Эд Горман - Blood Moon

Wasn’t Rosamund a fine lady? She sure was, he said. Wasn’t it nice of Rosamund to wait for him this way? It was indeed. Wouldn’t it be nice when they were married and leading a normal life? Absolutely.

Only toward the end, only when the fat-ass uniformed guard with his nightstick and his Magnum started to look antsy, the way he always looked when he was about to shoo visitors out... only then did Mr. Givens come to the point.

“Damn,” he said.

“What?”

He tapped his gold Rolex. “My watch seems to have stopped.”

“Huh?”

“At 10:25 A.M. On May 26.”

“Gee, a Rolex stopping like that. Who would’ve thought that—”

Only then, being a very slow learner apparently, only then did he realize what Givens was doing.

May 26 was four days away. How could his watch have stopped at a future date when—

Aw, hell.

He really was an idiot.

Here Givens had done everything except write it down and hold it up for him and he still hadn’t caught on.

10:25 A.M. on May 26th.

Of course.

“I noticed the soybeans over on the north side. They look great,” Givens said.

10:25 A.M., May 26th, soybean field on the north side.

There it was.

His way out of this place.

Thanks to Rosamund.

Then the guard came by.

“Time’s up,” he said.

And tapped his nightstick against the Plexiglas. Just so Givens would know who was really in charge here, just so Givens would know that this was one tight prison and that the guards planned to keep it that way.

“I’ll tell Rosamund you send your love,” Givens said.

“I’d appreciate that.”

“You’re the only thing she talks about anymore.”

Guard tapped his nightstick again. “You hear me, mister? Time’s up.”

“I thought,” said Givens, “we still had five minutes left. According to what they told me—”

“You want to take the time and go up and ask them again, fella? If you do, I’ll dock your friend here five minutes on his next visitation. You want me to do that?”

Givens sighed, shook his head.

“Take care of yourself,” Givens said, standing up.

He watched Givens walk out of the visiting room.

Guard looked at him and grinned. “You bastards over in D. You think you’re going to get away with hittin’ Bernie the way you did, don’t you?”

“I didn’t hit him.”

“Yeah, but it was your friend who hit him.”

“He isn’t my friend. I don’t even know him.”

“You cons are all the same, don’t matter whether you know each other or not. You stick together.” He knocked his nightstick against the Plexiglas. “Well, us guards, we stick together, too.”

That night, an inmate got his nose and three ribs busted up, same guy, by a big coincidence, who was the cellmate of the guy who’d hit Bernie the guard.

This was the talk of D for the next three days, how the guards had deliberately busted up the guy, and how D was going to pay the guards back.

But who cared?

He was, at long last, going to get out of here.

10:25 A.M., May 26, soybean field to the north.

Yes, ma’am; oh, yes yes, ma’am.

He let the other cons lay on their bunks and stew and sulk about that nasty guard and that poor defenseless con.

All he thought about was the soybean field.

The soybean field...

One day, I got authorization to go up to the Office of Technical Services, which is where the Agency keeps all of its James Bond devices, and a very friendly old chap spent an hour with me bringing me up to speed on devices for tapping phones and photographing documents and new ways to plant bugs. Most people don’t realize this, but the Agency employs a good number of cabinetmakers, leatherworkers, woodworkers and general carpenters who do nothing but devise better ways to conceal electronic bugging devices. When the old man finished telling me about his department, he said, “There’s only one thing we haven’t come up with yet.”

“And what’s that?”

“Some way for you agents to occupy your time while you’re on a stakeout.”

How true.

I gave Jane Avery a ten-minute head start and then I drove over to the McNally block and parked at the far end, between two cars, so I’d be less conspicuous.

Her police car sat right out in front of the McNally’s. As I drove by, I’d seen both of them in the lighted window, behind the gauzy cover of sheer white curtains.

Jane had been in there more than an hour.

As for me, I now had time to brush up on my three favorite sports: thumb-twiddling, sighing and keeping the cheeks of my backside from going to sleep.

Oh, yes, and one other sport: playing guess the Sears house.

Around the turn of the century, a lot of Iowa people bought house kits from Sears. These weren’t little shacks, either, the homes from these kits. In fact, the most popular in-town model was the Dutch Colonial, a two-story job with a gambrel roof and authentic reproductions of “Colonial sidelights” flanking the front door.

There were probably three or four hundred Sears houses still standing in Iowa, which said something about the quality of craftsmanship in those days.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see any Sears houses on Eve McNally’s block, no matter how hard I looked, no matter how many times I lifted my binoculars and checked them out.

Maybe the owners had done what the Mesquakie Indians used to do, before the white man came. They made houses from reed mats that lasted about seven years, which was also the time it took to exhaust the firewood in a given area. So the Mesquakies never, as it were, sought a home-improvement loan; they just moved on to a new area where they built new houses and started life afresh, members of a truly mobile society.

Jane Avery came out just as I was starting to rub my backside, prickly numbness having started to overtake it.

I slid down in the seat, figuring her lights would sweep across my door when she pulled out. As they did.

After a flash of headlamps, there was just darkness again. I pulled myself up, opened the door and walked across the street.

It was misting now, a chill spray that reminded me of lying with Jane on her bed. I smiled.

At the door, Eve McNally peered out through the dark glass before turning on the porch light. An aged yellow lamp above my head came on. It had probably chaperoned teenagers back in the days of Benny Goodman and swooning over Sinatra.

After recognizing me, she shook her head, waved me away.

From inside my jacket, I took a number-ten white envelope that was folded inside my shirt pocket. The envelope contained nothing more exciting than some notes I’d scribbled down about my biplane. But Eve McNally didn’t know that.

I held the envelope up and pointed at it importantly.

She was nice enough to fall for it.

It was an awful trick to play on a woman whose daughter had been kidnapped — she was likely hoping against hope that the envelope contained word of Melissa — but I didn’t have much choice.

She said, “What’s in the envelope?” Her words were muffled by the glass and the dusty door curtains.

“You need to let me in first.”

She shook her head again.

“I’ve got news,” I said.

A kind of frenzy overtook her. “News? Of Melissa?”

She looked confused a moment — should she let me in or not? — and then she made her mind up.