A SCHEME FOR ATTACK
A SCHEME FOR ATTACK
A SCHEME FOR ATTACK
Barrack kept his pistol pointed at them. “Cal!” he shouted.
Inside the cabin there was a crash.
Ken could visualize what had happened. The big man in the turtle-neck sweater, hurrying toward the door, had apparently knocked down a chair in the crowded little room.
For an instant Barrack’s eyes shifted toward the cabin doorway.
Sandy moved before the man’s glance had refocused. Like a steel spring uncoiling, his six feet straightened out—one shoulder forward, aimed for Barrack’s midriff.
Ken leaped forward too, only a fraction of a second behind him. He chopped at the hand that held the gun just as Sandy’s shoulder made contact.
The gun flew wide over the side of the barge. Barrack almost followed it, under the impact of two hundred pounds of well-conditioned muscle.
Almost before Barrack landed heavily against the bulwark, the boys had spun around and were tearing across the deck toward the ladder. The man named Cal emerged through the cabin doorway just as they charged past. He never had a chance to stop them. He hadn’t even raised his fist when Ken struck him a glancing blow that threw him backward.
The boys didn’t attempt to find the actual location of the ladder in the darkness. They vaulted straight over the bulwark, side by side, and landed on the concrete pier six feet below with bone-jarring thuds.
But both of them were on their feet an instant later and pounding toward the street, the shouts behind them echoing in their ears.
They reached the opening in the fence just as they heard the engine of Barrack’s car roar into life.
Ken glanced briefly back over his shoulder. Barrack had parked the car with its nose pointed toward the barge. He would have to back up and swing around.
Sandy was glancing quickly up and down the dark deserted street.
“There’s a diner down there!” he panted. The glow of neon lighting he was pointing to was at least three blocks away, but it seemed to be the only haven in sight.
They had covered less than a block when Barrack’s car emerged from the pier. It paused there briefly. The driver was apparently looking to see which way they had gone. And then, apparently, he sighted them. The car swung in their direction, its tires screaming.
“We’ll never make it!” Sandy gasped.
Ken’s eyes caught a flash of light on the opposite side of the street. He turned his head toward it without breaking his stride. “Look!”
A taxi was entering South Street from the cross street just ahead and slowing to a stop at the corner. As the two sailors in the back seat climbed out, Ken and Sandy were already tearing across toward it. Barrack’s headlights were close enough to outline them clearly.
“Hey!” Sandy yelled as they ran. “Cab!”
The driver waved a casual hand to let them know he saw them coming.
Ken tumbled inside just as Barrack’s car shot past. Sandy piled in on top of him. The driver, only mildly surprised at their haste, said, “In a hurry, huh?”
Ken watched Barrack brake to a stop just ahead of the taxi.
“Not particularly—not any more,” Ken managed to answer. “Take us uptown to Radio City, please.”
The cab swung in a wide U turn and headed north. Ken and Sandy slumped wearily back on the seat. For a moment they had all they could do to catch their breath.
“We messed that up for fair,” Sandy said finally, still gulping for air.
“I messed it up,” Ken said. “Me and my big sneeze.”
“Say, bud”—the driver pivoted his head to speak to them—“is that joker behind us a friend of yours?”
Ken sat up and swung around to look through the rear window. A pair of headlights were close behind them.
“Not that I know of,” Ken said. “Why?”
“That’s the car that stopped just ahead of me as you got in,” the driver explained. “He made a U turn, just like I did, and he’s been on our tail ever since. Thought maybe he was trying to catch up with you.”
Ken and Sandy looked at each other in the glow of a street light they were passing.
“He’s no friend of ours,” Ken said decisively.
“You don’t mind if I try to lose him then?” the driver asked. “I hate a fellow that nudges my rear end like that.”
“It’s O.K. with us,” Sandy assured him. “Go right ahead.”
“I don’t like this,” Ken muttered. He kept one eye on the rear window. “Here he comes.”
“I don’t like it, either,” Sandy agreed. “He probably would have used that gun, but fortunately we didn’t get a chance to find out.”
“If anybody asked him, of course,” Ken said, “he’d undoubtedly say he was just protecting private property from trespassers—and there’s no doubt that’s what we were.”
“Sure,” Sandy said. He was rubbing absent-mindedly at the knee he had landed on when he dove off the barge. “But the way he had that gun ready—” He shook his head. “There must be a bigger danger of trespassers around stone-loaded barges than I thought.”
“Maybe that’s not plain stone—maybe it’s gold ore,” Ken suggested flippantly, but his eyes glued to the back window were still grim. Barrack’s car had followed them skillfully around two more corners.
“Oh, indubitably.” Sandy’s tone matched Ken’s. “Or platinum ore. And now explain why it was Barrack who had the gun, instead of—what did he call him?—Cal. And what Barrack was doing there in the first place.”
Their cab, driving up lower Broadway now—a deserted canyon at that hour of the evening—stopped for a red light. The car behind stopped too.
“I think I’ll get out and give that guy back there a poke in the snoot,” the driver of the cab said. His hand was already on the door handle. “His lights are driving me nuts.”
Ken spoke quickly. “Wait until we get out. We’re in a hurry.”
“Well—O.K.” The driver sighed as he settled back behind his wheel. “Maybe by then I’ll have my temper under control.Iknow I shouldn’t always be wanting to give a guy a punch in the snoot. It’s just my impulsive nature.”
Ken and Sandy laughed in spite of themselves.
“I know just how you feel,” Sandy assured the man in the front seat. “I have the same trouble myself.” But the laughter was out of his voice before he stopped speaking. There was a menacing quality in the persistence of those lights behind them.
