Stronghold

by Stanley Ellin

  “Man, if the law is all around us out there, how do we get through them even with the woman in the car? You think they will let us go cruising around for the fun of it? Even if they do, that leaves the house to them while we are out in the open like pigeons.”

  I say, “We don’t leave the house to them. We only need two in the car, one to drive, one to hold a gun on the woman. The other two stay here.”

  Coco reaches forward and slides my gun to the middle of the table. Not exactly in the middle, but a couple of inches closer to him than to me. He says, “If you are signing up volunteers, get this straight. I am volunteering for the home guard.”

  “It was your idea to start with, you chicken bastard.”

  “I will tell you my idea. Send one of these women to town alone. Give her instructions for Hayworth. She already knows what happened to that Deborah. She will know that if Hayworth does not deliver fast, it will really happen next time.”

  I say, “You mean, hand over one of these women to Hayworth for no return? Then what? Another one tomorrow and another the day after?”

  “Shit,” Harvey says to me. “What are you talking about tomorrow and the day after for? What about right now?”

  “Fine. So how about right now you and I pile into daddy’s car and take ourselves a ride into town?”

  “No,” Harvey says. “Not me. Not Lester either.”

  Emily says to me, “Jimmy, I can drive into town and tell them whatever you want me to. I give you my word I’ll be back.”

  “And who’ll let you come back once you’re there? Forget it.”

  “You are just being stubborn, man,” Coco says.

  “Because I’m thinking ahead. Get it into that goddam thick skull that the way you want to do it is the way Hayworth wants us to do it. And we hand over one of the women now, he’ll know he’s playing his cards right.”

  Harvey says, “Emily here says she’ll come back. You want to make sure of that?” He gets up, hauls Janet out of her chair and twists her arm behind her. She groans and arches back against the pain. Emily yells “Oh, please!” and is up and grabbing at him, but he simply slings her halfway across the room. He shoves Janet’s arm up a little more, and now her face is turned toward the ceiling, her lips drawn back with pain, her teeth clenched. Harvey says to me, “You think Emily won’t come back as long as this is happening?”

  I am one tick of a second faster than Coco in getting to my gun, even though I have to sprawl halfway across the table to grab it. He does not argue the case when he sees it in my hand. Stretched like that across the table, I sight the gun on Harvey. “Let her go.”

  Janet is partially shielding him, but he’s so bulky that there’s still plenty of him left for a big fat target from one foot away, and he knows it. “What the hell,” he says, “I’m showing you how to handle it.”

  “Let her go.”

  I am going to squeeze the trigger, and he can feel it coming. What he isn’t sure of—what I’m not sure of myself—is whether I’ll squeeze it if he does let her go. So he doesn’t. He says, wheedling, “Come on, Jimmy. You’re making like she’s your private property or something.”

  “She is. Let her go.”

  I am suddenly shaking with a chill. I could be in a deep freeze the way it grabs me. A head-to-foot, teeth-chattering iciness, even my eyes blurred by it so that I have to squint to make out Harvey. What I make out is that he’s getting a good look at the gun shivering in my hand. He lets go.

  “Get away from her,” I order, and he backs away from Janet, holding up his hands to show what a friendly little old redneck he is. He says, “It makes no difference, Jimmy. Not me, not Les, that’s how it is. You don’t want any of these women to go deal with Hayworth on her own, you go with her.”

  As suddenly as that chill hit me, it is fading away. The shakes are going too. Everything is coming back into focus. I motion with the gun. “The car keys,” I tell Harvey.

  Moving very carefully, watching the gun all the while, he digs the keys out of his pocket and drops them into my hand.

  “All right,” I tell Janet, “we’re going for a ride to your daddy.”

