Rob ached to the bone. The parched dryness of his mouth was causing his tongue to swell. He determined to try shouting. At the moment, he felt that he could risk anything in order to get a glass of cool, refreshing water.
He took a deep breath – then held it as he heard steps outside, the sound of a key being turned in the lock. The door opened. A low candle power electric light clicked on. The big man, who had sat on the table, smoking, while amusedly watching Rob and the other man fight, walked across the stateroom to the porthole, pulled a curtain across it and stood looking down at Rob with eyes that were half-closed in thoughtful speculation.
“How about water?” Rob asked thickly.
“Sure,” the man said. “Sure thing. I’ll bet you are thirsty. You came out of it pretty easy though. You aren’t marked up much.”
“I feel as though I’d been put through a mangle,” Rob said.
“Sure, you’ll feel pretty tough. Okay, I’ll get you some water.”
He left the little room, taking care to lock the door behind him, was gone for some twenty or thirty seconds, then returned with a glass of water. “How about sitting up?” he asked.
Rob sat up. The man held the glass to Rob’s lips, tilting it so that Rob would gulp down the water.
“How’s that?” he asked.
Rob sputtered and choked on the last of the drink, but managed to say, “That’s better. I could use more of that.”
“Not right now,” the man said, perching himself on the table, cupping his hands around one of his knees and studying Rob thoughtfully. “You and I are going to have a little talk.”
Rob said nothing.
“You’re a tough little rooster,” the man said admiringly, lighting a rich brown cigar. “Where did you learn to fight?”
“I did some boxing in school.”
“I’ll tell the world you did. Put up a pretty good fight, considering that you had to give away forty pounds at the start. Now let’s talk a little sense. Let’s get over this business of being tough with each other. It isn’t going to get us anywhere.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Your name’s Trenton, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Rob Trenton?”
“That’s right.”
“Now look, Rob, let’s be grown up and quit this kid stuff. You drove that Rapidex sedan from the dock to your place at Noonville. Now something happened to the car between the time you started and the time you arrived.”
“Sure it did. I had a blow-out,” Rob said.
“Something else happened to it.”
Rob tried to look innocent.
“Now I’m going to tell you frankly,” the big man said, “we’re a pretty tough lot here. We don’t try to be tough but we’re playing for big stakes, and when a man gets to playing for big stakes he gets pretty impatient when something gets in his way. Do you understand what I mean?”
“I can appreciate the force of your statement,” Rob said.
“Sure you can, sure you can,” the big man said reassuringly. “Now look, Rob, things haven’t been going too smoothly and we’re going to have to clean up and make a getaway. Every minute that we’re wasting cuts down our chances. Of course, the boys think they can pull this thing and get away with it, but they’re worried, they’re anxious. We have a deadline of midnight. We’ve got to start scattering by midnight. We’ve got to be way out of the state on a plane before daylight tomorrow morning, and it has to be done in such a way that we won’t be caught. Now just put yourself in the position of one of the boys, Rob, and you’d be pretty impatient, wouldn’t you?”
“I guess so.”
“Sure you would. If you thought something was standing in your way, you’d get tough. You’d get awfully tough.”
“Yes, I guess I would.”
“Well,” the big man said, “you’re standing in our way, Rob. You’ve got information that isn’t going to do you a damn bit of good, but it’s information we need. We’ve got to get it. There are easy ways and there are hard ways. I don’t like to think of the hard ways because the boys are too much on edge. I can’t tell just where they’d stop once they started. I don’t like it myself, but I’m damned if I’m going to get soft in a show-down and let you cheat us out of the profits after we’ve taken all the risks.”
Rob said, “Why blame it on me? Do you know what happened there at the pier?”
“No, what?”
Rob said, “I was detained and searched to the skin. It was a matter of a couple of hours, I guess, and during all of that time the car sat out there in the shed–”
The man smiled and shook his head with easy good nature. “No, Rob,” he said, “that isn’t going to do. We weren’t dumb enough to let the car sit there without having someone to keep an eye on it. To tell you the truth, we were good and worried when you didn’t come down to drive it away. It bothered us a bit.”
“How did you know I was going to be driving it away?” Rob asked, trying to keep the eagerness from his voice, yet dreading to hear the answer.
The big man merely smiled and shook his head again. “We’re wasting a lot of time and a lot of words, Rob,” he said. “Suppose you just break down and tell us. Give us the low-down and I can assure you that nothing more will happen to you. You’ll be inconvenienced a little bit, but that’s all. You’ll have a chance to get away around midnight and … well, we’ll have to fix it so you can’t communicate with the authorities for, oh, maybe eight or ten hours, but that’s all that will happen to you.”
“That sounds like enough,” Rob said.
The smile left the big man’s face. “Look, Rob,” he said, “if you don’t co-operate, things are going to be bad, they’re going to be plenty bad. After the boys have gone so far, then you can’t tell what’ll happen. They’ll get the information they want, but if they’ve had to go far enough to get it, they well, put yourself in their position. You wouldn’t want to leave a witness behind you who could testify to kidnapping and diabolical torture and then make an identification. Now let’s be reasonable about this thing.”
Rob said, “From where I sit, my chances don’t look too good anyway.”
“Why not, Rob?”
