“Banty,” I said, “I don’t like it. Let’s take her back and be done with it.”
“Wait a minute. I’m thinking.” Banty was pinching the end of his nose again, staring at Felicia Gotlot with odd intensity, and it was apparent that he was thinking hard and fast about something that just come into his head. “I’m beginning to believe this dame. She is Felicia Gotlot, all right. Look at that dress. It doesn’t look like much, and there isn’t much to it, that’s for sure, but I’ll bet it cost three, four hundred at least, if it cost a penny. Look at that bracelet on her wrist. Those are real diamonds, if I ever saw one. Look at that fur piece. It could be mink, and I’ll bet it is.”
He started out talking quietly enough, but the more he said, taking inventory, the more his voice changed. It didn’t get louder or faster, nothing like that, but a kind of excitement came into it, something you could feel more than hear. After the inventory, he was silent for quite a while, still staring at her, and that sense of excitement was as real then, when he was silent, as it was before, when he was talking. All of a sudden he reached inside his coat with his right hand, and I thought he was reaching for a cigarette, but he wasn’t. He was reaching for a gun, a .38, and he pointed it over the back of the seat at Felicia Gotlot.
“Get up front,” he said. “Never mind getting out. Just crawl over.”
I said, “You lost your marbles, Banty?”
“Don’t ask questions,” Banty said. “She wants a kidnapping, she’ll get one. A real one.” The excitement was so big inside him now that his voice began to shake a little from it, but the gun in his hand was steady. “Don’t you get it, Carny? This is the big break. This is what I’ve been waiting for. This is good luck coming after bad. And it just walked in. Just walked right in and went to sleep. A rich little tramp with a load of gin. It’s like fate or something. A man can’t turn his back on fate, Carny. A man who did that would never have any luck again, never as long as he lived.”
It scared me, honest, hearing him talk like that, almost as if he were in a kind of spell, and he meant it all, every word of it. I knew it, and Felicia Gotlot knew it.
“I don’t want any part of it,” I said.
“It doesn’t make any difference what you want,” he said. “You’ve got part of it whether you want it or not. This is a snatch, as of right now, and you’re in it just as much as I am. You take my advice and play along, Carny, because the stakes are big. Five hundred grand against the chamber. Think of that, Carny. A cool half million. Peanuts to old Gotlot for his precious daughter. Maybe we could make it a million. I’ll think about it.”
There was no use arguing with him, or trying to get him to be reasonable at all in that queer mood he was so suddenly in, and Felicia Gotlot understood this as well as I did, for she simply crawled over the back of the seat with a big display of nylon that I’d have appreciated more some other time. She settled down between me and Banty, and Banty handed me the .38 and said, “If she makes a sound or a move, belt her over the head with it,” and we went on down the highway toward the forty acres of rock that Uncle Oakley had left to Cousin Theodore.
We had the devil of a time finding it in the dark, because it was a long way off the highway on a little gravel road leading into the hills, but we finally found it, after a lot of wrong turns and dead ends, and it was hardly worth finding at all, let alone with so much trouble, for it was nothing but a three-room shack made of rough native lumber that was as gray and weathered against the side of its hill as all the rocks around it. It turned out, though, that there was a good fishing stream on the place, and Cousin Theodore came down here often to fish. As a consequence, the place was stocked with sheets and blankets and cooking utensils and things like that, including a lot of canned goods.
There wasn’t any gas or electricity, only kerosene lamps and a wood stove in the kitchen for cooking, and Banty, who had clearly been here before, found some kerosene and lit some lamps while I watched Felicia Gotlot to keep her from getting away, although I don’t know where she’d have gone in those dark hills so far from anywhere. The truth is, she didn’t seem to have going anywhere in mind at the moment, and I don’t blame her.
One of the three rooms was a bedroom, with nothing in it but a bed and a chest with a mirror over it, and we put Felicia Gotlot in there. There was no way of locking her in, which was a problem, and Banty said we’d have to tie her feet and hands.
“It isn’t necessary to tie me,” she said. “There’s nowhere to go, and I wouldn’t know which direction it was if there were.”
“We’ll tie you anyhow, just to be safe,” Banty said. “It won’t hurt you, and it won’t be for long, because this job is hot, and I intend to work fast with it.”
She kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed, and we tore a sheet into strips to tie her with. We tied her hands together and her feet together and tied her at both ends to the head and the foot of the bed. We left enough slack so she could move some and be fairly comfortable, but not enough so she could sit up or reach her feet with her hands by bending. Then Banty went out to the kitchen to build a fire in the stove and make some coffee, but I hung back after he was gone. I don’t know why I did, exactly, except that I was feeling kind of bad about tying her to the bed that way, like an animal or something. To tell the truth, I admired her and respected her and wished we weren’t doing to her what we were. You had to admire and respect her, I mean. She had plenty of moxie, besides being kidnapped and all, without crying or making a big fuss, and she knew it was her fault for talking too much, letting Banty know who she was, after getting loaded on gin and crawling into the car and going to sleep. She took the blame, as I figured it, and was quiet and sensible.
