Man on a Leash

9

He placed his lips against her ear and whispered, “Stay down.” Feeling her head move as she nodded, he pushed away from her and stood up, trying to remember the dimensions of the room and the placement of all its furniture. He didn’t know which door it was he’d heard, but it was most likely the one at the other end of the kitchen; the electric panel with its switches and circuit breakers would probably be in the garage.

His eyes hadn’t had time to adjust yet, and the blackness was still impenetrable as he began to feel his ,way toward the wall by the kitchen doorway. He stopped to listen. He was on carpet, but if somebody were traversing the tile floor of the kitchen he should make some sound. The silence was unbroken. He stepped forward again, his hands groping for contact with the wall. Then the light burst in his face. Paulette screamed behind him.

It was white, focused, and blinding for an instant, the beam of a six-cell flashlight, and just below it and extending slightly into the beam were the ugly twin tubes of a sawed-off shotgun. He froze where he was, a good six feet from the ends of the barrels, and he could make out a little of the shadowy form behind the light. The man was clad in a black jump suit and black hangman’s hood. He’d made no sound on the kitchen floor because he was wearing only socks. They were black, too. Paulette screamed again. There must be another one behind him.

“Well,” the man with the shotgun said, “if you want to carry the big son of a bitch—”

Romstead started to turn his head. A fiery blossom of pain exploded inside it. The light in front of his eyes receded to some great distance and then went out.

* * *

He opened his eyes, winced, and closed them again as he fought off waves of nausea. In a moment he tried once more. It appeared to be daylight wherever he was—faint daylight, to be sure, but at least he could see. He was lying fully clothed except for coat and tie on a narrow and too-short bed covered with a blue chenille spread, looking up at what appeared to be a varnished knotty-pine ceiling. He was a light drinker, and only a very few times in his life had he consumed enough to have a hangover; but he was conscious of some woolly and unfocused impression that this must be the distilled essence of all the hangovers in history. His mind was beginning to function a little now, however, and he remembered the man with the shotgun and Paulette Carmody’s warning cry. He put a hand up to his head. There was a painful lump at the back of it, and his hair was matted with dried blood.

He looked at his watch. When he could get the face of it to swim into focus he saw it was ten minutes of nine, A.M.? he wondered. But it had to be; it was daylight. How in hell could he have been unconscious for—what was it—fifteen hours?

He gave up on that and turned his head, accepting the stab of pain he knew this was going to cost. Just beyond him was another narrow bed, the other of the set of twins and similarly covered with a blue chenille spread. Paulette Carmody lay on it, asleep, blond hair tousled and the wrinkled dress halfway up her thighs. Beyond her, at the end of a room which appeared to be all varnished pine, was the window from which the light was coming, what there was of it. It was barred. A small air conditioner was set in the bottom of it, and outside it the louvered shutters were closed.

Barred? He turned his head to the right. There was a door at that end of the room, armored with a thin plate of steel bolted at all four corners. Just to the right of it were two chests of drawers set side by side. Atop one of them was an intercom, and above the other a wall-mounted mirror and what looked like a sliding panel or pass-through below it. The panel was closed. But there was another door in the wall opposite the foot of the bed. It was ajar.

He swung his feet to the floor and sat up. Pain clamped its viselike grip on his head again, and he was assailed by vertigo. He tried to stand but fell back on the side of the bed. There was no feeling in his feet at all and no control over the muscles in his ankles. Apparently he’d been lying for a long time with his feet extending over the end of the bed, their own weight and that of the heavy brogues cutting off most of the circulation. He leaned down, managed to worry the shoes off, and began to massage them. They were swollen and as devoid of sensation as blocks of wood at first, but in a minute he could feel the pinpricks of returning circulation.

