Jimmy the Kid

by Donald E. Westlake

  "I thought as much."

  "Yeah. Okay, here it is. Tomorrow, you get a hundred-" Clatter, clatter. "Damn it!"

  "Beg pardon?"

  "Hold on, I lost my-" Rattling sounds. "Just a minute, it's-" More rattling sounds. "Okay, here we go. Tomorrow, you get a hundred fifty thousand dollars in cash. In old-"

  "I doubt I could go that high."

  "— bills. You- What?"

  "You say tomorrow. I take it time is of the essence here, and I'm not sure I could gather a hundred fifty thousand in cash in one day. I might be able to do eighty-five."

  "Wait a minute, you're going ahead of me."

  "I'm what?"

  "Here it is. That's up to you. The longer it takes, the longer it'll be before you see your Buh-Jimmy again."

  "Oh, I see, it isn't necessarily tomorrow."

  "It's whenever you want him back, Buster." She was sounding really very irascible by this point.

  "I was just thinking, if you wanted to complete this operation tomorrow, you might settle for eighty-five thousand."

  "I said a hundred fifty thousand, and I meant a hundred fifty thousand. You think we're gonna haggle?"

  "Certainly not. I'm not dickering over the well-being of my child, it's merely that I thought, within the time frame you appeared to be contem-"

  "All right, all right, let it go. It's a hundred fifty thousand. no matter what."

  "Very well." He sounded a bit chilly himself by this time, and listening to the recording now he could only applaud his decision then to let the woman see a bit of his irritation.

  "Okay. We'll go over it again. Tomorrow you get- Well. As soon as you can, okay? As soon as you can, you get a hundred fifty thousand dollars in cash. In old bills. You pack it in a suitcase, and stay by your phone. I'll call again to give you the next instructions."

  (It was during that statement of the woman's that the head FBI man had extended toward Harrington a slip of paper containing the penciled words, "Tell her to prove it.")

  "Urn. Prove it."

  "What?"

  "I said, prove it."

  "Prove what? That I'm gonna call you again?"

  (During which, the head FBI man had been with great exaggeration mouthing the sentence, "That they have the kid!")

  "No, urn- Oh! That you have the kid. My son. Jimmy."

  "Of course we have him, why would I call you if we didn't have him?"

  "Well, I just want you to prove it, that's all."

  "Prove it how? He isn't here by the phone."

  "Well, I don't know how."

  "Okay, look. Check this with the chauffeur. The Caddy was too wide for the truck. The planks broke. We all wore Mickey Mouse masks. We drove a blue Caprice. Okay?"

  (The head FBI man had been nodding.) "That's fine."

  "You're satisfied, hub?"

  "Yes. Thank you very much."

  "Yeah." It sounded very sour indeed. "I'll call you by four o'clock tomorrow afternoon."

  "Well, there's a possibility-" (clkk) "-I'll be called to Washington tomorrow to appear before the SEC, but- Hello? Hello?" (away from the phone) "I believe she hung up."

  "Okay," the head FBI man said. "Switch it off."

  The tape technician switched it off.

  The head FBI man said, "You recognize the voice?"

  "I didn't recognize either voice," Harrington said. "Did that really sound like me?"

  "Yeah, it sounded like you. But the other one didn't sound like anybody else you know, hub?"

  "How could it?"

  "Maybe a disgruntled former employee? A servant out here, somebody like that?"

  "Well, she did sound disgruntled enough, I'll say that for her. But the voice doesn't ring any bells at all. I'm sorry."

  The head FBI man shrugged. "Sometimes it pans out," he said. "Usually it don't." Nodding thoughtfully toward the tape machine, he said, "There's some interesting things in there."

  "Really?"

  'We didn't know it was a Caprice."

  "A caprice? I'd call it something more serious than that."

  "The kind of car," the head FBI man said. "Your chauffeur just said it was a blue car, so that's a piece of information we picked up."

  "Oh, very good."

