Smoke Page 38

“They want to talk to you.”

  “Then how come you’re talking to me?”

  A heavy male voice—this must be the maniac moonlighting cop, Barney—said, “We want you to understand, Freddie, what’s goin on here.”

  “You’re threatening a woman with a knife,” Freddie said. “I think I got it.”

  “No no no, Freddie,” said Barney’s croaky wisenheimer voice, “that isn’t the topic. You’re the topic.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re a valuable guy, Freddie, to whoever’s got a handle on you. And what we think we got here, with Peg, we think we got the handle.”

  “They want you to get in the Subaru,” Peg said, “and drive over—”

  “I’ll do the talking now, Peg,” Barney said. “Hang up.”

  Click. Subaru: double-click.

  Freddie said, “What do you want, Barney?”

  “You, Freddie, workin for me and workin for some friends of mine. Light work, very easy, a little excitement every now and then. Good pay.”

  “I don’t like to be an employee, that’s always been a problem I had.”

  “That’s too bad, Freddie, time you got over it. We got the idea you place a certain value on Peg here, and we got Peg, and we’re gonna keep Peg, so that makes you an employee. So you’ll get used to it.”

  “And what if I just say the hell with everything, and go someplace else? California, maybe.”

  “Gimme an address, to send the fingers.”

  “You can always shove them up your ass.”

  “Don’t be silly, Freddie,” Barney said, almost fondly. “You don’t talk tough to me. And you don’t leave Peg on her own, either, that’s one of the nicest qualities about you.” Off, he said, “Isn’t it, Peg?” Back, he said, “She agrees with me. She’s kinda counting on you, Freddie. So you come here, you come now, and you wear something so we can see you, and we give you the details of the situation.”

  Hogtie me, you mean. Other guys there, Peg said so, Barney didn’t like her telling me that. Lean on me because they’ll want me to do stuff I really and truly won’t want to do. Peg’s the hostage, and I’m the patsy, world without end. Don’t even get to be visible again someday, so I could retire.

  Well, screw that.

  Aloud, Freddie said, “I want Peg sitting on the front porch, so I can see she’s okay. All by herself.”

  “You know what’ll happen, she decides to run.”

  “Yeah, we all know. If she’s there, and she’s okay, I’ll come in.”

  “She’ll come in with you.”

  “Okay, fine. After I see she’s okay. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Peg tells me you’re ten minutes away.”

  Oh, hell, Peg, what’d you say that for? Freddie said, “Did you ever know a woman with any sense of time?” Forgive me, Peg. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Fifteen. If you aren’t here, she loses a finger.”

  “Then make it the pinky on her left hand, she never uses that. I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Freddie said. “And the first thing I’ll do when I get there is count Peg’s fingers.”

  And he hung up and ran.

  53

  Peg and Barney and one of the thugs had been in the chief’s office for the phone call, there being two phones on the same line in that room, one of them cordless. Barney, using that one, had paced back and forth like a fat Napoleon all through the conversation, and when it ended he thumbed the phone off, slapped it onto the desk, and said to Peg, “Up.”

  She’d been seated at the desk, talking on the other phone there, and now she obediently got to her feet. She’d done what she could to help Freddie, so now it was up to him. If only Barney were less mean, less quick, and less maniacal. But he wasn’t, so there you are.

  Barney called, “Bring in the chief,” and then started opening cabinets and closets, making small sounds in his throat that would have been humming if they weren’t all on the same note. By the time Chief Wheedabyx came in, with a second thug, Barney had found a whole cache of handcuffs. They clacked like castanets as he motioned with them at the desk chair, saying, “Take a load off, Chief. Things are gonna slow down and get peaceful now.”

  The chief said, “This is going to end badly for you, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know, Chief,” Barney said. “But if you don’t put the ass in the chair right now—”

  “Language,” the chief said, and sat in the desk chair.

  Barney stared at him. “Language? Chief, I hope you never meet up with any bad guys.” Picking out two sets of cuffs, handing them to the thug who’d been appointed the chief’s monitor, he said, “One wrist to each chair arm. If he gets a call, you hold the phone up to his head for him. If he says anything you don’t like, hang up and shoot him in the head. Then come tell me about it.”

