“Gee, that’s a strange one,” Jerry said. “Seems as though it ought to mean something.”
“We’ve been figuring it the same way.” Mike shook his head. “I don’t know, maybe it’s something from one of his movies.”
“You know,” Jerry said, casually, anecdotally, “I sold a house of Freeman’s once, up here in Woodland Hills. The one with the underground room.”
“Oh, yeah?” Then Mike did a doubletake: “The what?”
“Room under the house.”
“You mean a basement?”
“No, it extended out from the house to the swimming pool. Window at the end, you could look right out at the pool. Underwater, you know. People in the pool could dive and look through the window into the room.” Jerry laughed, lasciviously. “You’d be amazed how many dirty thoughts a setup like that can put in a person’s mind. Added eight or ten thousand to the purchase price, let me tell you.”
But Mike’s mind was on neither sex nor money. His eyes intent on Jerry’s amiable face, he said, “This room. How obvious is it?”
“Obvious? It’s underground!”
“I mean, from inside the house. It’s a regular room, right?”
“Well, not exactly. In fact, from a sales point of view that was the only drawback. You got to it through the utility room; not exactly a romantic or an elegant approach.”
“Jesus,” Mike breathed, and quoted from memory: “This is what’s left of Koo Davis, speaking to you from inside the whale.” He punched the table with the side of his fist, angrily saying, “God damn it, he told us! Inside the whale! Underground! Under water!”
Jerry gaped at him. “Mike?”
But Mike had turned his head, “Rick! A phone!”
19
Blindfolded, Koo stumbles up the stairs, urged on by nervous hands. Their nervousness is the only thing he finds reassuring about all this; it suggests circumstances aren’t quite as hopeless for Koo as they seem. On the other hand, maybe the nervousness simply means they’re taking him away now to kill him; after all, it’s easier to dispose of a body if you can keep it alive long enough to walk to the disposal site.
Koo wishes he could get his mind off such things, but death is in his thoughts at the moment, what with one thing and another. The “one thing” being the fact, the indubitable fact, that Peter’s arrival in the underground room interrupted a murder; Mark was going to strangle Koo at that moment, there’s no question. And “another” being the additional fact that he is still a kidnap victim in the hands—nervous or not—of crazies.
Head of the stairs. As well as being blindfolded, Koo has his hands tied behind his back, so that when his shoulder bumps painfully into a doorpost he very nearly falls backwards down the stairs; but impatient hands shove at him from behind, he brushes through the doorway, and now he’s marched for the second time through this house he’s never seen, and out to warm, somewhat moist air, and over a path that has the unevenness of brick. The hands stop him, and Peter’s voice says, close to his ear, “You’ll be traveling in the trunk of the car now, Koo. We’re going to lift you into it, so just relax.”
“Oh, I’m relaxed. It’s the suit that’s tense.”
“That’s right, Koo.”
Hands grasp him, shoulders and legs and waist, lifting him off the ground. His knee hits something metal, the top of his head grazes something else, and then he feels the rough hardness below him as they deposit him on his left side, knees bent. “Don’t move, Koo,” Peter’s voice says, from farther away, and the trunk lid slams, with a disagreeable implosion feeling in Koo’s ears and eyes. And in his nostrils there’s a rank oil-and-rubber odor. “I never was a rubber freak,” Koo mutters, and sings quietly to himself, “I was stuffed in a trunk, in Pocatello, I-daho.” But then he stops, and his mouth corners turn down, and he mumbles, “I may be losing my sense of humor.”
His clever message to the FBI; useless. Obviously nobody caught it, or they’d have been here by now, and if they ever do notice it’ll be too late.
The others are getting into the car; back here, the jounce as the weight of each body is added to the car is very pronounced. Bunk-bunk-bunk-bunk-bunk; all five of them coming along for the ride. And the slamming of four doors, and then the surprisingly loud sound of the engine starting up, followed by the heavy-seas motion as the car first backs in a half-circle and then moves forward.
Carbon monoxide? Death has so many threads tied to Koo, it’s positively discouraging. All roads lead to death.
God, but this trunk is uncomfortable! Doubled up in here like a shrimp, bouncing and bumping with every move of the car, Koo is beginning to feel like a potato in an automatic peeler, and when he starts picking at the cord holding his wrists it’s initially only in an effort to get into a more comfortable position.
It takes forever. The fingers of his right hand can just about reach the knot, or one of the knots, but the way the car flings him around he keeps losing the damn thing. Fortunately there are fairly frequent stops, apparently for traffic lights—with this cargo in the trunk, the gang has apparently decided to avoid the freeways, where police spot-checks are not an unknown occurrence—and at each stop Koo loosens the knot a bit more, until all at once it becomes easy, it unravels and unravels, and his hands are free!
Oh, thank God for that. Koo rolls onto his back, his bent knees still forced over to the left by the nearness of the trunk lid, and reaches up both hands to shove the blindfold away onto his forehead. Then he blinks, in total darkness, and for a few minutes simply lies there, resting from his exertions and enjoying the change of position.
The next time he moves, his right elbow smacks into something unyielding. “Ouch!” He reaches over with his left hand to massage the elbow, and his knuckles graze the same thing; he pats it, explores it with his fingers, and realizes it’s the latch for the trunk lid.
Oh ho. Is it possible that—? “Just let me do this, God,” Koo whispers, “and I’ll never say a fucking bad word again.”
The first thing is to roll over on his right side, so he’ll be facing the latch and can put both hands to work on it. The problem is, this trunk is both too narrow and too low; in order to get his legs from the left to the right he had to double them up like one of those exercise mavens on TV, bring them across his chest with knees and shoes both scraping the lid, and then discover that the lid slants down and he just can’t wedge his legs in there. He tries, gives up, tries to move the legs back to the left, and finds he can’t do that either. “Jesus Christ, I’m stuck. And what a position. Next thing, some crazed rapist will come along.”
This is ridiculous. The trunk lid presses down on his legs, his thighs press down on his stomach and chest, and he can feel the first twinges of cramp in both hip joints. “And that, children, is how the pretzel was invented.”
Got to—Got to get out of this fix! Koo’s flailing left hand finds the curving metal hinge piece and he clutches at it, pulling hard, at the same time pushing at the metal wall to his right. Slowly, very slowly, his body scrapes leftward across the rough pebbled surface of the trunk, gradually becoming easier, then all at once absolutely simple. He rolls to his right, his legs unfold as much as the narrow space will permit, and his hands reach out to touch that blessed latch.