Riding the Rap

by Elmore Leonard

  “Man, put your ski mask on.”

  Bobby said, “Fuck the ski mask, it’s too hot. I’m gonna hit the guy before he has time to see us.” He opened the door and got out.

  Louis sat there making up his mind—wear the ski mask or don’t wear it—watching Bobby outside now in the trees, Bobby anxious, huh? So anxious he almost got out of the car without a piece. Louis opened his door. Okay, no ski masks—shoved them back into the glove box and felt the roll of silver tape. Man, so anxious himself he almost forgot it. Once out of the car he told himself to be cool. Understand? You a pro, man. You know what you doing.

  He saw Mr. Ben King two trees away in deep shade, a big pink-and-white shape bent over his lie. Changing his mind then, using the clubhead to tap the ball away from the tree. Tapping it again to improve his lie. Louis moved up behind Bobby in the tree shade, about twenty feet from the pink-and-white man, watching him taking a practice swing now. The clubhead brushed against pine needles on the backswing and the man looked over his shoulder. He saw them, or saw something to make him turn around and now he was facing them, the cigar in his mouth, standing straight up staring at them. So they moved toward him. Bobby, holding his piece against his leg, said, “How you doing?” as friendly as Louis had ever heard him.

  The man wasn’t buying it. He said, “What do you want?” When they kept coming he said, “This is a private course. Get the hell off, right now.”

  There was nothing left to do but go for him, Bobby ahead of Louis as Louis told the guy, “Turn around,” brought up his piece to put it on him and said, “You hear? Turn the fuck around.”

  The man was turning, yeah, but getting ready to swing his golf club, but then hunched his shoulder as Bobby got to him and clubbed him over the head with his piece, the barrel part, chopped him, the man’s sun visor coming down on his face, the cigar gone. But the man didn’t drop like in the movies when getting hit over the head knocks the person out; Louis had never seen it happen in real life and he had seen people hit over the head with guns and heavy objects. The man was staggered, but still trying to swing his golf club at Bobby. Louis took the man around the neck as Bobby was about to chop him again and twisted, bringing the man over his hip and they both went down, the man’s thick body struggling against him, Louis trying to tussle him still while holding his piece and the fucking tape in his hands, Bobby saying, “Let me hit him good,” Louis saying to hold the motherfucker, will you? and Bobby stepped on the man’s wrist, reached down to take the golf club from him and shoved the grip end against his mouth, twisting so it would go inside. Louis sat on him now, laid his piece on the man’s chest so he’d have two hands to tear off some tape, then had to pull the man’s sun visor up off his face. So now they were looking at each other eye to eye, Louis feeling the man memorizing his face, every fucking line of it, before he stuck the tape over the man’s eyes. Bobby pulled out the golf club and Louis stuck a piece over the man’s mouth.

  Bobby said, “Some golf carts . . .”

  Louis looked up. Three hundred yards away a foursome was teeing off. Time to leave. He said to the blindfolded man, “You coming with us. Hear? So don’t give us no trouble. Stand up.”

  Bobby put his piece in the man’s face and cocked it. He said, “You give me any more shit, you dead.”

  They brought him through the trees to the car, taped his hands behind him quick, put him in the trunk and got out of there.

  Up to Royal Poinciana and across the bridge to West Palm.

  Louis said, “We should’ve wore the ski masks.”

  Bobby said it again, “Fuck the ski mask.” Like saying he didn’t care the man had seen them.

  Louis had to ask himself what he thought about that. What it meant.

  The last time the door opened, about a half hour ago, someone came in, didn’t make a sound, didn’t touch him, was in the room no more than ten seconds and out again, Harry thinking whoever it was had maybe left another snack; it wasn’t time for a meal. He took off the bathing cap and looked at the floor, looked at the trash on the other cot. . . . His peanut brittle was gone. These fucking guys, these creeps, one of them gives you a treat and another one steals it.

