by Ed McBain
The story he’d told them was that the travel group going down there to Guerrera contained a bunch of evangelicals, looking for converts, so Janet would ship the boxes out of the United States as missals and hymnals. Tonight, they’d leave the boxes at Seven Leagues, and in the morning she’d cover them with all the necessary tags and stickers, and the van carrying all the tour group’s luggage would come by to pick them up and take them down to JFK.
Once the boxes had been lugged into Seven Leagues and the door relocked, Querk said, “You fellas need a lift to your car?”
“No, that’s okay,” Kelp said, pointing vaguely north, out of town. “We’re parked just up there.”
Dortmunder said, “You want to get the truck back.”
“I sure do.”
Should he shake hands with them? He felt he should; it would be the more comradely thing to do. Sticking his hand out in Kelp’s direction, he said, “It’s been good working with you.”
Kelp had a sunny smile, even in the middle of the night. Pumping Querk’s hand, he said, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Shaking Dortmunder’s hand, bonier than Kelp’s but less powerful, Querk said, “We’ll be in touch.”
“You know it,” Dortmunder said.
“You know where to find me.”
“Sure do,” Dortmunder said.
Well. That was comradely enough. “I better get this truck back before sunup,” he said.
“Sure,” they said, and waved at him, and he got into the truck.
He had to make a K turn to go back the other way, cumbersome with this big vehicle. He headed toward the traffic light as Dortmunder and Kelp walked off northward, disappearing almost immediately into the darkness, there being streetlights only here in the center of town.
As he drove toward the traffic light, he passed Sycamore House on his left, and resisted the impulse to tap the horn. But Janet would see him, and a horn sounding here in the middle of the night might attract attention. Attention from Dortmunder and Kelp, in any case.
So he drove on, the traffic light graciously turning green as he reached the intersection. Behind him, Janet in the Cirrus would now have seen the truck go by twice, and would know the job had gone well. He could hardly wait to get back to her.
Querk grinned all the way to the garage, where he put the truck away, backing it in the way it had been before. Then he got into the Honda for the last time in his life and drove it back to Sycamore, not only grinning now but also humming a little and at times even whistling between his teeth. To his right, the sky was just beginning to pale; dawn was on the way.
Sycamore. Once again the traffic light gave him a green. He drove through the intersection, turned into the Sycamore House parking lot, and put the Honda next to the Cirrus. He switched off the lights and the engine and stepped out to the blacktop, leaving the keys in the car. Turning to the Cirrus, he expected Janet to either start the engine or step out to speak to him. When she did neither, he bent to look into the car, and it was empty.
What? Why? They’d agreed to meet here when the job was done, so what happened? Where was she?
Maybe she’d needed to go to the bathroom. Or maybe she started to get uncomfortable in the car, after almost four hours, and decided to go wait in the office instead. The whole purpose of her being here the whole time was so he’d have his own backup means of escape in case anything were to go wrong with the job. Once she’d seen the truck, she had to know the job had gone well.
So she must be up at Seven Leagues. Querk left the parking lot and walked up the street, taking the Seven Leagues key out of his pocket. When he reached the place, there were no lights on inside. That was strange.
He unlocked the door, entered, closed the door, felt around on the wall for the light switch, found it, and stared, unbelieving.
“Surprise,” Dortmunder said.
19
Between dinner and the job, in fact, Dortmunder and Kelp had found a number of things to keep them interested, if not completely surprised. Primarily, they’d wanted to know what part Janet Twilley planned to take in tonight’s exercises, if any, and so had driven out to the Twilley house a little before eleven, seeing lights still on in there. They’d visited that house last week, learning more about Roger Twilley than anybody else on Earth, and had found none of it pleasant. If Janet Twilley wanted to begin life anew with Kirby Querk, they couldn’t argue the case, not with what they knew of Roger, just so she didn’t plan to do it with their siapas.