“I can still make an identification.”
For a moment the big man’s eyes were cold and hard, then he said ominously, “You keep crowding your luck and you just might never show up in circulation again. This river’s about forty feet deep out in the channel and we could put weights on you so that after the bubbles quit coming up nothing else would ever come up.”
Rob said, “You could do that just as well no matter what I said. What assurance do I have that you’d play fair?”
“You’d have to take my word for it.”
“I don’t think your word’s very good.”
The big man slowly got down off the table, removed the cigar from his mouth, placed it carefully on the edge of the table, took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, said, “All right, young fellow, you’re going to get hurt. You’re asking for it. Any time you want to quit that’s all you have to do, just say so.”
The big man bent over him. His face had undergone a complete transformation. It was a hard, wicked, ruthless face, and the right hand, with the fingers open, was moving, towards Rob’s face, paused for a moment with the thumb over Rob’s left eye. Then abruptly the man stopped and said, “Say, you got a fountain pen in your pocket?”
“Well?” Rob asked, striving to keep his voice firm.
“What the hell. They haven’t even frisked you,” the big man said. “That’s a hell of a way to run a business. The boys are getting on edge, and when they get on edge you can’t seem to depend on them for anything. Let’s take a look and see what you’ve got in your pockets, son.”
He rolled Rob over, casually placed his right foot on Rob’s bound wrists, bore down with so much weight that Rob winced with the pain of it.
His hands started through Rob’s pockets. “Handkerchief,” he said. “Money … why, the damned fools, here’s a knife. You know, Rob, I get tired risking my neck trying to do the brainwork for a bunch of dumb eggs like that … the boys just do not think.
“Now you take that business of putting your car out of commission. Sticking something in the ring and pinion gears … the stupid fools. They could have let the air out of your spare tyre and then loosened the valve in one of your rear tyres so the air would ooze out. Then they’d have happened along just when you were up against it with two flats. It would have been a cinch then to have picked you up.
“After they’d grabbed you, one of the boys could have screwed the valve back in the tyre, pumped it up, driven your car away, and that would have been all there was to it. Then your car would have been out of sight. The way it is now, what’s the garage man going to think when he finds that somebody deliberately stuck something in the gears? You’ll have disappeared and your car will be there.
“The other way, you’d have disappeared and your car would have disappeared and everyone would have figured you’d taken a powder. Of course, they tied you up pretty well, but you could easily have hooked your heels up on the table and jiggled until that knife fell out of your pants pocket. Then you could have twisted around and got your fingers on it and cut the ropes, without anyone knowing about it.”
Rob felt his face getting red with self-anger as he realised how simple it would have been for him to have done exactly what the man had said. Yet he had never thought of it.
The big man removed the ball of his foot from Rob’s wrists. “Okay, Rob,” he said, “let’s roll over and see what we’ve got in the other side … Hold it a second, let’s take a look in that inside coat pocket … Oh, yes, a wallet, driving licence and … hey, wait a minute. What’s this? A notebook!”
The big man picked up the notebook, moved off a short distance and turned so that the light came over his shoulder. He said, “You’re one of these meticulous chaps. You probably keep complete, accurate records. Yes, here we are. Expenses … the numbers of your traveller’s cheques, the number of your passport. Now, Rob, you know, if you’d hidden anything, I’ve a hunch you’d have made some note about it … particularly if you’d had to hide it along the highway. Now let’s see, Rob, we’ll turn through all these pages of expenses and look for the last page in the notebook. The last one where … well, well, well! Here’s a little sketch map of a road intersection and – well, now, Rob, I think we’re beginning to get somewhere. If you’ll just loosen up and tell me about what these marks mean – no, wait a minute. You don’t have to. They’re fence posts, and these numbers must be the numbers of the highways, just so far from the intersection. That must be the count of the fence posts, and this diagonal with distances on it – why, bless your heart, Rob, that will be a road sign, right on the highway, and we can locate that road sign mathematically from these distances. Well, now, Rob, that’s better, that’s a lot better. Just a whole lot better.
“Well, now, Rob, it’s going to take a couple of hours for us to investigate this thing, but I think we’re really on the right track now. I think we really and truly are. Of course, it could be a trap, but I don’t think so. Now, look, Rob, I’ll put it up to you. You’re a grown man and we may as well be frank. I’m going to send one of the boys to take a look.
“If this is a trap it’s going to be pretty bad for you, Rob. You know, I don’t want to be melodramatic and make a lot of threats, but if this is a trap, Rob, things are going to happen to you that you won’t like. There are a couple of old drive shafts that weigh about eighty-five pounds apiece down in the engine-room, and there’s lots of baling wire. We’ll just wire you to these shafts so you’ll stay there for ever, and drop you in about forty feet of good, deep river water, Rob. We’re just going to risk one person on this. If the stuff is there, one person can find it. If it’s a trap … well Rob, we’ll be here, and you’ll be here.”
The big man paused and looked down at Rob, then he pulled back his right foot and calmly and methodically kicked Rob in the ribs, hard.
“Speak when you’re spoken to,” he said.
“It’s not a trap,” Rob Trenton groaned.
“That’s better,” the big man said. He walked out and locked the door behind him, leaving the light on.