THE SOUND OF VOICES DRIFTED DOWN TO me, as if through the depths of an ocean. For a while I was too far sunk to pay attention. Then, slowly, I surfaced and opened my eyes. My head felt heavy and swollen. Without even looking, I knew I was a prisoner.
The room I lay in was cold and dark, with the dank air of a cellar. Faint fingers of light crept in beneath a closed door. I tried to get up and could not. I was bound to a bed of some kind, roped down so tight the twine cut into my shins and wrists.
The voices came from above, along with other noises: chairs scraping, china clinking, the heavy tread of boots. A smell of frying meat and wood smoke wafted down. I guessed that I was lying below a kitchen and that a meal was under way. As I listened, the conversation began to piece itself together.
A man with a flat Boston twang spoke loudest and most often. He was angry about some job that had gone wrong. Cases had been lost, “scuttled” was his word. With that, I knew I was in the hands of a gang of rumrunners.
“Well, we know where we dropped ’em. They’re not going anywhere,” a younger voice replied.
“So why didn’t you go back already?” the Boston voice said. “There’s a hundred cases of Johnny Walker Red just lying out there in the harbor? Wait’ll the big boys hear that!”
“How’re we supposed to get ’em when it’s blowing from the north?” a high, nervous voice asked. “You can’t do nothing when it’s blowing that way.”
“The big boys don’t care if it’s blowing from Timbuktu! You get out tomorrow night and pull up those cases before they wash ashore. Get that guy with the fancy hook that did it for us last time. What’s his name?”
“Louie,” somebody said.
“Yeah, him. What’sa matter with you guys? You should’a thought of that yourself.”
Everybody was quiet for a while. Then someone with a country drawl launched into a story about a new transport van he had that was painted to look exactly like a Bushway’s Ice Cream truck. He was laughing about it.
“The Feds are out of the loop on this one! I’ve got that truck backed up to my cow barn a couple’a times a week, taking on loads for Boston, Providence, wherever. Only thing is, my neighbors next door had been watching. Last week one of ’em buttonholes me and says with a wink: ‘All this Bushway’s coming and going! You sure must be making a pile of money in the ice cream business.’
“I told him: ‘Yeah, we got great ice cream. Comes straight from the isle of Bermuda. You ever try that flavor?’
“‘And what flavor is that?’ he asks.
“I say to him: ‘Hot buttered rum!’”
A heavy round of guffawing came down through the floor. Then chairs squeaked and it seemed as if the atmosphere changed. A more serious topic arose, one that must have been under discussion before I woke up, because it sort of started in the middle. I took a while to catch the drift, but when I did, my ears were burning.
“How many cases are we talking about?” a voice asked.
“Over three thousand, fancy stuff like champagne and high-priced scotch.” This was the Boston accent again.
“Jeez, that’s worth a bundle.”
“It was scheduled to come in for Christmas. Now the big boys have got word it should be arriving just before New Year’s. She’s a freighter name of Firefly.”
“She’s coming from St. Pierre?”
“Canada, yeah. Packed to the gills. A private trader. She’s bypassing Boston and coming straight down.”
“How come?”
“Don’t know. Our gang didn’t set it up.”
“So who did?”
“That big operator who was running around us, Tony Mordello, in New Bedford. He knew he’d make out big on it. Guess what he used for a ticket?”
“What?”
“A fifty-dollar bill ripped in half.”
“Fifty bucks!”
“He had it on him when we bumped him off, but nobody knew. Then, one of his boys talked.”
“That stoolie cop Charlie Pope. He was in with Tony until he saw what happened to him. Then he decides to come over to our gang to keep the deal afloat since it’s already paid for. He stays in touch with the Canadians, pretends Tony’s still alive and in charge. Everything’s on schedule except no one can find Tony’s ticket. Charlie has his suspicions about where it went, but he can’t prove it. Then the big boys get a new tip. That’s why the kid’s downstairs. They heard he’s got the ticket stashed away somewhere.”
“Where’d the tip come from?”
“Who else? The badge.”
“That cop is in on everything.”
“Slippery as an eel. I keep warning the big boys, don’t trust him. Whoever pays him the most, he goes with. Anyway, if this kid knows where the fifty is, I’m supposed to get it outta him. Hey, Ernie, did you check on the punk lately?”
A minute later, footsteps sounded on the stairs coming down to my cellar. I took a couple of deep breaths, then a key turned in the lock and the door swung open.
My first idea was to keep my eyes shut and play dead. My head was burning up, though, and the ropes were cutting into me. When Ernie looked in, I looked back at him and asked for a drink of water.
“Harry!” he called. “He came to. What d’ya want me to do?”
“Let him alone. I’ll be down.”
“He’s asking for water,” Ernie called. “He can’t have it till he talks, right?” He was a big man with a wide, fleshy face. Some greasy scrap from supper still hung on his chin.
“Get him some,” came the reply.
The door closed. Ernie went back upstairs and returned with a mug, which he tipped so hard into my mouth that most of the water ran down my face.
