Canada lived on one of the man-made bay islands, with good security at the bottleneck leaving the causeway. The bottleneck couldn’t exclude cops, however, and Downey arrived in time to see Lou DeLuca come out of the house carrying a tape recorder. Downey considered giving him a fast frisk and a little pushing around, but decided he was too far down to know anything. He was the messenger boy, that was all. Downey rang the doorbell. The door was chained, and Mrs. Canada wouldn’t let him in.
He set off again and presently noticed that his car had taken him to the Interstate. Maybe the car knew something he didn’t. He went south to Homestead and in through the site. If you knew where to look, you could see signs of what had happened. A couple of official-looking cars were parked at the command trailer. Otherwise they were making highway as usual, noisily, under the usual cloud of dust.
Downey drove out the opposite end, made a forbidden U, and headed toward Miami Heights. He had a bet going. If his colleagues weren’t there, he would call it all off, the hell with it, it was too risky to attempt alone. But they were there. Werner was packing, and Pam was on the bed, wearing nothing to speak of and smoking a joint. Downey picked it out of her hand and drew on it deeply.
“We said goodbye,” she said.
“This may not be over yet.”
“Will you get out of here?” Werner said, with that funny mildness he had been putting on for the last couple of days.
With no change of expression, perfectly calm, Downey hit him twice, once in the kidneys, again at the hinge of the jaw. He put every ounce of his frustration into the punches. Ten years earlier he would have done some hospital damage. Werner went back on the bed, arms and legs splayed, looking surprised, but he stayed conscious.
“They had a phone call,” Downey said, “from Canada himself. So the son of a bitch wasn’t in that trailer after all. Now shut up and listen. Don’t ask me who was doing that shooting last night. All I know is, I got one of them good, in the gut. What I’m wondering, are those his bones in that trailer? I swear I saw Canada in there, at least I saw something. But hell, the visibility-maybe they set it up to look fat like Canada, and maybe he was somewhere else all the time.”
“You saw him breathing,” Pam said.
“Let’s not rake it all up. We all make mistakes.”
He was feeling dizzy, and he had to sit down. He had worked it out in the car, but under Pam’s skeptical look it began slipping away.
“I just came from the site. A couple of places where he might be, like a stretch of conduit, and there’s that whole swamp country around there. I’m not saying we ought to go out and look. We wouldn’t know where to begin. We don’t care about Canada-write that off. The money’s the thing. Listen, remember that payloader?”
“I’ll never forget.”
“I found out this morning that Benjamin, one of the guys who ripped off the stuff, is a payloader driver. That’s pretty conclusive.”
“They’re in jail.”
“Not anymore they’re not. Somebody bailed them. They stashed Canada somewhere, in a junked car or wherever, and he’s still there, isn’t he? They wouldn’t have time yet to move him. Now if I was in their shoes, I’d go to work as though nothing happened. They’re working overtime on that highway job, to seven or eight most days. Four-thirty is when they want the money to be ready. They’ll slip off to go to the john or something, pick up the dough, however they’ve got it arranged, hide it, and get back on the job. That’s guesswork, but it fits the facts. So what we do, we work on it on both ends. The money guy’s somebody nobody ever heard of, DeLuca. He’s my responsibility. You guys get over to the site and watch the exits, keep an eye out for Vaughan and Benjamin. We’ll rig up something good. When they go looking for the money, it may not be there. Or we’ll let them pick it up, put on the masks, and take it away, whichever. I’m not talking nickels now. I’m talking a million bucks.”
They didn’t see any of this as clearly as he did. The more he argued, the realer it looked. It took him over an hour to get them out of the house. At the end he was talking wildly, hardly knowing what he was saying.
He drove back to the site, showed his badge to the foreman, and asked him to identify a whole string of names, made up on the spot except for Benjamin and Vaughan. Vaughan was a dump-truck driver, in and out. Benjamin, the payloader guy, was working back and forth between the gravel pile and the hot plant.
Downey deployed his troops. He wanted them both to be really invisible, which meant they had to have a legitimate reason for being here. Downey attached his own police blinker to the roof of their rented Ford. With that long hair, Werner was hard to believe as a cop, so Downey bullied him to a Homestead barber, who cut a lot of it off. It changed his appearance completely. He looked like a detective Downey knew-that man, too, looked angry most of the time.
He drove Pam to the top of the site, where dump trucks bringing in sand and gravel had to cross the highway. A flag girl in a yellow hat and bright orange vest brought the traffic to a halt to let them pass.
Downey stopped beside her. “We got a call from your family, dear. Do you have your own car?”
“What do you mean? Is anything wrong?”
“Some kind of accident. She was so hysterical I couldn’t make out. Your dad? Somebody.”
The girl’s hand went to her mouth. “Is it bad?”
“She was leaving for the hospital. She wants you to go straight home.”
The girl was already untying her vest. “Oh, God. That’s a two-hour drive. Did she say what hospital?”
“Just to go home. Somebody’ll be there by then.”
“Now isn’t that just like my mom?” the girl cried. “I’ll be worrying all the day. Dad-he drives like a crazy person. I hope it’s not too bad.”
Pam put on the vest and hat and accepted the flag. Downey drove off with the girl.
Chapter 18
After counting the money, and counting it again to be sure he’d been right the other times, DeLuca had a final exchange with Canada’s wife.
“Lou, you’ll be careful?” She put a moist hand on his arm. “You won’t provoke them? Because he meant that. You know Larry, he wouldn’t put his money in any obvious place. I’ll bet you it’s in the Bahamas someplace. If anything goes wrong I’ll never find it.”
“If anything goes wrong,” DeLuca said, “it won’t be Lou DeLuca’s fault. I want to stay alive myself, you know. Most of this dough is other people’s. If Larry lives through, he’ll pay them back. Otherwise they’re out. So I’m going to play this strictly according to the book.”
Her hold tightened. “Lou, you’ve been such a good friend today. When this is over, I hope we can see each other more. You don’t know how lonely it’s been.”
He stood on the front doorstep for a moment to let anybody who was watching see that, as instructed, he was completely alone. Then he drove to the Miami High School, on Twenty-fourth Avenue. He had played the tape for a number of people during the day, but he had always cut if off at the point where it started to get specific. He didn’t want anybody lying in wait along the way. He was the only one who knew he was going to change cars. He spotted the pickup at once. A Chevy several years old, it had been used hard. Empty beer bottles were rolling under the seat. He turned on the radio. It was set on Channel 19, but was producing nothing but frying noises.
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.