  Up in her room I allow her another charge of meth—I am not all that sure she can operate without it—and before she puts the bottle away I am tempted to pop a couple of pills myself. I have malfunctioned. There is no other word for it. Malfunctioned. Outside is Duffy’s turf, FBI turf, and somehow I have been jacked into doing what no smart general ever does, move into enemy territory without supporting troops. That’s the guerrilla style, Che’s style. Stupid, visionary bastard didn’t last long that way. I consider the pills in my hand, then drop them back into the bottle. The one trouble with joy-popping is that when you think you are moving smart, you can angle off stupid and never know it.

  Downstairs again, I have Emily find me a length of clothesline, and I hack off a length of it and run a slipknot into it, a handy little noose. At the front door Harvey and Coco are standing by, Harvey holding the other Uzi. He says, “I told Les to cover you from the roof. I’ll take care from here.”

  Nice of him. From the sour look on his face and Coco’s, when I walk through that door I have almost as good a chance of getting it in the back as from the front. Coco doesn’t keep me wondering about why the sour looks. He says, “You be back, man, and with everything set up. You make a private deal with Hayworth and then take off on your own, you will not get that far from us.”

  “You can make sure of it yourself,” I tell him. “There’s plenty of room in the car for one more.”

  He isn’t buying that. He opens the front door a crack, looks through it, opens it wide. All anybody can see out there is Adam and Eve country before the apple. Peace, man, at least up to those trees across the road. I slip the noose over Janet’s head and around her neck, winding a couple of turns of slack around my left hand to make sure there’s no sudden getaway, and she just stands and takes this like nice doggie ready to go for a walk with the master. I press the muzzle of the gun to the side of her head so that it will be conspicuous from a distance. “Slow and easy,” I tell her as I push her out onto the porch, staying close behind her, my chest up against those bony shoulder blades.

  We cross the porch, go down the steps, and move in a sort of sideways shuffle along the front of the house. Clear of the house, I hear Lester call from the sun deck, “Nothing showing, Jimmy,” so I steer Janet at a fast clip across the open ground to the garage. I settle her behind the wheel of the LeSabre, and after reaching over to turn the key in the ignition, I get down low in the back seat behind her, my knees on the floor. I rest the gun barrel along her cheek and tug on the noose to show her it’s there. She makes no move to loosen the grip on her throat, but just says, “The seat’s too far back.”

  “Then fix it.”

  She rolls the seat forward. “Which way do we go?”

  A sound question. South Lane is the shorter way down the ridge, and turning into Front Street from it brings us right up to the bank entrance. But Hayworth has rented the Oates’ house to the counterculture, and there is no sense steering through any tripped-out pack of monkeys if I don’t have to. I say, “Past Lookout down Quaker Lane. And move it.”

  She handles the car like a racing driver. We come down the driveway already picking up speed and hit the road like a rocket. Thrown off balance as we swing north, I accidentally grab the noose tight. Janet yells, “Christ, you’re strangling me!” the car slewing this way and that until I give her slack, and she leans forward gasping, pouring on the speed again. Just beyond the bend of Lookout Point, we see it together. A barricade. Two cars angled across the road, their wheels sunk into the dirt. A bunker planted there, and who knows what kind of heavy fire waiting behind it. As Janet comes down on the brake, I sink my fingers into her shoulder. “Don’t slow down, you hear? Get around to South Lane. Fast!” and she swings the car right up on the sharp slope bordering the road, slamming through fence posts and wire, then makes a wide turn, the car almost h
eeling over, then back through fence posts and wire to the road heading the other way. I don’t hear shots from behind us, which means they spotted Janet at the wheel and aren’t taking any chances on blowing a hole in her. You don’t take any chances, baby, you don’t score any points.

  We’re getting close to the house again when I realize that if Lester doesn’t recognize the car first look, we can be hemstitched stem to stern by Uzi slugs, so I order, “Hit the horn! Keep hitting it!” and we go past the house this way, the horn blasting away, Lester probably wondering what the hell it’s all about. Then we are into the woods the other side of the house. “Watch it,” I warn. “Maybe another roadblock.”

