For a moment Chaney was too startled to speak; then he growled deep in his throat. Who did these two-bit punks think they were dealing with? Back home in Vegas he’d have their ears for penwipers for a dumb stunt like this! Well, it wasn’t Vegas, that was true, but even so it was a dumb stunt. Trying a stick-up on him! Dumb bastards to begin with — how much cash did they think he carried in these days of credit cards? And on a trip of just a couple days to a different town? Still, by their crummy standards he supposed the amount in his wallet would look like a young fortune to them. A pity he didn’t have any muscle in this cruddy place or he’d have some of the boys look them up and pound some sense into their thick skulls. It was a pretty sad day when anyone in a decent suit of clothes and with a shirt that didn’t have ring-around-the-collar couldn’t climb into a cab without getting mugged. Christ, this was as bad as New York!
“All right, you bright bastards,” he said harshly. “Take the dough and go out and buy the Mets! And thank your stars you don’t play in my ball park or you’d talk through bandages a month for this. Okay, the billfold’s in my left butt pocket. Leave the credit cards if you know the difference from lottery tickets; they ain’t no use to you. That’s if either one of you clowns knows enough English to even know what the hell I’m talking about!”
To his surprise the man with the gun pressed into his side made no motion for the wallet, and it was evident it was not from any fear that Chaney might make a move if he did so. The man also spoke English, accented but completely understandable, at least sufficiently to respond. “Keep quiet,” he said, and punctuated his brief sentence with a sharp prod of the gun. He spoke to the driver, switching to Portuguese. “Emil — the fazenda; the driveway. You know where.”
The driver nodded in lieu of speaking and speeded up the taxi.
Chaney frowned and tried to concentrate. It was not the first time he had faced a gun, and while he didn’t particularly like it, that part of the deal didn’t worry him, or at least not for the time being. It could still be a stick-up, of course, and they could be waiting until they could get him in a place where they could search him for any goodies he might not keep in his wallet, but it didn’t seem to smell like a heist. But if it wasn’t a stick-up, what was it? Probably, he concluded, a case of mistaken identity. Certainly nobody down here had any reason to put out a contract on him, or not at least that he could see, and back home he was clean as a whistle. Well, maybe not clean with Washington and the garbage brains in the IRS, but clean clean with the boys in Vegas. And anyway, Washington didn’t come after a guy with a rod; or at least not yet. Or at least not the tax department; what the CIA or the FBI did was maybe something else again, but they certainly had no reason to push him. Not, he admitted to himself, that they always needed a reason, but if these two clowns were part of any U. S. Government apparatus, then the hiring practices in Washington were even lousier than usual.
Something local? But why, for Christ’s sake? He hadn’t stepped on any toes. Christ, he didn’t know more than half-a-dozen characters in the whole country. Since he got here he’d kept his nose spotless; he had enough grief without trying to stir up any local headaches. He hadn’t even laid a finger on any broad who wasn’t a professional, so these characters couldn’t be working for no steamed-up husband. Weird!
Unless, of course, it wasn’t a rub-out after all. Suddenly the answer came to him — a kidnaping! He thought it had been some six or seven years since there had been a kidnaping of a foreigner in Brazil; he knew it was fairly common in Argentina, and it was even catching on at home, but he had been under the impression it had been pretty much wiped out in Brazil. In Argentina, in fact, some oil company put up fourteen million bucks, they said, for some character, but he couldn’t remember what had happened in that case. He knew some tire company sprung for three or four million for some clown who ran their office, although Chaney always figured both figures had to be strictly from the public relations department. Who paid out dough like that just to save a guy from getting scragged?
But he, Chaney, didn’t work for any big company — and the people who he used to work with, not for, wouldn’t put up a nickel to save their mothers from white slavery, let alone a guy who was retired from the organization. So what did these monkeys think they were going to get out of him? Sure, if they kept their demands within reason, he had dough of his own and he might spring for a little, but if these clowns were thinking in those paint-card numbers, they were dealing from a short deck. Ten grand maybe he’d offer, and maybe even go as far as twenty if he really had to; it wouldn’t hurt the bankroll, and it was still undoubtedly more scratch than these clowns saw in their whole lifetimes. But that was it, if they laid on the floor and screamed with disappointment.
Chaney stared through the window of the cab, watching the lights of the town dwindle as they approached the outskirts. Factories could be seen set far back from the road, huge spotlights illuminating the perimeters of their property; ahead of the speeding taxi the strings of vertical lights outlining the refinery cracking towers were now visible, topped by the gas flame issuing from the tallest stack like an eternal beacon. Chaney made no attempt to protest the steady pressure of the gun in his side. These characters had to be amateurs and it never paid to excite amateurs, especially when they had guns. Amateurs usually had nervous fingers; although he had to admit that the man beside him seemed about as nervous as four cubic feet of set concrete. Still, look at him calling the other guy by name — Emil. That was the kind of dumb thing amateurs were always doing. Sure, he didn’t speak their language, but hell! Emil was Emil in sixteen languages, including the Italian.
Chaney looked out at the passing landscape, surprised that he could recognize some of it. This was the same road he had taken from the Airport Hotel, not that it made any difference. He put aside consideration of the outside world and instead tried to recall all he had heard of past kidnapings in this part of the world. Usually, as he recalled, the guys putting on the snatch did so to raise dough for some local mob, but that was their affair. Chaney had no interest in politics. What he did remember, though, was that all the victims — or almost all of them — once they were freed, claimed they had been treated pretty good, considering. Even guys who had been held a long time. Of course, some of them had been blindfolded, but not all of them, even those who had gotten a good gander at their kidnapers, like he had. But most of them were so happy to get loose they hadn’t even tried to prosecute. Well, these two-bit punks would discover George Chaney was a lot different. Maybe he would have let them put the bite on his billfold and let it go at that, but if they stuck him for any real dough with this kidnaping bit, he’d find some boys in Rio, one way or another, look these monkeys up, and when he found them he’d turn them upside down, shake them a little, and count the scratch that fell out of their pistol pockets. And finding them shouldn’t be all that much sweat. Emil, eh? Dumb, dumb!