Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

He started out talking quietly enough, but the more he said, taking inventory, the more his voice changed. It didn’t get louder or faster, nothing like that, but a kind of excitement came into it, something you could feel more than hear. After the inventory, he was silent for quite a while, still staring at her, and that sense of excitement was as real then, when he was silent, as it was before, when he was talking. All of a sudden he reached inside his coat with his right hand, and I thought he was reaching for a cigarette, but he wasn’t. He was reaching for a gun, a .38, and he pointed it over the back of the seat at Felicia Gotlot.

“Get up front,” he said. “Never mind getting out. Just crawl over.”

I said, “You lost your marbles, Banty?”

“Don’t ask questions,” Banty said. “She wants a kidnapping, she’ll get one. A real one.” The excitement was so big inside him now that his voice began to shake a little from it, but the gun in his hand was steady. “Don’t you get it, Carny? This is the big break. This is what I’ve been waiting for. This is good luck coming after bad. And it just walked in. Just walked right in and went to sleep. A rich little tramp with a load of gin. It’s like fate or something. A man can’t turn his back on fate, Carny. A man who did that would never have any luck again, never as long as he lived.”

It scared me, honest, hearing him talk like that, almost as if he were in a kind of spell, and he meant it all, every word of it. I knew it, and Felicia Gotlot knew it.

“I don’t want any part of it,” I said.

“It doesn’t make any difference what you want,” he said. “You’ve got part of it whether you want it or not. This is a snatch, as of right now, and you’re in it just as much as I am. You take my advice and play along, Carny, because the stakes are big. Five hundred grand against the chamber. Think of that, Carny. A cool half million. Peanuts to old Gotlot for his precious daughter. Maybe we could make it a million. I’ll think about it.”

There was no use arguing with him, or trying to get him to be reasonable at all in that queer mood he was so suddenly in, and Felicia Gotlot understood this as well as I did, for she simply crawled over the back of the seat with a big display of nylon that I’d have appreciated more some other time. She settled down between me and Banty, and Banty handed me the .38 and said, “If she makes a sound or a move, belt her over the head with it,” and we went on down the highway toward the forty acres of rock that Uncle Oakley had left to Cousin Theodore.

We had the devil of a time finding it in the dark, because it was a long way off the highway on a little gravel road leading into the hills, but we finally found it, after a lot of wrong turns and dead ends, and it was hardly worth finding at all, let alone with so much trouble, for it was nothing but a three-room shack made of rough native lumber that was as gray and weathered against the side of its hill as all the rocks around it. It turned out, though, that there was a good fishing stream on the place, and Cousin Theodore came down here often to fish. As a consequence, the place was stocked with sheets and blankets and cooking utensils and things like that, including a lot of canned goods.

There wasn’t any gas or electricity, only kerosene lamps and a wood stove in the kitchen for cooking, and Banty, who had clearly been here before, found some kerosene and lit some lamps while I watched Felicia Gotlot to keep her from getting away, although I don’t know where she’d have gone in those dark hills so far from anywhere. The truth is, she didn’t seem to have going anywhere in mind at the moment, and I don’t blame her.

One of the three rooms was a bedroom, with nothing in it but a bed and a chest with a mirror over it, and we put Felicia Gotlot in there. There was no way of locking her in, which was a problem, and Banty said we’d have to tie her feet and hands.

“It isn’t necessary to tie me,” she said. “There’s nowhere to go, and I wouldn’t know which direction it was if there were.”

“We’ll tie you anyhow, just to be safe,” Banty said. “It won’t hurt you, and it won’t be for long, because this job is hot, and I intend to work fast with it.”

She kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed, and we tore a sheet into strips to tie her with. We tied her hands together and her feet together and tied her at both ends to the head and the foot of the bed. We left enough slack so she could move some and be fairly comfortable, but not enough so she could sit up or reach her feet with her hands by bending. Then Banty went out to the kitchen to build a fire in the stove and make some coffee, but I hung back after he was gone. I don’t know why I did, exactly, except that I was feeling kind of bad about tying her to the bed that way, like an animal or something. To tell the truth, I admired her and respected her and wished we weren’t doing to her what we were. You had to admire and respect her, I mean. She had plenty of moxie, besides being kidnapped and all, without crying or making a big fuss, and she knew it was her fault for talking too much, letting Banty know who she was, after getting loaded on gin and crawling into the car and going to sleep. She took the blame, as I figured it, and was quiet and sensible.

“You want some coffee?” I asked.

“No.”

“Well, good-night, then,” I said.

“Go to hell,” she said.

I went out to the kitchen instead, and Banty and I sat down at a table and had some coffee when it was ready.

“When you’ve had your coffee,” Banty said, “you’d better get some sleep because after I leave in the morning you probably won’t get much.”

“Where you going?”

“To Kansas City to get the money. Half a million. I’ve decided not to press our luck.”

It seemed to me he was already pressing it, but I didn’t say so. “You’d better get some sleep yourself,” I said.

“I’ll catch a few hours after I get back to KC. Then I’ll call old Gotlot and arrange for the payoff.”

“What if he won’t pay?”

“He’ll pay. I’ll tell him we’ll kill his precious daughter if he doesn’t.”

“What if he won’t?”

“Then we’ll kill her.”

“I hope he pays,” I said. I took a drink of coffee and wished it was whiskey. “What then?”

“I’ll drive back here with the money, and we go on south.”

“What do we do with Felicia?”

“We leave her here, tied to the bed. We’ll send a letter to the police after we leave, telling where she is. She’ll get hungry and thirsty waiting, but she won’t be hurt any.”

“Just a minute. We’ll have to wait until we’re a long way south before sending the letter, and the postmark will tell which way we’re heading.”

“There’s the difference between you and me, Carny. You’re stupid, and I’m not. We’ll send the letter from the nearest town. Only we’ll send it to the police in New York or Los Angeles or someplace like that, and they’ll have to call back to KC. It’ll give us plenty of time to get a long way away, and no one but us will know which way it is.”

“I have to hand it to you,” I said. “You’ve been doing a lot of thinking, all right.”

“I’ve always been a thinker,” he said. “I’ve just been waiting for my luck.”

“I don’t like leaving Felicia Gotlot tied to the bed for so long,” I said, “and I admit it.”

“You’ll like the quarter million well enough,” he said.

“When will you be back with it? That pretty green moolah.”

“Forty to fifty hours at the longest. I’ll work fast.”

“It’s a lot of money. I never thought I’d have so much.”

“Get some sleep,” he said.