The Scared Stiff

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Promise,” I said. “Carlita?”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you think? Are they gonna get me?”

  “Well,” she said, “they get almost everybody sooner or later.”

  “I’ll keep beautiful women around,” I suggested, “to rescue me.”

  “A good idea,” she said. “Artie, say hello to Ifigenia, and be good to her for a while.”

  “Okay,” Arturo said.

  She grinned and winked at me. “See you later, Felicio,” she said, and was off.

  38

  In a funny way, I was disappointed. I’d wanted to do the caper. Hiding in the men’s room, eating Ifigenia’s quesillo in the Hall of Records at midnight, sliding out in the morning just before Leon Kaplan would march in; then all of a sudden, it became too easy.

  But that was a quibble; basically, I was delighted. We’d had a terrible danger hanging over our heads — mostly Lola’s head, but mine too — and now, as far as we could see, it was swept away. So I returned to the back of the Impala, Arturo got behind the wheel, and he drove me back to Casa Montana Mojoca.

  And along the way, we also resolved the question of the quesillo, though not quite as easily. Arturo was very hoggish about that dessert, until finally I said to him, “Arturo, what am I gonna say, the next time I see Ifigenia and she asks me how was the quesillo?”

  “What makes you think,” he wanted to know, “you’re gonna see her again?”

  “I’ll make it my business to see her again, Arturo,” I said.

  He glowered at me in the mirror, but he knew when he was beaten, and there was no further discussion on the subject of quesillos.

  Being basically a sunny guy, Arturo had gotten over it by the time we reached the ferry, because, as he himself said, “She’ll make another.”

  “I’m sure she will,” I said.

  It was midafternoon by the time we reached the river, and two other taxis shared the ferry with us, containing two middle-aged couples dazed by sightseeing. They wanted to chat and smile and share their experiences, but I did not. The ferry coming the other way had one taxi on it, with two Guerreran businessmen inside — white guayabera, powder-blue guayabera — arguing furiously. My old friend with the beer truck was nowhere to be seen.

  Arturo deposited me at last under the porte cochere, and I rescued the quesillo from among the beer bottles on the floor in front. “Let me know what’s going on,” I said.

  “I will,” he promised.

  “See you later.”

  “So long,” he told the quesillo.

  •

  Two days later, Saturday afternoon, Arturo phoned to say that Leon Kaplan was gone, had flown out from San Cristobal that morning. Arturo, being a cabdriver at that moment — though not Kaplan’s — had been at the airport and had seen him go.

  It was over. Kaplan might still have his suspicions, but he had no proof and he wouldn’t get any proof. Guerrera was the only place there could possibly be evidence, so if he was leaving Guerrera, it meant he’d given up.

  After Arturo’s phone call, I was too restless to stay in the room, so I went out and walked the manicured grounds for a couple of hours, alone with my thoughts. This had been much trickier, much more difficult and dangerous, than I’d guessed, with jail for Lola and murder for me, but it was over now. What a relief.

  I got back to the room around five-thirty. What would I do till dinner? Nap? Shower? HBO or CNN?

  There was a knock on the door. What was this, another invitation from Dulce de Paula? I called through the door, “Yes?”

  “Rooh sehvice.”

  “Wrong room,” I called. “I didn’t order anything.”

  “Tree two tree,” called the voice. “Emory.”

  Well, now what? I opened the door and in they came, the six of them: Manfredo and Luis and the other Luis with the bad arm and José and Pedro and poco Pedro. Without, at least, his machete.

  39

  “Listen,” I said, talking fast, “let me explain something. The situation isn’t what—”

  One of them, walking by me, gave me a casual open-handed push on the chest that made me sit down quite suddenly on the bed. So I stayed there and went on talking, while they fanned out around the room.

  “—you think it is, there isn’t that much money anyway, not as much as you think, and anyway you aren’t getting any—”

  They were gathering my stuff. They put the green vinyl bag on the desk and started dumping my stuff into it, talking to each other in that guttural Guerreran Spanish all the while. They weren’t listening to me, I knew they weren’t, but I kept on anyway.

