Help I Am Being Held Prisoner

by Donald E. Westlake

  I screamed, “Eddie! Captain! We’ve gotta get OUT of here!”

  “Follow my lead,” he said quietly, and stood next to the guard shack, facing the oncoming jeeps, the automatic held down at his side.

  Follow his lead? Stand off two jeeploads of MPs with an empty gun? I stood there twitching, my mouth moving without words, trying to phrase the sentences that would get through to him that what we were doing was not sensible. “It’s not sensible!” I wailed, and the first jeep slued to a stop at our feet.

  Three MPs, white-helmeted, white-eyed. The driver yelled at us, “Captain, what’s going on here?”

  Eddie took a step closer to him. The other jeep was skidding up, brakes squealing. The smell of burnt rubber mixed with the acrid stink of the explosion. Eddie said, “Radicals. Weathermen, I think. Lieutenant Smith and I chased them this far. They dropped that carton when they blew the gate.”

  Two MPs had clattered out of the other jeep and come running over to hear the story. One of them yelled, “Captain Robinson! What happened?”

  So. Not for nothing had Eddie spent a week at this base. Not only had he familiarized himself with Camp Quattatunk, he had also familiarized Camp Quattatunk with Captain Robinson.

  The driver of the first jeep was getting more wide-eyed by the second. He said, “You mean, they were inside?”

  “They’ve done something to the sentry of building FJ-832,” Eddie told him. “You got a radio in there, Corporal?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Call in. Have that building searched. If they’ve killed that man—” He shook the fist with the automatic in it, then turned to the MPs standing beside him. “I’ll have to requisition your jeep, Sergeant,” he said. “You and your man stand guard on this gate, in case they come back.” Turning again to the driver of the first jeep, he said, “Get back to building FJ-832. If they’ve left a bomb in there, this whole compound could go up.”

  “Great Jesus!” the driver said. He threw the jeep in gear, stomped the accelerator, made one of the tightest U-turns in the history of vehicular travel, and roared off again into the sea of tanks.

  “Lieutenant!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “You’ll drive,” Eddie said, and vaulted into the passenger seat of the remaining jeep.

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Grab that carton of evidence!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  I grabbed the carton of evidence and threw it on the back seat, then pushed myself in behind the wheel like a woman pushing hair under a bathing cap. There was no room for my knees, but I put them in there anyway. The engine was running, the clutch was over there, the gear lever was floor-mounted. Left foot down, right hand forward, left hand clutching wheel, left foot up, right foot down hard. Tires screamed like stuck chorus girls behind me; the jeep lunged forward, leaped down into the grenade crater, cracked my spine in seven places when it landed, bounced forward, scrabbled up the rubble, made the blacktop, and off we roared down a hollow tube between lines of pine trees.

  It was a mile to the turnoff. It couldn’t have taken long to get there because I held my breath the whole time. Then, when we arrived, I had the greatest difficulty forcing my foot to come away from the accelerator. It was a sharp left turn I would have to make, and I was coming at it way too fast.

  So was the car coming the other way. All at once the intersection was full of a large black Buick, twisting into this road with its front wheels locked and its rear wheels skidding sideways, and there was absolutely nothing I could do but leave the road, jump the drainage ditch, and run head-on into the back of the sign that said dead end government property no trespassing.

  The rough turf and the wooden sign stopped us more than my frantic pounding on the brake, and the coup de grace was the ditch beside the main road, which ate our front wheels and left us angled steeply downward with our headlights glaring at the weedy opposite slope a scant three inches away.

  I appeared to be wearing the steering wheel on my chest. Removing it, I looked around and discovered I was still inhabiting the planet Earth. So it was likely I was still alive.

  “Nicely done, Harry,” Eddie said.

  I gaped at him. He had tossed his officer’s cap away into the ditch and was giving me his flinty smile. He was also in the process of disentangling himself from the jeep. “Time to move out,” he said.

