Donald Westlake - Smoke

The chief said, "This is going to end badly for you, you know."

"No, I don't know, Chief," Barney said. "But if you don't put the ass in the chair right now—"

"Language," the chief said, and sat in the desk chair.

Barney stared at him. " Lan guage? Chief, I hope you never meet up with any bad guys." Picking out two sets of cuffs, handing them to the thug who'd been appointed the chief's monitor, he said, "One wrist to each chair arm. If he gets a call, you hold the phone up to his head for him. If he says anything you don't like, hang up and shoot him in the head. Then come tell me about it."

"Got it."

Turning to the first thug, who'd been with them during the phone call, Barney said, "Grab down those rolls of twine from the closet there, bring 'em along."

"Uh-huh."

"Come on, Peg."

She followed Barney out of the office, the thug with an armload of rolls of twine following her, as the chief was cuffed to his own office chair. He looked grim and heroic still, like Mount Rushmore.

In the hall, they met the third thug and the attorney, Leethe. Barney said, "We're moving."

Leethe said, "What's happening?"

"He's on his way. Look in the tall cabinet in there, second shelf, you'll see boxes and boxes of thumbtacks and pushpins. I want 'em on the ground all around the property, and in the doorways, and on the windowsills. You and Bosco do that." Meaning the third thug.

Leethe looked surprised and displeased. "Barney," he said, "do you think I'm one of your henchmen?"

"No, I think you're one of NAABOR's henchmen, same as ever. We got no time to stroke egos, Counselor. Freddie's on his way."

Leethe made a bad mouth, but he went away to do Barney's bidding, followed by the thug now christened Bosco, while Barney led Peg and the remaining thug out to the porch, where they found the usual country assortment of wood and wicker furniture. The sturdiest of these was a straight-backed wooden armchair, long ago painted dark green, which Barney now dragged across the gray-painted porch floor closer to the door. "Park it," he told Peg, and as she sat he turned to the thug with the armload of twine. "Give me one roll," he said, taking it, "and go out there and string me trip wires all around the property, tree to tree."

"Right."

The thug left the porch and crossed the lawn over to a big maple, where he went to work. Barney opened the roll of twine, knelt beside Peg, and tied her right ankle to one chair leg and her left ankle to the other. "Slip knots," he told her, using the porch rail to help lever his bulk back up onto his feet. "If you bend down to touch the cord, I'll give you a warning shot in the shoulder. When Freddie gets here, ask him to untie you."

Leethe and Bosco came out, hands and pockets full of little boxes of thumbtacks and pushpins. They walked around like Johnny Appleseed, sprinkling shiny sharp things on path and lawn, so that when Freddie got here he'd have to move very slowly, clearing all the tacks and pins out of the way of his bare feet, if he was barefoot, or have to wear shoes. In either case, Barney and the others would see him coming.

Barney went back into the house. Peg sat in the chair and watched the preparations continue, Leethe moving around the house to the left, Bosco and the trip-wiring thug to the right. From time to time, a car or pickup truck went by on Market Street, and there were some curious stares, but not many. There was always some sort of construction work going on in town.

Bart Simpson drove by, in a green Hornet.

Barney had his crew add coffee cups and silverware and other noisemaking things to his trip wires, and make sure every door and window except the wide-open front entrance was locked and blocked and defended by thumbtacks. Then they stripped blankets and bedspreads from the beds upstairs and waited just inside the open front doorway. The idea was, when Freddie stooped or knelt to untie the twine around Peg's ankles, they'd leap out and wrap him in bedding and tie him up and then talk to him.

Maybe it won't be so bad, Peg thought, Freddie working for Barney and the lawyer. Steady employment, low risk. Probably no health benefits, though.

It's hard to look on the sunny side when you're in a shit-storm.

54

Freddie walked back to the house. He'd seen the preparations as he'd driven by, and now he took a closer look. Trip wires to make jangly noises. Sharp things on the ground for his bare feet. No windows open, on this nice sunny day, so probably everything locked up except that invitingly open doorway beside Peg, sitting there on the front porch. Was that some kind of cord or twine around her ankles? Very nice.

Freddie made a complete circuit of the house. It wasn't completely surrounded by trees, but there were enough large old maples spaced here and there to give comfortable summer shade. Also, at the moment, they made handy posts for the trip wires.

A big maple on the right side had branches going right up above the roof. Its lowest thick branch was a little more than seven feet from the ground, extending outward away from the house and trip wire. On his second jump, Freddie grabbed that branch and managed to pull himself aboard.

For a naked man, shimmying up a tree is even trickier than riding a bicycle.

Freddie didn't know it, of course, but the route he was taking now had been Geoff Wheedabyx's favorite path in and out of his house when he was between the ages of ten and twelve, sometimes traveling that way because his parents didn't want him out so late at night, sometimes going by tree merely because it was fun.

The thick branch Freddie inched out on, when he had ascended high enough, bowed and swayed with his weight; fortunately, nobody was looking up. It led him to the porch roof, which his bare feet touched so gently that even Peg didn't hear it down below, but kept on looking out at the street, wondering when something would happen.

The upstairs windows were open (good) but screened (bad). Freddie hadn't brought any tools with him. The screens were the old-fashioned wooden-frame sort, with small slitted metal bars at the top corners. These hung on metal tongues attached to the window frame. In the winter, no doubt, the chief came up here and took down these screens to put up old-fashioned storm windows on the same hardware.

First unhooking the screens, of course. Yes, each screen was hooked closed on the inside. The wooden screen frame was flush with the wooden window frame: nothing to get a grip on. And bare hands do not punch through well-made screens like this, not without harming the hands and alerting the already alert people just below.

This is very irritating, Freddie thought. Through one of the open windows, he could hear Barney and the others talking together downstairs. So near, and yet so far.

He walked over to the right corner of the porch roof, and from there, on tiptoe, he could just see the steep slope of the main roof. No trapdoor on this side; no, and there wouldn't be one on the other side, either, or it would be locked. There was a chimney over there, which he would not crawl down.

In trying to see the roof, he'd held on to the drainpipe that went down this corner of the house. Now he considered the drainpipe, shook it experimentally, and it was quite solid. New, or not very old. The chief was also a construction guy, so maybe he put his crew to work on his own house sometimes, when business got slow.

Freddie looked over the edge. The porch railing looked very far away, straight down. If he fell, of course, he'd just land on grass down there — no thumbtacks; they were all farther out — but he wouldn't land quietly, and then they'd know he was here.

Still, what choice did he have? He was on the house, and he had to get in the house. There was no silent way to get through those screens. There was no point going back down the tree. Time to do a little more Tom Sawyer.