As they neared Fourteenth Street the traffic began to get heavier. Soon the cab driver was able to swing in and out of the lanes of cars in a series of swift maneuvers that forced Barrack’s car to drop behind.
“That’ll hold him,” the driver said with satisfaction. “He’s pocketed now!”
“But something tells me he won’t stay pocketed,” Sandy murmured. “Even if we really lose him he could catch up with us later at your father’s apartment.”
“And if he arrives there, complete with gun, to ask what we were doing on the barge,” Ken said, “what do we tell him? That we were just out for a moonlight stroll along the river?”
“We ask him whathewas doing there.”
“And of course he’d tell us,” Ken said sarcastically.
“Of course.” Sandy laughed shortly. “Everything about him so far has been absolutely straightforward—the way he came to your father’s apartment, the way he told us he didn’t know Grace, the way he left that package for Grace to pick up—” He broke off angrily. “I’m certainly beginning to be mighty curious about that man. But I don’t see how we can learn much more about him, now that he’s got us spotted. If we turn up in his way again—”
“I’ve got an idea!” Ken leaned forward to speak to the driver. “We changed our minds. Take us to the Pennsylvania Station instead.”
“What? Penn Station?” The driver glanced around in surprise. “But I thought you were in such a hurry to get to Radio City.”
“Yes, we were,” Ken said. “But—”
“You have to humor him,” Sandy explained to the back of the man’s head. “It’s his impulsive nature.”
“Oh. Sure. In that case. Anything your little heart desires.”
The cab swung left on Twenty-ninth Street and sped westward toward Seventh Avenue. There it turned right for the big railroad station a few blocks northward. It was difficult to be certain, in these busy streets, but Ken thought he spotted Barrack’s car half a block behind.
“What’s your idea?” Sandy asked.
“You gave it to me,” Ken answered. “We’re going to make Barrack think we won’t turn up in his way again.”
The cab swung down into the ramp that led directly into the terminal. Ken paid the driver, thanked him, and then led Sandy through the door into the station.
“Let’s wait here a minute,” he said, just inside.
“What for?”
“Our shadow. We don’t want to lose him.”
“But I thought—!”
“Here he comes.”
Barrack’s car was pulling up to the same spot their taxi had left only a few seconds before. The man in the turtle-neck sweater, wearing his pea jacket again—apparently he hadn’t had time to stop for his cap—jumped out of the front seat. Then Barrack, at the wheel, drove the car away.
“Let’s go.” Ken took Sandy’s arm and moved casually forward. “I’m glad we’ve got Cal instead of Barrack. From the way he banged around in that cabin tonight, I don’t think he’s very quick on his feet.”
“It certainly would be nice,” Sandy said, “if I knew what you had in that alleged mind of yours.”
Ken glanced over his shoulder. “Good,” he murmured. “He’s only about fifty feet behind. Everything’s proceeding according to plan.” He steered Sandy toward the Information Desk. “When is the next train to Brentwood?” he asked in a clear voice.
“Brentwood? Just a minute.” The information clerk consulted a schedule. “Eight one. On Track Ten.”
“Thank you,” Ken said. “Might as well get our tickets now,” he added to Sandy.
At the ticket window, Ken spoke loudly and clearly. Their shadow, partly concealed by a mountainous heap of luggage, was only a few feet away.
As Ken tucked the two one-way tickets to Brentwood into his pocket he said, glancing at his watch, “We’ve got just an hour. How about something to eat?”
“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said in the last ten minutes,” Sandy muttered under his breath. He pulled out his wallet and counted the money in it. “Not quite six dollars,” he announced. “How much have you got with you?”
Ken checked. “Eight dollars and some change.”
“All right. I’ll take command of this phase of the action. Ever since I saw our friend there eating that doughnut and drinking that hot coffee—while we were freezing out in the cold—I’ve wanted to pay him back. And I know just the way to do it.”
They both still felt stiff and bruised from their leap to the dock, but the comparative warmth of the cab and the greater warmth of the station had thawed them slightly. They walked almost briskly toward the largest of the station’s many restaurants. Sandy led the way inside and chose a table in full view of anyone standing outside the big window overlooking the busy arcade.
Ken, shielding himself behind a large menu, stole a look through the glass. “He’s there.”
“Good.” Sandy grinned. “He’s going to love this. I could tell from the way he was eating in the cabin that he really enjoys his food.” He looked up at a waiter who had hurried to their table. “We’ll start with clams on the half shell,” he said. “Then soup—onion, I guess. And then a sirloin for two—very rare. With it we’d better have some....”
When the waiter headed for the kitchen a few minutes later he had a slightly glazed expression on his face.
“I take it we’re not really going back to Brentwood,” Sandy said over the clams. “That act of buying the tickets in a loud voice was just an act?”
Ken looked at him innocently. “Of course wecouldgo back tonight—but then we’d miss the basketball game.”
Sandy lifted an eyebrow at him. “I see. And what else would we miss?”
Ken shrugged. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “All I really had in mind was convincing them that we were clearing out of town—going home to Brentwood and our own business. I thought it would calm their suspicions.”
“By ‘them’ you mean Barrack and our boy Cal out there?” Sandy glanced through the window for an instant. “He’s drooling!” he announced happily.
“Barrack and Cal,” Ken agreed. “Grace too. I’m assuming they’re all tied in together in something.”
