The Kidnappers (12 page)

Frustrated, Willie and I stared at each other.

How much time did we have? They might get the ransom money tonight, or surely by tomorrow; then what would they do with us?

Willie must have been thinking the same thing. “They could just leave us locked in here, I suppose. Mr. Zoulas would find our bodies when he comes back from Paris.”

“They might leave something for us to eat,” I said, but I didn't believe it, and I could tell by Willie's face that he didn't believe it, either.

Somewhere a door closed audibly.

Were we alone in the apartment now, or had one of them stayed behind to guard us against escape?

We stopped breathing to listen.

Out in the living room something thumped.

So much for the hope that we were alone. If there was nobody to stop us, we might be able to break down a door, or take out the hinges if we could improvise a tool to do it. But that would make enough noise to bring the remaining kidnapper down on us.

Then there was a murmur of voices, almost—but not quite—understandable. So there were still two of them here.

“I wish we could hear what they're talking about,” Willie said, grinding his teeth in frustration. “It's never quite loud enough.”

Without explaining, because I wanted to hear, too, I took the water glass that sat beside the sink. I pressed the open top of it against the door, then leaned my ear against the bottom.

“Can you hear better?” Willie hissed, and I motioned for him to be quiet. When he shut up, I could actually make out a few words.

“—picking up the ransom now.”

Willie could tell from my face that I'd heard something significant. He leaned closer, as if he, too, might be able to hear something, even without the conducting glass.

And then we lucked out, in a way. Because the two men who were talking were coming along the hallway, and their voices became clearer. We could both hear them.

“Stupid,” one of them was saying. “Why did you bring him here?” The voice was vaguely familiar, though I didn't immediately place it.

“Because it was the closest and the easiest,” the second voice responded with irritation.

“Tedesco,” Willie whispered, identifying the second speaker.

“And the most dangerous,” the first man replied. “Now he'll have to be taken care of, too.”

Me? I wondered. Were they talking about me? What did they mean by
taken care of
?

“If everything goes all right, Studen should be back here in half an hour, an hour at the most. I gotta clear out the rest of our stuff, and we're ready to go.” Their voices faded out then as they either walked past our door or entered one of the other rooms.

I straightened up and took the glass away from the door. “I always wondered if that really worked, using a glass to amplify sound,” I said. I was trying to sound cool, but I was shaking, so I don't think I fooled Willie.

Willie had gone pale. He leaned against the wall, and I decided he was pretty shaky, too. When his voice came out in a whisper, I didn't know if he was trying to be very quiet, or if he felt too weak to speak any louder.

“Studen's gone after the ransom,” he said. “What if . . . what if my dad couldn't get it together after all?”

“Do you know how much they were demanding?” I asked, also keeping it low.

“Not exactly, but a lot. Enough to split three ways and live happily ever after, from the way it sounded.” Willie sank down onto the edge of the bathtub, as if his legs wouldn't hold him up anymore.

“Who's the third guy?” I asked, and right about then a horrible suspicion began to seep into my mind. “What's his name?” Had I really recognized his voice?

“I don't remember what they called him. And I don't know what his part is in the kidnapping, but he's in for a share of the money. Bishop, how do you think they're going to
take care of
us?”

“I don't know. But we've got an hour at the most, maybe less, to think of something, before they do whatever they're going to do.” I looked wildly around the bathroom for a weapon, for a place to hide, for some kind of miracle. It was just an ordinary bathroom.

“We've got to get out of here, Joe,” Willie said. It was the first time I could remember he'd ever called me by my first name.

“I don't think we can,” I said slowly.

“Are we giving up, then? We just sit here and wait for them to shoot us, or smuggle our bodies out to the Dumpster?”

Willie was scared, really scared, but I couldn't gloat over seeing him that way. I was scared, too.

The kidnappers were back in the hallway. “Give me a hand with this stuff,” Tedesco said, and I heard something . . . a suitcase? . . . bump against the bathroom door as they passed.