He could stand now. He swayed once and then lurched drunkenly over to the door that was ajar. It was a bathroom. There was a small window at the back of it, but it was covered with two vertical strips of two-by-two angle iron bolted at top and bottom. He stared at it numbly for a moment and then went over to the steel-faced door at the front of the room. He tried the knob. It was locked. And probably bolted on the outside, too, he thought. There was a faint humming sound from the air conditioner in the other window, but otherwise, the silence was total.

He went back to the window and examined it. They weren’t bars, as he’d thought at first, but lengths of two-by-two angle iron the same as those across the bathroom window. Only here, in order to clear the air-conditioner controls, they’d bolted horizontal lengths to the wall at top and bottom and then welded three vertical strips to them. The bolts were half-inch, he thought, the steel was quarter-inch stock, and the welds looked solid. He caught one of the vertical strips, put a foot against the wall, and heaved back. Nothing happened except that it made his head pound. You couldn’t budge it with a crowbar, he thought.

He held a hand in front of the air-conditioner grille. It was only the fan that was turned on, for ventilation. He put his face between two of the vertical angle irons, as near the window as he could get, and looked downward with the slope of the louvers outside. At first all he saw was the top of the external portion of the air conditioner. There was sunlight on it. The surface was weather-stained, and he could see dust on it and several pine needles. He moved over to the edge of the window, looked slantingly downward past the air-conditioner box, and saw a few feet of stony ground, the half-exposed root of a tree, and more pine needles.

Wherever they were, he thought, it wasn’t in the desert. Pines didn’t grow there, at least not at low altitudes. He turned back to the room. When Paulette Carmody woke up, maybe she could tell him what had happened and where they were. They surely hadn’t slugged her, too. She had turned again in her sleep, and the dress was now up around her hips. He pulled the spread off the other bed and covered her legs with it. She was going to have enough to cope with when she woke up, without being embarrassed on top of it.

He went back into the bathroom. The floor was badly worn linoleum but seemed to be clean. There was a commode and a washbasin with rust streaks under the spigots. Above the basin was a cloudy mirror. An old-fashioned tub with claw feet stood in a rear corner next to the window. There was a louvered shutter outside the window, the same as the one in the bedroom, so it was scarcely twilight inside the room. He flicked a switch, and a light came on above the mirror. A rack held a supply of towels, and there was a wrapped bar of soap on the side of the basin. He turned on the cold-water tap and washed his face. It made him feel a little better. The water was icy, which seemed further evidence they must be in the Sierra or at least in the foothills. And the place must be completely isolated, far from any traveled road. He hadn’t heard a car yet.

But how could he have been unconscious for that long? He’d been knocked out several times in his life but never for more than a few minutes, and he’d never heard of fifteen hours or longer except in cases of severe concussion and coma. He must have been drugged with something. His coat had been removed, and his tie, and he noticed now that the cuff of his left shirt sleeve was unbuttoned. He pulled the sleeve up and saw them immediately, two small blue puncture marks and a drop of dried blood. They’d used the tie for a tourniquet. And some junkie’s dirty needle, he thought, and then wondered if he were entirely rational even yet if he didn’t have any more to worry about under the circumstances than serum hepatitis.

He pulled open the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet. Inside were two new toothbrushes in plastic tubes, some toothpaste, a bottle of aspirin, and a water tumbler. He shook out four of the aspirin and examined them. They bore the well-known brand name and appeared to be genuine. He swallowed them, broke open one of the toothbrushes, and scrubbed vigorously at his teeth.

He came back out into the room. A curtained alcove to the left of the bathroom proved to be a closet. Several wire coat hangers dangled from a rod, and his suitcase, Paulette Carmody’s handbag, and a small overnight case were on the floor. His coat and tie were tossed across his bag. He let the curtain fall back into place and went over to the two chests of drawers against the front wall.

