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 outsiders, 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.
Greco was past, a rich man. He gave another wild hoot and wound into the next higher gear.
Nothing was ahead but a truck road and the flag girl. For no rational reason, merely to show her authority, she was waving her flag at him. She thought she could stop him with that puny flag? He decided to make her jump. Nice-looking cunt. Greco liked long hair on a girl, those skinny flanks. She pointed her flag, and he was struck a powerful blow on the chest, which knocked him backward out of his seat. One foot caught, and he stayed with the motorcycle. The heavy machine, no longer a friend, whipped around and came over on top of him. His scream rang back and forth inside the helmet like the screaming of more than one person. They slid twenty feet together, Greco and the Honda, through rising dust. When they came to rest, he was looking straight at the sun, but he was unable to close his eyes.
When Werner saw the motorcycle stop near the Pontiac, he started his motor and turned on the rooftop flasher. Of course, the kidnappers could have told somebody to come and pick up the cooler, but why would they do that when it could leave unobtrusively with Benjamin himself at the end of the day?
One of the payloaders was moving erratically. Suddenly the motorcycle burst out of the dust, with the cooler strapped to the rack. It disappeared and appeared again, playing games near the hot plant. Werner was moving. The motorcycle broke free, nearly colliding with a pickup- the pickup, he realized-then seemed to hit an obstruction at a bad angle and flipped. Werner drove up. Pam whirled.
“He’s got the money!”
Werner jumped out and quickly broke open the buckles. The dust from the spill was still in the air around him. Straightening, he took one step toward his car. Cars were moving out from the hot plant. A sand truck was coming in to cross. Werner had come in a police car and so was obviously a cop. But a real cop wouldn’t take off again an instant after arriving at the scene of an accident this bad. He couldn’t make up his mind. And he was still standing there, holding the cooler, being pulled in several directions at once, when the sand track came up. The driver looked at the fallen motorcycle. The front wheel was folded. The biker, covered with blood, looked almost as battered as his machine and considerably more fragile.
“Jesus Christ,” the truck driver said. “I’ve got a kid myself who wants one of those Hondas. Not with my money! Anything I can do?”
“We’ll take care of it,” Werner told him.
The truck pulled past, and Werner swung the cooler over the tailgate into the sand. It slid down the cone-shaped pile, out of sight from below.
Pam was trembling badly. Werner’s move with the cooler-whether that was smart or dumb, there was no way to call it back now-had caused him to unfreeze. He looked into the pickup. What he saw there drove him back several steps. Before he could freeze again, he snatched Pam’s gun and threw it into the front seat beside the dead man.
“Don’t tell Downey,” he said. “Half million for you. Half million for me. Fuck him. You don’t know a thing!”
Pam began shuddering, taking deep breaths and letting them out on a rising note. That was all right. She had witnessed a double shooting, and nobody would be surprised if she came slightly unglued. And all at once her orange vest seemed to break open from inside. Blood spurted out. The motorcyclist on the ground was holding his long gun in both hands. The barrel wavered and fell back.
Werner was too late to catch Pam as she fell. The yellow hat went bouncing away. He turned her over. After the first hard spurt, the blood was welling out of her chest like a pool overflowing. She tried to speak. Bubbles came out. He let her down. He wasn’t thinking of her at all, he was thinking about the money.
He clapped on her hard hat and automatically stopped being a cop and changed into a construction worker. He ran toward the cars, gesturing.
“They shot-killed-”
There were enough other things to look at so he got away with it. Other cars gathered. He doubled over and was sick in the dirt. It was real bile, real vomit. Very pale, his hand to his mouth, he turned his back to the confused scene and walked away. His rented car with the flasher would be left over when everything got sorted out. That would be hours from now. No one would make the connection.
He walked all the way through. Without looking to see who was watching, he crossed the access road and the highway. He made a wide detour through the tangled undergrowth, going into swamp water up to his knees, and circled back. A great irrigation conduit ran under the road at this point. He ducked down and went in, walking through a tiny sluggish trickle of water. The second half of the conduit had been tied in, but not yet covered with dirt.
He stopped several feet short of the mouth, in dark shadow. He could see the sand pile. The dump trucks were feeding the pile on the opposite side from the payloader.
Shayne, in the payloader cab, was a half mile from the action, his view partly obscured by the moving dust. He gave quiet instructions to the sheriff’s deputies. One police car, its blinker working, was on its way in from the highway. He was outside the cab, about to drop to the ground, when Benjamin called him back. He was in time to see the Honda and a pickup apparently collide. The Honda flipped and threw its rider. A sand truck crossed the highway, paused, and went on.
Shayne’s was the fourth car to reach the scene. DeLuca and the man he had imported to kill Canada had shot and killed each other, and the flag girl had been hit during the exchange. She was dying. The Styrofoam cooler was no longer strapped to the motorcycle.
These deaths were sheriff’s business, and the deputies had already begun the lengthy process of picking up. Shayne took the ranking deputy aside and asked for permission to search the pickup and the cars.