by Ed McBain
She is still studying Alice’s face intently.
“Or did you?” she asks.
“No,” Alice says. “I never got around to it.”
“I think it would look much better if I reported the accident, don’t you?”
“Probably.”
“Since I was driving the car and all.”
“I guess so. But I think there’s no-fault insurance down here, isn’t there?”
“I don’t know,” Jennifer says. “I’m a recent import myself.”
“Jennifer,” Alice says, “you have to forgive me…”
“I’ll call my insurance people when I get home, ask their advice.”
“I think that’s a good idea.”
“I’ll let you know what I find out,” she says, and hesitates. “Alice,” she says, her voice lowering, “I’m sorry for what happened, truly.” She offers her hand. Alice takes it. “Later,” Jennifer says, and smiles, and swivels off toward her red Thunderbird convertible.
Alice watches as she pulls out of the driveway.
Jennifer waves good-bye.
“Sweet chassis,” Rafe says. “The car,” he adds, and grins.
Alice says nothing.
“Who is she?” he asks.
“Woman named Jennifer Redding. She’s responsible for the foot.”
He takes her elbow, leads her away from the door. Across the room, the law enforcement people are gathered in a tight little knot, conferring.
“You think these people know what they’re doing?” he whispers.
“No, I don’t.”
“I gather they’re planning to pay the ransom with counterfeit money, is that right?”
“That’s the plan, yes.”
“You gonna let them do that?”
“I want my kids back.”
“Seems like a sure way not to get them back.”
“What else can I do, Rafe?”
“Give them what they want. Go to the bank and—”
“And what? Where am I supposed to get a quarter of a million dollars?”
Rafe looks at her.
“You told Carol there was insurance,” he says.
“They haven’t paid yet.”
“It’s been eight months, Alice.”
“Don’t you think I know how long it’s been? They haven’t paid yet.”
“Well… when will they pay?”
“Rafe, do me a favor, okay? Get in your truck and go wherever you have to go. You’re not doing any good here.”
“I’m just trying to help,” he says, almost plaintively, but she has already moved away from him to where a wall phone hangs over the kitchen counter. She picks up the receiver.
“Who are you calling?” Sloate asks at once.
“Charlie.”
“He’s done enough damage already. Asking questions…”
“He found out she’s a blonde!” Alice snaps. “You sit here with your earphones on, and your expensive equipment, twiddling dials, while a fifty-six-year-old artist—”
“We already know she’s a blonde,” Sloate says.
“What?”
“We already—”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?” she says, slamming the phone onto the hook. “These are my children! Why isn’t anyone telling me anything?”
She realizes she is screaming at him. She clenches her fists, turns away. She wants to punch Sloate. She wants to punch anyone.
“I’m calling Charlie,” she says, and picks up the phone again.
“This is a mistake,” Sloate says.
But she is already dialing.
“Hello?”
“Charlie? It’s me.”
“What does the blonde want you to do?”
“Bring her the money.”
“Have you got it?”
“Phony bills, yes.”
“That’s dangerous.”
“I know, but…”
“They’re not locals,” Charlie says. “The blonde was driving a rental car.”
Sloate’s eyes open wide.
“How do you know?” Alice asks.
“Guard saw an Avis bumper sticker. I went to the airport, checked on it—”
“Jesus!” Sloate says.
“—they wouldn’t tell me anything. But now that the cops are all over you, maybe they can find out who rented that Impala.”
“Maybe.”
“Where’d that woman ask you to leave the money?”
“Don’t tell him!” Sloate warns.
“The Shell station on Lewiston and the Trail.”
“What time?”
“Don’t…”
“Ten tomorrow morning.”
“Good luck, Alice.”
“Thanks, Charlie.”
She hangs up, looks Sloate dead in the eye.
“Think you can find that car now?” she asks.
Sloate turns to Sally Ballew.
“Make yourself useful, Sal,” he says. “We’re looking for a blue Impala, maybe rented from Avis by a blonde in her thirties.”
“Piece of cake,” Sally says dryly.
As she and her partner leave the house, the grandfather clock in the hallway reads 8:30 P.M.
When they first moved down here, the kids thought they’d died and gone to heaven. Before they bought the boat, Eddie and Alice used to take them to the beach on every sunny weekend. After they owned the Jamash, it was day trips up and down the Intercoastal or out onto the Gulf when the seas weren’t too rough. At the beach one day…
She remembers this now with sharp poignancy.
Remembers it with an immediacy that is painfully relevant.