“I think that’s pretty obvious,” Sandy said. “But in what? What kind of game are they playing—skulking all over town that way, mysteriously transferring packages from one person to another? And apparently ruining what used to be a perfectly good wholesale tobacco business?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ken said. He waited while cups of steaming soup were substituted for the plates of empty clamshells. “The only explanation that occurs to me,” he said quietly, “is that Grace is a fence—a receiver and distributor of stolen goods. It would explain his lack of interest in the tobacco business.”
Sandy considered the suggestion, his eyes slowly brightening. “I think you’re right. Then Barrack is probably a thief. That’s why he had to be so careful about transmitting that package to Grace.”
Ken nodded. “And maybe Grace uses Cal, on the barge, for transportation. Cal could get the stuff out of New York.”
Sandy stopped with a spoonful of soup halfway to his mouth. “But then what was Barrack doing on the barge? If he’s afraid to have any open contact with Grace, why wouldn’t he also be afraid to show himself around the barge?”
Ken thought for a long moment and then shook his head. “I give up. I can’t think of any explanation for that—unless he’s trying to cross Grace up some way.” He frowned down into his soup. “I wish we’d had a chance to learn more about the Tobacco Mart when we were down there this afternoon. I can’t help but feel that that’s the center of whatever’s going on.”
Sandy filled in the brief wait between the soup and the steak with a thick piece of French bread, lavishly buttered. “It’s certainly too bad,” he said, “that we don’t know just a little more about at least one of those characters. Then maybe we could go to the police.”
“There’s certainly nothing we could tell the police now,” Ken said. “Of course, if we hung around the Tobacco Mart again tonight—after we’d convinced our friend out there that we’d gone meekly off to Brentwood—wemightfind something interesting.”
Sandy’s glare cut him off. “That is the kind of suggestion,” he said loftily, “that has, in the past, landed us in some unpleasant situations.”
Ken grinned. “That’s right. And also, quite often, into some pretty exciting yarns. For which we have earned a reputation. Not to mention,” he added, “sizable checks.”
“Money is not everything,” Sandy informed him. “And reputation is not everything, either.”
“I’ll toss you for it,” Ken said, pulling a quarter out of his pocket. “Heads, we make one more quick survey of the Tobacco Mart tonight. Tails, we forget the whole business.”
Sandy was still maintaining his air of firm disinterest. “You are taking advantage of my well-known sportsman’s instinct,” he said. “I cannot refuse to toss you for it, but I insist upon going on record as opposed to the whole idea.”
Ken handed him the coin. Sandy flicked it up in the air with his thumb and watched it as it fell to the table.
“Tails it is,” Ken announced. “All right, we forget the whole business.” He attacked his steak. “This is certainly good, isn’t it?” he remarked conversationally.
“How can you eat at a time like this?” Sandy demanded. “Aren’t you interested in the outcome of the coin tossing?” And when Ken looked up at him, with an air of puzzlement, Sandy added, “I thought it was understood that I would toss for two out of three.”
“Oh.” Ken grinned. “Was it?”
“Certainly.” Sandy tossed the coin again. “Heads,” he announced.
He tossed it the third time. “Heads again,” he said.
With a heavy mock sigh he handed the quarter back to Ken. “Your impulsive nature has again overcome my good judgment,” he said. “You have forced me to agree to accompany you on a safari to the Tobacco Mart.”
CORNERED
CORNERED
CORNERED
At seven fifty-seven, four minutes before the Brentwood train was due to depart, the boys left the restaurant and sauntered down to the head of the stairway leading to Track Ten. At exactly eight o’clock they walked down the stairs, stopping at the bottom to make sure they were still being followed.
“All aboard!” the conductor was calling. “All aboard!”
The boys entered the car nearest them and began to walk toward the front of the train. Through the windows they caught a glimpse of Cal, keeping pace with them along the platform.
As they entered the next car there was a slight lurch, and then another. The train was starting to move. The boys sank down into an empty seat.
An instant later Ken leaped up. “O.K. We’ve left him. Come on.” He ran toward the forward end of the car with Sandy close at his heels. The trainman was just closing the door when they reached him.
“Wrong train!” Ken gasped, pushing past him. He leaped to the platform and ducked immediately behind a baggage truck piled high with mailbags. Sandy joined him there.
They let the last car of the train rumble past before they risked a look.
The man in the pea jacket had already turned his back on them and was walking toward the stairway.
“We’ll take the other stairs back there,” Ken said. “Keep behind the pillars.”
They reached the upper level before Cal did, in time to watch him cross the waiting room and take the escalator to the Seventh Avenue exit.
“He doesn’t know much about Penn Station,” Ken murmured. “Come on. We’ll get a cab before he does.”
He ducked down a short flight of steps to an intermediate level and ran for the taxicab stand. Less than a minute later they were once more leaning back against leather cushions and Sandy was saying, for the second time that day, “Chatham Square—as fast as you can get there.”
Twenty minutes afterward they were crouched down in a narrow passageway between two buildings, a few doors down the street from the Tobacco Mart. They waited nearly five minutes before a cab drew up before the shop’s darkened windows, and Cal darted out of it across the sidewalk.
His heavy knock on the door sounded above the roar of the departing taxi’s motor. They could even hear his voice saying, “It’s me—Cal.”
The door of the Tobacco Mart opened, Cal disappeared inside, and the door closed again.
“Now?” Sandy asked.
“I’ll just take a look around first.” Ken sidled out of the alleyway and stood in the shadows. There were few people on the street. The Chinese Theater across the square was still lighted up, and the library was still open. But the immediate vicinity of the Tobacco Mart was quiet.
“Let’s go,” Ken murmured.
