Hostage For A Hood

by Lionel White

  Bart also had tried to kiss her that first night after he had returned with her to the apartment she shared with another girl. Again she had been shy and a little frightened and had pushed him away. Only Bart hadn’t given up. He’d been wise and considerate. They continued to see each other outside of the office as well as in it. Gradually she became used to him.

  And then came the time they took the drive, planning to spend the day in the country and end up having dinner at the little inn over the line in Connecticut.

  Bart was in good spirits and she herself was feeling gay and carefree as they had started out. They’d sung together all the way up, she carrying the tunes of the modern songs and Bart attempting to join her with his deep, soft voice, which never could find the right key. They’d reached the inn early in the afternoon and had gone in and Bart had ordered daiquiris for them. She’d never cared much about drinking, but this day something had happened to her. She was ecstatically happy, for no reason at all except that she was with Bart and it was spring and they were young and full of life.

  They had two more drinks apiece and then Bart had ordered the dinner. He’d ordered a very special dinner, sautéed guinea hen and wild rice, and it had taken a while before it would be ready.

  While they waited they decided to take a walk and they followed the path behind the inn and down by the little pond. They were standing there at the edge of the pond when Bart had reached over and taken her in his arms and had kissed her. She had acted instinctively then, pushing him and leaning away, and then her feet slipped and the bank began to crumble and the next thing she knew both of them were waist-deep in the pond.

  They were laughing wildly as Bart helped pull her out. That’s when she suddenly turned to him and raising on her toes, put her arms around him and lifted up her lips.

  Ten minutes later they returned to the inn, both dripping wet.

  Mama Galuzzi, who ran the place, had thrown up her hands and screamed when she saw them. She yelled at her husband who was cooking in the kitchen and when he came to the door, she spoke to him rapidly in Italian.

  Mama Galuzzi took charge. She showed them upstairs and into what must have been her own bedroom. She threw Joyce a great woolly bathrobe and told her to get into it at once. She wouldn’t even listen while they tried to argue with her. And then she took Bart down the hall to a second room and handed him a second robe and ordered him to take off his soaking garments. He’d started to protest and she moved in and Bart knew that if he didn’t obey she would literally take the clothes off his back. So he, like Joyce, had agreed and had stripped to his skin.

  Mama Galuzzi left them up there then while she took their clothes down to the kitchen to dry out.

  It was Joyce who walked down and entered the room where Bart sat, hunched up on the edge of the bed. This time there was no hesitation at all when he held out his arms. They didn’t even bother to see that the door was locked.

  Later on, as they sat opposite each other at the table down in the dining room and ate the guinea hen and wild rice, Mama Galuzzi peeked in on them now and then, a sly smile on her old face. Bart had tipped her outrageously and they had left, driving back to New York the same way they’d come up, on Route Twenty-two. Neither had talked much on that return trip; neither had to. They knew then that it was all settled. It was just a case of setting the date …

  Yes, this road would ever be associated in her mind with Bart. It was odd how now, with this sinister, deadly man sitting beside her with his empty right sleeve tucked into the coat of his jacket, she kept thinking of Bart. She didn’t want to think of that empty right sleeve. She was too conscious of where the arm was which would normally have filled it. The arm was bent at the elbow and was concealed by his tightly buttoned jacket and his shirt. At the end of that arm was his hand and in the hand was the gun. The gun which was pointed directly at her as she carefully drove the old car.

  They had reached Route Twenty-two shortly after dumping the other three, and he had directed her to turn north, through the crowded traffic of the series of suburban towns which were strung out like beads on a necklace. She was surprised, assuming that he’d stick to the back roads.

  For a moment or so she’d felt a surge of hope, knowing there would be cars and people. There would undoubtedly be a roadblock, also, sooner or later. They must know about the robbery now, in Brookside. They would have found the armored car with its blood-drenched cargo.

  He must have guessed what she was thinking, because he spoke quickly, in that short, clipped voice, which wasn’t at all what she thought the voice of a gunman and killer would be, but which pronounced its words clearly and literately, for all of its deadly coldness.

  “We may very likely hit a roadblock,” he said. “It will be up to you, then. With all this traffic, they’ll probably just check your driving license and take a look in the back of the car. If everything is all right, they won’t go any further. You pray that they don’t. It isn’t only that I’ll shoot you first; I’ll get one of them, anyway, maybe more. I don’t have a thing to lose. Remember that—I have nothing to lose. So it isn’t just your life you’ll be sacrificing. I’ll have time to take at least another one along with me. Remember what I have told you. Tell them your right name, show them your license. I’m your father and I’ve been sick and you’re taking me for a ride in the country.”

  “I’ll do what you say,” she said.

  “You’d better.”

  They were past Bedford now and still heading north. She remembered the time early in the spring when Bart and she had stopped in Bedford and talked with the real estate agent who had shown them the houses, which were all too expensive. She remembered so many things and suddenly as she thought of Bart she realized that just about now he would be trying to arrange for the theater tickets.