  “—of it, none of it is coming down here, you don’t gain anything by killing me, the scam worked, will you listen—”

  Two of them went into the bathroom and came back out with my toilet kit and the hotel’s shampoo and body lotion, and dumped everything into the vinyl bag.

  “—to me, this isn’t necessary, you’re only going to get yourselves in terrible trouble, the insurance company’s paying off, there’s nothing to worry about, there’s no risk in me being alive and you aren’t getting anything out of it anyway, and — will you listen to me, for Christ’s sake, will you just listen?”

  No. One of them came over, pulled a long length of cord out of his pants pocket, that hairy kind of cord that’s put on packages, blond in color, and stood in front of me to say, “Manos.”

  He didn’t speak English. “You don’t speak English?” None of them spoke English. “None of you speaks fucking English?”

  “Manos,” he said. He was beginning to look impatient.

  I didn’t want to give him my hands. I didn’t want to give him anything. For Christ’s sake, why can’t I speak adequate Spanish? Or why can’t at least one of these brain-dead assholes speak English? Why do we have to have all these different languages anyway? Why can’t we all speak together, all understand one another, why can’t we all be brothers?

  No. We’ve got to be fucking homicidal cousins.

  “Manos.”

  Two of the others came over. One of them lifted my left forearm and the other lifted my right forearm. They didn’t seem to notice I was resisting, I was even fighting back. I was still saying words, too, in that useless English, but by now even I wasn’t listening to me.

  The two assistant executioners moved my forearms closer to each other until my wrists touched, when my pal Manos tied them together with the hairy cord. I knew enough to clench my hand and forearm muscles, so I’d have at least a little slack when he was done, but it was still pretty tight.

  Meantime, another one had gone to one knee in front of me and was tying my ankles together with a similar piece of cord. Over to my left, my clothing was being removed from the closet and dresser and jammed any which way into the vinyl bag. The one who’d pushed me onto the bed in the first place came over now and pulled something out from under his shirt.

  Oh, they’re going to slit my throat right here, I thought, in horror and despair, but what he brought out was a bundle of white cloth. He shook it open, and it was a giant cotton laundry bag, with CASA MONTANA MOJOCA stenciled on it, the kind of bag they would use for dirty sheets. Full, it would stand about four feet high, with a white drawstring at the top. The bag was frayed here and there, but I’m afraid it looked sturdy.

  The guy holding this bag gave me a second push, which flopped me onto my back on the bed. The two who’d helped with the hands now lifted my tied-together feet, and the pusher slid the opening of the bag over my shoes.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” I said, and one of the others came over from my vinyl bag to stuff one of my socks into my mouth. A clean one, but still.

  “Ngngngngng,” I said, which they understood about as well as they’d understood everything else I’d said so far and cared about as much, too.

  They stood me up. They raised the bag up around me. They pushed down on my head, crumpling me so that I bent at the ankle and knee and hip and neck and would have bent at o
ther spots too, if I could. They drew the drawstring closed over my head and I heard them knot it. And then I heard the vinyl bag zip shut.

  They weren’t going to kill me here. They were going to remove me, along with everything connected with me, so that I would never have existed in this room. They were going to take me and my vinyl bag away to somewhere private. I wasn’t sure what they’d do with the vinyl bag once they got it there, but I was pretty sure I knew what they meant to do with me.

  I was completely off balance, scrunched up in the laundry bag, but they didn’t let me topple over. They held me, casually but firmly, and after a minute I was lifted, and two of them carried me, one with an arm wrapped around my ankles, the other holding the laundry bag knot over his shoulder, so that the back of my head was against his shoulder blade and I would be transported head first.

  I heard the hall door open. I felt myself being lurched forward. Behind me, I heard the hall door shut.