  “Got it.”

  Turning to the first thug, who’d been with them during the phone call, Barney said, “Grab down those rolls of twine from the closet there, bring ’em along.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Come on, Peg.”

  She followed Barney out of the office, the thug with an armload of rolls of twine following her, as the chief was cuffed to his own office chair. He looked grim and heroic still, like Mount Rushmore.

  In the hall, they met the third thug and the attorney, Leethe. Barney said, “We’re moving.”

  Leethe said, “What’s happening?”

  “He’s on his way. Look in the tall cabinet in there, second shelf, you’ll see boxes and boxes of thumbtacks and pushpins. I want ’em on the ground all around the property, and in the doorways, and on the windowsills. You and Bosco do that.” Meaning the third thug.

  Leethe looked surprised and displeased. “Barney,” he said, “do you think I’m one of your henchmen?”

  “No, I think you’re one of NAABOR’s henchmen, same as ever. We got no time to stroke egos, Counselor. Freddie’s on his way.”

  Leethe made a bad mouth, but he went away to do Barney’s bidding, followed by the thug now christened Bosco, while Barney led Peg and the remaining thug out to the porch, where they found the usual country assortment of wood and wicker furniture. The sturdiest of these was a straight-backed wooden armchair, long ago painted dark green, which Barney now dragged across the gray-painted porch floor closer to the door. “Park it,” he told Peg, and as she sat he turned to the thug with the armload of twine. “Give me one roll,” he said, taking it, “and go out there and string me trip wires all around the property, tree to tree.”

  “Right.”

  The thug left the porch and crossed the lawn over to a big maple, where he went to work. Barney opened the roll of twine, knelt beside Peg, and tied her right ankle to one chair leg and her left ankle to the other. “Slip knots,” he told her, using the porch rail to help lever his bulk back up onto his feet. “If you bend down to touch the cord, I’ll give you a warning shot in the shoulder. When Freddie gets here, ask him to untie you.”

  Leethe and Bosco came out, hands and pockets full of little boxes of thumbtacks and pushpins. They walked around like Johnny Appleseed, sprinkling shiny sharp things on path and lawn, so that when Freddie got here he’d have to move very slowly, clearing all the tacks and pins out of the way of his bare feet, if he was barefoot, or have to wear shoes. In either case, Barney and the others would see him coming.

  Barney went back into the house. Peg sat in the chair and watched the preparations continue, Leethe moving around the house to the left, Bosco and the trip-wiring thug to the right. From time to time, a car or pickup truck went by on Market Street, and there were some curious stares, but not many. There was always some sort of construction work going on in town.

  Bart Simpson drove by, in a green Hornet.

  Barney had his crew add coffee cups and silverware and other noisemaking things to his trip wires, and make sure every door and window except the wide-open front entrance was locked and blocked and defended by thumbtacks. Then they
stripped blankets and bedspreads from the beds upstairs and waited just inside the open front doorway. The idea was, when Freddie stooped or knelt to untie the twine around Peg’s ankles, they’d leap out and wrap him in bedding and tie him up and then talk to him.

  Maybe it won’t be so bad, Peg thought, Freddie working for Barney and the lawyer. Steady employment, low risk. Probably no health benefits, though.

  It’s hard to look on the sunny side when you’re in a shit-storm.

  54

  Freddie walked back to the house. He’d seen the preparations as he’d driven by, and now he took a closer look. Trip wires to make jangly noises. Sharp things on the ground for his bare feet. No windows open, on this nice sunny day, so probably everything locked up except that invitingly open doorway beside Peg, sitting there on the front porch. Was that some kind of cord or twine around her ankles? Very nice.

  Freddie made a complete circuit of the house. It wasn’t completely surrounded by trees, but there were enough large old maples spaced here and there to give comfortable summer shade. Also, at the moment, they made handy posts for the trip wires.