They approached the Tobacco Mart and slipped quickly past it. The front part of the shop was entirely dark, but a dim light seemed to show somewhere in the rear, as if from behind a partition.
Ken stopped at a narrow door just beyond the shop and gave it a tentative push. It moved inward with a slight creak. He pushed it half open and peered inside.
“Come on.” Ken couldn’t keep the triumph out of his voice. He had noticed the door that afternoon, from his post in the library, and had guessed—after his conversation with the delivery boy—that it led to the floors above the Tobacco Mart. Apparently it was left unlocked for the convenience of the third-floor tenant.
On the far side of the door, which they closed carefully after they had slipped through it, they found themselves in a musty hallway. By the street glow which faintly penetrated the grimy pane they could see two mailboxes set into the wall. The door of one hung open on a broken hinge.
Ken risked a quick flash from his pencil flashlight. It revealed a flight of stairs that mounted upward against the left wall. Ken put a cautious foot on the first tread and let it take his weight. There was only a single creak—a faint one. Walking close to the wall, to minimize the possibility of other creaks, Ken led the way to the top.
A door, presumably leading to the empty second-floor apartment above the shop, was to their right. It had no lock. Ken’s flash showed a gaping round hole where the hardware had once been. He turned the flash off.
He waited a moment, listening. The silence was complete. Then he pushed the door open, looked into the empty room beyond, and led the way in.
They seemed to be in the center room of a three-room flat. An archway separated it from the room overlooking the street—a room faintly lighted by a glow through unwashed windows. A narrower open doorway separated it from the rear room.
Ken remembered the dim light that they had seen at the rear of the Tobacco Mart. He turned toward the rear room of the second-floor apartment.
“Easy,” he whispered. Sandy, behind him, needed no warning. He edged his feet forward as cautiously as if he were stalking a deer in the silent woods.
At the doorway that opened into the rear room they paused, a pair of silent shadows.
Suddenly Ken grabbed Sandy’s hand and pointed it at the thing he saw—a six-inch ragged round hole in the floor against one wall. Light came up through it, like a column of dim dust-filled smoke. And also, faintly through the opening, drifted the mumble of voices.
They were on the threshold of what must once have been a kitchen, Ken thought. And the hole in the floor had once given passage to a drain pipe.
Hardly daring to believe in their luck, he began to move carefully toward the upward-shining ray of light. Sandy edged along beside him.
They progressed scarcely an inch at a time, aware that they might be heard at any moment by the occupants of the room just under their feet. It took long minutes to cross the floor. But the voices below grew more distinct with every step they took. Before they reached their goal they had both identified the three voices taking part in the conversation below.
The boys had heard them all before. They were the voices of Barrack, Grace, and Cal.
The first full sentence they heard distinctly was spoken by Cal.
“But they went back home—to that town called Brentwood,” Cal said. “I tell you I saw them get on the train, and I saw the train pull out. So what is there to worry about?”
“I know what you told us.” Grace’s voice, which had been so diffident and polite that day in Sam Morris’s jewelry store, now had a startling note of authority and command. “But nobody can tell us what they’re going to do when they get there. Are they going to take their little story to the cops?”
“What story could they take?” Barrack demanded. “They’d be fools to report that they had a gun pointed at them on the barge tonight. Cal here could vouch that they’d been trespassing. Cops would laugh at them.”
“Cops might not laugh if the kids said it was you who had the gun,” Grace pointed out sharply.
“Cal would have to say they were mistaken, that’s all,” Barrack said. “I don’t know what you’re worrying about.”
There was a moment’s silence. Ken, in the process of lowering himself to his knees in order to look through the hole, held his body completely still.
“I’m worrying,” Grace said finally, “because they turned up there at all. They saw you last night. They’d seen me in that little jerkwater jewelry store. But how’d they happen on the barge? If you can’t give me a good answer to that, I think we ought to clear everything out of this location immediately. How do we know they haven’t already connected one of us with this place too?”
“Be reasonable,” Barrack said. “They’re just kids. They’re not geniuses from the F.B.I.”
“Anyway, you don’t have to worry about my end of it,” Cal said cheerfully. “I’m taking care of that tonight. If you just keep this stuff undercover for a while, nobody can prove anything on any of us.”
“Maybe so,” Grace said. “But what’s the good of producing this stuff if we can’t distribute it?”
Ken was finally on his knees, his hands on either side of the hole. He brought his eye into line with the opening just as Grace asked his question.
The three men were seated around a table in the room below. Their faces were in shadow but a light bulb dangling from a cord illuminated the table’s surface.
Ken stifled a gasp. All over the table, like a scattered pack of large cards, lay crisp fresh ten-dollar bills.
Counterfeiters! The word sounded so loud in his mind that for an instant Ken was afraid he had shouted it. Swiftly he tugged Sandy down to join him.
“This is good stuff,” Grace was saying. “And I’m not going to let anything jeopardize our chances to make a real killing with it. Believe me, it would take an expert to tell them from the real thing.” He brought one of the bills close to his eye to study it.
Sandy, upright on his knees again, pulled his tiny new camera out of his pocket. He held it in the column of light for Ken to see, and Ken nodded vehemently.
A photograph of the men around that money-laden table ought to be enough to send every Treasury agent in the country to Chatham Square.
Then Ken saw that Sandy was rising carefully to his feet. For a moment he was puzzled. Dimly he saw Sandy gesture toward the outer room, and finally Ken understood him. Sandy had to adjust his camera before it would be ready for use, and realized they didn’t dare use Ken’s flashlight so close to the hole. Some slight reflection might be caught downstairs.
