“We thought you got lost,” May said.
“Naw,” Murch said. “It’s simple. You go out 80, you get off at the Hope interchange, you take county road 519. Our big problem was, we had a hell of a time finding an abandoned farmhouse.”
“I knew it,” Dortmunder said. He gave a triumphant glare toward the book lying on the table in front of Kelp.
Kelp said, “But you did find one, huh?”
“Yeah, finally.” Murch shook his head. “All the abandoned farmhouses out there, people from the city already went out and found them and bought them and filled them up with fancy barn siding and cloth wallpaper and made country houses out of them.”
“They’ve all got Great Danes,” Murch’s Mom said. “We went out some of those driveways pretty fast.”
“But the point is,” Kelp said, “you did find an abandoned farmhouse.”
“It’s a mess,” Murch said. “There isn’t any electricity, and there isn’t any plumbing. There’s a well out back, with a handle thing that you pump.”
Murch’s Mom nodded. “It’s not like anything in the twentieth century,” she said.
“But it’s isolated,” Kelp suggested. “Is it?”
“Oh, yeah,” Murch said. “It’s isolated, all right. Way to hell and gone isolated.”
“Well, that’s the important part,” Kelp said. Primarily speaking to Dortmunder, he said, “We’ll only be there for a couple days, and the more abandoned and isolated it is the better.”
Dortmunder said to Murch, “How far is this from where we grab the kid?”
“Maybe twenty miles.”
“And how far from the kid’s house?”
“Maybe forty.”
Dortmunder nodded thoughtfully. “It’s kind of close,” he said.
Kelp said, “That’s got a big advantage, when you think about it. The cops won’t be looking in that close.”
“The cops,” Dortmunder told him, “will be looking everywhere. A rich man’s son is gone, they’ll look for him.”
“If they find that abandoned farmhouse,” Murch said, “I’ll be surprised.”
“We’ll all be surprised,” Dortmunder said. “Unpleasantly.”
“I’ll tell you something else,” Murch said. “Last night I started reading again the chapter where they do the kidnapping. You know, where they go and grab the kid.”
“Chapter eight,” Kelp said. “Page seventy-three.”
Dortmunder gave him a look. “You memorized it?”
“I’m just careful, that’s all,” Kelp said.
“Anyway,” Murch said, “we got a hell of a lot of stuff we’re supposed to put together for that job. Not just the abandoned farmhouse and the side road and all that, but a lot of stuff, you know.”
“Not that much,” Kelp said. “Just a couple things.”
“Not that much?” Murch started counting them off on his fingers. “A big tractor trailer rig. A school bus. A car. Guns. Mickey Mouse masks. A detour sign.”
“None of that is tough,” Kelp said. “I can get the car myself, I’ll borrow one from a doctor.”
“The tractor-trailer? The school bus?”
“We’ll pick them up,” Kelp said. “Don’t worry about it, Stan, we can do it. The detour sign I’ll paint myself and bring it along.”
“It’s a lot of stuff,” Murch said.
“Just don’t worry about it,” Kelp told him.
May said, “Let’s get back to the boy. How old is he?”
“Twelve,” Kelp told her. “That’s the adventurous age, May. The kid’ll have a ball, it’ll be like living out one of his favorite television shows.”
“I’m beginning to feel sorry for him anyway,” May said, “even if we don’t take him. Living all alone with nobody around but servants, hasn’t seen his mother since he was six years old. That’s no life for a little boy.”
Kelp said, “So this’ll make a nice change.”
May stared at him. “To kidnap him? A nice change?”
“Why not?” Kelp seemed perfectly sincere about it. “A break in the routine, everybody likes that.”
“I just wish I knew,” May said, “what kind of specialist he goes to when he comes to the city.”
“Maybe it’s a speech therapist,” Kelp suggested, “like the kid in the book.”
Dortmunder plunked his glass down on the table. Exasperated, he said, “How many coincidences you want out of that book?”
“Well, what difference does it make anyway?” Kelp shrugged. “The point is, he comes to the city on a regular schedule.”
May said, “I was just thinking about special medicines or treatments or something that we might have to have.”
“He looks healthy, May,” Kelp said. “Besides, we’ll only have him a day or two. He probably won’t even miss a session.”
“I’d still like to know who he sees,” May said. “Just what kind of specialist. Just to know.”
10
JIMMY HARRINGTON, lying on the black naugahyde couch in Dr. Schraubenzieher’s office, looking over at the pumpkin-colored drapes half-closed over the air-shaft window, said, “You know, for the last few weeks, every time I come into the city I keep having this feeling, someone is watching me.”
“Mm hm?”
“A very specific kind of watching,” Jimmy said. “I have this feeling, I’m somebody’s target. Like a sniper’s target. Like the man in the tower in Austin, Texas.”
“Mm hm?”
“That’s obviously paranoid, of course,” Jimmy said. “And yet it doesn’t truly have a paranoid feel about it. I think I understand paranoid manifestations, and this seems somehow to be something else. Do you have any ideas, Doctor?”
“Well,” Dr. Schraubenzieher said, “why don’t we study the implications. You feel that you are being watched, that you are somehow a target. Is that right?”
“That’s right. A very specific sensation of eyes, of being observed for some purpose. It’s like that well-known phenomenon of being on a plane and feeling that one is under observation, and then looking around to see that some other passenger actually is looking at you.”
“And in the current situation? Is anyone actually looking at you?”
Jimmy frowned at the drapes. They moved slightly, stirred by the quiet air-conditioner in the wall below. “I don’t know,” he said. “So far I haven’t caught anyone at it.”
“Caught anyone? A very suggestive phrase, that.”
“But that’s the way it feels.” Jimmy concentrated, trying to get in touch with his feelings. He’d been in analysis for nearly four years, and was very professional about it by now. “There’s an element of… — sport in it,” he said. “As though it’s a game, and I win if I catch them looking at me. I know that sounds childish, but that is the sensation.”
“As I am forced to remind you frequently, Jimmy,” Dr. Schraubenzieher said mildly, “you are a child. A childlike response, even from you, is not necessarily a negative event.”
“I know,” Jimmy said. One of his unresolved and so-far unstated disagreements with the doctor concerned this aspect of childlike behavior; Jimmy felt that his own disapproval of such behavior in himself was so instinctive and so strong that it simply had to be trusted. He was not, however, prepared as yet to debate the issue with Dr. Schrauhenzieher, so he altered the subject slightly, saying, “Why did you say that ‘caught anyone’ was a suggestive phrase?”
“You know very well why,” the doctor said; he himself knew very well why Jimmy was veering away from the topic of childishness, but he wouldn’t push the matter. In the course of the analysis the debate must eventually arise, and it would be better to wait for Jimmy to feel strong enough to raise the subject himself.
At the moment, Jimmy had hared off after this semantic scent. “I don’t see that ‘caught anyone’ is a particularly pertinent phrase,” he said. “It’s merely the standard idiom in that circumstance, normal American usage: ‘I caught him looking at me is simply the way that s said. I suppose it’s the mind’s instinctive aversion to the duplication of idea implicit in ‘I saw him looking.’ On the other hand, I could merely be evading the issue, analyzing it away.”