  A big maple on the right side had branches going right up above the roof. Its lowest thick branch was a little more than seven feet from the ground, extending outward away from the house and trip wire. On his second jump, Freddie grabbed that branch and managed to pull himself aboard.

  For a naked man, shimmying up a tree is even trickier than riding a bicycle.

  Freddie didn’t know it, of course, but the route he was taking now had been Geoff Wheedabyx’s favorite path in and out of his house when he was between the ages of ten and twelve, sometimes traveling that way because his parents didn’t want him out so late at night, sometimes going by tree merely because it was fun.

  The thick branch Freddie inched out on, when he had ascended high enough, bowed and swayed with his weight; fortunately, nobody was looking up. It led him to the porch roof, which his bare feet touched so gently that even Peg didn’t hear it down below, but kept on looking out at the street, wondering when something would happen.

  The upstairs windows were open (good) but screened (bad). Freddie hadn’t brought any tools with him. The screens were the old-fashioned wooden-frame sort, with small slitted metal bars at the top corners. These hung on metal tongues attached to the window frame. In the winter, no doubt, the chief came up here and took down these screens to put up old-fashioned storm windows on the same hardware.

  First unhooking the screens, of course. Yes, each screen was hooked closed on the inside. The wooden screen frame was flush with the wooden window frame: nothing to get a grip on. And bare hands do not punch through well-made screens like this, not without harming the hands and alerting the already alert people just below.

  This is very irritating, Freddie thought. Through one of the open windows, he could hear Barney and the others talking together downstairs. So near, and yet so far.

  He walked over to the right corner of the porch roof, and from there, on tiptoe, he could just see the steep slope of the main roof. No trapdoor on this side; no, and there wouldn’t be one on the other side, either, or it would be locked. There was a chimney over there, which he would not crawl down.

  In trying to see the roof, he’d held on to the drainpipe that went down this corner of the house. Now he considered the drainpipe, shook it experimentally, and it was quite solid. New, or not very old. The chief was also a construction guy, so maybe he put his crew to work on his own house sometimes, when business got slow.

  Freddie looked over the edge. The porch railing looked very far away, straight down. If he fell, of course, he’d just land on grass down there—no thumbtacks; they were all farther out—but he wouldn’t land quietly, and then they’d know he was here.

  Still, what choice did he have? He was on the house, and he had to get in the house. There was no silent way to get through those screens. There was no point going back down the tree. Time to do a little more Tom Sawyer.

  Which meant, first, extending his right foot down so he could press his toes against the metal collar that held the drainpipe just below the porch ceiling. That metal collar was unexpectedly sharp and painful to his flesh, but there still wasn’t any choice, so he gripped the drainpipe, shifted his weight to his extremely pained toes, lowered his right hand to a new grip, bent the right knee, pawed with his dangling left foot for the porch rail, lowered his left hand to a new grip, bent the knee a lot more, pawed a lot more, stubbed his toe on the rail, touched his toe to the rail, bent the knee more than he thought he could, shifted his weight to his left foot, pushed away from the drainpipe while still holding on to it, removed his extremely pained right foot from the sharp metal collar, went on holding to the drainpipe, turned on the railing, and saw Peg in profile, seated in that chair, arms on the chair arms, legs tied to the chair legs.

  Freddie climbed down to the porch floor, braced himself against the wall of the house, and felt the bottom of the toes on his right foot. He was amazed to find that he wasn’t cut or bleeding. He massaged the toes until they felt a little better, and then he moved.

  He was sorry he couldn’t whisper a word of encouragement to Peg on the way by, but he didn’t want to risk her giving some sort of startled response that would alert the guys inside. So he just eased on by behind her, then went through the open doorway, and here was the cop, hunkered over next to the wall, gripping a blanket in both hands like the child-eating ogre in a fairy tale.

  With the cop was the guy who had been with him that day in Bay Ridge, the guy Peg later had told him was a lawyer, though he didn’t look or act much like a lawyer at the moment. He had a nice old antique quilt bunched in his fists and hanging down his front, and he looked like the evil brother in a fourth-rate touring company of Arsenic and Old Lace. And also present, also holding blankets at the ready, either to douse a fire or capture an invisible man, were two plug-uglies in suits and white shirts and neckties. They looked like pit bulls that had been made to wear fancy collars.

