Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 44, No. 4, April 1980

How to Kill a Hostage by Richard Reinsmith

Her name was Susan. She was young and pretty — with her whole life ahead of her — but she could identify the men who’d robbed the bank, so she’d have to die. The question was: how to kill her? The answer was surprising — but quite effective!

When we came out of the bank, Sam held the hostage’s wrist, dragging her along. I carried the bag of money and we each had a gun in our right hand. We’d chosen the Triangle Shopping Center bank because the parking lot was a hell of a mess and we knew cops would have trouble reaching the scene. We’d counted on a teller pushing one of those silent alarms that notifies the police a robbery is in progress. We’d calculated we would be on our way before the cops arrived.

But it didn’t turn out that way. Two state troopers were outside the bank when we emerged. They didn’t fire at Sam because he had the pretty blonde bank teller shoved in front after we came through the glass doors. But they didn’t give a damn about shooting at me. A bullet roared past my head and smashed glass.

I had planned my response when we first began outlining the robbery. I didn’t want to kill a state cop. But I didn’t want to stand around on a Principle while one shot me. So, I’d finally reasoned, if we were faced with a shootout, I’d aim for the cop’s stomach. I deliberately carried a .25. With luck a person could live though a gut shot with that caliber — if somebody got him to the hospital fast enough, if the surgeon was good and if the bullet hadn’t done too much damage. What you might call a fighting chance. Whereas, if I’d carried a .45, the chances wouldn’t be so good. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people cannot live after having a .45 pass through their stomach.

The cop went down when I hit him and, luckily, the gun flew from his hand. I’d hoped the shot would knock him unconscious but it didn’t. There are times when it seems nothing goes exactly the way you’d hoped. He crawled toward his gun. Stubborn soul. Meanwhile — Sam had shot the other cop in the chest.

We reached our car. I was sliding behind the steering wheel when I heard Sam shoot again and looked up to see he’d shot the arm of the cop who’d been crawling toward his weapon. I only saw the last of it but it looked as if that stubborn soul had been about to shoot me in the back.

But then I slammed the car door and we roared out of there. A quarter of a mile away, we skidded to a stop beside the second car we’d arranged, transferred the money and the hostage to the trunk. Sam slapped some adhesive tape around the girl’s mouth, put handcuffs on her wrists. We took our false mustaches and beards and long-hair wigs, putting them in the bag we’d thought. I drove the second car toward our home base point while Sam walked the three blocks to our third car — dropping the bag of wigs in a street trash can.

All we needed now was some luck. The police would be looking for two men in a white car while we would be individuals, each driving a black car. The hair bit might throw them off too, if they took the wigs and so forth seriously, because Sam and I both had short haircuts, my hair was grey and Sam’s was blond.

About eight or nine blocks away, I stopped at a traffic light. A county cop pulled up beside me.

He frowned. He tilted his head to one side as if listening intently. I tilted my head to the same angle and tried to turn up the volume control on my ears.

Then I heard it. Thump-thump-thump. The girl in the car trunk was kicking.

“What the hell is that?” the county cop asked, frowning more deeply. He was a good frowner and looked like a mean cop.

I listened to the girl kicking against the trunk lid and said, “That’s my muffer. Got a bad hole. Makes a weird sound.”

“You’re telling me? You better get that fixed. You know there’s a law against—” But he stopped in midstream because they were calling him on his radio and telling him about an armed robbery at the Triangle Shopping Center. He did an illegal U-turn at the intersection and sped off.

I drove on to home base, took the money inside and then the girl. “You almost got me into trouble back there,” I told her. I pulled up the hidden trap door and pointed at the stairs. “There’s a bomb shelter down there,” I explained. “A comfortable room to keep you in until the heat clears off.”

I motioned for her to go down the stairs.

She shook her head no.

I said, “please?”

She mumbled something beneath the bandage that sounded like a no and didn’t move.

We must have picked the toughest teller in the bank.

“If you don’t walk down the stairs, I’ll hit you on the head and roll you down while you’re unconscious.”

I thought the threat would work but her face reddened with anger, she glared and growled something beneath the gag that sounded like a threat. I walked around and goosed her with the barrel of the .25.

She squealed and then moved under her own steam.

When Sam arrived an hour or so later, we divided the money. Over a hundred thousand dollars apiece — not a bad haul if we didn’t have to pay with our lives. As each hour went by, it looked as if there was less and less likelihood we’d have to pay in any way. We listened to the police radio band and learned they were apparently chasing us in the next state.