Jamie is three years old, and fancies himself to be an interviewer on one of his favorite kiddie TV shows. One hand in his sister’s, the other wrapped around a toy shovel he pretends is a microphone, he wanders up the beach, stopping at every blanket, thrusting the shovel-mike at each surprised sunbather, asking in his piping little voice, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Tirelessly, he parades the beach with his sister, a relentless, pint-sized investigative journalist.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
One day…
Oh God, that frantic day…
They know they are not to go anywhere near the water. The waves that roll in here are usually benign, even at high tide, but the children know that they are not to approach the water unless Eddie or Alice is with them. They know this. And usually, they wander up the beach for… oh, ten minutes or so… Ashley inordinately proud of her little brother’s interviewing technique, Jamie grinning in anticipation as he holds out his microphone to ask even sixty-year-olds, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
The beaches here on the Cape are not too terribly crowded, even in high season, so Alice or Eddie can keep the children in sight as Jamie conducts his “interviews.” But on this day…
They are discussing something important. Beaches tend to encourage deep discussions about important matters.
She doesn’t remember now what they were discussing. Perhaps buying a boat. Perhaps deliberating whether they can afford to buy even a used boat; they always seem to be discussing money, or the lack of money, when suddenly…
“Where are the kids?”
This from Eddie.
Alice looks up.
“Where are the kids?” he asks again. “Do you see them?”
She looks up the beach. She cannot see them anywhere. She is on her feet at once. So is Eddie.
“Did they come back this way?” he asks.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Did we miss them?”
Alice’s heart is racing now.
“They didn’t go in the water, did they?” she asks.
“You go that way!” he says, and points, and she immediately begins running up the beach. Eddie is off in the opposite direction.
“Ashley!” she yells. “Jamie!”
Running. Her eyes scanning the water. She does n
ot see them anywhere in the water. Nor does she see them anywhere on the beach. What…? Where…?
“Excuse me, did you see a little boy pretending to be a television reporter?”
Coming toward this end of the beach, the bathers and baskers thinning out now, still no sign of the children, oh dear God, please say they haven’t gone in the water, please say they haven’t been carried out to sea! She turns, comes running back down the beach, her eyes darting from sand to sea, and suddenly…
There.
Coming out of the tan brick building near the parking lot.
“Ashley!” she yells.
She rushes to the children, hugs them close.
“You scared me to death!” she says.
“Jamie had to pee,” Ashley says.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Jamie asks, grinning, and holds out the shovel to Alice.
The woman calls again at a few minutes before ten. “Listen to me carefully,” she says. “All you have to remember is that we have your children. If you don’t come to that gas station alone, your children will die. If you don’t have the money with you, your children will die. If anyone tries to detain me, your children will die. If I’m not back where I’m supposed to be in half an hour, your children will die. That’s all you have to know. See you tomorrow at ten.”
She hangs up.
“Twenty-three seconds,” Sally says.
The grandfather clock strikes ten P.M.
In exactly twelve hours, Alice will be delivering the ransom money. But the woman’s words keep echoing in her head. Your children will die, your children will die, your children will die.
Friday
May 14
5
The Tamiami Trail may once have been a dirt road hacked out through the palmettos and palms, but that was long before Alice moved down here.
Today, U.S. 41 is a four- (and sometimes six-) lane concrete thoroughfare lined for miles and miles with fast food emporiums, gift shops, car washes, gasoline stations, pizzerias, furniture stores, nurseries, carpet salesrooms, automobile dealers, shopping malls, movie theater complexes, and a variety of one-story cinder-block shops selling plaster figurines, citrus fruit, discount clothing, rattan pool and garden furniture, cigarettes and beer (free ice if you buy a case), stereo equipment, lamps, vacuum cleaners, typewriters, burglar alarms, swimming pools, and (the only such shop in all Cape October) adult marital aids, games, and related reading material.
Alice is familiar with the Shell station on Lewiston Point Road because the road itself dead-ends at the ferry landing where you catch the boat to Crescent Island, not a thousand yards off the southern end of Tall Grass. Crescent is the least developed of the Cape’s offshore keys. Accessible only by water, the island has on it a small, eccentric boater’s paradise known as Marina Blue, some thirty minutes away and 10,000 miles distant from U.S. 41. Some four or five years ago, the family spent a long, cherished weekend on Crescent, and the memories of that happy time are still with her.
She parks the black Mercedes truck in a space for about five or six cars, near the air hoses, gets out—and hesitates.
For a fleeting instant, she wishes she’d taken with her the snubnosed .32-caliber pistol Eddie gave her as a birthday present the year they moved down here. Instead, it is resting under her lingerie in the top drawer of the bedroom dresser back home.
But they have the children, she thinks.
The children will die, she thinks.
She shakes her head, pulls back her shoulders, walks briskly into the convenience area. The guy behind the counter there gives her a look as she limps past toward the rear of the building, following the sign that indicates RESTROOMS. He does not appreciate cripples limping in here to use the toilets without buying either gas or food. Alice is carrying the small Louis Vuitton bag, decorated with its repeated LV monogram, and stuffed at the moment with 2,500 fake hundred-dollar bills “so good nobody can tell them from the real thing”—she hopes.
A black woman is at the coffee machine, filling a cardboard container. She is some five feet seven inches tall, Alice guesses, as tall and as slim as a proud Masai woman. Wearing a very short green mini and a white T-shirt. Good firm thighs and shapely calves tapering to slender ankles in strappy flat sandals. Oversized sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat that hides half her face. Wide gold bracelet on the biceps of one dark, rounded arm. Alice wonders if this is the woman she’s been talking to on the phone.