  As Freddie walked in to study this diorama, the lawyer said, “How long?”

  The cop looked at his wrist. “Fifteen minutes. We’ll give him the twenty he asked for.”

  Thanks, Freddie thought.

  The lawyer said, “What if he doesn’t show?”

  “Then it’s Plan B.”

  “Barney, I don’t—”

  Sounding almost sorry about it, but not really sorry, the cop said, “Mr. Leethe, we got no choice. If we say we’re gonna take her finger, and then we don’t take the finger, we lose all credibility. Freddie wouldn’t have any reason ever to believe us again. And I want Freddie to believe, to really know and believe, that when I tell him something is going to happen, that’s what’s gonna happen.”

  Uh-huh. Freddie left them to their plans and stratagems, and went exploring, and the first thing he found was the chief, handcuffed to his own chair in his own office, with a third plug-ugly in suit and tie in another chair nearby, watching over him. The chief looked bitter, and the plug-ugly looked bored.

  Freddie explored on. He found nobody else on the ground floor, and didn’t expect there’d be anybody upstairs, so didn’t look. He was going through the kitchen when he heard voices, arguing together, and in a minute realized there were some people in the basement and the basement door was locked.

  Okay. Those are good guys, apparently, the chief’s friends. For the moment, we’ll leave them out of play.

  Freddie went back to the chief’s office, and nothing had happened, nobody had moved. He went over to the wall behind the plug-ugly, where all the hats were hung, and under the hats he found a lot of the chief’s equipment. There was a very nice fire ax, but that seemed extreme. Oh, here was a nightstick.

  Freddie picked up the nightstick, and the chief jumped a mile. Or he would have jumped a mile, if it hadn’t been for the cuffs holding him to the chair.

  The plug-ugly frowned at him. “What’s with you?”

  “Mosquito,” the chie
f said. “Could you wave a magazine around my head or something?”

  “Don’t worry,” the plug-ugly said. “You won’t itch for long. Just sit there and—”

  The chief winced.

  Freddie held the plug-ugly so he wouldn’t crash to the floor, adjusted him in the chair, then went over behind the desk and whispered in the chief’s ear, “Key. Whisper.”

  The chief was quite wide-eyed. “Hook,” he whispered, and pointed with his nose and chin at a small board of hooks, most containing keys, on the opposite wall.

  Freddie crossed the room, and the keys all had neatly lettered little cardboard tags attached to them with white string. He started to read the tags.

  “He says the time is—hey!”

  Freddie spun around, to see another of the plug-uglies in the doorway, staring at his unconscious friend. Hell and damn.

  The guy turned and left the doorway at the run, yelling, “He’s here! He’s here!”

  “Later,” Freddie told the chief. Dropping the nightstick, he ran from the office before he could be trapped inside it, and got out just as the doorway filled with the whole crowd of them.

  The cop was a fast thinker. “Bosco!” he cried at one of the plug-uglies. “Keep an eye on the broad! The rest of us, let’s see if he’s still in here. Freddie?”

  They moved forward into the room, the three men, spreading out, holding hands. “You here, Freddie?”

  Freddie was not there. Freddie was approaching the guy who’d been left to watch the broad.

  In the old days, when people knew what they were doing, plug-uglies did not wear neckties. Plug-uglies wore turtleneck sweaters, as you can see from looking at all the old photographs, and plug-uglies knew why they wore turtleneck sweaters. It was because turtleneck sweaters have nothing on them an enemy can hold on to.

  A necktie is a handle. Freddie grabbed this clown by the handle, ran him full speed across the front hall, and drove his forehead into the stairway newel post with such force the wood cracked.

  The clown kissed the carpet.

  Immediately the cop was in the office doorway, looking up from the guy on the floor, glaring around the hall, saying, “Freddie, Freddie, why be so unfriendly? Do you want the law to get you? Would you rather explain your life of crime to the chief in there?”