The intercom would be open, of course, and no doubt there was another bug somewhere in the room, or perhaps two, so after they’d muffled the intercom with a pillow and found the obvious bug, the plant, and pulled its teeth, there’d still be another recording everything they said. The mirror was obviously phony; on the other side of its dark and imperfect reflection it was a window through which they could be watched as long as the light intensity was higher on this side than on the other. He looked up. In the ceiling was a light fixture with what appeared to be a 200-watt bulb in it. It wasn’t turned on at the moment, but it would be at night. He could smash it, of course, but to what point? The spooks would simply come in with that sawed-off shotgun and tie them up.

Did the crazy bastard think he could get away with it again? It was obvious, now that it was too late, what Kessler had been looking for in his apartment; he’d even told Mayo, without realizing it. Bank statements. The hundred and seventy-two thousand dollars on deposit at the Southland Trust in San Diego, everything he had in the world except for the few hundred in the checking account in San Francisco. And now he was being programmed to go in and draw it out with a fatal third testicle of plastic explosive in a jockstrap or a stick of dynamite taped to the inside of his leg. This would be inside three or four pairs of panty hose, probably sewn to the bottom of a T-shirt, and finally covered by trousers with the belt and fly zipper jammed in some way. In ten minutes you could work your way out of it, and in one second or less you could be mutilated and dying. But what about the radio circuits and the other wires connecting them to the detonator? They must have been inside the old man’s coat somewhere, so why hadn’t he been able to get at them and disable the apparatus? His hands had been free. No doubt he’d find out, but at the moment there appeared to be no answer except that you never made any sudden and impulsive moves when somebody had you by the jewels.

But why had they kidnapped Paulette Carmody? Why, for that matter, had they gone to the trouble to bug her telephone and then close in on him while he was at her place? There didn’t seem to be any answer to these questions either. Then, for the first time, the absolute silence of the place was broken; from the other side of the wall against which the beds were placed there came a low murmur of voices and the creaking of a bed. He turned and looked at Paulette Carmody. Her eyes were open. She stared blankly at him for a moment and then put a hand up to her head, and said, “Good God!”

“They didn’t slug you too, did they?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “It must be that crap they shot into my arm. Battery solution or varnish remover.”

“I’m sorry about it,” he said.

“About what?”

“Getting you involved. I don’t know why they grabbed you too.”

“Money,” she said. She sat up with a grimace of pain and grabbed her head again, felt the disarray of her hair, and shuddered. He wanted to ask her what money and how they expected to get it, but it could wait. He brought her purse and the small overnight case from the closet and set them beside her. “There’s a bathroom,” he said. “And a toothbrush and some aspirin. Can you make it?”

She nodded. She pushed aside the bedspread he’d put over her, swung bare legs off the bed, and stood up. When she swayed drunkenly, he took her by the arm and helped her to the door of the bathroom and then passed in her purse. The creaking of the bed in the other room was increasing now, and he could hear the voices again. One of them was feminine. There began a series of little moans and gasping outcries. He cursed and hoped they’d get it over with before Paulette came out of the bathroom. They didn’t. When she emerged a few minutes later, wearing lipstick now and still running a comb through her hair, she walked right into it. There was a sudden crescendo of the lunging of the bed, its headboard banging against a wall apparently as sound-transparent as paper, and then a ragged and strangely hoarse but unmistakably feminine voice cried out, “Now, now, now! Oh, Jesus Christ, oh, God!” They looked away from each other in embarrassment as this ended in one final chaotic shriek and silence descended.

Paulette sat on the side of the bed and fished a cigarette out of her purse. “Well, at least they didn’t put it on closed-circuit TV and make us watch. Though I wouldn’t put it past the creepy dingaling.”

He gestured toward the intercom. “The room’s bugged.”

“So let him listen. What difference does it make?” she asked.

“None, now.” If her telephone had been tapped, Kessler already knew they had figured out his identity and they were doomed from the start, in spite of the window dressing of the hoods and masks.

“It’s my fault,” he said. “I blew it from every angle. If I hadn’t shot off my mouth—”

“Will you stop it? None of it is your fault. I was the primary target all along. From the little I overheard, you’re just going to pick up the ransom.”