  "And that slip of the tongue there. Be interesting to find out who this 'Bobby' is."

  "Do you suppose they kidnapped more than one child today? Maybe they're making a whole raft of phone calls."

  The head FBI man frowned, thinking that over. "Mass kidnappings?" He turned to one of the assistant FBI men who'd been hovering all evening in the corners of the room. "Look into that, Kirby," he said. "See do we have any more kidnapping reports today."

  "Right." The assistant FBI man faded from the room, not like a person walking out of a room, but like a television picture fading from the screen when the power has been turned off.

  "Another thing," the head FBI man said, turning back to Harrington. "It sounded at one point there like she was reading a prepared statement."

  "Yes, I noticed that," Harrington said. "I think she lost her place for a minute there."

  "Could be the kidnappers sent a dummy out to make the call, somebody that isn't really part of the gang. So if we traced the call and got her, she wouldn't be able to tell us anything."

  "Very clever," Harrington said.

  The head FBI man nodded. "We're up against a shrewd gang of professionals," he said, with a kind of gloomy satisfaction. "That'll make it tough to catch them. On the other hand, it means the boy is probably safe. It's your amateurs that panic and start killing people; your professionals don't do that."

  "It all seemed very professional to me, too," Harrington said. "Speaking as a layman, that is. But the truck, and the school bus, and so forth."

  "Very carefully planned." The head FBI man stroked his craggy jaw. "I keep thinking I've seen that MO somewhere before," he said.

  "MO?"

  "Modus operandi. Method of operations."

  "Isn't that interesting," Harrington said. "The way the initials work in both Latin and English."

  "Yeah," the head FBI man said. "I'll have to run it through our computers down in Washington, see do we come up with something." He nodded thoughtfully, then became more brisk. "Now," he said, "about the payoff."

  "Yes," Harrington said. "I was wondering about that."

  "We'll try to recover your money, naturally," the head FBI man said. "We'll even try to set a trap with it if we can, though I think this bunch is probably too sharp for that."

  "I got that impression," Harrington said.

  "The main point is to recover the child. The money is secondary."

  "Certainly."

  The head FBI man nodded again, and said, "How long do you think it'll take to get the money together?"

  'Well, it's too late to do anything tonight." Harrington frowned, considering the problem. "I'll call my accountant in the morning, work out the best way to handle this, from a variety of points of view. You may not be aware of this, but money paid to a kidnapper is not deductible on your income tax."

  The head FBI man looked interested. "It isn't?"

  "No. I remember running across that while looking up something for a client. I don't recall the justification; possibly it's considered payment for a service, nonbusinessconnected."

  "I've never had much to do over on the Treasury side," the head FBI man said.

  "In any event, there are various ways of going about it. Sale of securities, depending on whether it would be long-term or short-term gains, possibly loans against my margin accounts where my portfolio has increased sufficiently in value, various possibilities. Well, I'll talk it over with Markham in the morning."

  "But how long do you figure it'll take?"

  "Really, you know," Harrington said, "the most difficult part is going to be conversion of assets to cash, actual paper money. I don't believe I know anyone who deals in cash."

  "Banks do," the head FBI man said.

  "Eh? Oh, of course
! I never think of them that way."

  "I still want to know how long. Two days? Three?"

  "Oh, good Lord, no. I should have the liquidity by noon. One at the latest."

  "Tomorrow?"

  "Certainly tomorrow. Then it all depends how long it takes to bring the currency out here."

  "We'll take care of that," the head FBI man said. He was frowning deeply, studying Harrington's face. "Mr. Harrington," he said. "Can I ask you a question?"

  "Of course."

  "That business about the eighty-five thousand, that was all you could raise tomorrow. Do you mean you really were haggling?"

  Harrington thought about it. In sudden surprise, he said, "Why, yes! I do believe I was."

  The head FBI man looked at him. He didn't say anything.