“You want some coffee?” I asked.
“No.”
“Well, good-night, then,” I said.
“Go to hell,” she said.
I went out to the kitchen instead, and Banty and I sat down at a table and had some coffee when it was ready.
“When you’ve had your coffee,” Banty said, “you’d better get some sleep because after I leave in the morning you probably won’t get much.”
“Where you going?”
“To Kansas City to get the money. Half a million. I’ve decided not to press our luck.”
It seemed to me he was already pressing it, but I didn’t say so. “You’d better get some sleep yourself,” I said.
“I’ll catch a few hours after I get back to KC. Then I’ll call old Gotlot and arrange for the payoff.”
“What if he won’t pay?”
“He’ll pay. I’ll tell him we’ll kill his precious daughter if he doesn’t.”
“What if he won’t?”
“Then we’ll kill her.”
“I hope he pays,” I said. I took a drink of coffee and wished it was whiskey. “What then?”
“I’ll drive back here with the money, and we go on south.”
“What do we do with Felicia?”
“We leave her here, tied to the bed. We’ll send a letter to the police after we leave, telling where she is. She’ll get hungry and thirsty waiting, but she won’t be hurt any.”
“Just a minute. We’ll have to wait until we’re a long way south before sending the letter, and the postmark will tell which way we’re heading.”
“There’s the difference between you and me, Carny. You’re stupid, and I’m not. We’ll send the letter from the nearest town. Only we’ll send it to the police in New York or Los Angeles or someplace like that, and they’ll have to call back to KC. It’ll give us plenty of time to get a long way away, and no one but us will know which way it is.”
“I have to hand it to you,” I said. “You’ve been doing a lot of thinking, all right.”
“I’ve always been a thinker,” he said. “I’ve just been waiting for my luck.”
&n
bsp; “I don’t like leaving Felicia Gotlot tied to the bed for so long,” I said, “and I admit it.”
“You’ll like the quarter million well enough,” he said.
“When will you be back with it? That pretty green moolah.”
“Forty to fifty hours at the longest. I’ll work fast.”
“It’s a lot of money. I never thought I’d have so much.”
“Get some sleep,” he said.
I tried, but I didn’t do much good at it. I lay down on an old leather sofa in the living room and closed my eyes, but I kept seeing things behind my lids that I didn’t want to see, and I kept thinking about how Banty had never had any luck, and wondering if he could possibly have any this time, when we needed it most, and altogether it must have been a couple of hours before I finally went to sleep, which was almost time for me to wake up again. Banty woke me, and I got up, and he was ready to leave. It wasn’t light outside yet, but you had the feeling that it would be all of a sudden before long.
“I’m on my way,” he said.
“Good luck!”
“Keep an eye on that dame. She’s tricky.”
“You can count on me,” I said.
“I’ve got to,” he said, “and I do.”
He went out, and I could hear the jalopy start up and move off down the gravel road toward the highway, the sound of it growing fainter and fainter until it was gone completely, and then I went into the kitchen and lit a kerosene lamp and made a fire in the wood-burning stove. There was a full pail of spring water that Banty had brought in last night, and I put coffee on to perk and checked the supplies to see what I could find for breakfast. There was no bread or eggs or milk or butter, of course, nothing fresh, but there was a package of ready-mixed pancake flour and some cans of condensed milk. I found a skillet, made some batter with the flour and condensed milk, and fried some pancakes in the skillet that looked as good as you could want, if I do say so myself. By this time the coffee was done, and I went through the living room into the bedroom where Felicia Gotlot was, and she was awake.
“You sleep all right?” I asked.
“Wonderful,” she said. “It’s so comfortable being tied in bed that I’m going to sleep that way all the time from now on.”
“You want some breakfast?”
“If that’s coffee I smell, I’ll have some of that.”
“It’s coffee, all right. If you promise to behave yourself, I’ll untie you and you can come out to the kitchen.”
“My behavior, it seems to me, is pretty well determined. It’s your behavior that concerns me.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t bother you any.”
I untied her, and she swung her legs over the side of the bed, smoothing down the narrow skirt that had slipped up her thighs in the night. After rubbing her wrists for a minute and bending over to rub her ankles afterward, she stood up and went out ahead of me into the kitchen. I poured two cups of coffee and divided the pancakes into two stacks on a pair of tin plates that I found in a cabinet.
“I’d like to wash my face and hands,” she said.
“Go ahead. There’s some water in the pail there.”
“Where did it come from? Is there a well or something?”
“Not a well. A spring. There are springs all through these hills. Springs and caves.”
“How do you know so much about it?”
“I was born down here. Not far from here.”
‘Truly? I had the impression you were probably hatched from a billiard ball someplace in KC.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Never mind.”