  We moved in sporadic treks. I suppose two of them stayed out ahead to be sure the coast was clear, and two brought up the rear to be sure no one overtook us, while my two porters bore me on. Then, as we stopped yet again, I heard some sort of metallic rattling sound, and a pause, and my stomach spasmed as we dropped!

  No, not drop. An elevator. Not the regular elevator, the service elevator.

  Of course. Somebody who worked here was connected to the cousins somehow and had recognized me, or learned about me, and passed the word on. How the cousins had got onto the ferry I had no idea — maybe they had a boat and came down the river — but their inside man (or woman) had led them straight to me and was now leading them — with me — back out again.

  But how could they possibly get me across the river? Was there reason for hope after all?

  The elevator stopped with a whump. More metallic rattling sounds, which I now realized was the elevator door opening, and then the stop-start progress began again.

  We were outdoors. Even within the bag, I could sense the difference in the air. We were outside, and we’d stopped again, and I heard a metallic rattling sound once more, but slightly different. Another elevator?

  No. I was turned upright — head at the top, fortunately — and then I was jammed into something tall and narrow, hard sides pressing close against me, and I had a moment of panic, thinking it was a coffin — they weren’t going to take me across the river, they meant to bury me right here on the hotel grounds, bury me alive — and then my back hit hard things that moved, bumpy uncomfortable things that were a bit unsteady, rocking this way and that, no more than an inch or two in any direction. I was trying to figure out what the hell this was — where am I? what’s going on here? — when I heard the metallic rattling sound again, and the light went away from in front of me as something descended.

  Something sliding downward in front of me, cutting off the light. Various square-shaped boxy things behind me, jerking around slightly. A faint familiar smell in the air.

  All at once, I knew where I was, and then I understood the whole thing: who had betrayed me to the cousins, and how they would get me across the river.

  I was in the beer truck.

  40

  The body of the beer truck was divided into walled compartments on both sides, each the width of two cases, each with its own door that could slide up out of the way or slide down to be locked. I don’t know how deep those compartments were, but I was wedged into the space available when the front stack of cases is removed. One inch in any direction and I met a wall or a beer case or the door.

  And I wasn’t alone. Faintly I could hear voices around me, and I realized at least some of the cousins would be traveling in this manner too, except not tied up in a laundry bag. That’s the way they had gotten to the hotel and the way we all would leave.

  I don’t know how the cousins felt about that journey, but I hated it. The beer truck rocked a lot, even on the decent access road of Casa Montana Mojoca, and the ferry, when we got to it, didn’t merely rock, it also rolled. I truly did not want to throw up with a bag over my head, but it was a close thing.

  We reached the other shore, and the beer truck ground its way through the gears as it went up-slope from the ferry landing. Hands up to my face, sock spit out, I was now trying to undo the knots in that nasty tight cord with my teeth, but being jounced around so much by the beer truck meant I was mostly biting myself on the wrists. Still, I kept at it, having no other course of action I could think of, except to fill my pants, which I was trying very hard not to do. Let’s let everything on the inside stay on the inside and everything on the outside stay on the outside, and let’s see if I have any wits at all to keep about me, because somehow or other I have got to get away from these people.

  Sure. Tied hand and foot, knotted into a laundry bag, locked in the compartment of a beer truck driving thirty miles an hour through the jungle. Over to you, Mr. Houdini; what I’m mostly doing is biting my wrists.

  The beer truck slowed. It tilted way over, bouncing me into the door. Was it going to capsize? You can’t capsize on dry land. What the hell was it doing?

  Coming to a stop. On the side of the road, obviously, the right side — we drive on the right in Guerrera — and I was in a compartment on the right side, so when the truck stopped, since I had neither hands nor feet to help me support myself in here, I sagged helpless against the door.

  Which, a minute later, opened. That was painful. The door was a series of connected slats, like an overhead garage door, so it could follow its track on a curve up under the truck roof, and every one of those slats shaved my entire body on the way by. But what could I do? I was off balance; I couldn’t get away from it.

