Ed McBain - Alice in Jeopardy

She realizes she is screaming at him. She clenches her fists, turns away. She wants to punch Sloate. She wants to punch anyone.

“I’m calling Charlie,” she says, and picks up the phone again.

“This is a mistake,” Sloate says.

But she is already dialing.

“Hello?”

“Charlie? It’s me.”

“What does the blonde want you to do?”

“Bring her the money.”

“Have you got it?”

“Phony bills, yes.”

“That’s dangerous.”

“I know, but…”

“They’re not locals,” Charlie says. “The blonde was driving a rental car.”

Sloate’s eyes open wide.

“How do you know?” Alice asks.

“Guard saw an Avis bumper sticker. I went to the airport, checked on it—”

“Jesus!” Sloate says.

“—they wouldn’t tell me anything. But now that the cops are all over you, maybe they can find out who rented that Impala.”

“Maybe.”

“Where’d that woman ask you to leave the money?”

“Don’t tell him!” Sloate warns.

“The Shell station on Lewiston and the Trail.”

“What time?”

“Don’t…”

“Ten tomorrow morning.”

“Good luck, Alice.”

“Thanks, Charlie.”

She hangs up, looks Sloate dead in the eye.

“Think you can find that car now?” she asks.

Sloate turns to Sally Ballew.

“Make yourself useful, Sal,” he says. “We’re looking for a blue Impala, maybe rented from Avis by a blonde in her thirties.”

“Piece of cake,” Sally says dryly.

As she and her partner leave the house, the grandfather clock in the hallway reads 8:30 P.M.

When they first moved down here, the kids thought they’d died and gone to heaven. Before they bought the boat, Eddie and Alice used to take them to the beach on every sunny weekend. After they owned the Jamash, it was day trips up and down the Intercoastal or out onto the Gulf when the seas weren’t too rough. At the beach one day…

She remembers this now with sharp poignancy.

Remembers it with an immediacy that is painfully relevant.

Jamie is three years old, and fancies himself to be an interviewer on one of his favorite kiddie TV shows. One hand in his sister’s, the other wrapped around a toy shovel he pretends is a microphone, he wanders up the beach, stopping at every blanket, thrusting the shovel-mike at each surprised sunbather, asking in his piping little voice, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Tirelessly, he parades the beach with his sister, a relentless, pint-sized investigative journalist.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

One day…

Oh God, that frantic day…

They know they are not to go anywhere near the water. The waves that roll in here are usually benign, even at high tide, but the children know that they are not to approach the water unless Eddie or Alice is with them. They know this. And usually, they wander up the beach for… oh, ten minutes or so… Ashley inordinately proud of her little brother’s interviewing technique, Jamie grinning in anticipation as he holds out his microphone to ask even sixty-year-olds, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

The beaches here on the Cape are not too terribly crowded, even in high season, so Alice or Eddie can keep the children in sight as Jamie conducts his “interviews.” But on this day…

They are discussing something important. Beaches tend to encourage deep discussions about important matters.

She doesn’t remember now what they were discussing. Perhaps buying a boat. Perhaps deliberating whether they can afford to buy even a used boat; they always seem to be discussing money, or the lack of money, when suddenly…

“Where are the kids?”

This from Eddie.

Alice looks up.

“Where are the kids?” he asks again. “Do you see them?”

She looks up the beach. She cannot see them anywhere. She is on her feet at once. So is Eddie.

“Did they come back this way?” he asks.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Did we miss them?”

Alice’s heart is racing now.

“They didn’t go in the water, did they?” she asks.

“You go that way!” he says, and points, and she immediately begins running up the beach. Eddie is off in the opposite direction.

“Ashley!” she yells. “Jamie!”

Running. Her eyes scanning the water. She does not see them anywhere in the water. Nor does she see them anywhere on the beach. What…? Where…?

“Excuse me, did you see a little boy pretending to be a television reporter?”

Coming toward this end of the beach, the bathers and baskers thinning out now, still no sign of the children, oh dear God, please say they haven’t gone in the water, please say they haven’t been carried out to sea! She turns, comes running back down the beach, her eyes darting from sand to sea, and suddenly…

There.

Coming out of the tan brick building near the parking lot.

“Ashley!” she yells.

She rushes to the children, hugs them close.

“You scared me to death!” she says.

“Jamie had to pee,” Ashley says.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Jamie asks, grinning, and holds out the shovel to Alice.

The woman calls again at a few minutes before ten. “Listen to me carefully,” she says. “All you have to remember is that we have your children. If you don’t come to that gas station alone, your children will die. If you don’t have the money with you, your children will die. If anyone tries to detain me, your children will die. If I’m not back where I’m supposed to be in half an hour, your children will die. That’s all you have to know. See you tomorrow at ten.”

She hangs up.

“Twenty-three seconds,” Sally says.

The grandfather clock strikes ten P.M.

In exactly twelve hours, Alice will be delivering the ransom money. But the woman’s words keep echoing in her head. Your children will die, your children will die, your children will die.

The Tamiami Trail may once have been a dirt road hacked out through the palmettos and palms, but that was long before Alice moved down here.

Today, U.S. 41 is a four- (and sometimes six-) lane concrete thoroughfare lined for miles and miles with fast food emporiums, gift shops, car washes, gasoline stations, pizzerias, furniture stores, nurseries, carpet salesrooms, automobile dealers, shopping malls, movie theater complexes, and a variety of one-story cinder-block shops selling plaster figurines, citrus fruit, discount clothing, rattan pool and garden furniture, cigarettes and beer (free ice if you buy a case), stereo equipment, lamps, vacuum cleaners, typewriters, burglar alarms, swimming pools, and (the only such shop in all Cape October) adult marital aids, games, and related reading material.

Alice is familiar with the Shell station on Lewiston Point Road because the road itself dead-ends at the ferry landing where you catch the boat to Crescent Island, not a thousand yards off the southern end of Tall Grass. Crescent is the least developed of the Cape’s offshore keys. Accessible only by water, the island has on it a small, eccentric boater’s paradise known as Marina Blue, some thirty minutes away and 10,000 miles distant from U.S. 41. Some four or five years ago, the family spent a long, cherished weekend on Crescent, and the memories of that happy time are still with her.

She parks the black Mercedes truck in a space for about five or six cars, near the air hoses, gets out — and hesitates.

For a fleeting instant, she wishes she’d taken with her the snubnosed.32-caliber pistol Eddie gave her as a birthday present the year they moved down here. Instead, it is resting under her lingerie in the top drawer of the bedroom dresser back home.