They made their way back as far as the doorway with the same caution they had used crossing the room earlier. Ken’s hands were shaking a little by the time he was holding his light for Sandy, and the redhead seemed to be having some slight difficulty making the delicate adjustments on his small camera. They could no longer hear what the men below were saying. It was impossible to know what evidence they were missing. But if Sandy could get his picture that would furnish all the evidence they needed.
And they might be seriously in need of evidence—especially if the men did decide, as Grace had suggested, to clear everything out of their present location. If they managed to accomplish that immediately, the story Ken and Sandy could tell would seem to have little basis in fact.
Finally the boys were again creeping back to the hole and Sandy was lowering himself carefully over it, until he lay flat on the floor with the camera to his eye.
Ken was close enough so that he could hear the conversation below quite clearly again. Some decision seemed to have been reached.
“All right,” Grace was saying, “then your end will be O.K., Cal. I don’t think anybody could ever trace your purchase of the paper, Barrack. And all we’ve got on hand went to the barge tonight. So when I get rid of this stuff we’ll be ready for any temporary trouble those kids can make.”
“You’re sure the ink can’t be traced?” Cal asked.
“Not a chance,” Barrack said firmly. “I ordered it when I sent in the regular order for the print shop.”
Carefully the boys began to edge back, away from the hole. Ken was already trying to organize in his mind the story he would tell the moment he could get to a phone. The first important thing to impress on the authorities would be—
A dull pounding from downstairs broke in on his train of thought. It was a moment before he realized that someone must be knocking on the Tobacco Mart’s front door.
“Who could that be?” Barrack’s voice betrayed his tenseness.
“You jumped like an old woman,” Grace said. “Just stay quiet in here. I’ll see.” Footsteps moved quickly over the floor, and a door opened.
The moment the door shut again a hoarse cracked voice said, “I came to tell you—there’s somebody upstairs. I saw a light!”
“What?” Grace almost shouted it. Then he seemed to pull himself together. “That’s impossible. We’ve been right here. We’d have heard if—What kind of a light?”
“Just a little dim flickery kind of thing. The library was just closin’ up and they were tellin’ me I had to get out. But I swear I saw somethin’—quite a ways back from the windows.”
There was a moment of paralyzed silence.
Upstairs, in the musty darkness, Ken and Sandy were as staggered by the newcomer’s announcement as were the men below.
Grace’s authoritative voice broke the stillness.
“Barrack, you come with me upstairs! Get that gun out of the drawer there. You get back outside, Andy—and keep your eyes open. Cal, you take the back yard.”
Ken’s mind had begun to work again too.
There was no longer time to retreat by the stairs they had come up. They would run into Barrack and Grace before they reached the sidewalk.
Ken flashed his light toward the rear windows of the room they were in, hoping that it would reveal a fire escape beyond one of them. The little beam flattened out against the glass, unable to penetrate its thick coating of grime.
“There must be a fire escape!” Ken thought. He swung his flashlight in an arc to pull Sandy toward the windows with him.
The first sash they tried slid up with a grating sound, but it was too late to worry about noise.
Ken’s heart gave a leap when he saw the rusty shape of the fire escape beyond it. They still had a chance!
In a split second they had both wriggled through the open window onto the grating. Ten feet below them, illuminated by the light from the rear windows of the Tobacco Mart, was a small paved back yard.
Sandy swung one leg over the railing, his big hands firmly gripping the rickety metal framework. Behind them they could hear footsteps pounding up the stairs.
Just as Sandy prepared to swing his other leg over, the back door of the shop below them flew open and Cal stepped out into the courtyard. A pistol glinted in his hand.
Sandy’s leg lifted over the railing and in the same motion he dropped. His feet struck Cal’s shoulders. The impact swung the man halfway around—and then he crumpled under the weight of Sandy’s body.
Ken landed beside him, miraculously on his feet.
“Through the store!”
Sandy was up and had taken a step after him when Cal’s flailing hand caught his ankle. Cal’s other hand, still clutching the gun, came up from the pavement in a great arc.
The redhead’s fist shot downward toward Cal’s stubbled chin. The hand on Sandy’s ankle loosened its grip. The gun clattered to the concrete just as Cal’s head thumped heavily against the same hard surface.
Sandy spun around and ran after Ken.
One after the other they hurdled a large carton that stood in their way, swerved around a pile of shipping containers, tore through the door into the outer shop, and lunged toward the front exit. Ken’s fingers reached for the knob.
But before he could touch it the door opened inward, knocking him back on his heels. Sandy cannoned into him from behind.
Grace’s square middle-aged figure was outlined in the doorway. The gun in his hand was steady. He brought it forward until it nudged against Ken’s chest.
“Back up,” Grace said quietly. “It’s more private in the rear of the store.” Without turning his head he addressed Barrack, who had come up behind him. “Tell Andy to stay on guard outside. Then come back here. We have to decide what to do with these two snoopers.”
A DESPERATE PLAN
A DESPERATE PLAN
A DESPERATE PLAN
“Where’s Cal?” Grace said sharply.
They were all in the back room, within the circle of light that illuminated the table on which fresh green bills were still scattered. Barrack and Grace, both with guns, kept the boys between them.
“Cal!” Grace called.
“Coming!” The man spoke in a mumble, and when he appeared at the rear door a moment later he was shaking his head dazedly. But his head jerked up and his big hand balled into a fist when he saw the boys. He came toward them in a rush.
“Shut that door!” Grace’s voice stopped him.
Cal sketched a jab with his fist. “Just let me—!”
“I said shut that door.”
