Дональд Уэстлейк - Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

There was no one in sight. The parked cars in the general vicinity all seemed to be empty. When I hesitantly reached into the milk box and prodded the gray canvas bag, no alarm bells jangled, no spotlights flashed on. But I did hear the clink of coins.

Well I’ll be damned, I thought.

I took the bag out of the milk box. I could feel coins in there, and wads of paper.

Son of a bitch , I thought.

I stuffed the bag inside my jacket, grabbed my note from the night deposit slot and jammed it into a pocket, and walked briskly away, leaving the milk box as mute testimony to the gullibility of man.

I had just committed my first true felony. We have all read the statements of prison reformers claiming that jail creates more criminals than it rehabilitates, and by golly it turns out to be true!

The damn bag didn’t want to open. I stood in the Vasacapa corridor in the Dombey basement, wrestling with the gray canvas bag full of money, and gradually my new self-image as a master criminal crumbled into ashes at my feet. Some crook; I couldn’t steal my way into a canvas bag.

In my defense, I must say it was a tough bag to crack. Made of heavy canvas, it had a reinforced mouth that closed with a zipper, which in turn was attached by a small gleaming metal lock that would only open with a key. I fussed and fidgeted with the damn thing, listening to the coins clinking and the paper rustling in there, until finally I noticed a nail tip jutting through the side wall of the corridor, where Vasacapa had put up his paneling. Since this side of the wall hadn’t been finished, it was the back of the paneling I was looking at. Something had been fastened to the wall over there, with a nail that poked all the way through, extending a full inch into the corridor.

So I gashed the bag to death. I kept scraping it against the nail until I’d gnawed a hole in it, and then forced and pried and gouged until the hole was big enough for me to shake the contents out onto the carpet.

Coins came tumbling out first, quarters and dimes and nickels bounding around like playful fish on the silent carpet, and then a thick wad of paper held together with a red rubber band.

The paper was money: bills, half a dozen checks, and a deposit slip. The checks were made out to Turk’s Bar & Grill, and it was likely that Turk, or his representative, had been treating himself to a few on the house tonight, which was why he’d fallen for my sign-and-milk-box routine. Although as I remembered it, that fellow I’d read about in the paper several years ago had caught all sorts of citizens when he’d done the same thing. A businessman late at night, tired, impatient to be home, distracted by the events of his day, sees a note and something that looks vaguely like a strongbox, and just drops in the day’s receipts. In fact, the only reason that former practitioner of this dodge had gotten himself arrested was because he’d kept doing it too often. A mistake I wouldn’t repeat; this had been my first felony, and would be my last.

It is bad companions, by God; our mothers were right.

The deposit slip told me how much I’d collected in cash. One hundred thirty-two dollars in bills, eighteen dollars and forty cents in change. One hundred fifty dollars and forty cents.

Yes, sir.

The cash all went into my pockets, except for a dime that Max Nolan found in the carpet two weeks later. The checks and deposit slip went back into the canvas bag, and I went back into the cold to unload them.

I walked a block, found a garbage can next to somebody’s house, and stuffed the bag in amid the corn flakes boxes. Then, jingling pleasantly, warm despite the cold, I marched back to prison.

I had been out getting a Post Office box, and when I got back Joe Maslocki told me, “You better get over to the warden’s office. Stoon was around looking for you.”

“Stoon?” He was the guard who had accompanied me to the warden’s office my first day here. I said, “What’s the problem?”

He shrugged. “Who knows? I told him you were out looking for a box of stolen jockstraps.”

“Okay,” I said, and left the gym, and hurried across the yard toward the building housing the warden’s office.

This was two days after my successful milk box routine. That hundred and fifty dollars had finished the job of cementing my membership in the tunnel club, particularly when I’d related how I’d hidden near the bank and had leaped out to assault a businessman with a brick, relieving him of his night deposit cash. But I had no intention of stealing any more money, with either brick or milk box, so that’s why I’d been out getting a Post Office box. I’d phoned my mother and asked her to send me a thousand dollars in a check made out to Harry Kent, and she had promised she would. With that money I would open a checking account, and from now on whenever the boys believed I was out making a sting I would simply return with money I’d withdrawn from the account.

I could see that life was going to get a bit complex in the months ahead. Talk about wheels within wheels. To the prison authorities I was an inmate. To seven of the inmates I was a tunnel insider, involved in robberies and assaults. To postal clerks and bank tellers and possibly other people on the outside, I would soon become an ordinary local citizen named Harry Kent. And only I — if things went well — would know the whole truth.

I hadn’t asked for this, I really hadn’t. I’d been reasonably content in the license plate shop. But the ball had started rolling, and so far I hadn’t found any way to make it stop.

Now, approaching the warden’s office, I suddenly remembered the last thing he’d said to me on our first meeting: “If you behave yourself, I won’t see you in this office again until you’re discharged.”

I wasn’t about to be discharged, not six weeks into my sentence. I had obviously not been behaving myself, but if the warden knew about the tunnel wouldn’t he want to see all eight of us, not just me?

Something’s gone wrong, I thought. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t know yet how bad it was going to be, but one thing I knew for sure: something had gone wrong.

Guard Stoon was coming out of the building as I was going in. He looked at me and said, “Oh, there you are. Warden Gadmore wants to see you.”

“They just told me,” I said.

“Come on, then.”

I followed him inside, and down the squeaky-floored hall. Glancing back at me, he said, “You find the jocks?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “What?”

“The jocks,” he repeated.

Oh, of course: Joe Maslocki and his stolen jockstraps. Why had he given an insane excuse like that? “Yeah,” I said. “I found them.”

“Where were they?”

“One of the Joy Boys had them,” I said.

“Figures,” he said.

We went into the warden’s anteroom, and I waited fifteen minutes before Stoon came back out and said, “Okay, Kunt.”

“Künt,” I said. “With an umlaut.”

Stoon’s reaction to everything was to express weariness. Expressing weariness, he said, “Warden Gadmore wants to see you now.”

I went into the office and stood in front of the desk. Warden Gadmore was looking at documents on his desktop, showing me his bald spot. He lifted his head finally, gave me a critical look, and extended a smallish piece of paper toward me. I went on looking at him, and he jiggled the paper slightly, saying, “Go on, take it.”

I took it. I was now holding a torn-off piece of ordinary white typing paper, about four inches square. Written on it in large, uneven printing, using a black felt-tip pen, were the words HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER.