“Now can we talk?” Frieda said, relaxing. “I think I’m beginning to see the idea. Canada’s gone. So is a lot of their portable equipment. What the real kidnappers are going to think-”
“Right. That wasn’t a rescue, but a hijacking. According to Tim, there’s been some pretty heavy pilfering going on. They’ll think the regular thieves were working tonight, saw what was happening to Canada, and decided on the spur of the moment to move in. But this was a well-planned operation. When Canada didn’t cooperate, they reacted nicely. They’ve probably got the ransom note written, all their arrangements made. They’ve been thinking about how they’re going to invest all that money. I don’t think they’ll give up as long as they think there’s a chance to recover. If they can find out who’s been doing the stealing-”
“They’ll try a hijack in reverse, and we’ll be there waiting for them. Clever. But how will they know anything’s missing? They were already gone when you did all that.”
“A couple of angles I haven’t told you about yet. They already kidnapped one guy and killed him-a loan shark named Eddie Maye. Eddie’s wife told us he was being followed by a cop. How big a cop we don’t know, but he must have been fairly big because Eddie was lying awake worrying about him. That voice on the bullhorn sounded pretty professional, a cop’s voice. He’ll be talking to the sheriff. And then he’ll ask around-who’s been doing the stealing out here?”
Chapter 10
Werner peeled off his goalie’s mask and slapped it against the dashboard.
“Strictly according to plan. Everything taken care of. What could possibly go wrong?”
“Now don’t bug me, boy,” Downey warned. “I’ve taken all the shit from you I’m going to take. I’ve had the full quota.”
“Stop it,” Pam said, but her tone showed that she didn’t expect anybody to pay attention to her.
Werner had torn the sweat shirt back from his shoulder wound. One look had told Downey that the bullet had nipped in and out without catching anything but flesh and muscle. But naturally the boy thought he was on the point of dying.
Downey brought the tow truck to a sliding stop where they had left the cars. “Go straight to the Heights house,” he said curtly. “I’ll be with you in an hour, probably.”
“We won’t wait up,” Werner said.
“I’m going back in as a police officer and find out what’s going on. Something funny, I can guarantee you that.”
“No more!” Werner shouted, suddenly furious. “We’ve had enough, do you understand?”
“Come on, we have to talk about it.”
“No more!” Werner shouted again. “You shit head, you know what you did? You nearly got us all killed!”
Downey slapped his hand away and started the motor. Didn’t they understand they were like olives in a bottle here? First they had to scatter. Then they had to meet for the post-mortem. They couldn’t leave these loose ends flying around.
He got off fast. They would realize soon enough that they could air their grievances inside four walls, not out here where they might be seen and remembered by a couple of teen-agers who had been to an X-rated movie and were looking for seclusion to do their own screwing.
He heard a police siren. He didn’t believe it at first. How could they know? He listened more intently. That was what it definitely was, a siren, but it came from the Interstate.
Werner, driving like a madman in his Ford, came up behind him, honking, headlights up full. He rode up to Downey’s car and clashed bumpers. On top of everything else, with that shoulder he had to be driving one-handed. A wipe-out here would be good news, wouldn’t it? Downey speeded up to establish an interval, got on a better road, and lost them. They had paid a month’s rent on a house in Miami Heights, back from the bay with trees around it and no close neighbors. They’d be sensible and go there and wait, wouldn’t they? Sure they would.
As a matter of fact, for kids, they had done pretty well. Downey remembered the first time someone had shot at him. He hadn’t liked it much, either. He had hit the pavement so fast he skinned his whole face, the first blood he had lost as a cop. And that reminded him that he was a cop still, with a cop’s privileges. He turned on the police band. A couple of highway cruisers were talking to each other. A robbery? Robbery, hell. That was a snatch, man, interrupted by persons unknown, one armed with a gun, one with a payloader.
He slowed down until he was barely crawling. The dispatcher had pulled off one of the cars to look for a tow truck. That worried Downey. How would they know about a tow truck unless somebody saw it, and in that case what else had they seen? Of course, the masks had still been on then. Coming to a full stop on the shoulder, he felt for the pint bottle in his glove compartment. As a matter of fact, he was damn tired. For the last couple of weeks, he had been working full-time at a regular job and full-time on this. He had had to do all the planning, all the psychology. The size of the stake had added to the strain. His two colleagues, he was discovering, were far from being the most transparent people in the world. With Pam especially, he could never be sure what she was thinking. He impressed her, he knew. At the same time, he had a strong suspicion that she thought he was a bit of a phony.
He couldn’t understand Canada’s behavior. The part called for him to put down his gun and come out laughing. Why all the shooting? True, they had shot Eddie Maye, but they wouldn’t shoot Canada because he had to be delivered alive. And all those voices suddenly. Downey had been in some hairy situations in his time, especially during those years in the black precinct, but being attacked by a payloader was one of the worst. Usually a Cadillac gives you a feeling of security and power. Not this time. He could still see that big bucket lift, lift, lift fifteen feet in the air and come smashing down.
The whiskey burned some of the fuzziness away, and he took another bite. If Werner hadn’t run off the minute he was nicked, Downey could have turned on the lights and found out what they were up against. It couldn’t have been cops. They hadn’t behaved like cops, and from what he was hearing on the police band, the cops were just beginning to get there now. Canada’s people? No, there would have been more gunfire, Downey would now be lying there dead probably, and the cops would never have been notified at all.
So by God, maybe two things had been running concurrently there, their own thing and the robbery the cops were talking about. It would have to be somebody who knew the site and knew how to run a payloader. Two people at the most, amateurs, doing a little harmless picking on their own time. All that radio commotion might have come from a single source. Could it be? It could be, Downey decided. A couple of guys sitting there in the darkness, getting more and more itchy, and when they saw that what was happening was a snatch of Big Larry Canada, easily a million-dollar parcel, they decided to make a little racket with the radios and see what happened.
He drove to the site, identified himself to the patrolmen, said he had picked up their conversation, and could he do anything to help? They couldn’t think of anything. He wandered away and looked for the Cadillac. That long, arrogant car, perched halfway up a little volcano of gravel, was surely a mess. Canada, as he had supposed, was no longer inside.
“Now how the hell did that happen?” he asked.
The highway patrolmen, who saw plenty of wrecked cars in the course of their working day, hadn’t been able to explain this one. Somebody happened to know that the job super lived in a trailer in the big encampment outside of Leisure City. They did some phoning. When the super arrived, the first thing he was able to do was identify the smashed car as belonging to the top boss. Everybody suddenly became much more careful. One of the sheriff’s deputies, who had found a bottle of whiskey in the trailer and was about to see how it tasted, replaced the cap and put it back in the drawer.