“How much?”

“Two million.”

He whistled. “How do they expect to get it?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t discuss it much, except one of them suggested they avail themselves of the facilities while they had me there alone with you drugged and knocked out. The other one told him to shut up and attend to business. That’s when the two million was mentioned. You could be swimming in it, he said, in that bracket. Wall-to-wall tail is the elegant way he put it.”

“Then there were just two of them?”

“That’s all I saw.”

“Was one of them Kessler? Or would you be able to recognize his voice?”

“I might. But they were both too big, six feet or over. One had a hush-puppy accent, Texas, I think.”

“So there are three of them, at least.”

She gestured toward the wall. “Plus Hotpants.”

“Did you get a look at their car?”

“No. I think it must have been down the hill in back, at your father’s place. After they slugged you and injected that stuff in your arm, they held me and gave me a shot of it, too. Then the one who seemed to be in charge sent Tex off to get the wheels. Tex was the one who was smitten by my desirability. Or maybe availability is the word. Anyway, the stuff didn’t take effect right away, and I was still with it to some extent when I heard the car pull up in front; but by the time they’d lugged you out there and then come back for me. I was out. I have some kind of vague impression of about half-way waking up somewhere along the line and the two of us were lying on a mattress in the back of what might have been a panel truck. We were stopped, and they seemed to be giving you the needle again. But the whole thing might have been a dream.”

“No. There are two punctures.”

“But why the drugs at all? They could have just tied us up.”

“So we wouldn’t be able even to make a guess which direction we were driven or for how long. We could be twenty miles west of Coleville or four hundred miles south. I think we’re in the Sierra or the foothills, for what that’s worth, which is nothing.”

“Do you suppose they’re going to do the same thing again, send you into the bank for the money the way they did your father?”

“Apparently. It worked the other time, so maybe they think they can get away with it again.”

“But there’s one thing I still don’t understand. His hands were free, of course, so why couldn’t he—”

“Time,” he said. He explained. “He’d have been blown up before he could even start to get out of it.”

“But, Eric, part of the junk must have been somewhere else on him. In his coat, maybe, so there’d have to be interconnection wires he could yank loose.”

“Yeah, I “know—” he began, but at that moment the intercom came to life.

“Of course he could have pulled the circuits apart,” a voice said. “But that was the last thing on earth he wanted. Believe me.”

They looked at each other. The question was obvious in Romstead’s eyes. She shrugged. It could be Kessler, but she wasn’t sure.

Romstead turned toward the intercom. “Why?”

“You know anything about electrical circuits or electronics?” the voice asked.

“Very little,” Romstead said bleakly.

“Well, your old man did. He got it right away when I showed him the circuit.”

“You want me to ask, is that it?”

“I don’t care if you do or not, but I think you ought to understand what you’re up against. The detonator was on the back contact of the relay. Failsafe in reverse.”

“All right, whatever that means.”

“It means, quite simply, that the thing wasn’t intended to be detonated by the radio signal. It was the radio signal that kept it from detonating, if you’re still with me. He was on a leash.”

Romstead got it then, the full horror of it and the helplessness his father must have felt. He couldn’t run, because if he went beyond the range of the transmitter he’d blow up automatically. If the police grabbed Kessler, or if he himself got close enough to grab him or knock him out, the same thing would happen.

“The spark supply was self-contained,” the voice went on. “A bank of charged capacitors. Perfectly harmless as long as the detonating circuit was open, but if the radio circuit failed for any reason, the relay fell open and completed the detonating circuit through the back contact. Neat device.”

Egomaniac, Romstead thought. He was capable of talking himself into the gas chamber just to prove how brilliant he was. But that was of little help here.

“Now we’re all agreed you’re a genius,” Romstead said, “do we have to have the burro?”

“No, we haven’t got another burro. We’ve got some good sixteen millimeter footage of that one, though, if you need convincing.”

