“You want some coffee?” I asked.
“No.”
“Well, good-night, then,” I said.
“Go to hell,” she said.
I went out to the kitchen instead, and Banty and I sat down at a table and had some coffee when it was ready.
“When you’ve had your coffee,” Banty said, “you’d better get some sleep because after I leave in the morning you probably won’t get much.”
“Where you going?”
“To Kansas City to get the money. Half a million. I’ve decided not to press our luck.”
It seemed to me he was already pressing it, but I didn’t say so. “You’d better get some sleep yourself,” I said.
“I’ll catch a few hours after I get back to KC. Then I’ll call old Gotlot and arrange for the payoff.”
“What if he won’t pay?”
“He’ll pay. I’ll tell him we’ll kill his precious daughter if he doesn’t.”
“What if he won’t?”
“Then we’ll kill her.”
“I hope he pays,” I said. I took a drink of coffee and wished it was whiskey. “What then?”
“I’ll drive back here with the money, and we go on south.”
“What do we do with Felicia?”
“We leave her here, tied to the bed. We’ll send a letter to the police after we leave, telling where she is. She’ll get hungry and thirsty waiting, but she won’t be hurt any.”
“Just a minute. We’ll have to wait until we’re a long way south before sending the letter, and the postmark will tell which way we’re heading.”
“There’s the difference between you and me, Carny. You’re stupid, and I’m not. We’ll send the letter from the nearest town. Only we’ll send it to the police in New York or Los Angeles or someplace like that, and they’ll have to call back to KC. It’ll give us plenty of time to get a long way away, and no one but us will know which way it is.”
“I have to hand it to you,” I said. “You’ve been doing a lot of thinking, all right.”
“I’ve always been a thinker,” he said. “I’ve just been waiting for my luck.”
“I don’t like leaving Felicia Gotlot tied to the bed for so long,” I said, “and I admit it.”
“You’ll like the quarter million well enough,” he said.
“When will you be back with it? That pretty green moolah.”
“Forty to fifty hours at the longest. I’ll work fast.”
“It’s a lot of money. I never thought I’d have so much.”
“Get some sleep,” he said.
I tried, but I didn’t do much good at it. I lay down on an old leather sofa in the living room and closed my eyes, but I kept seeing things behind my lids that I didn’t want to see, and I kept thinking about how Banty had never had any luck, and wondering if he could possibly have any this time, when we needed it most, and altogether it must have been a couple of hours before I finally went to sleep, which was almost time for me to wake up again. Banty woke me, and I got up, and he was ready to leave. It wasn’t light outside yet, but you had the feeling that it would be all of a sudden before long.
“I’m on my way,” he said.
“Good luck!”
“Keep an eye on that dame. She’s tricky.”
“You can count on me,” I said.
“I’ve got to,” he said, “and I do.”
He went out, and I could hear the jalopy start up and move off down the gravel road toward the highway, the sound of it growing fainter and fainter until it was gone completely, and then I went into the kitchen and lit a kerosene lamp and made a fire in the wood-burning stove. There was a full pail of spring water that Banty had brought in last night, and I put coffee on to perk and checked the supplies to see what I could find for breakfast. There was no bread or eggs or milk or butter, of course, nothing fresh, but there was a package of ready-mixed pancake flour and some cans of condensed milk. I found a skillet, made some batter with the flour and condensed milk, and fried some pancakes in the skillet that looked as good as you could want, if I do say so myself. By this time the coffee was done, and I went through the living room into the bedroom where Felicia Gotlot was, and she was awake.
“You sleep all right?” I asked.
“Wonderful,” she said. “It’s so comfortable being tied in bed that I’m going to sleep that way all the time from now on.”
“You want some breakfast?”
“If that’s coffee I smell, I’ll have some of that.”
“It’s coffee, all right. If you promise to behave yourself, I’ll untie you and you can come out to the kitchen.”
“My behavior, it seems to me, is pretty well determined. It’s your behavior that concerns me.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t bother you any.”
I untied her, and she swung her legs over the side of the bed, smoothing down the narrow skirt that had slipped up her thighs in the night. After rubbing her wrists for a minute and bending over to rub her ankles afterward, she stood up and went out ahead of me into the kitchen. I poured two cups of coffee and divided the pancakes into two stacks on a pair of tin plates that I found in a cabinet.
“I’d like to wash my face and hands,” she said.
“Go ahead. There’s some water in the pail there.”
“Where did it come from? Is there a well or something?”
“Not a well. A spring. There are springs all through these hills. Springs and caves.”
“How do you know so much about it?”
“I was born down here. Not far from here.”
“Truly? I had the impression you were probably hatched from a billiard ball someplace in KC.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Never mind.”
She washed in the cold water, using a pan beside the pail, and dried herself on a towel hanging from a nail in the wall. Then she combed her short hair with her fingers, lacking anything else to do it with, and we sat down at the table and began to drink coffee and eat pancakes. She ate as if she were hungry, which she probably was, and didn’t complain about not having any butter for her pancakes or sugar and real cream for her coffee, nothing like that. She was altogether a remarkable young dame, I’ve got to admit it, besides being the prettiest one I had ever seen close up in my life, or far away either, for that matter, in spite of being rumpled and tousled with last night still in her face.
She gave me an uneasy feeling, and I didn’t like it. It was the kind of feeling you get over some girl when you’re a kid, before you’re old enough to know better, and it makes you think crazy and act crazy. It’s bad in a kid and worse in a man. I wasn’t acting crazy yet because I hadn’t had time, but I found myself wishing all at once that she was someone besides who she was, Felicia Gotlot, and I was someone besides who I was, a guy called Carny, and that there was a chance of our being something to each other besides what we were and had to be but she wasn’t, and I wasn’t, and there wasn’t. I hoped Banty would hurry back from KC, and meanwhile, I decided, I’d better think less about her and more about the quarter of a million dollars I was going to have all for my own to spend as I pleased.