  There is an S curve midway between the house and the Oates’ place, and sure enough, when we are in the middle of the curve I see it planted there across the whole road like a goddam fortress, an old bus sunk down in the dirt the way the cars were, but this one with enough room in it for a battalion, and I say, “Back to the house!” and Janet tries the same trick she used before, full speed up and around on that slope, ripping through the fences, then we sideswipe a tree with a rattle and bang, and the car goes out of control, bouncing across the road and on down the slope of the Lake George side, caroming off one tree then another like a pinball, until what’s left of it pulls up short in a clump of bushes. There’s a stink of gasoline all around, and Janet quick cuts the ignition. The good news is that we’re alive. The bad news is that now I’m on the wrong side of the road and have to cross it on foot to get back to the house.

  The doors of the car are twisted out of shape, but I manage to force one open partway and get us both through it. I drag Janet down to the ground next to me while I sight the gun up the slope, waiting for somebody to show on the roadside.

  I wait.

  Nobody shows.

  They had to see the car go off the road. Are they ordering up the whole battalion to check it out?

  Still nobody shows.

  Janet is on her belly next to me, watching the road too. I keep my shoulder against hers so I can grab her if she makes a sudden move. She makes the move, but it is only to turn over on her back and start to pull the clothesline leash up over her head. I knock her hands away from it. “Let it be.”

  She lets it be. Just lies there, eyes closed. But I remember how she went up that ladder to the sun deck, so I know she can move quick as a cat when she has the impulse. Just to keep her from having the impulse, I rest my leg between hers, the weight of my hip bearing down on her hip, and Christ, cut off from the house, pinned down like this, waiting for the first of Duffy’s heroes to show up, I find I am getting horny this way.

  She must know it too. I take a look at her face but nothing shows on it. She could be asleep, from what I see. She isn’t. She says, “My mother is right, Flood. It’s empty out there. All empty.”

  “Then who the hell set up those roadblocks, baby?”

  “It had to be my father. And David. That bus belongs to the commune, Flood. And those two cars aren’t police cars. Use your brains. First no news on the radio, now this. I’m telling you nobody knows about all this except my father and David. And they’re giving you a message loud and clear.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like go away, that’s all. You and your gang just go away. Listen to me, Flood. You can cut right across here into South Lane and walk into town, and I’m telling you nobody will even look at you. Or you can take that back trail from the house down to the highway. Either way, I can have a car ready for you right there.”

  “With my money? And my plane arrangements?”

  She opens her eyes now, looking at me. She shakes her head. “No. If my father knew you wouldn’t keep us as hostages even after he paid you off, he would have done it himself by now. This way you don’t lose but you don’t win. You come out even. That’s not bad, considering what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  “It’s not good either. Not by a million dollars and a trip out of the country.”

  “Look—”

  “No, you look. You’re trying to peddle the idea that daddy could cut off phone service to the house and stop mail delivery along that road and set up roadblocks on it, all without the cops knowing. Without anybody in the whole goddam town knowing. All right, baby, now you tell me how he did it?”

  “I can’t. He did it, that’s all.”

  “That’s what you’d like me to believe. And then he turns over his house and his family to me until I’m tired of them. That also makes sense to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like hell. You already gave me the lecture on how daddy goes by the book, daddy doesn’t have brainstorms. You mean you changed your mind about that all of a sudden?”

  “No. I just think he’s not using my book.” Suddenly she has my thigh locked tight between hers. “Flood, let me arrange for a car so you can get away without any trouble, and I’ll go along with you. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  It turns me off like a cold shower. “Quit talking like an old movie, baby. Because you are a beat-up dyke and you are strung out on crystals and downers and they never made that movie.” I pull free of her and stand up, keeping low. I yank her leash. “Now we’re going up this hill and across that road fast. Then we hit the dirt on the other side and see what happens.”

  I don’t like the idea of dragging her behind me on a run like this, but it would be foolish to put her in front of me where she can suddenly stop me short in the middle of no man’s land. She gets to her feet, a little wobbly, but when I say “Now!” and take off, she is right at my heels at the other end of the leash. The car has plowed a track down the slope, and we follow this up, stumbling and tripping over chopped-off tree roots and shredded twigs and underbrush.