“It worked,” Sam said with a smile as we sat there, looking at each other over the two stacks of money on the table.

The plan had started when Sam’s father died and we began renovating his summer cottage for either sale or personal use. We couldn’t quite decide which. In the process of working on the cottage, we’d discovered the hidden trap door and the bomb shelter beneath. We’d started by speculating it would be a good place for someone to hide the loot if they pulled a robbery. The speculation had led to the actual plan. We had a perfect reason for being at the cottage. Everybody in the country knew we were renovating it.

“Now we let the hostage loose and we can relax.” Sam looked at the girl as she sat there tied to the chair and the smile slowly faded from his face.

At first I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. The gag was still around her mouth. Nothing wrong with it. I’d done a good job of tying her to the chair.

Her blue eyes kept watching us, growing wider and wider.

“We made a mistake,” Sam said. “We forgot to blindfold her.”

I was glad he said we.

Hell of a mistake to make. We’d planned a blindfold.

“We’ll have to kill her,” Sam said. “She knows what we look like.”

“I’ll do it,” I volunteered. “She’s a royal pain, almost got me in trouble for having a bad muffler... You know that law about mufflers? She was kicking like hell in the trunk. And she wouldn’t come down the stairs.”

I took my gun, released the safety and aimed at her head. Sam turned the other way. He didn’t want to watch.

The girl began to cry. Not much sound but those big blue eyes were spilling tears that rolled down her cheeks. She began to shiver.

I lowered the gun. “I can’t do it.”

“Huh?”

“She’s crying. Look at her. She’s scared silly.”

“Don’t be afraid,” Sam said, turning in his chair to face her. “It’ll be so fast you won’t feel a thing. Just think... you won’t have to pay taxes. No worries about anything.”

The girl began to cry harder.

“I don’t think she’s sold on death, Sam.”

“I’ll do it.” Sam took his gun and aimed at her head. He closed his eyes and for a moment I thought he’d pull the trigger while he wasn’t looking. But he opened his eyes again and dropped the gun on the table. “Let’s think of some other way. A gun is so damned messy.”

“We don’t have any.”

“Suffocation?”

Sam looked at the girl and wrinkled his nose. “That might work but she’ll make some sickening sounds while she’s suffocating.”

He didn’t have to elaborate. I knew he meant we were both too soft-hearted to listen to the sounds of her dying. “The same goes for strangulation...”

“Why can’t you do it with the damned gun?!” Sam said suddenly, slamming his fist against the table. He glowered. “You killed so many men in combat, what’s one life more or less?” The glower turned to a reproachful expression.

I shrugged. “They were men, not women. They weren’t crying like she is. And they were trying to kill me. That makes a hell of a difference, you know. She’s as helpless as a kitten.” I wondered if I could turn the tide. “Why’d you shoot that cop in the chest? I thought we agreed to aim for the stomach. If you like to kill so much, why can’t you kill her?”

Sam shook his head. He grimaced. “You said you’d aim for the stomach. I didn’t say I would.” He shut his mouth and I thought that was the end of it. He crossed his arms and settled into a stony silence as he relaxed in the chair. About four or five minutes later, he added, “I was aiming at the cop’s stomach. I’m a lousy shot.”

“Hit her over the head?” I suggested.

Sam’s face whitened. “Can you imagine the sickening sound that would make?”

“I don’t think it’ll make much sound.”

“I read a book once where—”

“OK, OK, OK. How about breaking her neck?”

“No! I couldn’t stand that snapping sound!”

“Sam,” I said as patiently as I could, “I don’t see how we can kill her without making some sound. If we’re going to worry about sounds—”

“There must be a silent way of doing it.”

Speaking of silence, we both fell into silence awhile.

“Electrouction,” Sam said, his eyes bright. In addition to other things, Sam was a licensed electrician.

“I don’t think I could stand the smell of an electrocuted body.”

More silence.

I snapped my fingers. “Knife.”

Sam left the bomb shelter to get a hunting knife and returned, placing it on the table. “Cut cards to see who does it?”

“OK.”

Sam went to get a deck of cards. He lost the cut.

“Find her heart first,” I suggested. “Do it in one stab.”

Sam picked up the knife and held it in his right hand while he unbuttoned the girl’s blouse with his left. He slipped the hand over her bosom. “Slightly to the left of center, right? Her left... Ah...”

“You found it?”

“The’re real. Oh. Here’s her heart. Beating fast. Beating faster. Hey.” The girl slumped in the chair.

I guessed, “She’s either had a heart attack or she’s fainted.”

