could no longer pretend that the blackness didn’t exist.
She looked for the twentieth time at her watch. It was an expensive watch, a gift from Sammy. She found herself absently counting the jewels in the band and she felt a sudden coldness in her chest and in her mind. It was so hopelessly ridiculous, so terribly idiotic, that for a moment she thought about starting the car and heading back for New York. Or she might go visit her mother in Biloxi.
Somehow the thought left a foul taste in her mouth. She had never cared for her mother and father and they had cared little about her. There would be nothing but unhappiness if she went home.
What then? She no longer fooled herself. It would always be the same with Sammy. The money, if they were successful, would change nothing. They would go right on living the same meaningless life, doing the same meaningless things, regulating their existence by the turn of a card or a senseless whim. And why? For love?
It was odd how her life had been shaped by incidents rather than true feelings. She had slept with Sammy because she liked his looks, had lived with him because she had nowhere else to live, had married him because marriage offered a solution to her problems.
Now, this way, she knew there could be no solution...
She was about to start the engine of the car when she suddenly saw the rig — its lights came on, went out, came on again — rumble past with a faint tap on the horn. Without realizing it, Lila sighed deeply, her mind curiously numb. Almost without thinking she moved the Thunderbird into the line of traffic.
The rig was almost a half mile ahead.
As she pressed down on the gas pedal, she had the momentary sensation that she was driving headlong over the side of a bottomless abyss.
21
It was nearly dark when Womack stopped the rig next to a ramshackle lumber shed in the logging camp. The dirt road continued on for about a hundred and fifty yards, sloping down sharply, ending at a big pond where they intended to get rid of the armored car.
According to Travis, the pond was about thirty feet deep. Womack got out of the tractor and walked down by the edge of the water. It was very muddy. A couple of ducks floated near a marsh on the far side.
Womack walked back up the slope. His shoes left dark pock marks in the wet dirt. They would have to be careful about that.
Before he got back to the rig, Lila drove into the clearing, parked the Thunderbird under the overhanging branches of a tall pine tree. The camp was surrounded by pines. They reminded him of the pines that grew around the CCC camps where he worked for a few years after leaving the reform school.
The big double doors of the van were still closed. Womack pounded on the metal with his fist. There was no sound from inside.
“Travis!”
Still no sound.
“White!”
Womack got the .45 from the tractor, pumped a shell into the chamber, and approached the doors. They had risen quite a few feet from the floor of the desert and there was a chill in the air.
Womack was aware of Lila standing beside him.
“What’s happened?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t they open the doors?”
“I don’t know.”
Standing there in the clearing, Womack was touched by fear, enveloped by it. But there was only one thing to do, and he did it.
As the doors opened, a stifling wave of carbon monoxide poured out. Coughing and chocking, they stared incredulously into the van. Then Lila screamed shrilly. The sound of it came down like a club on Womack’s head. He slapped her and the scream broke off in the middle, punctuated by the sudden, stifling silence.
They were dead — all of them: White, sprawled face down just inside the van; the young security guard, staring unblinkingly through blood-spattered goggles; the armored car driver; and Travis — entangled in the canvas money sacks he had been removing from the truck, his thin face twisted and blue.
“Go back to the car,” Womack said.
Without a word Lila turned and walked away over the blanket of pine needles.
Womack’s mind was suddenly alert. He would have to work fast. Climbing up into the van, he removed the remainder of the money sacks from the armored car, put the two bodies inside with the guard. When he jumped back to the ground there was a sticky mess on his fingers.
It took a full five minutes to back the van down to the edge of the pond. The slope was very muddy. Muck rose up over the rear wheels, but he continued backing slowly, until the van was actually part way out in the water.