  I waste no time checking out the road. It is all-or-nothing time, so we sprint across it full speed, then make it up the slope on the other side, floundering through the underbrush among the trees, Janet holding the leash with both hands to keep it from slicing through her neck as I hustle her along, until we hit a monster tree with a trunk thick enough to offer complete concealment from the road. I pull us up behind it to get my wind back. Janet sits down on the ground and leans forward, her shoulders heaving as she sucks in air.

  Finally she says, “Oliver Twist. Jesus, what a story you do have to tell, don’t you, Flood?”

  “Shut up.” That voice is a magnet for any patrol scouting through these trees, now that they know I’m back on this side of the road.

  She doesn’t shut up. “Your father used to get boozed up and belt you around for kicks. You mean you really liked that better than what those terrible people up on the ridge were handing you?”

  Kicks is the word. I drive my shoe into her ribs hard enough to knock her sideways, and as she lies sprawled out there I boot her in the flank to make sure she finally understands who’s boss here and what he can do about it.

  I say, “We’re heading back to the house now. If you don’t want to be dragged there by that rope, get on your feet.”

  She doesn’t move, just lies there on her back, arms out, jaw slack, eyes slitted open so I can barely make out a glimmer of light in them. Faking it? I prod a shoe into her side. “Up, baby.”

  A cat. The next thing I know, she grabs my legs out from under me, and down I go, the gun flying out of my hand. She throws herself right over me to get to it before I can, her knee slamming me in the jaw on the way. She twists free as I get a hand on her ankle, then we are on our feet facing each other. She is looking at me, I am looking at that gun. She has it clutched in both hands, a finger on the trigger, aiming it at my face, and Christ, somehow she knows enough to cock it. The motion of the barrel as it weaves unsteadily but always in my direction almost hypnotizes me. I raise my hand cautiously. Janet looks completely out of her skull, her face twisted, tear tracks showing through the dirt on it.

  “Easy,” I say. “Easy, baby,” reaching for the barrel very slowly, half inch by half inch, and suddenly she cries out, “Oh, Go
d damn you, Flood,” and wildly flings the gun away.

  My mistake. I start to go for the gun instead of her, and next instant she darts away, heading through the trees in the direction of the Oates’ house. The hell with the gun. I go after her, twenty yards behind, slipping my knife from my pocket as I go, springing open the blade.

  Nobody shows among the trees yet. Duffy must have set up his cops along the property line from the bus to the top of the ridge, getting them ready to move after dark. And here is this skinny bitch heading right for that line like an Olympic runner, steering through and around stands of trees so that sometimes I lose sight of her. Twenty yards away is too much. Close together, the knife at her throat is what I need for protection from the enemy.

  Her mistake. She comes up to underbrush thick as a wall and hesitates, looking uphill and downhill, then starts uphill. That hesitation is all I need to cut the distance between us in half. Then she is gone. Completely gone. No sight of her anywhere. No sound of her.

  Somewhere behind a tree. Maybe down on the ground huddled in a clump of bushes. I wait, my back to that wall of underbrush, sighting uphill, checking out each tree, each clump of bushes. Dead quiet now. But sooner or later she’ll have to make a move. The sound will zero me in on her.

  The one advantage she has is that she’s probably watching every move I make. That means that if I start searching in the wrong direction or get myself tangled in these bushes, she’ll be off in the opposite direction before I can corner her.

  The sound comes. A rattle and thump, not uphill among those bushes and trees, but behind me among that underbrush. It could be her, somehow trying to worm her way through what looks like impenetrable brush. It could be Duffy’s men, seeing me alone and with only a knife in my hand, finally getting up courage to take me out. I wheel around, and a sound behind me tells me I have been suckered into it. From where she was hiding out, Janet had lobbed a stick into the brush, and as soon as I tumbled for this stupidest trick of all, she took off. There she is, scrambling up the ridge, glancing back at me now and then as I go after her.