“Morning,” the woman says, and smiles.
Alice does not recognize the voice.
“Morning,” she answers, and goes to the door marked WOMEN, and tries the knob.
“Occupied,” the woman says.
Alice still does not recognize the voice.
“Are you waiting?” she asks.
“Nope,” the woman says.
The door to the ladies’ room opens. A fat woman in a flowered dress comes out, smiles at both of them, and then goes toward the front of the building. The black woman is now putting sugar into her coffee. Alice goes into the ladies’ room.
The room is an entirely gray entity. Gray tile floors, gray Formica countertop, gray porcelain sink, gray door on the single stall in the room.
She throws the bolt on the entrance door. The click sounds like a minor explosion in the small confines of the room.
She approaches the gray door. She enters the stall—the fat woman has forgotten to flush—puts the bag down alongside the toilet bowl.
For a moment, she stands alone and silent in the small cubicle. Then she leaves the stall, and leaves the ladies’ room. The black woman is still there at the coffee machines, sipping from the cardboard container.
Alice walks over to her.
“Are you the one?” she asks.
The woman appears startled.
“Are you the one who has my children?”
The woman says nothing.
“If you are, then listen to me,” Alice says. “If you don’t let my kids go, I’ll find you and kill you.”
“Gee,” the black woman says, and goes immediately to the ladies’ room door. She grabs the doorknob, turns to face Alice, looks her dead in the eye. “Be gone when I come out,” she says. “Do anything foolish, and they die. We’ll call you.” She nods. “You understand what I’m saying?” she says, and stares at Alice a moment longer before opening the door and entering the ladies’ room.
Alice hears the click of the bolt.
“I hope you understood me!” she shouts to the closed door.
But her threat is an empty one.
They have the children.
There is nothing she can do.
Nothing at all.
The three detectives have positioned themselves outside the Shell station in a classic triangular surveillance pattern, ready to pick up on the perp the moment she comes out of the convenience area, if indeed she’s in there. They have to assume she’s in there. They haven’t spotted a blue Impala in the station area itself or parked on any of the surrounding side streets, so they can only think she walked from wherever she parked the car, if in fact she drove the blue Impala and not some other vehicle here to the station. But she has to be inside there. Nobody in her right mind would leave a satchelful of hundred-dollar bills in a public ladies’ room for longer than five minutes.
The detectives know they are not quite as Mickey Mouse as Alice Glendenning believes. They have already ordered backup from Captain Steele, and four unmarked CID cars are waiting to pick up the perp’s trail the minute she steps into a car, if she steps into a car. One of them is parked facing the distant Gulf, its nose pointed toward the Crescent Island ferry, in case she decides to head out that way. The other is parked facing east on Lewiston, in case she decides to go for I-75. The other cars are facing north and south, on either side of 41, should she decide to go either north to downtown Cape October, or south to Fort Myers. All four cars are within reach of easy radiophone contact if/when Sloate, Di Luca, or Cooper, on foot, h
ave any information to relay.
From all three vantage points, they each and separately see Alice Glendenning come out of the convenience area and walk rapidly to her black Mercedes. She is no longer carrying the Louis Vuitton bag. Good. That means the perp now has the evidence money in her possession, which further means they can arrest her without a warrant. Arresting her is not what they wish to do, however. What they wish to do is follow her to wherever she and her blond accomplice are holding the kids. That is their hope and their plan.
Mrs. Glendenning is in the car now.
The Mercedes engine kicks into life.
Sloate figures she will now be heading home.
Good, he thinks. Just stay out of our hair.
We’ve got the situation under control here.
From where Christine is crouched beside the small window in the ladies’ room, she can see the black Mercedes backing out of its space, and then circling past the gas pumps, and making a left turn on the corner, heading north on 41, toward downtown Cape October.
She looks into the Louis Vuitton bag.
All that money in there looks so sweet and beautiful.
She comes out of the ladies’ room, walks past the coffee machines and the counters bearing fast food junk food, and then stops at the counter to pay for her coffee. In a moment, she is out the front door, walking across the asphalt pavement past the gas pumps.
Almost jauntily, she steps out into the balmy morning.
The three detectives are right behind her.
The girl is very definitely black.
Some five-seven or -eight, Sloate imagines, sporting a short green skirt and a busty white T-shirt. Good-looking girl. Splendid legs, sweet ass. Gold bracelet on her right arm, the one carrying the Louis Vuitton bag.
She struts off 41 and begins walking west toward Citrus, a cell phone to her ear now, supremely sure of herself, the bag full of bogus bills bouncing on her right hip. She knows that as long as she’s got those two kids tucked away someplace, no one’s going to touch her.
Sloate is on point.
Cooper is across the street from him, and several yards behind, in case she decides to turn right.