Man on a Leash (12 page)

“And now, Romstead. We want a hundred and seventy thousand. All you have to do, naturally, is sign that withdrawal slip. It’s not the bank’s money; it’s yours, and what you do with it is your business. We’ve already contacted your friend Carroll Brooks there by telephone—.”

“No.” It was Romstead’s turn to interrupt. “The signature doesn’t mean a thing. The bank is obligated to turn the money over only to me or somebody I’ve designated as my authorized agent.”

“Which is exactly what the bank is going to do. Deliver it to you personally.” Kessler’s voice was smug. “Along with Mrs. Carmody’s, since she’ll be there too. Carroll Brooks is going to do it.”

So now he’s made the second one, Romstead thought, but he kept his face impassive, knowing he was being watched through the mirror. “It’ll like hell be Brooks,” he said scornfully. “You know as well as I do it’ll be a special agent of the FBI. You don’t think they’re going to hold still for this, do you?”

“Oh, I don’t doubt the wires to Washington are red-hot right now. But it won’t be an FBI agent. That’s taken care of.”

“Look, use your head, will you? It’ll be D, B. Cooper all over again, and if they let you get away with it, every lamebrained creep in the country who can change the batteries in a flashlight is going to become an electronics supercriminal, demanding millions and blowing people up all over the place. This time they’re going to get the first one, believe me, if it takes every man in the bureau, and they’re going to skin him very slowly with a dull knife and nail his hide on every front page in the country before the imitators can start crawling out of the woodwork.”

“If you’ll remember,” Kessler’s voice said, “D. B. Cooper got away with it, precisely because he was first and he was qualified.”

The bed was beginning to creak on the other side of the wall. Romstead and Paulette Carmody looked at each other and shrugged.

“So sign it, Romstead,” the voice went on. “And Mrs. Carmody, just write ‘Dear Jerry’ comma ‘send it’ period ‘He means business’ period on that sheet of paper. I want that note on its way in the next ten minutes.”

“And if we don’t sign?” Romstead asked, knowing it was a futile question and what the answer would be.

“We bring Mrs. Carmody out here and work on her. We’ll do it in front of the intercom, so you can listen.”

Romstead thought of the burro. He signed the withdrawal slip and handed her the pen. The sheet of paper was on the nightstand between the beds. The little gasps and outcries filtered through the wall. “I’ll be glad to sign it,” she said wearily to the intercom, “if you’d just move that riding academy to some other room.” She wrote the message he had dictated and put her signature to it. Romstead put the two pieces of paper on top of the chest under the panel, along with the passbook. A hand came through and picked them up. The slide closed and he heard the latch being refastened. The ecstasy on the other side of the wall reached climax, died with one final shriek, and silence returned. Paulette Carmody didn’t even try to evade it anymore; maybe, Romstead thought, she had accepted it as part of the process of breaking them down and decided that escape from it was hopeless.

He wondered if the girl could be Debra, but it didn’t seem likely. Debra was presumably on heroin, which was supposed to inhibit all sexual desire; if anything had ever eroded this chick’s libido, he’d hate like hell to have run into her in a dark alley before she began to cool down. He heard a car start up somewhere in front. The ransom note was on its way.

“What was all this about D. B. Whatsisname?” Paulette asked.

“You remember,” Romstead replied. “D. B. Cooper—at least that was supposed to be his name. He started the wave of plane hijackings for money; bailed out over the Pacific Northwest with two hundred thousand dollars, and so far he’s either got away with it or he’s dead. I’m all for his being dead, and there’s a good chance of it. Jumping into heavy timber in the dark will never make you the darling of the insurance companies.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “I remember it now. And you figure if this dingy creep gets away with it, electronic extortion will be the latest craze to sweep the country? I see what you mean. And what do you think his chances are of getting away with it?”

“Damned good,” Romstead said. “For the short term. They’ll get him in the end, of course, but I don’t know how much good that’ll do us.” There was no use raising any false hopes; also, they were being overheard.

There was no further word from the intercom. The day dragged on. At noon two bowls of some kind of stew were handed in through the sliding panel, along with some cans of beer and a carton of Paulette Carmody’s brand of cigarettes. They began to hope the girl had gone off with the bearer of the ransom note, but shortly after noon she was back in action again.