“O.K.” Cal turned and slammed the back door shut with a crash.
“Sit down—you two,” Grace ordered the boys. “And put your hands flat on the table.”
“Look here!” Sandy managed to get a note of angry innocence into his voice. “I don’t know what you—”
“Quiet.” Barrack added weight to the command with a prod of his gun.
Cal laughed unexpectedly. “They’re sure not going to be taking any stories to the police now.” He grinned even as he massaged the reddening bruise on his chin.
“What makes you think the police don’t already know what we know?” Ken asked. His voice had sounded uneven for the first few words, but he had managed to steady it before the end of the sentence. “And the Treasury men too?” he added for good measure. “We’re with Global News, you know, and the way we work—”
“I told you to keep quiet.” Grace sounded more impatient than alarmed.
“Look, Grace,” Cal said suddenly, “why don’t we—?”
Grace turned on him angrily. “Whatever we’re going to do,” he said, “we’re not going to discuss it now.” He jerked his head toward the boys. “Keep them covered, Barrack.”
He disappeared into the front part of the shop for a moment and returned with a roll of wrapping twine.
“Here, Cal,” he said, tossing it to him. “Tie their hands.”
Helpless between the two pointing guns, Ken and Sandy had to submit. Cal took a vicious pleasure in his task. He jerked their hands roughly behind them, and when he bound the rough twine around their wrists he pulled it so hard that it cut into the flesh.
“Just tie them,” Grace said. “Don’t try to amputate their hands.”
“They’re all right,” Cal assured him. “But they’ll stay tied, believe me.”
“We’ll put them in the cellar for the time being,” Grace ordered. “They won’t be able to overhear us from down there. And they won’t,” he added with a faint smile, “be overheard themselves if they decided to do a little yelling. The buildings on both sides of us are empty until eight o’clock in the morning—and there’s a heavy stone wall on the street side.”
He opened a door in the side wall as he spoke, and gestured to Barrack to lead the way down a flight of stairs visible below. Barrack lighted the way with a flashlight.
Ken and Sandy were prodded after him down the rough uneven stairs into a damp, dank-smelling basement. Old boxes littered the floor and cobwebs hung from the beams like tattered gray curtains. For a moment, in one corner, a pair of small bright eyes caught the light from Barrack’s flash, and then there was a scampering sound as the rat burrowed into the safety of a pile of rubbish.
At Grace’s order Barrack swung open a heavy door.
“In there,” Grace told the boys.
Cal’s heavy hands thrust at their shoulder blades and they half fell into an empty coalbin.
The door swung shut behind them. They could hear it being jammed into place as one of the men drove a piece of timber against it from the outside.
Then the footsteps of the departing men resounded on the stairs.
Almost immediately a faint scurrying began somewhere near by in the heavy darkness.
“More rats,” Sandy said between clenched teeth.
Ken controlled his own instinctive shivering at the thought. He knew that rats and snakes were the two things Sandy hated most. “Just keep shuffling your feet,” he said, “and they won’t come near us.” He shuffled his own feet noisily on the gritty floor.
“If I could just—!” Sandy broke off with a gasp and Ken realized that he was straining at his bonds.
“You’ll never break that twine,” Ken told him. “Don’t wear yourself out trying.”
Sandy let his breath out in a gust. “Guess you’re right.” He moved a few steps. “But I can try the door. Maybe—” He threw his weight against it, using his shoulder as a battering ram.
The wood didn’t even budge. Sandy tried a second time, and a third, with no better results. Then he gave up.
“Doesn’t make any sense, anyway,” he muttered. “Even if we got out of this hole—” He stamped his feet up and down several times, and somewhere a startled rat squealed sharply. “I wish I’d taken the time to hit dear old Cal a second time. If there’d been just two of them to handle—It would have been even smarter if I hadn’t tried to adjust my camera in the light of your flash.”
“How could we have guessed,” Ken demanded, “that one of those old men in the library reading room was a lookout? Anyway,” he added, “we’d have been all right if I hadn’t stopped on the way out to grab a couple of those bills off the table. If I’d reached the door half a second earlier I’d have had it open before Grace got there and we could have been out on the street.”
“I didn’t know you had some of the bills.” There was a desperate note in Sandy’s sudden laugh. “Well, they say money talks. Maybe it’ll tell us how to get out of here.”
“Grace and his friends are going to get us out of here themselves before tomorrow morning,” Ken said firmly. “You could tell that from the way they talked. They’re not going to risk keeping us here when the buildings on either side are opened up.”
“Maybe they’re not going to keep us anywhere—alive,” Sandy said. “Grace didn’t fall for your hint that the police know as much about them as we do. Probably he thinks he could just quietly put us out of the way, without anybody ever guessing what had happened to us.”
“If he was going to do that, I think he’d have done it immediately,” Ken said. He hoped he sounded more convinced of that than he actually felt. “This is his base of operations. I don’t think he’ll risk doinganythinghere that might attract attention to it.”
“Half an hour ago we were on the point of attracting attention to the place ourselves,” Sandy said bitterly. “But now that he’s got us under his thumb he doesn’t have to worry any more. He’s safe.”
He lashed out suddenly with his foot. There was a piercing squeal and then the thud of a soft body against the wall. “That’s one rat that won’t walk across my foot again,” Sandy muttered. “I agree with you,” he went on an instant later, “that they’ll probably move us out of here. But the only place I want to go right now is to the police—and somehow I don’t think that’s where they’ll take us.”