  Move out. Could I move at all? I hunched up and back, pushing against the windshield frame and the back of the seat until I could catch my heels on the seat itself. Sitting briefly atop the seatback, woozy and dazed, I looked around some more and saw the black Buick roaring backwards toward the intersection from the side road. Eddie was out of the jeep by now and climbing out of the ditch, leaving clothing in his wake. Uniform blouse off, tie now sailing away behind him. And also words: “Bring the carton, Harry!”

  He was calling me Harry. Was the craziness over? The Buick, braking sharply to a stop just shy of the intersection, suddenly disgorged Phil, who popped out on the passenger side and yelled, “Come on! Come on!”

  I went on. I finished separating myself from the jeep’s loving embrace, then picked up the carton and went staggering off across the uneven ground toward the Buick. Eddie was already there, sliding into the back seat.

  I followed, pushing the carton ahead of me. Phil climbed back in, we slammed all the doors, and Jerry, at the wheel, backed up in a smart half-circle out onto the main road, shifted, and we tore off toward town.

  There was civilian clothing for both of us in the back seat and we both hurriedly began to change. Phil, half-turned so he could talk to us, said, “How’d you get out?”

  “Eddie blew up the gate,” I said. “It was terrific. I thought we were doomed, I thought we were goddam doomed, and he just blew up the gate and commandeered a jeep and son of a bitch!” Relief was making me giddy; it was only with the greatest effort that I managed to stop talking.

  Phil said, bitterly, “We had a surprise shakedown, the whole fucking prison. Thank God we had Muttgood in the gym, he helped us cover for you two. I gave him the idea you were off screwing each other on some roof.”

  “Fast thinking,” Eddie said. My own comment I left unvoiced.

  “But we couldn’t get away for fucking hours,” Phil said. “I really thought you people had bought the farm.”

  “So did I,” I said. “Eddie, you’re a genius.”

  “The first principle of military endeavor,” he said. “Always keep the mission in mind. If you know what you want to do, you’ll know how to do it.”

  “Anything you say,” I told him, and put on my civilian pants.

  Phil said, “How’d you blow up the gate?”

  “With a hand grenade,” Eddie told him. “I took several, thinking they might be useful.”

  “Hand grenades?” Phil seemed startled, almost frightened. “In this car here?”

  “They’re perfectly safe,” Eddie said, and patted the carton.

  “The hell they are,” Phil said. “We don’t want them. Throw them the fuck out.”

  Eddie cocked his head to one side. “Are you sure, Phil?”

  “The laser’s all we need,” Phil told him. “We start cocking around with hand grenades, all we’ll do is blow our own asses off. Throw them out.”

  Eddie shrugged. “You’re the team leader,” he said, opened the carton, and took one of the grenades out. He rolled the side window down, pulled the pin, and tossed the grenade out into the weeds beside the road.

  “Not like that!” Phil yelled, and when Jerry slammed on the brakes Phil screamed at him, “Don’t stop, for Christ’s sake!” So Jerry accelerated again, and a piece of black night behind us went boom.

  Jerry ducked his head down into his heavy shoulders. “What the hell was that?”

  “Just drive,” Phil told him, and said to Eddie, “Throw them out nice. Don’t blow things up.”

  Eddie had the other grenades in his hands, holding them casually, like a juggler just before doing his act. “
I didn’t want a child to find one and hurt himself,” he said.

  Jerry said, over his shoulder, “There’s a bridge up ahead. Throw them in the river.”

  “Fine,” Phil said. “But don’t pull any pins.”

  “Right,” Eddie said.

  We rode along then in silence. Eddie kept playing with the grenades, tossing them from hand to hand. We couldn’t get to that river too soon for me.

  22

  The lying awake was bad enough, but the nightmares were worse. I spent the rest of that night in the gym, on a cot in a room also occupied by Eddie and Phil and Jerry, and every time terror drove me up out of dreams into consciousness I could only stare in wonder at those three, sleeping soggily— and in Jerry’s case noisily—through all the bombs and fires of my imagination. In sleep I was chased by long-nosed tanks with lives and minds of their own, I was captured by soldiers who turned into policemen who turned into Joy Boys on some black roof somewhere, I was shot, blown up, set fire to, set on by dogs, set every way but loose.