  This time he knew right away it wasn’t just one guy. Harry had his bathing cap down over his eyes as soon as he heard them at the door. He sat on the side of the cot hunched over, arms resting on his thighs. He heard one of them making kind of a grunting sound, maybe in pain. He heard something hit the wall opposite him and a groan and a voice say, “Goddamn it, take it easy.” A deep, kind of loud voice. Harry raised his head and almost asked if he had a cellmate, feeling surprised and a lift along with it, wanting to say something, and was glad he didn’t. One of them put a hand on his head and pushed him back; he had to grab the edge of the cot to keep from hitting the wall. He heard the chains then, rattling, and heard the same deep voice say, “The hell you doing, chaining me up? What is this? Will you tell me, for Christ sake, have I been kidnapped? If that’s what this is, guys, you have to get in line. There’re between four and five hundred people say I owe them money.” There was a silence then, except for the sound of the chains. Harry waited, listening inside the hot rubber bathing cap. Now he heard the voice again. “What’re you doing? . . . Jesus Christ, you’re tearing my skin off.” It was quiet then. Harry imagined the voice belonged to a guy who was maybe his age, maybe a little younger, but a big guy, robust, heavyset. He imagined them ripping tape from the guy’s eyes and blindfolding him with something else. How about another bathing cap? Harry could see himself and the guy sitting here like a couple of aquacaders waiting to go on. He heard the guy’s voice again say, “Which one are you,” quieter this time, “the colored guy or the spic?” Harry shut his eyes inside the bathing cap and right away heard the smacking sound, the guy getting punched in the face, and another voice, with an accent, saying, “I’m the spic.” Harry heard him get smacked again and the Latino voice say, “You want to fuck with me, man? You gonna have a hard time here.” Harry heard a low voice, a murmur, not the words, and then the Latino voice saying, “What’s the difference? They gonna talk to each other.” Then a silence, Harry thinking: Two of them, the black guy, the one who’d spoken to him and gave him the bathing cap, and the Latino. Then another voice saying, “If that’s how you want it, I don’t give a shit what you do.” The thin, middle-aged guy with the hair, he’d caught a glimpse of before, Harry sure that’s who it was. A few seconds later the door slammed closed. Harry waited. Now he heard the black guy say, “You want me to tell him?” The Latino voice said, “Go ahead,” and the black guy said, “Mr. King, we want you to think on how you gonna get us some money, the bottom line being three million. If we like the idea, then all you have to do is get it. We don’t like the idea, you get shot in the head. Dig?” The deep voice said, “I don’t have three million, I don’t have a dime, I’m bankrupt. You know how to read? I’ve been all over the papers, the past month.” The black guy said, “You broke, then you get shot in the head. You want to think on it some more? Maybe you have money you forgot about.” The deep voice said, “If you put it that way, I might. . . .” The black guy said, “We gonna let you think on it.” Harry waited. He heard the door open and the black guy again, saying, “Don’t touch the blindfold. Understand? Take it off, you get shot in the head.”

  Harry waited again, hearing only the guy’s chains rattling, and pulled off his bathing cap.

  King sat across his cot in the trash—wrappers and empty containers—head and shoulders against the wall, chin down on his chest. The towel covering his head—silver tape around it—showed traces of blood and there was blood on his shirt. He had on black-and-white golf shoes.

  Harry cleared his throat and saw King’s head raise.

  “I’m Harry Arno. Your name’s King?”

  The guy didn’t answer, surprised or maybe thinking it was some kind of stunt, take him off-guard. But then he said, “Who are you?”

  “I just told you, Harry Arno. I been here . . . W
hat day is it?”

  “Thursday. You chained up?”

  “Yeah, but I can take my blindfold off when they’re not in the room.” He watched King sit up and begin picking at the tape. Harry said, “I wouldn’t do that. They like to keep you in the dark for a while, I think to get you disoriented.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Someplace on the ocean.”

  “That tells me a lot.”

  “You know as much as I do,” Harry said. He didn’t care for the guy’s attitude. Still, if they were going to be together . . . “You were playing golf, huh, when they picked you up?” The guy didn’t answer, busy working on the tape, and Harry thought, No, he wears the golf shoes for tap dancing. Ask a stupid question . . . He watched the guy pull the towel and the tape from his head and Harry recognized him right away, Ben King, his picture in the paper lately, the S&L crook, dried blood in his hair, looking this way now.

