“He won it off a guy and you can have it for a couple hundred bucks.”
“Yeah, that’s it, and he’ll be here any second and . . . and—” An idea hit him like a punch in the stomach. After a moment he said faintly, “You was the guy that called.”
“Uh-huh. So I don’t think we’ll be disturbed.”
“Now look, Bill, don’t be hasty. Let’s talk this over. I’m getting an idea.”
“What kind of an idea?”
“Give me a couple seconds, will you? I got to wrassle with it.”
Russ was wrestling with an idea, all right, and there seemed to be some question who would win. That didn’t necessarily mean it was a big idea. Sometimes even a little one could throw Russ. This one seemed to be rocking him with forearm blows and body slams. Russ was looking as pained as a wrestler in a television bout, except that in this case the match was on the level.
“Hurry up,” Bill said. “I can’t wait all night. I have a date with an alibi.”
“Now look,” Russ said with a great effort, “how about if I tell you how you can cut yourself a nice hunk of change? Maybe a quarter million bucks. Only you got to be sensible about this shooting business.”
“First let’s be sensible about the quarter million. That’s a lot of money to talk about. You don’t look like you have a speaking acquaintance with more than a couple hundred.”
“Yeah? Well, I got a speaking acquaintance with half a million bucks. In gold, too.”
“Sure. You have an ancient map to the Lost Dutchman Mine or Montezuma’s treasure. An old prospector gave it to you on his deathbed. We look for a mountain that throws the shadow of a skull on a valley just as the full moon comes up in August.”
“The map I have,” Russ said doggedly, “is a nice modern oil company road map. And we don’t look for no mountains. We look for a C-47 plane that crashed.”
“This is getting to be quite a yarn. Is this supposed to be our C-47 you’re talking about?”
“Don’t be like that, Bill. I’m leveling with you. Sure, it’s our C-47. It was carrying half a million bucks in gold. The stuff was in boxes marked with Chinese writing saying they held medical supplies. You sure ought to remember them boxes. Don’t you?”
Russ could no more make up a yarn like this than he could do a toe dance in the ballet. “Yes,” Bill said thoughtfully, “I remember those boxes. I wanted them thrown off the plane. I begin to see why everybody got so upset.”
“I said we ought to tell you what was in them boxes. But no, the other guys said it wouldn’t make no difference to you. So bingo, there’s got to be a shooting.”
“You’re giving up that yarn about the soldier potting me by mistake, are you?”
“All right. You’re too smart to buy that. But it still wasn’t me that did it.”
“Who did?”
Russ set his jaw stubbornly. “I don’t know. You want to talk about this dough or don’t you?”
“Okay, Russ. What happened to the Chinese black market guy who owned those boxes?”
“Oh, him? You know how the starboard door on that plane didn’t latch good? We hit an air pocket and the door flipped open and he fell out. He was standing too close to it.”
“He was standing too close to one of you guys.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Russ said, without interest. “I was up on the flight deck at the time.”
“Natch. Then what happened?”
“Well, we come in to Hong Kong and we figure we better not try cashing in the gold there. So we headed Stateside by way of the Philippines and Japan and the Aleutians and Alaska and Canada. That’s when things went wrong. We didn’t know if some customs guy in the U. S. might get nosey about them boxes so we figured on not landing at any regular field. We figured on setting down way out in the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and hiding the boxes. Only what with trying not to make too many stops we stretched the gas too far. So there we are with the tanks running dry and nothing under us but a lot of lousy mountaintops.”
“With guys like you I don’t know how we ever flew the Hump.”
“You should talk!” Russ cried. “All right, so if you had been running things it wouldn’t have happened. And why weren’t you running things? Because you’d turned chaplain on us. So who was dumb first?”
“I won’t argue. I was dumb first. What did you do when you ran out of gas? Bail out?”
“With all that dough aboard? Jeez, we’d have ridden it down right into a mountain. But Ken spotted a lake. He ditched the plane on the lake right nice. But all we had time to do was break out a rubber raft and shove off before she sank. So all that dough is just waiting there to be brought up.”
“That was a long time ago. I’d have expected you guys to grow fins and gills diving for it.”
“All right, wise guy. There’s a hundred feet of water over the plane.”
“That’s nothing for a trained diver in a suit. None of you felt like learning?”
“Sure, we felt like learning. Cappy and Domenic out on the coast have both learned. Trouble is, that ain’t no deserted lake. It has a dozen cabins where guys come up for vacations and weekends. Any time the roads are open so we could truck in a good-sized boat and an air pump and diving suits, somebody’s there fishing or lying around. It’s not a big lake. Anybody on shore can see most of it. We don’t dare go after that stuff with people watching. An hour after we started diving, we’d have to shoot some curious dope.”
“Times have changed. Now nobody wants to shoot anybody.”
“Who likes to shoot people?” Russ said in a hurt voice. “There’s another way to handle it. We been buying up the lousy lake. We got all the land now except around six of the cabins. A couple years more and we can afford to buy those. Then we block off the road and go to work. It’s taken a lot of dough and we sure been sweating to earn it.”
This was good. You could call it poetic justice. The five of them started out to make a fast buck and ended by earning slow pennies. Sometimes fate showed a nice sense of humor. “You mentioned me getting a quarter million bucks,” he said. “With six guys cutting into half a million, how does one come out with a quarter million? Did the five of you talk it over and decide you’d better pay me off big?”
“We ain’t talked it over.”
“Well then, what happened when you told them about that newspaper clipping saying I was back?”
“I didn’t tell them you was back.”
“That’s queer. Why not?”
Russ looked embarrassed. “I figgered maybe you’d want to surprise them. How did I know you would drop in on me first?”
“Was that friendly? I might have hurt one of them.”
“Let ’em get hurt,” Russ said bitterly. “Crashing that plane because they couldn’t figure the fuel right! Taking it easy while I sweat my eyes out here! I been putting in more toward buying that lousy lake than any two of them. I ain’t had a day off from this joint in two years.”
“What about that little trip you took to Philadelphia last month? Didn’t that count as time off?”
Russ peered out from under heavy eyebrows as if his eyes were small wary animals. “I didn’t take no trip.”
“Somebody took a shot at me last month in Philadelphia.”
“One of the others did, then.