“Maybe we shouldn't leave the kids unguarded. That Bishop kid is inventive,” the other man said. “It wouldn't surprise me if he figured out a way to blow up this place and leave a hole in the wall so big the entire police force would come to investigate.”

“Ah, they're locked in. What can they do? Here, you take this one . . .” The voices trailed off, still audible but we couldn't make out the words anymore.

Willie swallowed. “He sounded like he knows you.”

It couldn't be, I thought. But his voice . . . surely I knew that voice. And I knew who it sounded like. I just didn't want to believe it.

“Maybe he does,” I said, sounding hollow. I started pulling open drawers, looking for anything that might be useful. “It sounds a lot like Ernie. Our chauffeur.”

Willie blinked, gulped again, and asked, “What are you looking for?”

“A tool. Something to build a bomb. A . . .” My voice trickled off to nothing. In the drawer was a hand mirror, and I stared at it. I couldn't let myself be so scared I couldn't think.

“Can you really build a bomb?” Willie asked hopefully.

“Not with anything I've found so far. I think Mark knows the general principle, but Father said he'd skin him alive if he ever caught him with one of those instruction books again. He found it on a bus.”

I reached into the drawer and took out the mirror. “This one's smaller than the mirror on the medicine chest, but maybe it will work.”

“For what?” Willie trailed me back to the bedroom window, depending on me to come up with an idea.

“Maybe I can attract attention from the building across the street. Let's find out.”

I held up the mirror and tried twisting it up and down, back and forth, trying to pick up enough light with it to flash into one of those apartment windows across the narrow street.

The result was so pale I could barely make out the flashes. Nobody in the windows—the old lady, the guy at the computer, the man watching TV—noticed a thing.

“It's not bright enough,” Willie said.

“No. It's not. I need something to produce more light.” My mind was racing, already counting those few remaining minutes before our captors decided to
deal with
us. Mom said once she thought I lived 90 percent of my life inside my head, oblivious to what was going on in the real world. Well, it was time it paid off. My life—
our
lives—might depend on it.

“I read something once,” I mused as the memory came back. “About Thomas Edison, a biography. I think it was him. His mother needed an operation. A long time ago, you know, before electricity was common. If I remember right, it was an emergency, and the doctor had to perform the surgery there in her house, on the kitchen table. It was night, and I guess they had kerosene lamps, but they didn't give enough light so he could see very well. So Edison, if it was him, got all the mirrors he could find, and grouped them behind the lamps, and it made twice as much light as the lamps alone. Take the shade off that lamp beside the bed, and off the floor lamp, too, and bring them over here . . .”

It seemed perfectly natural to give orders to Willie, and he followed them without hesitation. It wasn't Willie I was afraid of any longer, and he'd forgotten we'd been enemies only yesterday.

“A flashlight would be easier,” he complained as he positioned the floor lamp beside me. “What'll I put the small lamp on? Maybe I can slide the nightstand over by the window.”

“Since we don't have a flashlight, this'll have to do.” We plugged the two lamps in, and then I flipped the mirror around so it picked up the extra light and flashed it out across the darkness.

“You know Morse code, or what?” Willie asked.

“Yeah. I don't know if anybody else does, but almost everybody recognizes a distress signal, don't they? SOS . . . dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot.”

The signal flashed on the building facing us was still not as bright as I'd have liked, though it was a little bit brighter. I concentrated on the guy with the computer, but he was so absorbed in whatever was on his screen that he didn't notice when the light was focused on him. I repeated the pattern for a minute or so, wondering how he could ignore it.

Finally he got up and moved away from the window.

I sighed in frustration, shifting my weight so that I moved my foot. I looked down, then, because I had stepped on something.

A spoon. I retrieved it and held it up.

“Oh, I must have dropped that when they let me have some ice cream,” Willie said. “It's not much of a tool, is it?”

“A table knife would be better. Maybe this would work, though.” I set the mirror aside and walked over to the door to look at it closely. “You ever take a door off its hinges?”

“No. What good would that do, anyway? It's still locked.”