  "It was just force of habit," Harrington said. Then, when the head FBI man continued to gaze at him unspeaking, he added, "I certainly wasn't going to turn the deal down."

  18

  After dinner, Jimmy went back to work. The fact that the boards were nailed to the outside of the window frames rather than the inside made his task a bit more difficult, but not impossible. He had removed one board before the cooking woman had brought him his dinner — how unearthly an adult wearing a Mickey Mouse mask could look in just the glow of a flashlight-and now he was removing more. They were fairly narrow boards, and he thought it likely he'd have to deal with four of them before making a space wide enough to climb out through.

  His method was simple, but time-consuming. With the screwdriver, he would pry the board a bit loose, then oil the nails as he worked to keep them from squeaking. A bit at a time, prying and oiling, prying and oiling, he would loosen the board from the window frame. The final fraction was always the trickiest, since he didn't want the board to fall out onto the ground below; managing to avoid that, he would bring the board inside, then use the pliers to snap each nail off short. After oiling the nails once more, he would put the board back in place, the stubby nails slipping a short distance into their former seats in the window frame. The boards looked the same as before, but would pop out at the touch of a finger.

  It was that last part that took the extra time. The job would have been much quicker and simpler if all he had to do was bash the boards out and depart. But in the first place he never knew when they might decide to come back up and double-check on him, and in the second place he wanted to leave them with a certain amount of misdirection and confusion. Therefore he took the extra time to do the job right, and considered it time well spent.

  Outside, in those intervals when he had a board out of the window space, he could hear the rain continuing to pound. This room faced the back of the house, and there was no light outside at all, nothing but pitch blackness and the sound of pelting rain.

  Some water did splash in from time to time, but not enough to give him away. A worse problem was the cold; a chill wet wind blew in whenever he had a board off the window, and his jacket just wasn't warm enough for weather like this. When he'd put it on this morning, the worst climate he'd expected to be exposed to was the air-conditioning in Dr. Schraubenzieher's office.

  Well, one did have to expect to rough it from time to time in this life. With which thought Jimmy snapped the last nail that needed to be snapped, picked up the oilcan, oiled the nails in this fourth board, and carefully reinserted the board into the window, thus not only restoring the original appearance of the room, but also eliminating again that whistling wind.

  What next? The tools and oilcan went into the toolbox, and the toolbox went into the space beneath the floorboard he had previously loosened. Flashing the light around the room, he reassured himself he wasn't leaving any unnecessary clues in his wake, and then turned to the rope.

  It was quite long, but maybe not as thick or as strong as he would have liked it. Still, it would have to do, and once it was doubled it surely would do. Fine. So now there was nothing to do but depart.

  So why did he hesitate? Why did be glance ruefully toward that small cot with its inadequate blankets?

  Childishness, he told himself. Babyishness and weakness. And not to be given in to.

  Taking a deep breath, squaring his shoulders, he hesitated just a second longer, then abruptly began to move, and from then on continued to move steadily and smoothly, doing everything just as he had planned it.

  First, all four boards were taken out, and stacked next to the window. Next, one end of the rope was slipped through between the still-attached fifth and sixth boards, in a tiny space showing down by the windowsill. That end of the rope was played through and around the outside of the fifth board and back into the room, until the center of the rope rested on the windowsill, against the bottom of the fifth board, inside the room. Dirt smudged on that length of rope made it virtually invisible.

  Now. The two lengths of rope were allowed to hang down along the outer wall of the house. Jimmy, leaning out, feeling now the force of the wind and rain on his bead, grasped the two lengths, brought a part of it back into the room, and tied a loop in it that would hang about three feet below the window. Then he dropped it outside again.

  The rest would have to be done in darkness. Switching off the flashlight, Jimmy put it in his jacket pocket and felt his way to the window. Climbing carefully over the sill, he grasped the rope, pulled it up till he felt the loop, and put the loop like a stirrup over his right foot. Then he lowered himself slowly out the window until he was standing on the loop of rope, his forearms resting on the windowsill.

