Brett Halliday - Win Some, Lose Some

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.

The man gave him a hard look. “This is your show, Mike. Go ahead, but you know we’re going to need a lot more than you’ve given us so far. Am I permitted to ask what you’re looking for?”

“The Styrofoam cooler that was on the back of the Honda.”

“A beer cooler? Three people are dead here, Mike. They weren’t arguing about beer.”

“Probably not,” Shayne agreed.

Two feet by one foot by a foot and a half, the cooler would be a hard thing to conceal. By the time Frieda arrived, Shayne had decided it must have bounced off the carrier during the jolting ride. But Frieda was sure it had still been on the motorcycle when it sheared away from the pickup and went down.

“We were facing the wrong way, with the bucket up. I lost track of him when he went under the belts. When he came out in the open again, the first thing I looked for was the cooler. It was definitely there, Mike.”

Shayne looked at the tire tracks again. Squatting, he drew a diagram in the dirt. The only vehicle he couldn’t account for was the sand truck, one in the long anonymous succession of trucks feeding the piles. He thought for a moment, rubbing his sandpapery jaw.

“It’s a longshot, but we might as well try it.”

He drove back to the payloader. The mixing tank, at the center of the great spiderweb, continued to be fed, to revolve, to disgorge. The landscaping and finishing crews were coming in to park their working vehicles and go home. The hot plant would go on working as long as it had daylight. A new load of sand was being dumped at the far side of the pile.

Climbing into the cab, Shayne told Benjamin, “Let’s rotate. Get some of the new sand that’s come in in the last half hour.”

In the mouth of the culvert, Werner was making plans. The police had two dead men and a dead girl. That would keep them busy for hours. But they wouldn’t be here all night. Werner was more worried about Benjamin and Vaughan. And he was worried about Downey. He could see Downey’s car outside the control trailer, but Downey himself must be off with the other cops, trying to make sense of the multiple shootings. Like Benjamin and Vaughan, he would be looking for two things-a Styrofoam box and Werner.