Дональд Уэстлейк - Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

Well, I still wanted to know, and I still heard nothing. Holding my breath, I stepped around the door and across the threshold, then pulled the door quietly shut behind me.

The room was perhaps twenty feet wide, with the door centered. The row of lockers left an aisle about three feet wide between themselves and the wall, stretching in both directions not quite all the way to the end.

For no particular reason, I chose to go to the right. I walked down there, silent, breathing shallowly, and at the end peeked cautiously around the last locker before finally walking around it completely and surveying the empty room.

Totally empty. This row of lockers faced an identical row of lockers standing against the opposite wall, about eight feet away. Two long wooden benches were bolted to the floor in the middle space. A dozen lockers on the door side had combination padlocks on them. Otherwise, there was nothing to see, nothing to explain what either of those men had been doing in here. Nor to explain everybody’s tension at my presence.

I walked down the row of lockers to the group with padlocks. I pulled one experimentally, but it was solidly locked. A nearby one without a padlock opened readily enough, but showed me an empty metal interior with the standard shelf and hooks.

What in hell was going on? I turned around and around, trying to figure things out, and all at once one of the lockers against the rear wall opened and a man in civilian clothes stepped out. Short, fiftyish, sharp-faced, wearing a brown leather jacket and a cloth cap, he took one look at me and yanked a small wicked pistol out of his jacket pocket.

“Oh, my God!” I said, and fainted.

They locked me in a room full of bases while they decided what to do with me. That was Jerry Bogentrodder, the other two cons, and the man in civilian clothing who’d been in the locker. “We can unload the body,” I heard one of them say as they closed the door. “That’s no problem.”

“We’ll see what Phil has to say,” Jerry Bogentrodder said, and I heard them all troop away down the corridor.

I still didn’t know what I’d stumbled into, but of one thing I was sure: Peter Corse had been absolutely right when he’d told me to stay away from this bunch. I was sure I’d seen all of them in that same group with Phil Giffin, even the man in civvies, and if I’d had any choice I would absolutely have stayed away from them forever.

I sat on a stack of bases and brooded. If only I hadn’t let my curiosity get the better of me. If only I hadn’t been transferred from license plates. If only those Congressmen had gone to Atlantic City instead. If only I’d been born with a different name.

I was in there perhaps two hours before it occurred to me there might still be a chance to survive. It was my body they’d been talking about unloading. Did I want that? Of course not. Could I fight off four or five tough cons, one of them armed with a gun? Never. Could I survive despite that, despite everything? Maybe.

My potential salvation was due simply to my being a prisoner in a penitentiary. Since I was on work assignment right now, I wouldn’t be subject to any sort of headcount until dinnertime, but the instant my cell-block lined up for dinner my absence would be noted. Where was Künt the last time anybody saw him? Over in the gym. Time for a search, then.

So. All I had to do was stay alive until dinnertime and the inevitable search. Then I would be found, I would report everything I’d seen and heard to the guards, and I would be safe. Relatively.

Safer, anyway, than if my body was in the process of being unloaded.

Well, if I was going to survive until dinnertime, the best thing to do would be separate myself from the tough guys. And the simplest way to do that was to bar the door.

Meaning these bases I was sitting on. About fifteen inches square and two inches high, they were made of tough gray canvas filled with dirt or some other lumpish heavy material, and they were normally put out on the yard during baseball games. This being November, off-season for baseball, they were all in here, twenty or more of them, heavy stolid things, stacked up along the wall.

It was a chore to move them, but well worth the effort. One at a time I lugged the bases over and plopped them down against the door. Let’s see them open that , I thought.

My barrier was about waist-high when the door opened, outward , and Phil Giffin stood there looking at me, poised with a base in my arms. He gave my work a jaundiced look and said, “You expecting a flood?”

“Uh,” I said.

“Get this shit out of the way, will you?”

The door opened the wrong way. With the base sagging in my arms I said, “You aren’t going to kill me, are you?” I don’t know why, but for some reason his face looked wrong for murder; he wouldn’t be so exasperated if he meant to kill me.

“That’s all I need,” he said, “a disappearing con. Move this crap, so we can talk.”

I moved it, hurrying. He leaned in the doorway till the pile was two bases high, then stepped over it and sat on a stack I’d made just to the left of the door. He took out a cigarette and lit it, and watched me move the rest of the bases out of the way. Then he said, “Shut the door. Sit down.”

I shut the door. I sat down.

He considered me, critically. “Well, you don’t look it,” he said.

I didn’t know what I didn’t look, so I just sat there. “I did a quick run on your records,” he said.

That surprised me. I hadn’t been at Stonevelt long enough then to know that a disguised subculture of trusties actually ran the place at the day-to-day level, just as the subculture of career sergeants actually runs the Army. Giffin had merely gone to the trusty who was Warden Gadmore’s filing clerk, had put in his request, and had been handed my records faster than if the request had come direct from the warden.

I felt sudden embarrassment. I had no idea what Giffin was in jail for, but I doubted it was for being a practical joker. I felt the awkwardness of the bush leaguer who has inadvertently annoyed the old pro. I said nothing, and looked contrite.

“I guess you’re one of those baby-facers,” he said, still studying me as though it was hard to believe his eyes. “Anyway, you must be tougher than you look, so I’ll take a chance on you.”

What in the name of God was he talking about? Then the wording of the indictment came back to me, the actual crimes with which I’d been charged, and it all became clear. The authorities hadn’t been able to bring me to trial charged with putting a naked mannequin on my automobile hood, nor was being a habitual practical joker a felony, though I’ve occasionally heard people claim that it should be. The indictment had been specific yet vague: “grievous bodily harm,” “malicious intent,” “assault with attempt to injure,” “felonious assault.” I had been convicted of synonyms which had not quite fit my case.

The result was, Phil Giffin was now prepared provisionally to accept me as an equal. Of course, this decision of his was also prompted by his need to keep things quiet and not do anything that might draw official attention, but my misleading records certainly helped. If he had learned from those records that I was an untrustworthy and possibly unbalanced inveterate practical joker, he might have decided it was safer to let his friends unload the body after all, and brazen out the search that would follow.

A sheep in wolf’s clothing, I was safe for the moment.

Giffin leaned closer to me. Smoke curled up over the harsh angles of his face from the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Squinting from the smoke, he said, “I’m gonna tell you a story, Kunt.”