Hellbox (Nameless Detective) by Bill Pronzini

both involving Verriker … make people suspicious, maybe start the county law looking his way. Besides, what kind of accident could he rig with Verriker and a missing tourist woman? And keep himself out of it with an alibi at the same time? No kind he could think of.
    Okay, another accident was out. What other way was there to finish Verriker? Never mind the woman, he’d worry about her later. Couldn’t just shoot the bastard … yeah, he could, blow his head off and then make the body disappear. No, that was too risky. He had to come up with something foolproof. And soon. He wouldn’t have no peace as long as Verriker was still alive.
    Eladio’s rattletrap Dodge was parked between the fairgrounds’ restrooms and the portable storage unit where he kept his power tools and other job-site materials locked up. The unit’s door was open, Eladio and the half-wit already working. You couldn’t trust most Mexs, but Eladio had worked for him off and on for years—Balfour hadn’t had any qualms about letting him have a key.
    He was still feeling mean, so he ragged on them some, told them to quit dogging it even though they weren’t. The kid showed his smarmy grin, but kept his mouth shut—good thing for him he did. Two of them were doing the last of the fixes on the two big booths that sold beer, inside out of the sun, so he got his hand tools and a couple of sheets of already-sized and cut plywood, and went to work on the partitions between the toilets in the women’s can. Already hot closed up in there; he was sweating like a pig before long.
    Some days he could work off a hangover. Not today. His head ached like a bitch and his gut felt as if it was boiling, getting ready to toss up his breakfast any minute. Couldn’t keep this up all day, not without a break and a little hair of the dog—two or three beers and a double shot of Jack. Take an early lunch, go on over to the bar at Freedom Lanes. The bowling alley was closer than the Miners Club, and he’d had his fill of the Buckhorn.
    He was thinking about that, outside using his table saw to cut another section of plywood, when Tarboe showed up.
    The faggot went to check on the concession booths first, so he finished the cut and took the piece back into the women’s can. He was fitting it into place when Tarboe came prancing in. Not a drop of sweat on him, not a wrinkle in his clothes. Suit and tie in the middle of summer, for chrissake. Like he was somebody important … a lousy small-town fairgrounds manager.
    “You and your men don’t seem to be making much progress, Balfour.”
    “Then why don’t you pick up a hammer and some nails and give us a hand?”
    Tarboe’s nose twitched like he was smelling something bad. “Why do you always have to be so disagreeable?”
    “Why do you always have to come around biting my ass when I’m trying to work?”
    “The mayor—”
    “Don’t start with that mayor shit!”
    “If you’d just listen before flying off the handle. I was about to say the mayor, Mayor Donaldson, called me this morning. He’s concerned that the work won’t be done by the Fourth.”
    “How many times I got to tell you it will be?”
    “Well, it doesn’t look that way to me,” Tarboe said. “If you’d started this project when you were supposed to, and worked a full, forty-hour week instead of whenever you felt like it, it would have been done long since.”
    “So you said maybe fifty times already.”
    “You know we’re expecting between fifteen hundred and two thousand people on Friday. The rows of portable toilets won’t be enough, we need all the facilities to be available.”
    Balfour gritted his teeth, banged a nail into place.
    “And all the refreshment booths open for business. Do you have any idea how much money we’ll lose if—”
    Lost it then. “No, and I don’t give a flying fuck!” Spitting the words.
    “You have a foul mouth, Balfour. If it had been up to me, you would never have been hired for this