They were parked down the block from the Twilley residence, discussing how to play this—should Kelp drive Dortmunder back to town, to keep an eye on the plant, while Kelp kept the car and maintained an observation post chez Twilley—when Roger decided their moves for them. The first thing they saw was the garage door open over there.
“The light didn’t come on,” Dortmunder said.
“I knew there was something,” Kelp said.
Next, a car backed out of the garage, also with no lights on, and moving very slowly. Not only that, Roger himself came trotting out of the garage right after the car, so who was driving?
Turned out, nobody. Fascinated, they watched Roger push his car around in a great loop to park it on their side of the street, about two houses away.
“He, too, knows something’s up,” Kelp said.
Dortmunder said, “But he doesn’t know what.”
“He’s gonna follow her.”
“So we,” Dortmunder said, “follow him.”
“I got a better idea,” Kelp said. “Have we got that bag in the back?”
“In the trunk? Yeah.”
On an outing like this, they always traveled with that bag. Small, it was packed with extra materials that, who knew, might come in handy. Tools of various kinds, ID of various kinds, weapons of various kinds, and handcuffs of just one kind.
“What do you need from it?” Dortmunder asked.
“The cuffs. I’ll ride in the back of the peeping tom’s car, take him out if there’s a problem, borrow it myself if she doesn’t come out to be followed. You stash this car in town, tell Kirby I’ll meet up with you guys at the plant.”
So that’s what they did, Dortmunder learning some more along the way, beginning with the fact that the driver’s seat had even less legroom than the passenger seat. He stashed the compact in the Sycamore House parking lot, but stayed with it, and was there when Querk arrived, parked his Honda, and went off to set things up over at the printery.
A little later, he was also about to leave when Janet Twilley drove in, shut down, but didn’t get out of her car. That was interesting. Not wanting to call attention to himself, he removed the bulb from the compact’s interior light so that everything remained dark when he eased out of the car and out of the parking lot to go over to the Hess station and wait for Querk.
One thing about the phone booth outside the Hess station; it had legroom. Dortmunder leaned his back against the phone, folded his arms, and watched the traffic light change. After a while he saw Querk cross the street and walk north, and then here he came in the Honda south.
After the job at the plant and the departure of Querk to return the generator truck, there’d been nothing left to do but gather up Janet Twilley, still at her post in her Chrysler Cirrus, and use her keys to gain entrance to Seven Leagues. As for her husband, he could stay where he was, trussed up on the floor of his own car down by Luigi’s. Good place for him.
And now it was simply a matter of waiting for Querk. And here he is.
20
Querk stared, pole-axed with shock. Janet was gagged and tied to her office chair, wide-eyed and trembling. Even her bruise was pale. Kelp, still with that sunny smile, sat near her in the client’s chair. And Dortmunder stood near Querk; not too near, but close enough so that, if Querk decided to spin around and pull the door open and run, it wouldn’t happen.
Stammering, the tremble in his hands back and worse than ever, Querk said, “What? What happened?”
&nbs
p; “We came to settle up,” Dortmunder said, while Kelp got to his feet, walked back to the unused desk, took the client’s chair from it, and brought it back to stand facing himself and Janet. “Take a load off,” he offered.
Dortmunder said, “Andy, turn the desk light on, will you? It’s too bright in here.”
Kelp did, and Dortmunder switched off the overheads that Querk had switched on. It became much dimmer in the long room, the light softer, though not what Querk thought of as cozy. Watching all this, he tried desperately to think, without much success. What was going on? What were they going to do? He said, “What’s wrong? Fellas? I thought everything was okay.”
“Not exactly okay,” Dortmunder said, as he perched on the corner of Janet’s desk.
Kelp said, “Come on, Kirby, take a chair. We’ll tell you all about it.”
So Querk sat in the chair Kelp had brought for him, and folded his shaking hands in his lap. He could feel Janet’s eyes on him, but he couldn’t bring himself to look directly at her. He was supposed to make things better for her. Tied up in a chair by two heisters from New York wasn’t better.