Sam removed the bandage from around her mouth. He slapped her cheeks. He went and brought her a glass of water. He talked to her until she regained consciousness, then giving her some water to drink.

“You won’t kill me, will you? This is all some kind of wild joke, isn’t it?” She stared at us, her eyes as wide as saucers. Hopeful expression on her face.

“It isn’t a joke,” Sam said.

She began crying again. Crying silently with a gag around her mouth was bad enough. Crying with sound was downright awful. Sam tried to calm her. He kept talking. He asked what her name was. Susan. They started to seem so friendly, I butted in. “I don’t think you should get real chummy with her if you’re going to knock her off. It’s easier to kill strangers.”

“I guess you’re right.” Sam picked up the knife.

“Please! Please! Please don’t use a knife!” It was easy to see she was horrified of knives.

“She doesn’t want us to use the knife,” Sam said sadly.

“Let’s go hide the money and come back to the problem. They say that works sometimes.”

We went upstairs and concealed the money in the wall as we had planned. It didn’t take long. In a couple of hours we had the whole livingroom paneled, Sam’s money on one side, mine on the other. I didn’t worry about Susan, our hostage. The bottom door to the bomb shelter was a strong one and we had it locked from the outside. We’d left her tied to the chair and even if she managed to free herself, she couldn’t break out of that room. There was an air vent to her room but the line had such strong filters in it that anyone screaming their head off couldn’t be heard in the cottage or nearby.

“I think I’ll go down and untie Susan so she can stretch her legs,” Sam said.

I nodded OK. He came back two hours later with a strange expression on his face. “She said she’d do anything we want if we don’t kill her.” Sam sighed and leaned against a wall, sliding down it, sitting on the floor, looking exhausted. This thing was taking a lot out of him, I saw. I sat on the floor nearby. We hadn’t moved any chairs into the cottage so far and we’d decided to fiddle with the renovation, taking as much time as possible.

“I thought of an ideal way to kill her,” Sam said.

“How?”

“Let her starve to death. She can’t break out of there. And there’s no food down there. Just the table and the chairs we carried down. I think she’ll starve in two weeks or less.”

I thought about the idea a few minutes. “Sounds good,” I said.

We didn’t talk about the hostage during the weeks that followed. We’d work on the cottage an hour or two some days, but sometimes skipping two or three days in a row. The cop that Sam shot managed to live, thanks to modem surgery. I think we were both a little relieved. But the rap for armed robbery and shooting two policemen was bad enough that it still seemed to warrant killing the hostage so she couldn’t identify us.

Our lives other than working on the cottage were on widely diverse paths during which we seldom saw each other. Sam was still single but liked to horse around with a young crowd full of lively chicks. As a widower, I preferred quiet evenings, occasionally with a woman approximately my own age. Sam and I had little in common other than having once worked for the same company. It was strange in a way — we’d become closer friends because he’d inherited the cottage from his uncle and because I had some skill as a carpenter — a skill he lacked. The summer cottage and its concealed bomb shelter had spawned the whole idea of the bank robbery.

I intended to, visit the cottage alone about two weeks after we began starving the hostage. It stretched to two months before I finally got up the nerve. I’d decided to bury the body myself and spare Sam the unpleasant task since he’d seemed to like the girl.

I dug a grave in the woods not too far from the cottage and then went down to the bomb shelter, unlocking the door with my key. Nobody could live two months without food. Starvation had been the perfect solution. I’d decided to wrap the girl in a blanket to carry to the grave and was holding the green blanket under one arm as I opened the door.

Our hostage, Susan, was sitting up in a bed I’d not seen before. She was watching a large color television that had not been in the cottage. A box of candy and a vase of flowers rested on a nearby bedside stand. She was wearing a shortie blue nightie — and a gold bracelet I didn’t remember seeing before. As I looked around the room I saw a large refrigerator, an electric stove, a homemade bookcase filled with books and some storage shelves loaded with cans of food. An electric heater had been placed near one wall and there was a vanity covered with perfumes, combs, lipsticks and a large oval mirror. The sight sort of stunned me because the last time I’d seen this room it had contained only a table and three chairs.

Susan, startled, looked up and stared at the blanket under my arm. Her eyes were wide, frightened. I placed the blanket on the floor and grinned sheepishly. “I thought you might want another blanket. Winter’s coming.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I turned and went out, locking the door again.

Sam had his own key to the bomb shelter, of course. And he wasn’t as dumb as he’d sometimes seemed. He’d thought of the best way to kill our hostage: keep her well fed and let her die slowly of old age during the next fifty or sixty years.