Elmore Leonard - Riding the Rap

He waited.

“I said I’m gonna keep quiet,” Harry said, and did, kept his mouth shut after that, sitting there chained and blindfolded. Minutes passed. He thought he heard them moving around and did hear a door close. Harry listened, pretty sure he was alone before reaching down to find a light chain wrapped around each ankle and padlocked, about twelve inches of chain between his legs and the rest of it extending along the floor. Harry got down on his hands and knees and followed the chain, about eight feet of it, to a metal ring bolted to the floor, through the deep-pile carpeting. He stood up and began to shuffle around, touched the wall by the cot, then shuffled off across the room and banged his shin on another metal cot. He felt along the wall and got as far as an open doorway before the chain stopped him.

He wondered if it was the way he came in. If it was… He began to imagine them on the other side of the doorway watching him, some guys he might even know, Harry becoming more sure of it. He said, “You’re right there, aren’t you, you fucks.” He said, “Will you say something, for Christ sake?”

“Talking to somebody he thinks is in the bathroom,” Louis said that first day, watching Harry on the TV screen in the study. “Uh-oh, he’s trying to lift up his blindfold.”

“He’ll learn quick,” Chip said.

They watched, on the screen, the door open and now Bobby was in the room, Harry turning toward the sound, getting all the way around as Bobby clobbered him with a right hand-Chip saying, “Pow, right in the kisser”-and Harry stumbled and went down.

“So now he knows,” Louis said, “no peeking.”

They watched the monitors all that weekend, cutting from the patio to the front entrance to the driveway-watching the driveway more than the other areas now-to the bedroom upstairs, Harry sitting on the cot with his head raised, listening, like a blind man looking around.

Whenever Louis or Bobby got ready to go up to the room Chip would say, “Be sure you don’t speak, okay?”

They both went upstairs one time and Bobby said, “He tells me that again, I’m gonna get the tape and shut his mouth with it.”

Louis said, “I’ll hold him.”

They put a plastic bucket in there next to the cot by Harry’s feet and he got the idea he was to use it to piss in. So they wouldn’t have to run in there every time he had to go.

Bobby said, “Why don’t we give him more chain, he can go in the bathroom?”

“That would make too much sense,” Louis said. “Then he could go in there and do number two by himself and we wouldn’t have to unchain him every time. Last night I took him in there he asked for something to read.”

Other things didn’t make sense to Bobby. Why take the beds out, put in those little cots? Louis said it was how the Shia done it over in Beirut, the Shia having written the book on how to mind hostages. Louis said Chip wanted to use straw mattresses like he read about in one of the hostage books, but nobody made such a thing.

Food, they’d bring in on a tray and hand it to him: all different kinds of TV dinners Louis chose. The first time they fed him, that Friday night, they stayed to watch Harry dig in blindfolded. He took a bite of the Mexican Medley and said, “What is this shit?” but kept eating, made a mess cleaning his tray. Finishing up Harry wanted to know what was for dessert. When he didn’t get an answer or any dessert he said, “How about some Jell-O? If you guys don’t know how to make it, go to Wolfie’s on Collins Avenue and pick me up some. Strawberry, with the fruit in it. Get some rice pudding, too.”

The routine Louis decided on was to feed Harry TV dinners twice a day and snacks in between like cookies, potato chips, candy bars. Louis said the Shia fixed their hostages rice and shit, but no doubt would have given them TV dinners if they had any.

Saturday morning Bobby drove Harry’s Cadillac to a bump shop in South Miami to unload it, Louis following in Bobby’s car to pick him up. On the way back he watched Bobby counting a stack of bills, his lips moving, but never saying how much he got and Louis didn’t ask. Fuck him. He thought since they were alone Bobby would want to talk about Freeport, ask Louis what his idea was to get to Harry’s money; but he didn’t, busy with his own money, and Louis didn’t bring it up.

Coming to Delray Beach, Louis turned off the freeway and headed east toward the ocean. Bobby, looking around, asked where was he going and Louis said to Tom Junior’s Rib Heaven, get some takeout, best ribs in South Florida. He said they had other good stuff, too, like conch fritters, collards-man, blackeye peas. Bobby said he didn’t eat that shit and Louis held on to the steering wheel.

When he turned off Old Dixie and pulled into a grocery store on Linton, Bobby said, “What you stopping here for?”

Louis said, “Supplies,” and got out of the car thinking the P.R. motherfucking bill collector would sit there and wait, but Bobby followed him in the store.

A man and woman that reminded Louis of the Shia, Arab-looking, were behind the counter in front talking to each other in a foreign language, arguing, it sounded like, ugly people. When they looked up Louis said, “How you doing?” He took a cart and started down the nearest aisle, wondering if the woman had dyed her hair orange or was wearing a wig. You saw people like them all over running little groceries and party stores, Arab or something like it. Louis began picking out snacks from the shelves. He got Oreo chocolate sandwich cookies. He got potato chips, tortilla chips, Cheez-Its, pretzels, a box of peanut brittle, some candy bars, moved on to the cereals, picked out-let’s see-Cocoa Puffs, Cap’n Crunch… and Froot Loops. Louis went on to the dairy case for milk, picked up six-packs of beer and Mountain Dew-he’d heard had more caffeine in it than any other kind of soda-and a pair of rubber gloves for cleaning the blindfolded man’s bathroom. Louis put the groceries on the counter and said to Bobby, looking at the magazine rack, “Since you got all the money, you want to pay for this?” Turning, walking away, Louis said, “I forgot something.” He went down an aisle where he thought Jell-O should be and over to another aisle before he found it, all kinds of flavors in color. He took three boxes of strawberry, what Harry said he liked, two strawberry-banana, and an orange. He didn’t see any rice pudding, but there were jars of instant tapioca and he took one of them.

Louis stepped over to the aisle that went directly to the counter, seeing Bobby standing there now and, past him to either side, the Arab-looking grocer and his wife with orange hair. They were watching Bobby doing something.

Throwing a package aside after taking something out of it, it looked like.

Raising his hand in the air then as he pulled a yellow rubber glove down over the hand.

Louis saying, Oh shit, to himself.

He kept on to the counter, seeing Bobby pulling the other glove on and then reaching for the grocer as the man ducked down behind the counter to come up holding a gun that Bobby right away took by the barrel and twisted and the man screamed something in his language, letting go of the grip. Bobby kept hold of the gun by the barrel, a big chrome revolver he hit the grocer over the head with, swiping the man sidearm, and the man screamed again holding his head, blood coming through his fingers as Louis reached the counter and saw the man sink to his knees. The woman was screaming in her language- had been screaming-and now Bobby reached over to grab her by the hair, got a good hold of it-Louis thinking the orange hair would come off in Bobby’s hand, but it didn’t. It was her hair. Bobby now dragged her up against the counter. The woman tried to push away and Bobby let go of her hair, seeing her hands on the counter and looking at them closely.