“Here! Get your head up!” he said. Since even my neck was tied down, this was impossible. Ernie thought that was hilarious. He sat back and laughed at me.
A thin, narrow-eyed man wearing a fisherman’s cap stepped into the room. I recognized him right off. Suddenly I knew who Ernie was, too. They were the gangsters with the machine guns who’d shot Tom Morrison’s Viola. My blood went cold.
“Let the kid up,” the thin guy said. “Nobody can drink lying down.”
“Sure thing, Harry.”
I was untied and allowed to sit up on the edge of the bed to drink more water. Three other gang members came down to watch. One of them was John Appleby.
“Hello, Ruben,” he said, with a sneer.
If I could, I would have spit in his face. I’d figured out by then that this was the Boston gang headed up by the College Boys. Marina was right, they’d been all around me, watching and waiting. I’d been a blind fool.
As soon as I’d drunk my fill, Harry started in on me. He was the one with the Boston drawl.
“We know you picked that body on the beach. We know what you picked, too, so don’t bother with the funny stuff. Where’s that fifty-dollar bill?”
“What bill?” I said.
“You know what. Your little friend saw it.” Harry stabbed his finger into my chest. “He says you put it in a schoolbook. Where is it now?”
I kind of choked. I’d more or less forgotten Jeddy had seen me drop the bill in front of our lockers. Even worse, though, I couldn’t believe he’d tell on me. My mouth got dry.
Harry moved in so his breath was on my face.
“What’s your name, kid?” he asked.
From behind him, John Appleby answered for me. “Ruben Hart. His dad is manager of Riley’s store.”
“Now, Ruben, listen up. We don’t want to hurt you. We want to get you back to your dad as soon as possible. This is just business, see? That bill is part of a deal we’re doing. We’ve got to have it or the deal won’t go through. So, where’s this book? At school?”
If only that bill still was in my book at school, I would’ve told them. If I’d had it on me, I would’ve handed it over in a minute. What did I care about some freighter from Canada? The trouble was, it was in the tobacco pouch under my mattress at home, and I didn’t want Harry or Ernie or any of those gangsters going anywhere near my house. My mother and Aunt Grace were there, probably by themselves.
“I don’t have it anymore,” I told Harry.
“C’mon, kid. We’re not stupid.”
“That’s a good one.”
“I did. How did I know anybody’d want it? You can’t buy anything with half a fifty dollar bill. I kept it for a while, then I threw it away.”
“Where? When?”
“At school, in the wastebasket in my classroom, about a week ago.”
Harry’s eyes went narrow. I could see he didn’t believe me and was trying to make up his mind what to do about it. The rest of the gang stood around like vultures, watching.
“C’mon, boss, let me pop him a few times,” Ernie said. “He’ll talk.”
Harry looked as if he was considering this when a phone started ringing upstairs.
“Get that,” he ordered. John Appleby went for it. You could see he was low man on the totem pole, the same as he was at the store. After a minute, he yelled down:
“Harry! It’s the badge.”
“That weasel. What does he want?”
“He says to quit working on the kid. On orders from the big boys.”
“What? Why?”
“The badge says he got a call from Boston. There’s been a change of plans. They’re sending somebody else over to talk to the kid.”
Harry went into a string of terrible curses when he heard this. “Here I’ve done the dirty work and caught the punk, and now they’re turning him over to somebody else? That doesn’t make sense. Hold the phone, I’m coming up.”
“He hung up already.”
A grim look came over Harry’s face when he heard this.
“I smell a rat. I’m calling Boston to check this. You take over with the kid,” he told Ernie, and went off.
I was petrified. I knew if I was left in Ernie’s hands, I’d be dead, or knocked out again at the least. Just looking at Ernie told you he lived his life on a short fuse. Any little thing could set him off. He’d shot Viola for tripping over her.
Harry must have had second thoughts, too, because halfway up the stairs he stopped and yelled back.
“Wait! Tie the kid up again. And Ernie, don’t touch him. You hear me? I don’t want no mark on him when I come back.”
So I was tied down to the bed again. Ernie looked disappointed not to be able to work on me, but he followed orders. Since I was awake, he gagged me this time. When he finished, John Appleby, who’d been hanging around smirking, gave my bed a kick.
“How d’ya like that?” he said. “You’re in trouble now and your daddy ain’t here to fix it, is he?”
I tried to look daggers back at him, but he just laughed at me. Then he and Ernie closed me in and went upstairs. I was alone in the dark again, except for those little fingers of light coming under the door. I began to get scared. For one thing, I was wondering who this cop “the badge” might be. Or rather, I wasn’t wondering, I was pretty sure I knew. The air around me suddenly got colder and denser. The walls of the cellar seemed to creep in on me. I tried to wiggle my feet and hands to keep the blood flowing, but slowly the feeling went out of them. I gave up and lay still. Whatever was ahead for me, I knew I didn’t have anything but a prayer to raise against it.