“Use your head, will you?” Ken forced himself to speak sharply. “If they’re going to take us some place else, that will be our chance. Start thinking about that, instead of—”
“Chance to make a break, you mean?” There was a new, faintly hopeful note in Sandy’s voice.
“To make a break—or maybe to send a message. Wait! I think I’ve got an idea!” Ken was no longer trying to steady Sandy. He was caught up in the excitement of the thought that had just struck him. “Those phony bills I picked up—there are about five of them, I think—are inside my windbreaker. Can you back up to me and open the zipper?”
“I think so,” Sandy said. “Why?” But he was feeling his way toward Ken in the dark.
“These are apparently good counterfeits,” Ken said, turning so that Sandy’s fumbling hands would find his zipper tab. “They’d probably fool most people—except bank clerks.”
“So? I don’t get it. Hold still.”
“I’ll hunch down to make it easier.” Ken scuffed his feet noisily for a moment and then bent his knees until the top of his windbreaker was even with Sandy’s hands.
“There it is.” Sandy had found the tab. “But my fingers are so numb I can’t pull it down.”
“Just hold it,” Ken directed. “I’ll stand up.” He straightened slowly, and the slide fastener slid down as he came erect. “Good. Now try to get hold of the bills inside.”
“Wait until I see if I can get the circulation going again.” Sandy began to beat his hands against the wall. “Go on with what you were saying,” he muttered.
“If we can tear these bills in half and scatter them along the way to—wherever they take us—we’ll be leaving a trail for the police to follow,” Ken said.
Sandy grunted. “But suppose the police don’t find them? Suppose somebody else does? The proportion of police to ordinary citizens in this town—”
“But it won’t matter who finds them,” Ken broke in. “Look: what good is half a ten-dollar bill?”
“No good,” Sandy said shortly. “Especially to us.”
“But suppose you found half a bill. What would you do?” Ken persisted.
“Take it to a bank,” Sandy said. “That would be the only place that would—Bank!” he repeated suddenly. “What a dope I am! The bank would spot it as a phony. The person who brought it in would be questioned.”
“Right,” Ken said excitedly. He had had to make Sandy figure it out for himself, to prove that his idea was sound—that others might reach the same conclusion he had himself. “And when they trace the location of the various halves that are picked up, they’ll have a rough chart of where we’ve gone. Provided,” he added, less hopefully, “that we’re not taken out into the country somewhere. We couldn’t count on the bills being picked up anywhere except along a city street.”
But Sandy’s spirits were now high enough for them both. “They won’t waste the time to take us very far,” he insisted. “And when a gang of Treasury men are turned loose on the hunt,theywon’t waste any time. Come on. Let’s get those bills torn in two while we’ve got the chance. Which side are they on?”
Ken turned. “I’m right in back of you. They’re on my right—tucked into my belt.”
“Got them!” Sandy fumbled a minute, remembering to shuffle his feet as he did so. “Those rats are getting braver every minute,” he muttered. Then he sighed. “I can’t tear them by myself.”
“It needs both of us. Wait—let me help.”
It was heartbreaking work. Standing back to back, their hands almost numb, they kept laboriously at it. Ken held a bill and Sandy tore the stiff paper a fraction of an inch at a time. Fear that they might drop a piece on the floor, and expose their possession of the bills, made them doubly careful.
But finally the job was done. Ken had five halves stuffed into a back pocket, and so did Sandy. Even with their hands bound they could pull them out and drop them somewhere—if they ever got the chance.
“If we were only untied,” Ken muttered, “I could write a couple of words on each one. Dad’s name, maybe, and the word Global. That ought to be a help if—”
He stopped. There were footsteps coming down the stairs. Even through the heavy door they could hear Cal’s whining voice.
“I can’t help it if it is too early for you,” he was saying. “I have to get the truck back by eleven. That’s when he starts working.”
“If you’re worried that somebody will notice their tied hands,” Barrack said, “let’s untie them temporarily. I’ll keep a gun on them, in case they try to make a break. And it’ll just be across the sidewalk.”
“All right,” Grace said grudgingly. “That’s the way we’ll have to do it.”
Ken held his lips against Sandy’s ear, while the men outside were tugging the bracing timber away from the door.
“Help cover for me if we get a chance, and I’ll try to scribble something on the bills,” he whispered.
“Right.”
A few moments later, in the beam of a flashlight and under three watchful pairs of eyes and three guns, the boys were rubbing at their loosened hands, trying to revive feeling in the numbed fingers.
“Never mind the calisthenics,” Grace ordered. “Get going. Barrack, you go ahead of them.”
Upstairs, in the kitchen, Grace spoke again briefly.
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to inconvenience you for a while,” he said with a pretense at politeness. “It’s your own fault for sticking your noses into something that’s not your business. But the inconvenience will be temporary if you behave yourselves.”
“But make one move,” Barrack added, gesturing with his gun, “and you’ll be worse than inconvenienced.”
“Follow him,” Grace then ordered the boys, indicating Barrack.
When the boys emerged onto the sidewalk they looked quickly around. The nearest human being in sight was a man nearly a hundred feet down the street, with his back turned toward them. They didn’t need the reminder of the guns prodding into their backs to know how futile it would be to attempt to run for it.
“Get in here.” Barrack lifted the tarpaulin at the back of a small delivery truck and pointed inside.
The interior of the little truck was dark and smelled overpoweringly of fish. Ken and Sandy sat side by side on a couple of empty fish crates, with Ken close against the driver’s closed cab. The canvas walls of the truck fluttered against their backs. Barrack crawled in after them. The flashlight in his hand held them in a steady beam. He dropped the tarpaulin.
