Harlan Ellison - No Doors, No Windows

He examined it from every angle, playing devil’s advocate with the idea, posing every possible catastrophic fuck-up imaginable. But be was able to continue a way around each one; till it became obvious the plan was foolproof.

Revenge and a solution and everything all knitted together so beautifully he felt like clapping his hands in joy. But he stilled the happiness within him and looked at it again, exhaustively, from every fantastically improbable viewpoint of failure. There would be difficulties, but not nearly as many as he had first supposed. By doing it as simply and directly as possible, it would work.

He drew deeply on the pipe, sitting on the sofa, his feet up on the coffee table, staring at the redness of his heels in the bedroom slippers.

It would work. Dammit, it would work!

The next day he closed the shop at lunchtime and drove the pickup truck down onto 23rd Street, stopping at a likely pawn shop.

He bought the old office model Underwood typewriter for fifteen dollars, carrying it quickly to the truck, and leaving before the owner could remember who he was, or what direction he had taken.

Back in the shop he typed the note on a piece of plain paper napkin, taken from a Nedick’s orange juice stand in midtown Manhattan. He wore gloves.

The note was short and direct.

Then he waited three weeks, stalling off the bill collectors, telling them he was getting a loan from the bank.

Then the night arrived.

He waited silently, feigning sleep, till three-thirty when the night was at its most silent. Then, he dressed quickly and quietly, making certain Felice in the other bed did not waken. Then he took the rope and the gag and the many strips of adhesive tape he had secreted beneath his winter sweaters in the bureau, and crept silently into Penny’s room.

He had the ten strips of adhesive over her eyes, and the gag in her mouth, taped down, before her struggles grew violent. It was unnecessary to become brutal about it; just a light tap behind the ear, and she went limp.

He tied her securely, hands behind her back, and carried her down the service stairs to the street, making certain he had not been seen. It was perfect; not a soul in sight, and as moonless a night as one could wish, so the insomniacs in their nocturnal wanderings could not be sure of anything they saw.

The car was directly in front of the building. He had made certain of that. The drive out to Jersey was smooth and fast with traffic in the Holland Tunnel almost nonexistent. Penny lay silently under a blanket in the trunk.

He had scouted the area carefully, and found the abandoned farmhouse outside Red Bank, New Jersey with little difficulty. The weather-beaten, almost-collapsed tool shed was set back from the house, in a little hollow: cut off from sight from the road.

He put the flashlight on the shelf and shone it on the post he had driven into the ground the week before. He tested it again to make certain it was solid. It wouldn’t budge an inch, no matter how hard he struggled, and he tied Penny to it tightly, making certain the adhesive was still over her eyes. She came to, just as he was burning the gloves. She struggled and coughed, and tried to scream, but it did no good. She was secured. For two days, if all went well.

For an instant he had qualms about her starving, left alone for two days. He thought back and tried to remember if he had heard of two-day starvation. Nothing came to mind, and he dismissed the thoughts, making certain the gloves burned to ash …

He gathered the remains on a piece of newspaper and folded it together to be disposed of along the road back to New York.

He looked at his step-daughter for a moment longer, then edged the door open with his foot. As he did so, he looked down, and smiled at his cleverness in wearing a new pair of tennis shoes. Shoes that could be bought in any one of a hundred stores in Manhattan, but shoes he had bought two years before — and had never gotten to wear. They would go, too, as soon as he was in the car and driving back.

He didn’t bother to say goodbye to Penny.

No sense letting her know it was her “Dear, Darling Daddy” who had kidnapped her.

He edged the door closed securely, and went back to the car. The night was still moonless. Ideal for a late drive home.

It had all been easier than he’d thought.

He had made a point of sleeping late the next morning, waiting till Felice’s sharp, repetitive screams had brought him leaping from the bed. He had rushed into the small bedroom, seen Felice screaming over and over again, crying, moaning, beating at the pillow.

He had given close attention to the note, just like any terrified father, and read it over to himself, reveling in its simple wording as keynote of the entire scheme:

DELIVER 200 THOUSAND DOLLARS TO ME IN SMALL UNMARKED BILLS AT THE DOWNTOWN ENTRANCE OF THE 79TH ST IRT SUBWAY BY NOON TOMORROW OR YOU WILL NEVER SEE YOUR UTTLE GIRL ALIVE AGAIN. DO NOT CONTACT THE COPS OR SHE WILL DIE. WE WILL KNOW IF YOU CONTACT THEM.

He had called Bob immediately, reaching him at the brokerage. All the relatives had shown up an hour later, all terrified, all anxious to help, an anxious to kick in their share of the two hundred thousand dollars to get their darling little Penny back again.

Felice had had to be put under a sedative, and for a time Roger worried only about Bob’s suspicions nature. He knew the question would come up of why Penny had been singled out for kidnapping, but he pretended too much anguish to worry about trivial details, and the question passed unnoticed. So did all the others — how the kidnapper had gotten in, how he had left, what would happen if they did see the police — and finally, Bob and Ralph and Madge and Harold had called their lawyers for the money.

Two hours later the money arrived, and Roger was adamant about carrying the payoff. “After all, she is my little girl, even if she is my step-daughter!”

Three years in high school dramatics paid off handsomely. They believed him. He had the money.

The next day at noon, he took the envelopes of bills — which, under the pretense of being the distraught father, he had checked to insure against markings — and went to the subway, making certain he was not followed.

He left the money wedged behind the big candy machine bolted to the wall in the subway, and came home, describing a pock-faced man with hat pulled low who had disappeared into the subway immediately after telling him to go home and wait and to tell no one what had happened.

They believed him.

What else could they do.

He cried so damned convincingly.

The night was not moonless, but the overcast clouds blotted it so effectively, it might well have been. He drove to Red Bank with a light heart. He would wait an appropriate length of time before using the money he had retrieved from behind the candy machine. The money that nestled under the rubber matting of the car’s trunk. He would use small amounts to make token payments to all his creditors, to forestall them, and in a year he would have it all paid off, with enough capital to expand a bit.

Roger whistled merrily as he drove the endless night to the abandoned farm house.

Penny had worked steadily at the ropes. They were tight, but a nine-year-old girl’s fingers are small, and fingernails are sharp, and two days struggling, though producing bloody hands, could work wonders. It was night again. She could tell, because the owl in the tree somewhere outside to the left was hooting again in that frightening way.

Then, suddenly, the bonds were loose, and her numbed hands slipped free. She struggled with the tape over her eyes, ripping it off painfully. Then the tape from her mouth, and she spat out the gag with a strangled cough. It was so, so, so dark from behind the tape; she could see nothing. Then, as she fumbled with the ropes that bound her feet, the tool shed came into focus a bit.