  Now for the tricky part. Reaching inside, he took the first board, which he knew belonged in position number four, and working by feel he slipped it back into place. Then three, and then two. Number one was the most difficult, since he had such a narrow space to bring the board out through, and he almost gave the whole thing up as an over-elaboration, but at last he did get the thing out and in place, and felt better for having done it.

  The idea was, whenever the gang next decided to check on him the room would appear to be unchanged. They would have to believe that he'd managed to turn the key in the lock from inside, and that while he was no longer in the room he must still be somewhere in the house. So they would confine their search, at least for a while, to the interior of the house, thus giving him longer to get away.

  And if worse came to worst, if they did catch him again, he would say that he'd turned the key with his ballpoint pen insert, had locked the door again behind himself, and had snuck downstairs, going out the front door while they were all searching elsewhere. If they swallowed that and put him back in the same room-which they probably would, since they didn't have any other room prepared for him-he could simply take the boards down again and escape all over.

  So. Having been as clever as possible in his departure, Jimmy now rappelled down the side of the house, permitting the back of his jacket to take most of the stress and most of the friction of the rope passing through, and all at once he found himself standing in mud, on the ground, outside the house.

  Escape; he'd done it.

  Now all that was left was to walk to the highway, hail a passing car, and inform the police. This gang would be rounded up, probably in less than an hour, and by midnight Jimmy would be safely at home and asleep in his own bed.

  He almost felt sorry for the kidnappers. But they

  couldn't say they hadn't asked for it.

  For the first leg of the journey he wouldn't be able to use the flashlight, and it really was dark out here. Also wet. Also cold. Already drenched to the skin, Jimmy reached out in front of himself, patted the weathered boards of the house, and then moved off to his right, keeping his left hand constantly in touch with the house.

  Traveling that way, he walked around the house to the front, and there at last he did see some light; flickering yellowish light showing through chinks in the boarded-up living room windows. So, if he turned his back on those lights, the farm road should lead directly away in front of him. Turning that way, looking over his shoulder
to be sure he was facing exactly away from the light, he made off cautiously into the rain-drenched darkness.

  The first two times he looked over his shoulder those faint lines of light were still there, but the third time they were gone. "Ten more steps," he whispered to himself, and made ten slow slithering steps through the mud before hesitantly switching on the flashlight, keeping his fingers dosed over most of the glass so not too much light would come out.

  He was in a field. At one time under cultivation, it had apparently come recently into a state of semi abandonment. That is, no crop was grown here, but it seemed as though someone was keeping the rougher vegetation cut back, and any case, it wasn't a road.

  To the left? Jimmy flashed the light that way, and couldn't see any road.

  To the right? No.

  Okay. So he'd have to do it differently; go back to the house and start all over, with quick on-oils of the flashlight right from the beginning, so he wouldn't get lost. Flashlight off, he turned around and headed back the way he'd come.

  No house. After a while he became pretty sure he should have reached the house, and there just wasn't any house. No thin lines of yellow light at all, not a one.

  Oh, the hell with this darkness! Switching on the flashlight, not putting any fingers over the glass at all, he aimed the beam all around himself, and didn't see a damn thing.

  Where was the house? Where was the road?

  It was getting cold out here. The rain didn't help and the wind didn't help, and even without them it would have been cold. With them, it was becoming almost terrifying.

  Well, he couldn't just stand here. If he didn't get to someplace pretty soon, he'd be in big trouble. He could die of exposure out here, and wouldn't that be a dumb thing to do!

  Apparently he'd come farther from the house than he'd thought. It had to be out in front of him, invisible in the pounding rain. So the thing to do was keep moving forward.

  He moved forward. His shoes were becoming heavy with mud, and after a while it became easier to just drag his feet through the puddles rather than try to lift them.

  Heavy. Cold. Hard to see in this light. And now the flashlight was starting to dim.