The Collection (128 page)

“Sure,” I said. “Be glad to. Where is he?”

“Back this way.” He opened the door to the room behind the
shop, and I went in after him. I turned around to ask the girl if she minded
waiting a few minutes, but she was following us. She said, “May I watch?”

“Sure,” I told her, and we followed Workus into the back
room.

He was leading the way back past a row of cages when it happened.
Up at shoulder height, a small brown monkey arm darted out through the bars of
one of the upper cages, and grabbed.

Workus swore suddenly as his hair vanished into the monkey
cage. Then, his face a bit red, he said, “Excuse my language, miss. But that's
the second time that d-darned monkey caught me napping.”

He opened the door of the cage and reached in to recover his
toupee, which the now-frightened and jabbering monkey had dropped just behind
the bars.

I hadn't known, until now, that Workus wore a toupee; and
I'd jumped a bit at the apparent spectacle of a man being scalped. For under
the toupee, Workus was completely bald.

“Say,” I said, half jokingly and half seriously, “it wasn't
by any chance you who bought these cats of ours, was it? If you left off your
toupee and hat, and put on dark glasses and a mustache---”

Workus had closed the door of the monkey cage, and was
adjusting the toupee on his head. He looked at me strangely. “Are you crazy,
Evans? Or joking? Why would I want to do a thing like that?”

“I haven't any idea,” I said cheerfully. And I hadn't. But
something was beginning to buzz at the back of my mind, and without stopping
to think it over, I went on talking. “But one thing does strike me funny. My
mother described the mysterious Mr. Smith as being about
your
height and
weight. Now what made her say that? She's seen you only a few times in her
life. But, in thinking what the man who bought the cats was like, she used your
name. Doesn't it seem that it might have been because---sort of
subconsciously---she saw through the disguise, and recognized your walk, or
your voice, or something?”

Workus was frowning. He said, “Are you accusing me of---”

“I'm not accusing you of anything. If it was you, there's
nothing criminal about buying cats. All we want is Miss Weyburn's cat back, and
we'll . . . I'll pay for it. That sale wasn't legal, anyway. We can
get a writ of replevin for the animal. But I hope we won't have to go to the
police.”

And having gone that far, I decided to bluff it on out, and
added, “Or will we?”

He didn't answer at all for a moment. Then, quite suddenly
and surprisingly, he grinned at us. “O.K.,” he said. “You win. It was me. And
I'll see that you get your cat back, Miss---Weyburn, is it? I'll give you a
note to the man who has it, and his address.”

He crossed toward the desk at one side of the room, and I
turned and looked at Miss Weyburn, and said: “See? The Bon Ton Pet Shop gets
results. Even if we have to turn into a detective agency. We get our cat. Like
the Northwest---”

But she was looking past me, toward Workus. Suddenly, at the
startled look on her face, I whirled around. Workus was holding a gun on us. A
.38 automatic that looked like a cannon when seen from the front. He said,
“Don't move.”

For a moment, I thought he was crazy. But I lifted my hands shoulder-high,
and I tried to make my voice calm and reasonable. I said, “What's the idea? In
the first place, Workus, you can't get away with this. And in the second---”

“Be quiet, Evans. Listen, I don't want to kill you unless I
have to, and if you're reasonable, maybe I won't have to. But I can't let you
out of here; you'd go to the police and they just might decide to investigate
what you told them. Even if you got your cat back, you might.”

“Listen,” I said. “What's all this about? Am I crazy, or are
you? Why this fuss about cats?”

“If you knew that, I'd have to kill you. Still want to
know?”

“Well,” I said, “if you put it that way, maybe not.
But---about holding us here. How long---”

“Tomorrow. I'm through here, and leaving town after tonight.
Tomorrow I won't care what you tell the cops. I'll be clear.”

I grunted. “But dammit---” I turned my head toward the girl.
“I'm sorry, Miss Weyburn. Looks like I got you in a mess.”

She managed a fleeting smile. “It isn't your fault. And---”

The sound of a door opening behind me made me start to turn
my head farther around, but Workus' voice barked, “Look this way.” And the
snick of the safety catch on the automatic backed it up, and I turned.

