Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,61
through, aimed at his chest.
“Okay?” a voice asked. It was Top Kick.
“You answered my question,” Romstead said. He put the shoe back on and paced the room, goaded by restlessness and frustration.
“I’ve never been able to understand,” Paulette Carmody said, “what the relationship was between you and your father. If there was any.”
“There wasn’t much,” Romstead replied.
“I know. Let’s face it, parenthood must have weighed about as heavily on him as it does on the average ram or stallion or seed bull, and somehow I can’t quite see him as today’s suffering blob of guilt on the head candler’s couch weeping and beating his chest and asking, ‘What did I do wrong?’ He supported you until you were old enough to support yourself, and if he happened to run into you now and then he’d buy you a drink, but that was about it. But still he liked you and admired your athletic ability, and it all seemed to turn out all right. Did you resent the fact you hardly ever saw him? Did you feel rejected?”
“No.” He stopped pacing and thought about it. People had asked him the same question before, and he’d never known how to answer it. There had been respect between them and a good deal of mutual admiration, but they’d simply never needed each other. Maybe, actually, neither of them had ever really needed anybody; the self-sufficiency was inherited, built in, and perhaps that was the only thing they shared.
“Have you got a girl?” she asked.
“Yes. Quite a girl.”
“I’d like to meet her sometime. But God help her if she ever marries you. You’re simply too much like him.”
He shrugged. “That’s what Kessler said.”
“And I wonder what he meant. They killed your father in the end, but I’m not sure that’s all that happened. They’re very, very careful.”
He started to tell her that you always had to be careful of people who didn’t have much more to lose, but there seemed no point to it. She was tough-minded and realistic enough to handle it, but why belabor the matter?
They were given some more of the stew for dinner. The overhead light was turned on at dusk. Sleeping under it was difficult, but, Romstead reflected, it would have been a little difficult anyway. All they could do was endure it and wait. It was eleven o’clock the next morning when they heard a car drive up in front. A few minutes later Kessler came on the intercom.
“You’ll be glad to hear that Jerome Carmody and the bank have agreed to the two million,” he said, “and to the terms of delivery.”
“What about the police?” Romstead asked. “And the FBI?”
“They swear they haven’t called them in, and there’s nothing in any of the papers or on TV; but of course they have. I have no doubt that right now whole roomfuls of them are playing the telephone tapes over and over and tearing their hair out in handfuls trying to get voice patterns or something in the background. A cordless vibrator against the throat doesn’t help them much.”
Keep going, Romstead thought; embroider. Egomania’s about all we’ve got going for us—egomania and greed.
“At first we thought of having Jerome Carmody deliver the money,” Kessler’s voice went on, “but we found out he’s got a serious heart condition, and I don’t want somebody crapping out on a freeway at seventy miles an hour with two million dollars of my money in his car—”
“You ought to guard against that streak of sentimentality,” Paulette interrupted.
“Shut up, if you want to hear this. So we decided on Brooks. He works for the bank, so the bank is simply delivering your own money to you. Two of us have seen him up close, so they can’t run in an FBI ringer on us.
“They have the pictures and the facts of life as they are. You’ll be on the leash, with enough explosive in the car to blow it all to hell and only the transmitted radio signal keeping the detonating circuit from closing and setting it off. I’m using a lower frequency this time for longer range of operation and so there’ll be no reception blind spots when you’re behind hills or in canyons. And I won’t be at the transmitter; that’ll be in another part of the forest and remote-controlled itself. They can locate it with direction finders and get up there where it is with mules in five or six hours, but why would they? If they turn it off, they’ll