  “Who’re those guys?”

  “I just met them myself seven days ago,” Harry said, “but I haven’t seen them yet.” He held up his bathing cap. “I have to put this on, anybody comes in.”

  “I saw them,” King said. “I won’t forget them, either.”

  The wrong attitude.

  “I’d put the blindfold back on,” Harry said, “if I were you,” knowing King wouldn’t do it, the type of hairy-assed individual he was, used to having his way.

  “How long have you been here?”

  See? Didn’t even listen.

  “This is my seventh day,” Harry said.

  “How much they want from you?”

  “All they can get.”

  He saw King becoming interested in him. “Yeah? What do you do?”

  “I’m retired,” Harry said, not feeling a need to confide in this guy, this crook. He began to wonder how the black guy was going to work his scam, whisper things to him with King in the room. It was something to think about. But if the black guy could cut out his partners to deal with him one-on-one, he could do the same with King.

  “You ever play the Breakers,” King said, “the ocean course?”

  Harry shook his head. “Never have.”

  “I was on a straight par four,” King said, “lining up my approach. If I got anywhere near the pin I was going for a bird. . . .”

  Louis took Chip to the kitchen to make drinks, but mostly to get the man away from Bobby. Louis got out the ice, put it in three glasses and poured Scotch, telling the man, “The way you see something work in your head, don’t mean it can work that way when you go to do it. Understand? Bobby say they gonna be talking anyway, comparing their situations, asking each other if they gonna pay and how much, all that shit.”

  “They ought to be in separate rooms,” Chip said.

  “That’s right, but what you have is this cheap motherfucking video system, a camera in the one room. I told you I wasn’t gonna keep running up and down the stairs, check on the room don’t have the camera. Man, a cut-rate operation like this, you play it as you go.”

  “Bobby’s got money,” Chip said.

  “You want to ask him for it?”

  Louis saw the man thinking of something else, sipping his drink and thinking.

  “I have to pay Dawn. She called, she’s getting goosey.”

  “You want me to talk to her?”

  “It was on my mind—you and Bobby got back and I mentioned it to him. He’s gonna go see her?”

  “Want to scare her more’n she is, huh? Well, Bobby’s the man.” Louis picked up his drink and the one for Bobby.

  Chip said, “The marshal came back.”

  Louis paused. “He see you?”

  “Rang the bell, went around and knocked on the patio doors.”

  “I want to know did he see you?”

  Chip shook his head.

  “We can talk about it afterwhile,” Louis said. He turned and led the way from the kitchen across the hall to the back study, the TV room.

  Bobby was standing, watching the screen. He said, “Look at this.”

  Louis turned to the screen with a drink in each hand. “Yeah? You said they be talking.”

  Bobby said, “That’s all you see? I told him don’t take off the blindfold. He has it off.”

  Louis said, “No, I told him don’t take it off.”

  Chip said, “This’s what happens you start changing things.”

  Louis said, “I knew we gonna have trouble with this one.”

  Bobby said, “No, we’re not,” and walked out of the room.

  Chip said, “Where’s he going?”

  “Gonna beat him up,” Louis said. “Want to watch? Be good if the man fights back, huh?”

  Louis’s eyes held on the screen; he didn’t look at Chip or hear him say anything. What Louis saw, waiting for the door in the hostage room to open:

  Ben King sitting hunched on his cot and Harry Arno, the bathing cap off, sitting hunched on his, the two hostages facing each other, Ben King doing the talking, gesturing, the man taking his left thumb in his right hand—look at him—like you grip a golf club, taking a short swing now, showing Harry—the man, blood in his hair, blood on his shirt—telling Harry about his golf game. It’s what he was doing. Wait. Looking up now. Harry looking up and putting his bathing cap on quick and then sitting back, and here was Bobby in the room, Bobby from behind going to Ben King, Ben King starting to push himself up from the cot, Bobby grabbing him by the hair to raise his face and punch him, what it looked like, but it wasn’t happening. Right there Chip said, “Jesus!” loud, because Bobby’s right hand was behind him, coming out from under his Latino fiesta shirt with a piece Louis hadn’t seen before, not the Browning, one that looked like it, an automatic that size Bobby put in Ben King’s face, King all eyes seeing it, mouth coming open, and Bobby shot him. They heard the sound of it like somewhere in the house far away. Louis watched Bobby turn and look up at the camera, his face on the screen with no special kind of expression, like saying to them, hey, nothing to it, and now he was gone. Louis saw Ben King lying dead across his cot in the trash, blood on the wall, man, blood all over it, Harry Arno sitting there made of stone with his bathing cap on.