  At seven I was up, completely unrefreshed; I’d never been so exhausted in my life. I went through breakfast like a mule who’s been hit on the back of the head with a rock, and then staggered away to my own sweet cell, far from the gym, far from the cares of the world, and there slept until one in the afternoon, deep, dreamless sleep from which I emerged in sudden brand-new terror, thinking, We rob the bank today!

  Today; good God. We had the laser. Max Nolan and Joe Maslocki had found the spot right out on the street where the Twin Cities Typewriter man parked his truck every day, never later than five minutes past five, and they now had a key to fit its ignition. The typewriter had been obtained, a guard uniform for Eddie Troyn was on tap, there were more than enough guns for the whole gang, and the names and addresses and home phone numbers of the principal bank employees were all written down in a notebook in Phil’s hip pocket. A surprise prison inspection, or “shake-down” as they called it, would definitely not happen today to throw a crimp in the plans, not right after one had been performed last night. There was nothing at all to stop the robbery from happening. Today.

  At five-thirty this afternoon. Four and a half hours from now. I jittered out of bed, shaking and quaking, and scurried off to the gym.

  Bob Dombey was there. He and Max would be staying in the gym, minding the store as it were, while the rest of us went out to commit our double felony. If I could somehow have wangled that assignment for myself I maybe wouldn’t have minded it all as much. It was the thought of actually being in the bank, a gun in my hand, terrified customers cowering before me, that turned my knees to jelly. And my stomach to jelly. And my brains to jelly.

  Bob, looking as shifty-eyed and weaselish as ever, was actually in a pretty good mood. “You haven’t met my wife yet, have you?” he said.

  “Eh?” In my condition, I could hardly remember that he was married. “Oh. Wife. No.”

  “She’d like to meet you,” he said. “You two ought to get along, Alice is a real reader.”

  My image around the prison, I think I may have mentioned, was that of educated hood. To the illiterate, all readers share a bond, a commonness that assures they will ‘get along’ with one another, regardless of the particular thing they happen to read. It’s similar to the belief among some whites that all black people know each other. To Bob’s statement, therefore, I merely said something along the lines of, “That’s nice.” While the major portion of my brain continued desperately to chew its nails.

  “We’ve been thinking of having a little get-together around Christmas,” Bob told me. “Alice loves to cook for a gang, and she doesn’t have much chance since she moved up here.”

  “Uh huh,” I said.

  “I’ll let you know pretty soon.” Then he grinned, in his hunted-weasel way, ducking his head and looking up at me as though peering out of a hole, and added, “Maybe a celebration dinner after today, huh?”

  “Aaa,” I said, wildly trying to remember how to smile. “Mmm,” I said, while my lips twitched this way and that around my head. “Well, I’ve got to—” I said, and wandered away in search of some grave to fling myself into.

  Ten minutes later I was in the room where the baseball equipment was stored off-season, putting a good big dollop of Vaseline inside every glove, when salvation hit me like a paper bag full of water dropped from an upstairs window. “Ah!” I said, and lifted my head to stare in sudden wonder at the light that had appeared at the end of the tunnel. Could I? I could! Delighted, I slapped my palm to my forehead and thereby covered my face with Vaseline.

  Drat. After I washed the stuff off—which takes forever—I went back to chat with Bob Dombey again, and to say after a minute, very casually, “Well, I guess I’ll go on through now. See you later.”

  “Good luck,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  It wasn’t yet two o’clock when I crawled through the tunnel and emerged once more in the free world. Still, there was a lot to do before the bank closed, and I left the Dombey residence at the fastest possible walk, heading downtown.

  I had two stores to stop at, a pharmacy and a five-and-ten. Then I closed myself in a gas station men’s room for a while to do the assembly. I was fumble-fingered and hasty, and not absolutely sure what I was doing. How could such a thing be timed with the necessary accuracy? If it happened too soon, it probably wouldn’t help. If it happened too late—I didn’t even want to think about that.