  And then the door was open, so naturally I fell out. Fortunately, the rocky ground stopped me, starting with my head. I rolled over, stunned, and hands pulled me up to a sort of seated position: what would be a seated position for Humpty-Dumpty immediately after the fall. There was a tiny pause, and then I was hit hard on the side of the head, just above and behind my right ear.

  Everything before this had hurt, but that blow hurt. However, I was quick enough, thank God, to realize at once that the purpose of that hit, with a piece of wood or something, was not to chastise me for misspelling quesillo but to knock me out. Therefore, if I moved around or yelled ow or anything like that, they would know I was still conscious and they would hit me again. So I did the only thing I could do, which was flop over onto the ground and play dead. Or play unconscious, anyway.

  They accepted the idea. They believed I was unconscious, so they didn’t hit me again. I had been bound and gagged and bagged, I hurt all over, I was developing a truly terrible headache, I was on the ground amid six brutal maniacs determined to kill me, but I didn’t get hit again. We take our victories where we find them.

  They picked me up, a lot of them, not gently, and carried me over uneven ground awhile, not gently, and then dropped me onto a hard metal surface, not at all gently. The hard metal surface then dipped a couple of times. Boots made ringing noises against it near my ear.

  Their pickup truck. I was lying in the bed, and my kidnappers were boarding. In the distance, I heard the beer truck drive away. And then some sort of tarp or something was thrown over me, making it much darker inside my bag, and the truck moved forward, and all of a sudden, some kind of delayed reaction took place, and I wasn’t conscious.

  •

  The sound of rain. No, not rain. I was still in the bag, in the bed of the pickup, covered with a tarp, but the truck was not moving. And that sound I heard was six men pissing.

  I worked my wrists up to my mouth again. I’ve got to get out of this. I don’t want to die, I’m already dead, I want to live. I can’t give up; we never say die, do we? Do we?

  The truck dipped and bounced as they all climbed back aboard. The truck jolted forward, and I felt the cord with lips and teeth.

  The knot is too tight, I can’t pull it loose with my teeth. If I try, they’ll see my head moving, and they’ll clobber
me again to keep me quiet.

  Can I bite it? Can I gnaw it, like a rat? If I can’t I’m a dead man, so the answer better be yes.

  There was one little area, between my wrists, below my thumbs, where the cord did not stick into my flesh but stood out plain. By loosely cupping my hands around my eyes and sticking my nose into the space between my thumbs, I could just get to that cord with my front teeth, the sharp ones. Sharper. I kept licking the rope, licking my teeth, licking my lips, and in between I chewed on the rope, which tasted something like Shredded Wheat without the milk and sugar.

  I don’t know how long we traveled, but a long time. An hour? More. I was wearing my Rolex, but under the circumstances I couldn’t exactly consult it. If they were taking me home to Tapitepe, that would be a trip of 200 miles. In this pickup it could take four hours. It seemed to me horribly likely they’d prefer to get rid of me sooner, but on the other hand, they did have to go home to Tapitepe anyway, and they might know the countryside better around there, have more secure places to stash me where I’d definitely never ever be found.

  So, after one long time, they stopped and only one or two got out, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on until I smelled gasoline. Then, being as egocentric as anybody else, my first thought was, They’re going to burn the body! Before it’s dead!

  But then I realized, No, they were just filling the pickup’s gas tank. Which they did, and we rode on.

  This was boring work, gnawing through hairy cord, but I didn’t have anything else to occupy my time, so I kept at it. Every once in a while, somebody would poke me with a foot to see if I were conscious and ready to be slugged again, but I always lay doggo and spared myself further punishment.

  Up until the stop for gas, I had no real feeling of accomplishment with the cord. I had it nice and wet, and it was less hairy, while my teeth were more hairy, and it seemed thinner and more wirelike, but I wasn’t noticing any loss of strength. Sometime after the stop for gas, however, I felt it start to give. A faint loosening around the wrists. The ability to move my thumbs just a tiny bit farther apart. Encouraged, damn near elated, I gnawed on.