Kelp said, “You know, Kirby, the thing was, at first we believed there really was a Rodrigo.” He still seemed cheerful, not angry or upset, but Querk didn’t believe any of it.
“You got us there, for a while,” Dortmunder agreed. He sounded sullen, and that Querk could believe.
“What we figured,” Kelp said, “why would you go through this whole scheme unless you had a payout coming? So that’s why we believed in Rodrigo. Until, of course, we heard about Janet. Just as a by the by.”
“Just dropped in the conversation,” Dortmunder said.
“And Harry Matlock said you were a better follower than a leader,” Kelp said, “so we began to wonder, who exactly were you following? So when we came up here last week, I stopped in to see Janet.”
What? Querk now did stare directly at Janet, and she was frantically nodding, eyebrows raised almost to her hairline. “She—” Querk had to clear his throat. “She didn’t tell me.”
“She didn’t know,” Kelp said. “See, I was a customer, I was interested in going somewhere in South America, I wasn’t sure where, and we talked about, oh . . .” He looked at Janet, amiable, inquiring. “About fifteen minutes, right?” Looking at Querk again, he said, “And the funny thing, never once did she mention that tour going to Guerrera. In fact, she never even mentioned Guerrera, the whole country.”
“Probably,” Querk said, even though he knew it was hopeless, “the tour was full by then.”
“Which gets to how easy the extra two tickets were,” Kelp said. “First she can wangle one ticket, but then two tickets is easy, no sweat, you don’t even have to check back with her. But I’m getting ahead of my story.”
“I thought you were buying it,” Querk said.
Kelp’s grin got even wider. “Yeah, I know. Anyway, when I was here that time, I noticed the shiner on Janet, and you didn’t seem the type—”
“We both thought that,” Dortmunder said.
“Thank you,” Querk said.
“So we checked out her house,” Kelp said, “and that’s some winner she decided to marry.”
“I guess he didn’t seem that bad at first,” Querk said.
“Maybe,” Kelp said. “Anyway, here’s this bossy woman—”
Janet gave him a glare, which Kelp ignored.
“—with a shiner and a bad husband. And here’s you, likes to be bossed around. So we decided, what it was, you didn’t have any Rodrigo, because how is this Janet here in upstate New York gonna make that kinda connection. Also, this is not a really successful travel agency here, which you can see by the fact that the other desk isn’t used, so if she ever had an assistant or a partner the business couldn’t support that person. So maybe, just maybe, the idea is, you’ll run these half million dollars’ worth of siapas, and you and Janet will drive to Guerrera, down through Mexico and all that, maxing out your credit cards along the way. And when you get there, you find a nice place to stay, you start living on the siapas. You put ’em in a few banks down there, you can even come back up to the States sometimes and spend them like money. Of course, there wouldn’t be any for us.”
“I’m sorry,” Querk said.
Dortmunder nodded. “You certainly are.”
“You needed two guys,” Kelp said. “You couldn’t go with local amateurs, so you had to reach out for pros, and what you got was us.”
“I underestimated you,” Querk said.
“Don’t feel bad,” Kelp advised him. “That’s what we specialize in. So here you are, you’ve kissed us off, and Anne Marie and me are gonna feel really stupid tomorrow night at JFK with those imitation tickets—”
“I’m sorry,” Querk said again.
“We know,” Dortmunder said. He didn’t sound sympathetic.
“But, you know,” Kelp said, “this is better for you, because Roger knew something was up. You know, the paranoid is sometimes right, and Roger was right. So he was following Janet tonight, and if it hadn’t been for us, Roger would be making a whole lot of trouble for you people right now.”
Querk was rather afraid of Roger Twilley. “Roger?” he said. “Where is he?”
“Tied up in his car, down at Luigi’s.”
Dortmunder said, “You owe us for that one.”
“Well,” Kelp said, “he owes us for the whole score.”
“That’s true,” Dortmunder said.