Romstead said nothing. The bed was beginning to creak again on the other side of the wall. The voice went on, “Not necessary, anyway. You don’t think we’re stupid enough to try the same thing again in the same way, do you? This is a whole new operation with a different approach. Do you want some breakfast?”

“Oh, God,” the girl said on the other side of the wall. Romstead looked at Paulette Carmody. She shook her head and looked away.

“We appreciate it,” Romstead said, “but not with the present entertainment.”

There was a chuckle from the intercom. “Boy, have you got hangups. Well, we’re going to bring you out in a little while for the pictures we have to have.”

The headboard of the other bed was beginning to bump the wall once more. “Fast turnaround; no down time at all,” Paulette Carmody said. “Or she’s taking them in relays.” She went into the bathroom and closed the door. He heard her flush the toilet and turn on the water in the basin. After the final shriek she came out again.

“And I always loved sex,” she said. “Do you suppose I’ll ever be capable of it again?”

“Sure,” Romstead replied. “Barnyard matings never bothered you before, did they?”

She lighted another cigarette. “It’s a wonder the great genius didn’t put a TV camera in here so they could watch us as well as listen.”

“Oh, we’re being watched.” He gestured toward the front wall. “The mirror’s a phony.”

She looked at it with interest. “You mean like those they’re supposed to have in some of the casinos? How does it work?”

“You just have to have more light on the front side than the back. It’s probably in a closet out there, or there’s a curtain over it.”

“Oh. What was all that about a burro?”

He explained about finding the skeleton with its broken ribs. “It was a demonstration, to put the old man in a receptive frame of mind. They strapped a bundle of dynamite to the poor little bastard, tied some tin cans to his tail to make him run, and then blew him up several hundred yards away.”

“Oh, my God! How sick can you get? And they took movies of it?”

“So he says.”

“But how could they get them developed?”

“Some bootleg lab that does processing for stag movies.”

She gave him a speculative glance. “For an ex-jock and a prosaic businessman, you seem to know some of the damndest things.”

He shrugged. “I read a lot.”

“Yes, but I wonder what.”

He made no reply. Two million dollars, she’d said; he’d had no idea she was that wealthy, but Kessler must have, and apparently he was right. His intelligence operations must have improved since they’d kidnapped his father. He thought of Jeri; maybe that had been her job and she’d bungled it. But how in hell did they expect to collect any such sum and get away with it, when the FBI would be turning over every rock west of the Mississippi? He, Romstead, was supposed to pick up the ransom, she’d said. What did that mean? Go into the bank, as the old man had? No, this was supposed to be something entirely different. The only things for sure were that it would be somewhere on the border line between brilliance and insanity, it would involve electronics, and at the end of it, unless he could find some way out of here, he’d be dead, the same as his father.

He wondered if they’d rented this place or if they’d bought it with some of the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. No doubt after it was over, they’d remove the bars, the steel plate, the mirror, and all the rest of it, and plug up the holes, but if they knew anything about the FBI, they’d better do a good job. With two million paid in ransom and two people dead, the country was going to be sifted, and sifted very fine.

There was the sound of a latch being released, and the narrow panel above the chest of drawers slid open. A hand reached in holding a pair of handcuffs and two strips of black cloth. It deposited these on top of the chest. Then the twin barrels of the sawed-off shotgun protruded from the opening, and a voice said, “Romstead, go to the back of the room and face the window.”

Dramatic bunch of bastards, Romstead thought, with a real flair for the theater. Next thing he’ll gesture with the gun the way they do on TV. He turned and walked back, and stood facing the window. Behind him, the voice went on, “Mrs. Carmody, take these things back there. Blindfold him and handcuff his hands behind him.”

“I don’t know how to handcuff anybody,” she replied. “I must have been absent that day at the Police Academy—”

“Shut up and do as you’re told. The cuffs are open. All you have to do is put them around his wrists and push in until the ratchets catch. And if you’re fond of him at all, put that blindfold on right.”