“You first, Evans,” Workus snapped. “Put your hands behind
you to be tied.”

I obeyed, and somebody behind me did a good job of tying my
wrists. Then a blindfold was tied over my eyes and a clean handkerchief from my
own pocket used as a gag. When, on instructions, I sat down and leaned back
against the wall, my ankles, too, were tied.

Then, after Miss Weyburn had been similarly tied and placed
beside me, I heard the footsteps of Workus going back to the store at the
front. The other man opened and closed a door, and I heard his steps on stairs,
but don't know whether he was going up or down them.

And then, for a long time, nothing happened.

I tried, experimentally, to reach the knots in the cord that
bound my wrists, but couldn't touch them, even with the tip of one finger. I
might have been able to loosen the cord by rolling around until I found a rough
edge somewhere to rub it against, but every ten or fifteen minutes, all
afternoon, I'd hear Workus' footsteps coming to the door to look in at us, or
coming on into the back room on some errand or other. So, for the present,
there was nothing I could do---except wait and hope for the best.

Time passed, but slowly. Very slowly. You'd think that in a
spot like that, you'd have enough to worry about to keep you from getting bored.
But after an hour or two, you haven't. You can be worried, or afraid, or mad,
just so long and no longer. It begins to taper off; an hour or two passes like
a year or two, and you begin to wish something would happen, almost anything.
Time becomes an unendurable vacuum.

I don't know how long it was before I got the idea of
opening communication with the girl beside me in code. But suddenly I thought
of the old idea of communicating by taps or touches; one for A, two for B,
three for C and so on through the alphabet. If she got the idea---

I wriggled over a few inches until my right elbow touched
her left. By nudges, I spelled out C-A-N U U-N-D-E-RS-and she saved me from
spelling out the rest of the “understand” by cutting in with Y-ES.

It was a slow and painful method of communication, and I
prefer talking and listening, but it helped pass the time and it didn't matter
how slow it was, because we had more time than we knew what to do with. And
often we could shorten it by interrupting a question in the middle as soon as
there was enough of it to guess the rest.

It didn't take long to find out that neither of us could
make any intelligent guess as to the motive and purpose of our captors. We
decided that if a reasonable chance of escape should offer itself, we should
take it rather than trust too completely to Workus' stated intention to let us
go the next day. But that for the present, we'd better make the best of it.

Then---for chivalrous, if unromantic, reasons---I moved farther
away from her. I had discovered that I entertained other company. Undoubtedly,
I was too near the monkey cage, and undoubtedly Workus was too stingy with his
flea powder. I probably got only a couple of them, but they moved around and
gave the impression of a legion.

But time did pass, and after a while I heard Workus closing
up the shop and pulling down the shades. He didn't leave, though, but remained
up front, still looking in on us occasionally. The man who'd gone up or down
the stairs rejoined Workus; then first one and then the other left by the back
door and returned after a while. Probably they had gone out to eat; one at a
time, while the other remained on guard.

After a while my trained fleas seemed to have left me, and
it was lonesome alone, so I slid over next to the girl again. I spelled out O-K
and tried to figure out how to put a question mark after it and couldn't, but
she spelled back Y-E-S W-H-E-R-E W-E-R-E-, U, and I spelled F-L-E-A-S, and she
came back N-O T-H-A-N-KS, which didn't make sense, but then probably my answer
hadn't made sense to her.

Then---it must have been close to nine o'clock---the two men
came into the back room together. One of them took my shoulders and one of them
my feet and I was carried out the back door and into what I judged to be
Workus' truck; a light delivery van with a closed body. A minute later the girl
was put in with me and the back door of the truck closed and latched.

The engine started and I hit my head a resounding thump as
the car jerked into motion.

It lurched through the roughly paved alley. Out on the
streets, the motion wasn't so bad. But from time to time we hit bumps and went
around corners. I tried to brace myself, sitting up and leaning against a side
of the truck body, but it didn't work. The only way to avoid frequent head
thumpings was to lie flat.