  She thought of the check for twenty-six hundred dollars which she had in her purse and of the surprise she had planned for him, the impractical new car which he wanted so badly. She fought to keep the tears back.

  A mile or so further on Cribbins told her to slow down and he had her pull off the highway in front of a roadside stand. The carhop came out and smiled at them and Cribbins ordered four hamburgers and a couple of bottles of soda.

  “You got change?” he asked, when the girl left to fill the order.

  Joyce nodded.

  He told the carhop they’d take the food and drinks with them and she didn’t realize what he was up to until he made her stop the car a mile further along the road. Then he took the meat from one of the sandwiches and held it out to the dog, who until then had sat stiff and tense between them, growling now and then.

  Flick looked at the rare meat and drew back and the man spoke gently. The dog’s curly head shot forward and he took a piece of meat. He ate the second sandwich without being coaxed.

  “I want him friendly if we get stopped,” he said to Joyce. He told her that she could have the other sandwiches but she shook her head. She wasn’t hungry. She did drink one of the bottles of soda.

  “What are you going to do with me?” she asked. “Can’t you just take the car and let me out and … “

  He smiled thinly. “You’re staying with me,” he said. “If I let you out now I’d have to kill you.”

  She gasped and the wheel jerked in her hands.

  “Take it easy,” he said. “Nothing’s happened to you yet. Maybe nothing will. I don’t know myself. Just keep driving.”

  They went on, passing through Bedford Hills and Golden’s Bridge and into the three-laned highway leading to Brewster. It was a mile or two before the Brewster city line that the traffic suddenly became heavy and they were forced to slow down to around twenty-five miles an hour. He was very alert and noticed at once that traffic coming south was normal.

  “This is probably it,” he said. “Just remember what I told you.”

  He was right. Within a few hundred yards she had to put the car into second gear and then, as they barely crawled along, they passed a sta
te trooper standing next to his motorcycle at the side of the road. He stared at them as they crawled past him and a moment or so later she had to stop. She could see the line of cars stretching out up ahead.

  It took them almost half an hour to reach the point in the highway where the police car was pulled diagonally across the road, blocking the northbound lane.

  The car directly in front of them was a low-slung, sporty convertible with its top down. A lone man was behind the wheel. She watched, held in dumb fascination as she saw the two troopers converge. Off to one side, in a second police car, another pair of officers sat. The doors of the police car were open and she could see that the trooper on the outside kept his hand on his holster.

  Two state policemen approached the convertible from each side and the one opposite the driver just stood and leaned against the car and said nothing. The other trooper was asking to see the man’s license. While he was getting it out, one of the men from the police car at the side of the road got out and strolled over. He looked into the tonneau of the convertible and then slowly circled until he came to the rear of it. He lifted up the trunk cover and looked inside.

  Joyce Sherwood shuddered. She was thinking of the trunk of her own car; thinking of what lay in it. Not only of the money bags from the wrecked armored car, but the submachine gun and the pistols.

  Once more Cribbins seemed to sense what was going through her mind. “I’m warning you,” he said in a harsh whisper. “Do it just the way I told you to. Don’t forget.”

  Flick growled low in his throat and tensed. A moment later he barked sharp and clear, his feet on the top of the door and his head out the opened window. Cribbins held the dog by his collar and spoke softly to him as the dog continued to bark.

  Joyce started to speak, but her companion quickly interrupted. “Let him bark,” he said. “Just be sure about yourself.”

  The driver in the convertible was putting his license back in his wallet. A moment later and they waved him on and signaled for Joyce to move forward. She felt the cruel hard end of the gun poke into her ribs as she slowly released the clutch.

  “Smile, damn you,” Cribbins whispered. “Smile. Talk with me.”

  She fumbled with the hand brake as she stopped the car. She knew the color had left her face and she could see her hand trembling on the wheel.

  The trooper was at the side of the car now and he was looking at the dog and half grinning. The other one, the one on Cribbins’s side, had approached, but he was keeping his distance. He didn’t see anything funny at all about the dog.

  “Quiet, boy,” Cribbins said.

  “Like to see your license, miss,” the trooper said. “Where are you headed for and where have you come from?”

  She spoke as she reached into the leather bag for the license.

  “What is it, Officer? What’s happened?”

  “Just a checkup, miss,” he said. He extended his hand and waited.

  “We’re from Brookside,” Joyce said, and the second the words left her mouth she caught the quick sharp look on the trooper’s face. At the same time she again felt the prod of the gun in her side.

  “I told you you were going a little fast, dear.” Cribbins spoke suddenly. He looked at the trooper and frowned in irritation. “My daughter’s supposed to be taking me for an airing in the country, but you’d think she was going to a fire.” He smiled, and then coughed.

  “We’re not checking on speeding,” the trooper said shortly. He looked down at the license. “Let’s have the car registration, too.”

  He waited until she handed it to him and then looked at it very carefully.

  “You’re Mrs. Joyce Sherwood?”

  “Yes.” It came almost in a whisper. She tried to smile again, but couldn’t quite make it. “My father’s been sick,” she said. “I’m taking him for a ride.”