It wasn’t the same voice they’d heard on the intercom; it was a little deeper in pitch and the delivery more aggressive. There was no trace of regional accent that “he could hear, so it couldn’t be Tex. Then there were at least three. Call this one Top Kick.

He heard her come up behind him and put his hands back. The steel rings closed over his wrists, and then she knotted the blindfold around his head. “Now stand beside him and blindfold yourself,” the voice said. Romstead heard her move and then the sound of a bolt being drawn and the turning of a lock.

“Got him heah,” another voice said. So that was Tex. That meant he also had a gun of some kind and was covering from the door. Theatrical they might be, but they played it close to the chest when it came to taking chances, though what they thought he could do handcuffed and sightless was beyond him at the moment. The floor was bare except for a throw rug between the beds, and he could hear footsteps coming up behind him. Then another set nearer the door. They were both in the room now.

“You jist go wheah I point you, Sugarfoot,” Tex said. His and Paulette’s footsteps retreated toward the door, and then something poked into Romstead’s back.

“Twelve-gauge double, loaded with number two’s,” Top Kick said. Romstead made no reply. A big hand grasped his left arm above the elbow and turned him around. “Straight ahead.” They crossed the room. He already had the dimensions of that fixed in his mind, and he felt his right arm brush against the door facing just when he expected it. “Right,” Top Kick ordered, and pushed his arm. Hallway, Romstead thought, with at least two bedrooms opening onto it. He silently counted the steps. They should be opposite the mirror now, and he pushed the right elbow out just slightly and felt it brush against cloth. So it was curtained on this side.

“Left,” Top Kick commanded. So the entrance to the bedroom hallway would be just about opposite the see-through mirror. Romstead turned and began counting again, taking the short steps that would be natural to a sighted person temporarily unable to see but at the same time would be as near exactly two feet as he could make them. He heard a refrigerator motor start up and a dripping sound that could be a leaky faucet. There was the smell of coffee in the air here and the residual odor of fried bacon. The floor was still bare, but he could no longer hear Tex and Paulette ahead of him. Then a screen door opened momentarily, stretching its spring, and Tex said, “Short step down, Honeybunch.” The screen snapped back, the latch rattling against the wood. They’d just gone out, so there must be carpet ahead. Then he was on it, twelve feet from the rear wall of the bedroom hallway.

Three steps in on the carpet, they turned obliquely left, and after nine more Top Kick stopped him and he could feel the threshold under the toe of his shoe. Top Kick pushed the screen door open, still holding the shotgun at his back. “Down,” he said.

So the front door of the long room was offset slightly to the left of the hallway door, and they’d had to skirt something, a table or sofa, instead of going straight across. He wondered why he was doing it; it must be purely automatic. The information would be invaluable to the FBI afterward, but who was going to give it to them?

He stepped down carefully and felt a cocoa mat under his foot. Bare planks then for six feet, and then another two steps down onto the grating crunch of pea gravel. There was the resinous fragrance of pine in the air, but no wind at all to give him any aural indication as to how near the surrounding trees were or how dense. No sound of traffic in any direction. A bird he thought was a jay scolded them from somewhere nearby. Sunlight on his head. Remote, peaceful, he thought. Sure, great.

“Left,” Top Kick ordered. He turned and began counting again, feeling the rasp of the gravel under his shoes. They were apparently going to another building for some reason, so this direction and distance would be the most important information of all from an investigative standpoint, assuming anybody ever received it. With aerial photography you could cover thousands of square miles in a few hours, looking for two buildings of approximately XY and XY dimensions and separated from each other by Z distance in Z-Prime direction in a clearing in some pines, breaking them down into impossibles, possibles, and probables as fast as you could develop the film.

It seemed highly unlikely that the technological genius didn’t know this himself, so the fact that he didn’t seem to care was as chilling as the rest of it.