Apparently the girl had made the same discovery, because I
found her lying beside me, and we found that by lying close together we
minimized the jouncing and rolling. We didn't try our code of signaling,
because the joggling of the moving truck would have made it impossible.

After an hour or so the truck hit a rough driveway again,
went along it what seemed quite a distance, and stopped. From the time we'd
been traveling, I judged that we were well out in the country somewhere; but I
couldn't have made the wildest guess as to our direction from town.

Then the ignition went off, and the truck stopped and stood
still. I heard the doors on either side of the truck cab slam, but Miss Weyburn
was spelling out something by nudging my elbow and I concentrated on that and
got: R U A-L-L R-I-T-E, and answered Y-E-S, and then it occurred to me that
spelling out that question and answer had taken quite a bit of time, and why
hadn't Workus and the other chap opened the back of the truck to take us out?

But maybe they weren't going to. Maybe they intended merely
to leave us here in the truck while they accomplished their business---whatever
it was---in this place, and they'd get rid of us later.

And that meant that we might have quite a bit of time here.

There was one possible way of our getting loose from those
all-too-efficiently tied cords around our wrists. A way I'd thought of, but
which hadn't been practicable in the back room of Workus' pet shop, with him
looking back at us frequently. But now---

As quickly as I could, I spelled out: L-I-E O-N S-I-D-E
W-I-L-L T-R-Y U-N-T-I-E.

She got the idea, for instead of trying to answer, she immediately
rolled over with her back toward me and held out her bound wrists.

My fingers were almost numb from lack of proper circulation,
but I started right in on the knotted cord about her wrists, and the effort of
trying to untie it gradually restored my hands to normal.

It was a tough knot; we'd been tied with ordinary heavy wrapping
twine, I found. Several turns of it, and then a knot that was made up of four
square knots, well tied; each had been pulled as tight as possible before the
next one was made.

But one at a time, they gave way. It was slow business,
because my own wrists were tied crosswise and I could reach the knots of the
girl's bindings with the fingers of only one hand at a time. It must have taken
me nearly half an hour before the inner knot gave way and I felt the cord
itself slip as she pulled her wrists apart.

A moment later she took off my gag and blindfold and then
whispered, “I'll have you loose in a minute, Mr. Evans.”

“Phil, now,” I whispered back, as she started work on the
cords on my wrists. “What's your name?”

“Ellen.” With both her hands free, she could make faster
progress than I had on her bindings. “Got any idea where we are?”

“No, but it must be way out in the country. No street lights
or anything. And listen; isn't that frogs?”

It was dark inside that truck, but when my wrists came free
and I sat up to start on the knots at my ankles---while Ellen did the same with
hers---I could see a dim, gray square that was the back window of the truck.

“Listen,” Ellen said. “Did you hear---”

It was the distant yowling of a cat. Of several cats. Once
my ears were attuned to the sound, I could hear it quite plainly.

I whispered, “Is it Cinder? Can you recognize his
. . . uh . . . voice?”

“I think so. I'm almost sure. There---my ankles are---”

The cords on my own ankles came loose at the same moment,
and I crawled to the back of the truck. The twin doors were latched from the
outside, and I reached through the barred window, but I couldn't get enough of
my arm through to reach down and turn the handle.

Ellen joined me, and her more slender arm solved the problem.

We stepped down, cautiously, into the unknown. We stood
there, listening.

Frogs. Crickets. And cats.

There was a thin sliver of new moon playing hide and seek
among high cumulus clouds, fast drifting, although down on the ground there
didn't seem to be a breath of wind.

We were standing on grass between two wheel ruts that were a
crude sort of driveway. It led, ahead past the front of the truck, to what
looked like a big, ramshackle barn.

And a dozen yards the other direction was a building that
looked like a farmhouse. An abandoned farmhouse, judging from its state of
disrepair and the high grass and weeds about it. There was a dim light in one
room that seemed to be the kitchen.

I took Ellen's arm and whispered, “The driveway to the road
leads back past the house. Shall we risk that---or try the other way?”