“True. But I've read about doing this, and I saw my uncle do it once. If we can pry out that rod that drops in from the top of the hinge, we might be able to work the door enough to break it off at the lock, enough so we could squeeze out the crack and get to a phone. Here, you try that, like this, see? And I'll keep trying Morse code at the window.”

“The spoon's not really thin enough,” Willie grunted after his first attempt.

I picked up the mirror again, pausing to look around one more time. “Is that a closet over there? Are there any wire hangers in it? Maybe one of them would have a section thin enough to fit in that crack. Once the bolt starts to loosen even a little bit, you could get the edge of the spoon under it.”

“Okay. I'll try that,” Willie agreed.

While he worked on the door, I went through the whole pattern of sending signals across the street, blinking my SOS at the man watching TV. Again, he wasn't aware of anything but his program.

I couldn't help thinking how quickly the time was passing. Half an hour, Tedesco had said. An hour, tops. Studen was out now, picking up the ransom.

“Maybe the police have laid a trap for him,” I thought aloud. “Maybe when Studen goes to pick up the ransom money, they'll be waiting for him and arrest him.”

“If that happened, do you think he'd confess? And lead them back here?” Willie speculated. “Or would Tedesco and this other guy, your chauffeur, Ernie, split and run if they knew Studen had been arrested?”

“I doubt if they can afford to go anywhere until they get the ransom. Only a week ago Ernie was talking about how expensive it is to take Alice out. She's his girlfriend. He likes to take her to his mother's for dinner because it doesn't cost him anything.” I gave up on the TV watcher and angled the mirror so it would reflect into the window of the old lady working the puzzle. “Without money, they can't fly to Mexico or South America or wherever they're planning to go.”

I heard Willie swallow. “So do you suppose they have to kill us, so we can't tell what we know about them?”

I didn't answer that. I didn't know, and I didn't want to think about it. I didn't want Ernie to be part of the conspiracy, either, but several things were coming back to me.

It had never occurred to me that Ernie was mixed up in any of this. Now it struck me that he'd kept me from calling the police—something had happened to the cellular he kept in the car, he said—and he didn't kid along with my story the way he usually did with stuff I made up. Instead he'd refused to take me seriously and kept me from reporting the kidnapping as long as he could.

I hadn't thought to look at our car when I got out of it, to see if it had marks from an accident. Ernie said he'd been late on Friday afternoon to pick me up because of a fender bender, yet certainly there hadn't been any obvious damage to the car. I'd been so busy thinking about the kidnapping I never thought that anybody I knew might be mixed up in it.

Ernie hadn't wanted to stop anywhere so I could use a pubic telephone to call the police. And I'd blabbed about everything, so Ernie and the others had known all the time that I could identify Tedesco. And the car. And he must have known while we were out in the alley that it was the kidnap car. Why had it been there? Not waiting to run over me, because I wouldn't normally have been out there. But maybe because the driver wanted to talk to Ernie about something?

It began to make sense that Ernie was one of the conspirators. Ernie and Tedesco, another chauffeur, and the man called Studen, who had worked for Mr. Zoulas, could easily have gotten acquainted here in the building or in the back alley. They all wanted more money than they got paid for their jobs.

So they decided to try kidnapping. A kid like Willie whose dad could pay a big ransom. What if they'd snatched me, instead?

I didn't want to think about that. One of the men, maybe Ernie, had caused a minor accident with the Groveses' car, so that chauffeur couldn't pick up Willie from school before the kidnappers got there. That made Ernie late getting
me
. He couldn't have known that I'd see the kidnapping, but he could have realized I had when I came running out all excited. He'd had time then to stuff the phone out of sight under the seat so I couldn't use it. Then he'd stalled as long as possible, to let his cohorts get Willie away. And when we came out into the alley, Ernie had pretended he was going to investigate the car when I recognized it, and was as surprised as we were when the car nearly ran over all of us. They didn't know Pink and I would come out the back way, so they couldn't have planned that part.