“O.K., Cal,” he said.
The tarpaulin was tied in place, the truck engine started, and the vehicle moved off.
Sandy leaned forward, an inch at a time, until he half shielded Ken from Barrack’s view. Ken found a stub of pencil in his pocket. He drew out one of the half bills, with infinite care, and without daring to look down at it scrawled two words that he hoped would be legible.
Sandy was supplying additional cover by making conversation. “You’ll be picked up by tomorrow morning—at the latest,” he said cheerfully to Barrack.
“Let me worry about that.”
“O.K. It’s your neck.”
Ken forced his fingers between the canvas wall and the side of the truck, the bit of paper held between them. Then he let go and drew his hand back again.
A gust of air had struck his neck as he thrust at the canvas. Sandy tensed. He had felt it too. Ken hoped that Barrack’s coat collar was high enough so that he hadn’t noticed. He reached for another torn bill. Sandy kept talking.
One by one Ken scribbled on the bits of paper and pushed them down the crack alongside the tarpaulin. Each time he did so the wind blew in, sharp and cold, and he held his breath. But Barrack apparently didn’t feel the draught.
When Ken finished the halves in his own pocket he reached for those in Sandy’s, thankful that they happened to be on the side next to himself.
“What’s the penalty for counterfeiting these days?” Sandy asked Barrack. The cheerfulness in his voice indicated to Ken that he had felt Ken’s hand—that he knew the sixth bit of paper was on its way outside.
Barrack didn’t answer.
“Six?” Sandy pressed. “Years, I mean,” he added quickly.
Ken shoved one more paper outside. “Seven maybe.”
Sandy seemed to be considering, until another cold draft struck their necks. “Or eight,” he said.
Barrack was still silent.
The truck swerved sharply and stopped a moment later. “We can settle on ten, I guess,” Ken said. “That’ll hold him for a while.”
Sandy risked a quick pat on his arm in congratulation.
The rear tarpaulin was lifted.
“Get out,” Cal said.
Barrack backed out first, his gun always ready, and stood guard while the boys lowered themselves to the ground. The moment they left the protection of the truck a bitter wind hit them. They were back on the pier again. Ken and Sandy were prodded up the ladder which led to the deck of the barge they had hurriedly left not long ago.
But this time the little cabin of the barge, when they were thrust into it, lacked the cozy air they had envied earlier. Nothing had been changed. Cal’s coffeepot still stood on the stove. But now, somehow, the cramped little room seemed to smell of danger.
Cal retied their hands again immediately, and as tightly as he had the first time. Then he bound their feet together, crossing their ankles first so that bone pressed against bone and the boys were as helpless as trussed chickens. And finally, with cruel pleasure, he added a large patch of adhesive plaster over their mouths.
Then Sandy was thrown into the lower bunk, and Barrack and Cal picked Ken up and tossed him into the upper one.
“You know what to do?” Grace asked Cal.
“I know, all right.” Cal began to turn down the lamp. “And they’ll be perfectly safe here until I take the truck back.”
Three pairs of footsteps moved toward the door. It was opened and shut, and the boys could hear it being locked from the outside.
Silence settled down heavily in the little room. Outside a tugboat hooted sorrowfully. The stove clinked once. Otherwise only the ticking of a clock marked the stillness.
Ken grunted as loudly as he could past the plaster over his mouth. Sandy grunted in answer.
Ken grunted again—an uneven series of sounds. A moment later Sandy did the same. Interpreted into the dots and dashes of the Morse code, the noises meant “O.K.” Sandy was letting him know that he too realized they could communicate.
“B-I-L-L-S G-O-N-E,” Ken spelled out laboriously. He felt certain Sandy was already aware of that, but to tell him so gave Ken the comfort of contact.
“G-O-O-D,” Sandy grunted back.
They had done what they could. Before noon, Ken hoped, there should be a small stream of people hopefully applying to one bank or another, asking if the torn bills they had found might be replaced by whole ones. And soon afterward—if all went well—a small army of police and Treasury agents would be combing the lower east side area of New York.
Ken wondered if he should have written “Tobacco Mart” on some of the bills. It might have directed police attention to the spot. But, on the other hand, it might instead have sent the finders of the bills to Grace’s headquarters, and that would have defeated Ken’s purpose.
The minutes dragged by in the dark.
Suppose, Ken found himself thinking, that none of the bills were picked up? Or that none of the finders were hopeful enough of being able to cash in on them to take them to a bank?
If he and Sandy weren’t rescued by morning, would they ever be rescued?
But we will be, Ken told himself. Everything will work out the way it should. The police would notify Richard Holt when they found his name scribbled on the bills, and Ken’s father would drive the investigation forward at top speed.
“By noon—by afternoon at the latest,” Ken kept repeating to himself, “we’ll be free. And Grace and his gang will be behind bars.”
He wished he could signal his hope and confidence to Sandy, but the effort seemed more than he could manage. He ached in every muscle. His hands and feet were beginning to pain agonizingly from the tight bonds.
The minutes lengthened into hours. Ken had no idea what time it was when Cal returned, looked at thembriefly, and went out again to pace back and forth on the aft deck.
Suddenly there were sounds of men calling back and forth. The barge lurched once, and seemed to shift. It bumped into something with a solid thud.
Ken tried to heave himself into a sitting position, but it was impossible. He began to grunt frantically.
“M-O-V-I-N-G,” he spelled out.
Sandy answered with one word. “Y-E-S.”
There was no need to try to say more. Both of them realized that when—or if—the police came to the dock the next morning in search of them the barge and its captives would no longer be there.