Rising, Kelp said, “I’ll go get our wheels, you explain it.”
Kelp was the pleasant one. Why couldn’t Dortmunder go get their car? But, no; Kelp nodded at Querk and left the shop, and it was Dortmunder who said, “This is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna leave you one box of the siapas, that’s a hundred grand you can take down to Guerrera, get you started. In six months, you come up to New York, you buy at least one more box from us, half price. Fifty grand for a hundred grand of siapas. You can buy them all then, or you can buy a box every six months.”
Querk said, “Where am I gonna get that money?”
“You’re gonna steal it,” Dortmunder told him. “That’s what you do, remember? You gave up on reform.”
Querk hung his head. The thought of a Guerreran jail moved irresistably through his mind.
Meanwhile, Dortmunder said, “If you don’t show up in six months, the four boxes go to the cops with an anonymous letter with your names and a description of the scheme and where you’re hiding out, and the probable numbers on your siapas. And then you’ve got nothing.”
“Jeez,” Querk said.
“Look at it this way,” Dortmunder suggested. “You lied to us, you abused our trust, but we aren’t getting even, we aren’t hurting you. Because all we want is what’s ours. So, one way or another, you keep your side of the bargain, and we keep ours.” Looking past Querk at the window, he said, “Here’s the goddam compact. I hope we can fit these boxes in there. Come on, Querk, help me carry the loot.”
“All right.” Rising, Querk said, “What do we do about Roger?”
“Nothing,” Dortmunder said. “Luigi’s cook’ll find him in the morning, let him decide what to do. Come on, grab a box.”
So Querk did, the two of them shlepping the boxes one at a time, Kelp busily moving crap around inside the car. They managed to cram three of the boxes into the trunk and one on its side on the alleged back seat, with their luggage on top.
At the end, feeling humble, Querk said to them both, on the sidewalk, “I wanna thank you guys. You could of made things a lot tougher for me.”
“Well,” Dortmunder said, “I wouldn’t say you were getting off scot free.” He nodded at Seven Leagues. “Sooner or later, you’re gonna have to take off that gag.”
ANNE PERRY
_________
Anne Perry is the bestselling author of two Victorian detective series that are practically mandatory reading for any aficionado of the historical mystery. Her Thomas Pitt series and the William a
nd Hester Monk series, although both set in the same nineteenth-century London, take very different looks at English society. She is also writing another acclaimed historical series set during the French Revolution, and consisting of the books A Dish Taken Cold and The One Thing More. She has also started another series set during World War I, which launched with the acclaimed novel No Graves As Yet. Besides this, she has also written a fantasy duology, Tathea and Come Armageddon. But no matter what genre she writes in, her deft, detailed research, multifaceted characters, and twisting plots have garnered her fans around the world. In her spare time she lectures on writing in such places as the cruise ship the Queen Elizabeth II Recent books include A Christmas Journey, featuring a secondary character from the Thomas Pitt novels taking center stage, and the second volume in her World War I series, Shoulder the Sky. She makes her home in the highlands of Scotland.
HOSTAGES
Anne Perry
Bridget folded the last pair of trousers and put them into the case. She was looking forward to the holiday so much there was a little flutter of excitement in her stomach. It would not be the west coast she loved with its clean wind off the Atlantic and the great waves pounding in, because that would mean crossing the border into Eire, and they could not do that. But the north coast held its own beauty, and it would be away from Belfast, from Connor’s responsibilities to the church, and most of all to the political party. There was always something he had to do, a quarrel to arbitrate, someone’s bereavement to ease, a weakness to strengthen, a decision to make, and then argue and persuade.
It had been like that as long as she had known him, as it had been for his father. But then the Irish Troubles were over three hundred years old, in one form or another. The courage with which you fought for your beliefs defined who you were.
There was room for more in the suitcase. She looked around to see what else to put in just as Liam came to the door. He was sixteen, tall and lean like Connor, not yet filled out with muscle, and very conscious of it.