Ed McBain - Alice in Jeopardy

The meet, Alice thinks.

“Two: You get out of the car, walk over to her…”

“Why would she risk that? Me seeing her?”

“Tell her to disguise herself however she wants, okay? We’re not interested in identifying anyone at this point in time. The bills are marked, the minute they try to spend them, we’ve got ’em. All we want to do right now is get your kids back.”

“Will I be alone?”

“No. We’ll be there, wherever she says you’re to bring the money.”

“I’d rather go alone.”

“No. We may have to move in.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. These are my kids, damn it!”

“I know that. But these people—”

“What do you mean, you may have to move in? I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all.”

“Can you think of a better way?”

“Yes. Leave me alone. Let me handle this alone.”

“How?”

“I don’t know how, damn it!”

Sloate looks at his watch.

“You’ve got ten minutes,” he says. “Relax a bit till the call comes.”

“I’m relaxed,” she says.

He looks at her.

“I’m relaxed, damn it!”

“Ma’am, we’re just trying to help,” he says. “No one wants anything to happen to—”

“Please don’t call me ma’am. My name is Alice.”

“And mine’s Wilbur,” he says.

Alice nods. She cannot in a million years imagine calling this man Wilbur. Or any other man, for that matter. He is still standing near the table where the recording equipment is set up. Leaning against the table. Big gun holstered on his right hip. In the hallway beyond, the grandfather clock ticks noisily.

“Why do you suppose Rafe popped up here all of a sudden?” he asks.

“I don’t know why. My sister said Jacksonville.”

“But here he is on the Cape.”

“I don’t know what he’s doing here.”

“A coincidence probably,” Sloate says.

“Probably,” Alice says.

They look at each other.

“Unless they wanted an inside man at the skunk works,” Sloate says. “Somebody who’d know what’s going on in here.”

“I don’t think Rafe is involved in this,” she tells him.

“Be nice to know if he told anybody about that big insurance policy, though. Be real nice to know,” Sloate says. “How much longer you think he’ll be snoring in there?”

“I have no idea.”

He looks at her again. He’s really trying to figure this out, she thinks. But he seems so very damn stupid. If this wasn’t a hick town with a Mickey Mouse police force…

But it is.

This is Cape October, Florida, population 143,000, and my children have been kidnapped, and in ten minutes the woman who has them will call again and we will make arrangements for an exchange, kids for money, money for kids. And if it works…

“Try to keep her on the line longer this time,” Sloate says. “Tell her you’re getting confused, tell her you can’t keep it straight, all this hanging up. She’ll resist, but she’s closer to the payoff now, so she may be getting hungry. And careless. They sometimes get careless.”

With my children, Alice thinks.

And in that instant, the doorbell rings.

Sally Ballew recognizes Sloate at once.

“Hello, Wilbur,” she says, and steps boldly into the house, taking in the living room with a single swift sweep of her dark brown eyes, knowing at once that the Garrity woman wasn’t snowing them about a kidnapping. There’s another dick from the CID here, too, Marcia Di Luca from their Tech Unit, which means they’ve already set up a wire tap and a trace; nobody’s fooling around here.

“Hello, Marcia,” she says. “Catch yourselves a little snatch here?”

“Who are you?” Alice asks at once.

“Special Agent Sally Ballew,” she says, and shows her shield. “FBI. My partner Felix Forbes. We’re here to lend a hand, ma’am.”

It is three o’clock sharp.

Alice is surrounded by law enforcement people.

Yet for the first time since four yesterday afternoon, she really feels in jeopardy.

The telephone rings.

Alice’s hand is trembling as she picks up the receiver.

“Hello?” she says.

“Have you got all the money?” the woman’s voice asks.

“Yes,” Alice says.

“Good. Now listen to what I have to say. I’ll be on for thirty seconds. You can think over what I’ve told you before I call back again. Is that clear?”

Marcia Di Luca pulls a face. Thirty seconds again! Standing beside her, Sally Ballew seems to grasp what’s going on with the trace. She nods sympathetically.

Into the phone, Alice says, “I understand.”

“There’s a gas station on U.S. 41 and Lewiston Point Road. A Shell station. Do you know it? Yes or no?”

“Yes,” Alice says.

“Bring the money to the ladies’ room there. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Have you got all the money?” she asks again.

“Yes,” Alice says. “But—”

“Just listen. There’s only one stall in the ladies’ room. Leave the money in the stall. Ten o’clock. Come alone.”

“I will. But how do I—?”

“I’ll call back,” the woman says, and hangs up.

Sally Ballew thrusts out her chest as if to assert female superiority. It is some chest. All the men in the room are impressed. So is Alice. But she does not need the FBI here now, not when her children are out there someplace with a strange woman and whoever may be her accomplice. Too many cooks, she thinks. Too damn many cooks.

“How long does he stay on the line, average?” Sally asks.

“ She, ” Marcia corrects. “Twenty, thirty seconds.”

“You’ll never get her.”

“We might,” Marcia says dryly.

The two women do not like each other. This is very clear to Alice.

My children will die, she thinks.

“What are you hoping to accomplish?” Sally asks Sloate.

“Who invited you here?” Sloate asks. “I wasn’t aware a state line had been crossed.”

“I’m asking what you hope to accomplish, allowing this woman to talk directly to the—”

The phone rings again.

Sloate nods to Alice. She picks up. It is going to be the same routine again. On again, off again. Except that this time, she is caught in the crosshairs of inter-agency rivalry.

“Hello?” she says.

“Do you understand everything I told you?” the woman asks.

“Yes.”

“Repeat it to me.”

“Ten tomorrow morning.”

“Yes?”

“Shell station at Lewiston and the Trail.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“The stall in the ladies’ room.”

“Yes. You’ll leave the money there,” the woman says.

“No,” Alice says.

There is a brief silence.

“No?” the woman says. “Listen to me, girlfriend. You ever want to see your children alive again—”

“We make an exchange,” Alice says quickly. “Right then and there.”

Sloate is already shaking his head. Sally doesn’t know what’s going on. Neither does Forbes.

“I hand over the money, you hand over the kids,” Alice says. “A simultaneous exchange.”

“Stay by the phone,” the woman says, and hangs up.

“Thirty seconds on the nose,” Marcia says.

“You just blew it,” Sloate tells Alice.

Charlie gets to the airport Avis desk at ten minutes past three that afternoon. A woman with voluminous blonde hair greets him with a cheery smile, but the moment he asks about who might have rented a blue Chevrolet Impala sometime recently, she tells him she’s not allowed to give out such information.

Charlie tells her what the problem is.

Using the same open infectious smile and innocent guile he used while talking countless susceptible Japanese maidens into bed on R & R in Tokyo during the Vietnam War, he says that he is an artist, and here he shows her several postcard-sized samples of his work from his gallery in Naples. He tells her that his gallery in New York informed him that they were sending an independent contractor down to pick up some of his paintings, but the person never showed up. So when he called New York this morning, they told him a blue Chevrolet Impala from Avis had been rented by the contractor sometime recently…