  Finally I left the men’s room, with my two small packages in my jacket pockets. I walked to the bank, wrote a check for twenty-five dollars, walked around the bank a bit looking it over, cashed the check, and went out to the street. It was ten minutes to three. I proceeded to the bar called Turk’s and gave the owner back some of the money I’d taken from him with the milk box.

  23

  Avoiding the temptation to get drunk, I left Turk’s at four and walked back to the bank, where nothing unusual was happening. Discouraged but not despairing, I walked across the street to the luncheonette, where I found Phil and Jerry and Billy already seated at our regular table by the window. I joined them and Phil gave me his hard grin and said, “Well, today’s the big day.”

  Smile, I told myself. “Sure is,” I said.

  They were talking about football. Jerry had played it in high school and the Army, generally as a tackle, Billy had hung around at one time with some former professional football players running a strike-breaker service in the Tennessee-Kentucky-Carolina area, and Phil ran a lively book in the prison on the pro games. Phil was at the moment discussing percentage points in the upcoming Jets-Oiler game, Jerry was describing things that could be done on the playing field to an opponent who had become annoying, and Billy was telling cheerful mountain tales of broken arms, backs, and heads.

  I seemed to be blinking again. While the other three talked, I brooded out the window at the bank, where nothing continued to happen. Whenever I did glance at my tablemates, my blinking got a lot worse, yet through it I could still see them, all too plainly. I was sitting next to Billy, and his near arm looked to be the size and density of a caveman’s club. His head was a boulder partially sculpted into what might with charity be called a face. His shoulders looked like football pads, but they weren’t; they were shoulders.

  Opposite me were Jerry and Phil. Jerry was another monster, in size if not in appearance. In fact, there was something almost baby-faced about Jerry, despite the great bulk of him, and his flesh appeared to be no harder or colder than normal human flesh. Still, his football field tales of snapping ankles and ripping nostrils made it clear he could be decisive if aroused. As to Phil, he didn’t have the mass of the other two, but there was a quick, mean intelligence about him and a wiry strength that was in its own way even more intimidating. Jerry and Billy might be able to dismember me more completely, but Phil was the likeliest to realize I ought to be dismembered.

  Around four-thirty the anthropomorphic high school boy floated by like a bottle with a note in
it, was given an order for four coffees, and disappeared forever. I gazed at the bank past Billy’s rocky profile, and now my left cheek was twitching. Nothing was happening over there. Nothing.

  Phil said, “Getting a little nervous, Harry?”

  Startled, I thrashed about, facing him. If that fool of a boy had brought coffee I would have dumped it on myself. “Nervous?” I said, blinking, twitching, scratching my left elbow with my right hand. “Me? No. Not a bit. Not at all.”

  Grinning, he said, “I know lots of guys nerved up ahead of time, and not a one of them ever admits it.”

  “Is that right?” I said. By keeping one eye closed, I could control a bit the twitching in the other.

  “I knew a guy,” Jerry said, “solid as a rock before a job, he’d always throw up right afterwards.”

  “Sure,” Phil said. “It hits different guys different ways.”

  “Can you imagine?” Jerry said. “You stop a getaway car so a guy can throw up.”

  Phil laughed at that, responded with a remembrance of his own, and I was safely out of the conversation again. I looked some more at the bank. Why wouldn’t anything happen?

  And why was I so nervous? In setting up my own little tricks, where there was almost always some chance of getting caught, I was invariably calm, almost casual. So why this time was I fidgeting and blinking and twitching and scratching and swallowing and feeling a sudden pulse pound in the side of my throat? Why, in short, was I becoming a nervous wreck?

  Because this was different, that’s why. Because in the first place it wasn’t one of my little tricks, it wasn’t my kind of thing at all. And because in the second place this was serious and maybe even deadly, a movement in which I was trying to put something over on society and these tough guys all at the same time, and all completely over my head. And because, goddamit, nothing was happening over there in the goddam bank!