  “What time did you start out?”

  Joyce opened her mouth to speak, but Cribbins quickly cut in. His voice sounded old and querulous.

  “Around eight-thirty,” he said. “You see we hoped to get up to Pawling in time for lunch and I don’t like Joyce to drive too fast.”

  Joyce felt the car shake slightly and a moment later, as she sat watching the trooper carefully checking her license again, periodically looking up at her to see that the description on the driver’s certificate fitted, the trooper who’d been at the rear of the car circled to the side.

  “Your trunk’s locked, lady,” he said. “Mind letting me have the key?”

  For a moment she almost forgot her lines in her sudden terror. But the quick pain as Cribbins again poked the gun into her side brought her to. “It isn’t locked,” she said. “It’s jammed. The key was lost and the trunk’s jammed and we haven’t been able to get it opened.”

  “I warned you,” Cribbins said. “I warned you, Joyce. Said that we might want to be getting into it. What would happen if we should have a puncture or something.”

  He turned to the trooper and spoke in a tired voice.

  “Break it open,” he said. “Don’t mind if you do. It would serve her right for not stopping and having it fixed.”

  The man checking the license looked up at Joyce and smiled. “Guess that won’t be necessary,” he said. “But you better stop at a garage and get the thing looked at. You might have a flat at that.” He handed back the license. “Some dog you got there,” he said. He stepped back and waved them on.

  As the car pulled away, he turned to the officer who’d failed to get into the trunk. “They were from Brookside,” he said.

  “Jesus, maybe we should have taken a look in the back,” the second trooper said. He seemed nervous.

  “Don’t be a damned fool,” the first one said. “There’s a hundred cars passed through here from Brookside and White Plains and down around there. You think that old guy and his daughter pulled the job? Maybe the pooch was the lookout.” He laughed and waved the next car toward him. “Anyway,” he said, “you heard the old buzzard invite you to break it open, didn’t you? Well.”

  5.

  Ten miles north of Brewster, Cribbins told Joyce to turn off to the left of the road at a macadam intersection. Joyce, following directions, drove on for a few miles and then made a second turn. A mile beyond they entered the town of Cameron Corners.

  Cameron Corners is an old farming town. Three or four times in the past fifty years small manufacturing enterprises were started up by local promoters, but little ever came of them. It wasn’t until after World War II that the town began to grow at all, largely as a result of an influx of city people looking for weekend places in the country.

  The larger of the two grocery stores took additional space and called itself a supermarket, and the other one went out of business. A couple of new gas stations and a second hardware store were opened. Outside of that, and a new open-air theater on the edge of town, very little has changed over the years. The post office was moved from the drugstore into a little one-story building of its own on the main street and that’s about it.

  Most of the houses had been built in the last part of the nineteenth century and they are painted uniformly white and kept in excellent repair. Lawns are kept trimmed and Cameron Corners remains a typical neat little New England village.

  They entered the town from the south and Joyce followed Cribbins’s directions, driving down the main street and out to the north end. They passed a number of small houses and he told her to make a left turn. She continued on for two more long blocks and once again he directed her to turn left.

  It was a neighborhood of old, Victorian mansions set well back in spacious lawns, shaded by great oaks.

  “Second place on the right,” he said. “Turn in at the drive and go right on back to the garage.”

  There was a circular drive, passing the main door in the front and turning then to follow the side of the house. An old-fashioned carriage porch covered the drive.

  The house itself was much like its neighbors. Four stories high, surrounded b
y wide verandas, it was covered with ivy. In its day it had been a fine mansion and the years had failed to alter its impressive dignity.

  Behind the main building was the old carriage house, which had been converted into a garage. Its wide doors stood open and Cribbins directed Joyce to drive inside.

  Joyce caught a quick glance of a face at the window as they passed the house. The face of a young, rather pretty girl, her dark eyes wide and startled.

  She drove into the garage and just sat behind the wheel until Cribbins’s voice brought her back to reality.

  “We’re here,” he said. “Get out. And hang on to that damned dog.”

  As Joyce stepped to the floor of the carriage house, she noticed the sedan parked next to her own car.

  Cribbins had her wait outside the barn and hold the dog by its leash while he pulled the doors closed. It was difficult, using only one hand.

  They walked back down the long drive toward the side entrance of the house.

  The street out in front was completely deserted and the hot sun-drenched air of midday seemed to hang heavy around them. Joyce shivered involuntarily as they approached the stoop leading up to the porch which circled the house.

  Santino watched the car until it turned and swung into the bypass leading up to the overhead road. When it had passed beyond his sight, he slowly dropped his eyes and for a moment just stood there. Then he looked up at the other two men. “The dirty son of a bitch,” he said. “This is just great. Here we are, and there he goes with the only car and with the dough.”

  Mitty didn’t say anything, but Luder spoke up. “It’s best,” he said. “The only thing he could do. This way there’s a chance he may make it. The only chance. The four of us would be bound to be stopped. This way there’s a chance.”