“Do you suppose,” Paulette asked, “there are any convents that take neophytes my age?”

Romstead smiled but said nothing. He was only half listening to her. He wished Kessler would come on the intercom with his plan for the ransom pickup. There was little or nothing to work on until he did. After a while he went over and spoke into it. “When do we get some idea of what we have to do and where we do it?” There was no reply. Maybe it was going onto a tape. How many were left out there now? There had been complete silence for more than half an hour. Had they all left on business in connection with the pickup? He took off one of the heavy brogues, went over to the chest, and raised the shoe as if to smash in the mirror. The panel slid back, and the barrels of the shotgun came through, aimed at his chest.

“Okay?” a voice asked. It was Top Kick.

“You answered my question,” Romstead said. He put the shoe back on and paced the room, goaded by restlessness and frustration.

“I’ve never been able to understand,” Paulette Carmody said, “what the relationship was between you and your father. If there was any.”

“There wasn’t much,” Romstead replied.

“I know. Let’s face it, parenthood must have weighed about as heavily on him as it does on the average ram or stallion or seed bull, and somehow I can’t quite see him as today’s suffering blob of guilt on the head candler’s couch weeping and beating his chest and asking, ‘What did I do wrong?’ He supported you until you were old enough to support yourself, and if he happened to run into you now and then he’d buy you a drink, but that was about it. But still he liked you and admired your athletic ability, and it all seemed to turn out all right. Did you resent the fact you hardly ever saw him? Did you feel rejected?”

“No.” He stopped pacing and thought about it. People had asked him the same question before, and he’d never known how to answer it. There had been respect between them and a good deal of mutual admiration, but they’d simply never needed each other. Maybe, actually, neither of them had ever really needed anybody; the self-sufficiency was inherited, built in, and perhaps that was the only thing they shared.

“Have you got a girl?” she asked.

“Yes. Quite a girl.”

“I’d like to meet her sometime. But God help her if she ever marries you. You’re simply too much like him.”

He shrugged. “That’s what Kessler said.”

“And I wonder what he meant. They killed your father in the end, but I’m not sure that’s all that happened. They’re very, very careful.”

He started to tell her that you always had to be careful of people who didn’t have much more to lose, but there seemed no point to it. She was tough-minded and realistic enough to handle it, but why belabor the matter?

They were given some more of the stew for dinner. The overhead light was turned on at dusk. Sleeping under it was difficult, but, Romstead reflected, it would have been a little difficult anyway. All they could do was endure it and wait. It was eleven o’clock the next morning when they heard a car drive up in front. A few minutes later Kessler came on the intercom.

“You’ll be glad to hear that Jerome Carmody and the bank have agreed to the two million,” he said, “and to the terms of delivery.”

“What about the police?” Romstead asked. “And the FBI?”

“They swear they haven’t called them in, and there’s nothing in any of the papers or on TV; but of course they have. I have no doubt that right now whole roomfuls of them are playing the telephone tapes over and over and tearing their hair out in handfuls trying to get voice patterns or something in the background. A cordless vibrator against the throat doesn’t help them much.”

Keep going, Romstead thought; embroider. Egomania’s about all we’ve got going for us—egomania and greed.

“At first we thought of having Jerome Carmody deliver the money,” Kessler’s voice went on, “but we found out he’s got a serious heart condition, and I don’t want somebody crapping out on a freeway at seventy miles an hour with two million dollars of my money in his car—”

“You ought to guard against that streak of sentimentality,” Paulette interrupted.

“Shut up, if you want to hear this. So we decided on Brooks. He works for the bank, so the bank is simply delivering your own money to you. Two of us have seen him up close, so they can’t run in an FBI ringer on us.

