Bitter Gold Hearts

"That whole mess started out as a fake. The kid wanted to run out on his old lady and rip her off at the same time. He fixed it up with Donni to make it look like a snatch and he'd split the payoff with her and start travel­ing. Donni was going to split her half with us for making it look good. It wasn't the kind of thing Gorgeous usually got into, but it looked like money for nothing, so he sent for the old gang and we did it." "Only it didn't come off that way. What happened?" "I don't know. Honest. The same night after you and me go around in the street, Gorgeous calls me in and says there's a big change of plans. I seen Donni leaving, so I know where the change came from. Anyway, he told me 1 had to go out where the kid was hid out and turn it into the real thing. And when the payoff came through, we was supposed to be a whole lot better off than with the old plan. We was going to leave the kid twisting in the wind."

"Uhm." I thought a moment. "What about Donni's cut of the fatter pot?"

"We got that whole wad. All the kid's share." Something told me Donni Pell had gotten her share somewhere else.

"So that's that? You just went out, got the money, and headed north?" My tone warned him. "No. You know that, don't you?" "You had to kill a girl to get that extra chunk." "Gorgeous said it had to be done. I didn't like it." "Why?"

"I don't know. Look, no matter what you do, I'm going to tell you that a lot. Because I don't know. I wasn't his partner. Gorgeous told me to do things and I did them and he paid me good. And part of what he paid me for was not asking questions. You want to know who wanted something done and why, you got to find Donni Pell and ask her."

"What you say is probably true, but you have eyes and ears and a brain. You saw things and heard things and you thought about them. Why do you think the girl had to die?"

"Maybe she knew too much about something. She knew the kidnap was a fake because she was supposed to run off with the kid and the money. Maybe she found out the fake turned real. Maybe she just did something to make Donni want to get her. Maybe it was just because she was set to take the frame for the kidnapping and Gorgeous didn't want her turning up saying it wasn't so. I know we was supposed to make her disappear forever. Only when we showed up to do it she had some son of a bitch with her and he turned out to be a goddamned one-man army. And by the time we got him down, there was traffic coming and we had to throw them in the bushes and make it look like nothing happened. When we got back, we found out that big ape wasn't dead at all. He'd grabbed the girl and took off through the woods. I never thought he'd get far, cut like he was. And he left us with a lot of cleaning up to—"

"That's enough of that. Tell me about the payoff. Where. When. How."

"On the Chamberton Old Road four miles south of where it runs into the Vokuta-Lichfield road, just north of the bridge over Little Cedar Creek. Set for midnight the night before what we was just talking about, but the delivery was two hours late. I guess Gorgeous wasn't pissed because he never complained."

I didn't know the place. On the map the Chamberton Old Coach Road cuts up through woody hill country four miles west of the route I'd taken when I'd gone out to explore. "Why that spot?"

"The road runs straight for a mile either way from the bridge. There's never any traffic at night, but if there was, you'd spot it coming in plenty of time. And you can look off northeast and see the ridge the Lichfield road runs on. I was up there to watch in case there was any tricks. I was supposed to light one signal flare if everything was all right and two if it wasn't."

"Did you expect trouble?"

"No. We had them by the short hairs. But you don't take chances with those people."

"And the delivery was late?"

"Yeah. But I guess that was just because the damnfool woman didn't know what she was doing. Any idiot should know a covered wagon with a four-horse team won't make time like a buggy or carriage."

Oh? "You weren't there for the actual payoff, then?"

"No. But Gorgeous said it went down exactly the way it was supposed to."

"Which was?"

"The wagon came down and stopped in the road. Gorgeous and Donni had their coaches off to the side. Gorgeous and Donni had their drivers transfer the mon­eybags, half and half. The woman and her wagon headed on south. Donni stayed put for an hour, then headed south too. Gorgeous came up where I was and gave me my cut and enough to pay off the boys so they could go home after the business in the morning. We didn't want them coming to TunFaire, getting drunk, and shooting their mouths off."

"They knew what was happening?"

"Not the payoff. But they were in on a killing."

"There was no concern about just following the woman?"

"She wasn't told what to do about going back till she turned over the ransom."

"I see." Not very bright, this Skredli. "She didn't have anything to say when she didn't get the kid after the payoff?"