She washed in the cold water, using a pan beside the pail, and dried herself on a towel hanging from a nail in the wall. Then she combed her short hair with her fingers, lacking anything else to do it with, and we sat down at the table and began to drink coffee and eat pancakes. She ate as if she were hungry, which she probably was, and didn’t complain about not having any butter for her pancakes or sugar and real cream for her coffee, nothing like that. She was altogether a remarkable young dame, I’ve got to admit it, besides being the prettiest one I had ever seen close up in my life, or far away either, for that matter, in spite of being rumpled and tousled with last night still in her face.
She gave me an uneasy feeling, and I didn’t like it. It was the kind of feeling you get over some girl when you’re a kid, before you’re old enough to know better, and it makes you think crazy and act crazy. It’s bad in a kid and worse in a man. I wasn’t acting crazy yet because I hadn’t had time, but I found myself wishing all at once that she was someone besides who she was, Felicia Gotlot, and I was someone besides who I was, a guy called Carny, and that there was a chance of our being something to each other besides what we were and had to be but she wasn’t, and I wasn’t, and there wasn’t. I hoped Banty would hurry back from KC, and meanwhile, I decided, I’d better think less about her and more about the quarter of a million dollars I was going to have all for my own to spend as I pleased.
It had got light outside, and by the time we’d finished our cakes and coffee it was light inside too, light enough to blow out the kerosene lamp, which I did. We washed up the tin plates and the skillet and went into the living room, and it looked like a long day, waiting and waiting for Banty and wondering all the time where he was and what he was doing and how long he would be, and it was made longer and worse by having started so early, and by the problem of what to do with Felicia Gotlot.
I decided not to tie her up again until night, unless she tried something tricky that made it necessary, and I told her this, and she said thanks, she appreciated it. Sarcasm.
“Remember I’ve got this .38 in my pocket,” I said.
“I remember.”
“Don’t think I won’t use it if you make me.”
“Would you?”
She found some old magazines and began to leaf through them, and I smoked and watched her for a while. Then I thought I’d have another cup of coffee, and went after it, and she said she’d have another cup too, and so I brought it. I sat down and began to drink my coffee, and she drank hers, but she kept looking at me over her cup with this odd expression.
“What are you looking at?” I asked.
“You,” she said.
“Well, cut it out.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like it.”
“Do you know what I was thinking? I was thinking about what you might have been like as a kid in these hills.”
“I was dirty and ragged and ignorant.”
“You must have had a lot of fun.”
“Sure I did! My old man was a drunken bum and my old lady was a drunken slob.”
“Is that why you left home?”
“Partly.”
“What’s the other part?”
“Just to get away from these rocks and see if I could find a dollar to carry in my pocket.”
“Did you find one?”
“I’ve been doing all right.”
“Now you’re going to do even better, aren’t you? Now you’re going to have a whole quarter of a million dollars to carry in your pocket.”
“That’s right.”
“No, it isn’t. That’s wrong.”
“You think so? Wait and see.”
“Do you really imagine that fellow you called Banty can pull off something like this?”
“Sure. Why not? Banty’s smart.”
“I doubt it. Anyhow, he’s weak. He doesn’t have anything inside. He’s just some curly hair on top of nothing.”
“You don’t know him, that’s all.”
“I don’t have to know him. All I had to do was look at him and hear him talk. You’ll find out. He’ll botch the job and squeal on you, and both of you will e
nd up in prison, and maybe in the gas chamber.”
“Shut up. If you haven’t got anything sensible to say, just keep your mouth shut.”
“Take my advice. Get out while you can. You could get away if you left right now.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“It makes no difference to me, really. I just hate to see you get into any more trouble than you’re already in. That Banty’s bad luck.”
“I should tie you in bed and leave you there.”
“Have it your own way,” she said.
She shrugged and began leafing through another old magazine, and I began to think again about Banty and try to figure when he’d probably be back. He hadn’t told me any schedule, of course, because that was something he’d have to work out in KC after he got there, but I figured he’d probably contact Arnold Gotlot tonight, or maybe even this afternoon, since the job was hot. Besides, he wouldn’t want to prolong his chances of running accidentally into Archie Flowers or one of his boys. He’d tell Arnold Gotlot about having Felicia and wanting the half million to give her back alive, and then he’d probably hang up and let Gotlot think about it for a while. Later on, maybe tonight or early tomorrow, he’d call again from another phone and set the time and place exactly for the payoff. I didn’t know where the place or when the time would be, naturally, but I knew, knowing Banty, that the place would be one he’d choose carefully and the time would be soon, and it was my bet that it would be tomorrow night. That meant Banty would be back early the next morning at the latest, probably between midnight and daylight.
As I expected, it was a long day and a bad one, and I thought it would never pass, but it did. We ate something from cans about noon, and something else from cans before dark, and between the two times, Felicia Gotlot went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed and had a nap. I was tired and sleepy myself, having started the day so early after a hard night, but I didn’t dare go to sleep because of having to watch Felicia Gotlot, to see that she didn’t run away, maybe hitting me over the head or shooting me with my own .38 before running. I made her leave the door to the bedroom open so I could see her lying in there from where I sat, and I played Old Sol ten times with a pack of cards I found, and he beat me every time.
The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK Page 39