“They have the pictures and the facts of life as they are. You’ll be on the leash, with enough explosive in the car to blow it all to hell and only the transmitted radio signal keeping the detonating circuit from closing and setting it off. I’m using a lower frequency this time for longer range of operation and so there’ll be no reception blind spots when you’re behind hills or in canyons. And I won’t be at the transmitter; that’ll be in another part of the forest and remote-controlled itself. They can locate it with direction finders and get up there where it is with mules in five or six hours, but why would they? If they turn it off,
they’ll
kill you. They’ve been warned that any deviation at all from the procedure I’ve given them and you’ll go up, and they know that anywhere along the line we can get a look at the vehicle to be sure it’s Brooks in it.

“Delivery of the money will be in the Mojave Desert between Barstow and Las Vegas. If any other vehicle follows him off the highway or if there’s a plane or helicopter in sight anywhere the deal is off and we go back to square one and start over—”

“All right,” Romstead interrupted. “Let’s say they give you that—Brooks alone, nobody following him. You’ve got enough clout at this point that they probably have to. But for Christ’s sake, use your head. In the first place, you should know as well as I do that Brooks is going to be in constant contact with the FBI by radio. The United States government has access to maybe a little electronics expertise itself. Second, the car, whatever it is, is going to be carrying a homing device of some kind so they can track it with direction finders, and in the third place—and this is the one you can’t beat—wherever you take delivery you’re going to be quarantined. You’re going to be surrounded on all sides to the point of saturation, by police, sheriffs deputies from a half dozen counties, and FBI agents. They’ll block every exit a jackrabbit could squeeze through. And don’t think they can’t.”

“Of course they can.” Kessler sounded amused. “Blockade, cordon, or whatever you want to call it, is one of the oldest law enforcement tactics in the world, and it works—provided you know what area to blockade. They won’t, until it’s too late, and it’s a long way from Barstow to Las Vegas. Over a hundred and fifty miles to be exact ... All right, pass him the maps.”

This latter was obviously addressed to whoever was on the other side of the mirror. Romstead went over by the chest. The panel slid open. Oil company highway maps of California and Nevada were deposited on top of the chest, followed by a large sheet of white paper folded several times and some thumb tacks. The panel closed, and Romstead heard the latch being fastened.

“Unfold the large map, and thumbtack it to the wall,” Kessler ordered, “so you can follow this.”

Romstead unfolded it. It was meticulously hand-drawn and inked, and he assumed it was a large-scale blowup of some section of the highway from Barstow to Las Vegas. He stuck it to the wall between the beds with the tacks.

“Those highway maps you’ve got don’t show all the desert roads,” Kessler said. “Mine does, even the ungraded ones. It’s drawn to scale, and I’ve run all those roads myself, the ones we’re going to use. It extends for thirty miles east and west along a section of Highway Fifteen east of Barstow and covers the area from ten miles south to twenty miles north of the highway, or nine hundred square miles in all.

“Now. Brooks doesn’t know yet where he’s supposed to go, only that he’s to use an open Toyota Land Cruiser so we can see there’s no FBI joker concealed in it. Ten minutes before he’s due to leave the bank with the money he’ll get a phone call, the last one, which will throw all the Efrem Zimbalist Juniors into a third-degree flap trying to trace it. It will be long-distance-dialed from one of a room-long bank of pay phones at Los Angeles International by a girl in a wig and dark glasses, and the message will take five seconds, so lots of luck—”

“Accomplished young lady,” Paulette Carmody murmured. “She operates vertically, too.”

Kessler paid no attention. He went on. “It’ll simply tell him to go to Barstow, which will take less than four hours, and register at the Kehoe Motel under the name of George Mellon. There’s a package there for him that was delivered two days ago by a parcel service with instructions to hold for arrival. It’s a radio receiver, single channel, crystal-controlled. The object of all this scrimshaw, of course, is to keep the Zimbalists from getting hold of it enough in advance of when he has to use it so they can find out what frequency it’s tuned to. They’ll descend on the Kehoe the minute they hear this, of course, and they’ll have the receiver before Brooks gets there; but there’s still not time, and they wouldn’t have the lab facilities in Barstow anyway. There’s a note with it telling Brooks to proceed east on Highway Fifteen with the phones plugged into the receiver for further instructions.”

Romstead broke in. “It won’t do any good. They’ll be in front of him and behind him, and even if they can’t pick up the channel themselves, they’ll see where he leaves the highway.”