Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,54
you? This is a whole new operation with a different approach. Do you want some breakfast?”
“Oh, God,” the girl said on the other side of the wall. Romstead looked at Paulette Carmody. She shook her head and looked away.
“We appreciate it,” Romstead said, “but not with the present entertainment.”
There was a chuckle from the intercom. “Boy, have you got hangups. Well, we’re going to bring you out in a little while for the pictures we have to have.”
The headboard of the other bed was beginning to bump the wall once more. “Fast turnaround; no down time at all,” Paulette Carmody said. “Or she’s taking them in relays.” She went into the bathroom and closed the door. He heard her flush the toilet and turn on the water in the basin. After the final shriek she came out again.
“And I always loved sex,” she said. “Do you suppose I’ll ever be capable of it again?”
“Sure,” Romstead replied. “Barnyard matings never bothered you before, did they?”
She lighted another cigarette. “It’s a wonder the great genius didn’t put a TV camera in here so they could watch us as well as listen.”
“Oh, we’re being watched.” He gestured toward the front wall. “The mirror’s a phony.”
She looked at it with interest. “You mean like those they’re supposed to have in some of the casinos? How does it work?”
“You just have to have more light on the front side than the back. It’s probably in a closet out there, or there’s a curtain over it.”
“Oh. What was all that about a burro?”
He explained about finding the skeleton with its broken ribs. “It was a demonstration, to put the old man in a receptive frame of mind. They strapped a bundle of dynamite to the poor little bastard, tied some tin cans to his tail to make him run, and then blew him up several hundred yards away.”
“Oh, my God! How sick can you get? And they took movies of it?”
“So he says.”
“But how could they get them developed?”
“Some bootleg lab that does processing for stag movies.”
She gave him a speculative glance. “For an ex-jock and a prosaic businessman, you seem to know some of the damndest things.”
He shrugged. “I read a lot.”
“Yes, but I wonder what.”
He made no reply. Two million dollars, she’d said; he’d had no idea she was that wealthy, but Kessler must have, and apparently he was right. His intelligence operations must have improved since they’d kidnapped his father. He thought of Jeri; maybe that had been her job and she’d bungled it. But how in hell did they expect to collect any such sum and get away with it, when the FBI would be turning over every rock west of the Mississippi? He, Romstead, was supposed to pick up the ransom, she’d said. What did that mean? Go into the bank, as the old man had? No, this was supposed to be something entirely different. The only things for sure were that it would be somewhere on the border line between brilliance and insanity, it would involve electronics, and at the end of it, unless he could find some way out of here, he’d be dead, the same as his father.
He wondered if they’d rented this place or if they’d bought it with some of the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. No doubt after it was over, they’d remove the bars, the steel plate, the mirror, and all the rest of it, and plug up the holes, but if they knew anything about the FBI, they’d better do a good job. With two million paid in ransom and two people dead, the country was going to be sifted, and sifted very fine.
There was the sound of a latch being released, and the narrow panel above the chest of drawers slid open. A hand reached in holding a pair of handcuffs and two strips of black cloth. It deposited these on top of the chest. Then the twin barrels of the sawed-off shotgun protruded from the opening, and a voice said, “Romstead, go to the back of the room and face the window.”
Dramatic bunch of bastards, Romstead thought, with a real flair for the theater. Next thing he’ll gesture with the gun the way they do on TV. He turned and walked back, and stood facing the window. Behind him, the voice went on, “Mrs. Carmody, take these things back there. Blindfold him and handcuff his hands behind him.”
“I don’t know how to handcuff anybody,” she replied. “I must have been