  Louis looked at Chip staring at the screen.

  “You wanted Bobby Deo, you got him.”

  Lay it on the man, then go speak to Bobby. He was in the mother’s bedroom now, the show over, but still holding the piece when Louis walked in and turned on the light. Louis stood watching him, not saying anything just yet, wanting to hear what Bobby had to say.

  Nothing. Laying the piece on the dresser, he looked over at Louis and Louis said, “What you got there?”

  Bobby seemed to shrug, subdued after killing a man. He said, “A Sig Sauer. I’ve had it.”

  “You had it at the golf course,” Louis said. “I see you getting out of the car without a piece . . . but you had that on you, huh? Have it on you all the time. You wanted to shoot the man right then, didn’t you? Out on the links. Why was that, you hadn’t shot anybody in a while?”

  “I didn’t like him,” Bobby said.

  “I got that impression.”

  “You the one told him don’t take off the blindfold. Didn’t you say, or you shoot him?”

  “In the head,” Louis said. “Laying it on to make my point.”

  “Well, you tell them what you gonna do, man, you have to do it. You know? Or else don’t say it.”

  “I do the telling and you do the shooting, huh?”

  “I could see already it was a waste of time with him. He wasn’t gonna pay us nothing.”

  “What about the mess you made?”

  Bobby said, “Harry can clean it up,” still subdued, like he was tired or didn’t care.

  But when Louis said, “Harry, the witness, heard the whole thing. You gonna shoot him too?”

  Bobby got his attitude back, put on that macho shit saying, “If I have to.”

  It hooked Louis. He said, “You mean if you want to.” He watched Bobby shrug like, yeah, that was
cool, and Louis said, “What you gonna do with the man’s body?”

  “Dump him in the swamp. You want to help me?”

  Louis walked over to the dresser; he picked up the piece Bobby had told him was a Sig Sauer and hefted it.

  Bobby said, “Light, uh, for a .45? Eight shots.”

  “You think that’s enough?”

  “I can have one, nine millimeter, holds twenty in the magazine, if I want it. Five hundred.”

  “Go to war with a piece like that,” Louis said. “How ‘bout I help you to the car with Mr. King? You take him to the swamp, wherever you take people, and I’ll get Harry to clean up the room.”

  Bobby gave him his shrug.

  “Want the room nice,” Louis said, “for the next guest. That is, if you like him.”

  Bobby gave his dead-eyed look now, no expression.

  The man’s problem, he had no sense of humor.

  Louis said to Harry, sitting on the cot with him, “You didn’t see nothing, you didn’t hear nothing.”

  “It was loud,” Harry said. “Jesus.”

  “I bet it was.”

  “I had the bathing cap on.”

  The man seemed numb.

  “I know you did. Like doing time, man, you don’t know nothing going on around you, even right in the cell you’re in. So don’t think about it no more. You never saw the man. . . . You listening to me?”

  He watched Harry’s bathing cap with the yellow flower nod up and down, the man sitting straight, like afraid to move.

  Louis sat thinking for a minute, looking at Mr. King’s stain smeared on the opposite wall, then looked away as he realized he was staring at it. He said, “Harry, go on in the bathroom and stand at the mirror—you be away from the camera—and pull your blindfold off.” He had to say, “Go on,” before Harry picked up his chains and shuffled in there. Louis followed him.

  Louis stood behind Harry, taller, looking over the man’s shoulder to see his face appear, red marks on it from the bathing cap, eyes bloodshot, with the pitiful expression of a man who didn’t know shit what was happening to him.