Ed McBain: King's Ransom

“I don’t know. Or, yes, I do know. I can’t give those men the money they want. I can’t because it would kill me. If that makes me rotten, then all right, I’m rotten. But I can’t change the way I am, Mr. Carella. That’s for the fairy tales. The mean witch who turns into a lovely princess, the toad who turns into a prince, the rotten louse who suddenly sees the error of his ways and vows to do good for the rest of his life, fairy tales, pap for the television viewers of America. I’ll never change. I know it, and Diane knows it, and she’ll come back to me, Mr. Carella, because she loves me. I’ll never change. And if I’m rotten, I’m rotten. But I’ve fought all my life, and if I can’t give those men the money they want, I can fight them this way, by going along, by doing something.”

He shook his head.

“I know none of this makes any sense. For the first six months of my married life, we lived in an apartment that had cockroaches the size of flying bats. I never want that again, Mr. Carella. I want my house in Smoke Rise, and I want my servants, and I want a Cadillac with a telephone hanging from the dashboard, and I want…”

And in that instant, the telephone hanging from the dashboard rang.

It had been a simple matter to learn the frequency band within which all automobile telephones in the vicinity operated. Once this had been learned, it was equally simple to steal the necessary equipment: the 600-volt oscillator and the 1600-volt oscillator, the transmitter and the various relays and switches, and lastly the batteries. It was a little more difficult to come across the dial which Kathy had thought seemed alien to a radio set—and only because it was alien. The dial was a telephone dial hooked to the battery and the relay, so that it could key the telephone in King’s car and cause it to ring. Once King picked up the telephone, Eddie could speak to him over the microphone attached to his transmitter. King’s automobile telephone number, quite naturally, had been obtained from the telephone company. Eddie Folsom’s preliminary sketches from the setup had looked like this:

The setup was now a reality before him. He had dialed King’s number nervously. He waited now, one hand trembling around the microphone, the receiver tuned to pick up King’s voice, the transmitter ready to relay Eddie’s instructions.

Pick up the phone, he thought.

Pick it up!

“Wh—?” King said.

“What’s—?” Carella said from the back seat.

“The telephone! The telephone’s ringing.”

“Holy God, that’s how—Answer it! Go ahead, answer it!”

King lifted the receiver from where it hung on the dash. “Hello?” he said.

“All right, Mr. King, this is it,” Eddie said. “You listen carefully, because you’ll be receiving your instructions over this telephone for however long it takes you to get where we want you to go. Do you understand?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m listening.”

“Nobody’s going to help you now, Mr. King, because this conversation can’t possibly be traced. I’m using a radio transmitter and not a telephone. So get that out of your mind in case you had any idea of stopping and telling anyone about this. We know exactly how long it should take you to get where you’re going, so no tricks, please. Now. Where are you?”

“I’m… I don’t know.”

“All right, keep that phone in your hand. You are not to hang up until this trip is over. Keep it in your hand, and as you pass the next cross street, tell me where you are.”

“All right.”

“What is it?” Carella whispered. He was kneeling close to the back of his seat, his mouth alongside King’s ear. King shook his head and pointed to the telephone.

“You think he’ll hear us?” Carella whispered.

King nodded.

“I’m coming up front. I’ll talk to him from now on. The reception on these damn things isn’t hi-fi, that’s for sure. We’ll have to hope he doesn’t recognize the change of voice. What does he want?”

“Cross street,” King whispered as Carella climbed over the seat and took the phone from King’s hand. He looked through the windshield and then brought the receiver to his mouth.

“I’m approaching North Thirty-ninth and Culver,” he said into the phone.

Apparently, Eddie did not detect the difference in the voices. His own voice level and calm, he said, “Turn left on North Fortieth. Continue in a southerly direction until you reach Grover Avenue, then turn left again. Go uptown until Forty-eighth, where you will see a crosstown entrance into the park. Take that entrance and continue driving. When you reach Hall Avenue, let me know. Have you got that?”

“Left on North Fortieth,” Carella repeated. “South until Grover, then left again. Uptown to forty-eighth, and then into the park. Right.”

He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “Have you got that, King?”

“Yes,” King said.

“He’s giving it to us piecemeal so we can’t alert the nearest traffic cop as to just where we’re heading. These are shrewd bastards, Mr. King.” Carella’s brow furrowed. “I wish I knew how to stop them. I just wish I knew.”

* * * *

Sitting in the parked car, Sy Barnard smoked his tenth cigarette in the past half hour. Anxiously, he looked at his watch. Then he glanced again at the road. The car was parked in the woods, completely shielded from the road by an old electric-company repair shack. The screening, in all truth, was unnecessary.

Only one car had driven by in the past half hour, and on the day he and Eddie had chosen the site they had clocked only three cars in two and a half hours. The chances of being spotted by a curious motorist were negligible, almost nonexistent. Nor was there much possibility of a police car cruising by. Studying the list of road blocks, Sy knew that the nearest police barricade was at a big intersection some fifteen miles to the west. He had easily avoided it in getting here, and he knew he could easily go around it when driving back to the farmhouse.

Even if King refused to obey orders, even if, for example, a squad car were following the black Cadillac at this moment, the plan was foolproof. And the part of it that made it so beautiful was the fact that no one but King knew where he was going, and even he was getting it in small bits and pieces so that he couldn’t possibly give any meaningful information to a third party. The electric-company shack was just around a curve in the road. If a police car were following King, it would have to maintain a respectable distance or risk being detected. Detection would endanger the boy, and so Sy knew that any following police would stay pretty far behind the lead car. Communicating with King via the telephone, Eddie would know when King was about five miles away from the site. He would tell him to pull over to the side of the road and lower his right-hand window. Then he would tell King to begin driving again. At a point a half mile from the shack, Eddie would tell King that he was approaching a curve in the road. As soon as he rounded that bend, he wanted King to slow down, pull over, stop, and drop the carton of money out the window and into the bushes on the right-hand side of the road. He was to drive away from the spot as quickly as possible then, following the instructions that came to him over the telephone.

And therein lay the beauty of the plan. A following squad car would be nowhere in sight when the drop was made. By the time they approached the electric-company shack, King would have driven off. They would continue to follow, not having witnessed the drop, not even knowing it had taken place. Eddie would continue talking to King. He would lead him out to the very tip of Sands Spit, turn him around at the end of the peninsula, and then lead him back to the city via another route. The following police car, if there was one, would continue tailing the lead car. Eddie would continue talking to King until Sy had picked up the money and driven back to the farmhouse. The moment Sy stepped through the door, Eddie would stop transmitting. King—and the police, if there were any—would then be on their own. They would be free to drive wherever the hell they wanted to. They could even drive back to the electric-company shack if they so chose; Sy would have left there long ago.