Ransom by Jon Cleary

her face and looked up. “Why don’t you let Mrs Malone go? You don’t want her.”
    “No, that’s right,” said Carole. “And I’m sorry we had to bring you here, Mrs Malone.” She looked at Lisa, at the innocent stranger who would have to die tomorrow if the ransom demands were not met, and felt sick and sad. Violence had its own impetus: that had killed Roy. And as soon as she thought of him all pity for anyone else, stranger or not, disappeared. Abruptly she went out of the room, saying as she went, “Your husband had just better work on the Mayor, that’s all.”
    Abel stared at the two women, his face bony and hard behind the dark glasses, then he went out, locking the door again. The wind had risen and they could hear it rattling the shutters outside the boarded-up windows, like some beast trying to get in at them.
    “They’re going to kill us,” said Sylvia.

Chapter Four
    Malone got out of the police car, waited for Jefferson to ease his bulk out of it. “We could’ve walked over here,” said Jefferson, “but I gotta keep in touch on the radio, just in case. Stick around, Stan. Anyone wants to give you a ticket, tell him you know a cop.”
    “I’ll do that, Captain,” said the driver with the tired smile of a man who had listened too long to tired jokes.
    Malone had been looking about him, at the towering block of the Manhattan House of Detention, The Tombs as it was called, above him, at the shabby bail bond shops across the narrow street. The shops surprised him. He hadn’t known what to expect, perhaps upstairs offices with small brass signs by their doors: the shops, with large signs painted across their windows, somehow reminded him of pawn-shops. But of course that was what they were, shops where men pawned their liberty.
    A figure went by, long-haired and covered from neck to ankles in a huge shaggy fur coat. Jefferson looked after it and Malone said, “What do you do? Root it or shoot it?”
    “I dunno, I try not to be too square, but I guess I got old-fashioned eyes or something. I have to keep telling myself to accept ‘em, that they’re today and I’m just a bit of yesterday that’s left over.” As they crossed the sidewalk he said, “I hope I did the right thing in asking you if you wanted to come over here with me.”
    “It’s better than sitting on my bum back at the hotel.”
    “That’s what I thought.”
    After the second phone call to Forte’s office and the subsequent discussion which had been only words going in circles, Malone had wanted to escape from the ornate room and the stifling atmosphere brought in by the men who

    surrounded Michael Forte. He had realized that the Mayor himself had wanted to escape, if only back into his official routine. Malone could not understand why the kidnappers’ demands could not be met at once, but he knew he would get no answer to such a question if he asked it in the company the Mayor kept. He would have to wait till he was alone with Michael Forte again. But then he would not make it a question: it would be a demand.
    He had come out of the Mayor’s room escorted by Manny Pearl. “I suggested to the Mayor that it might be better - for you, for all of us - if you moved out of your hotel and went up to Gracie Mansion.”
    “I’ll think about it,” said Malone.
    “It would save you from being pestered by the press. And - ” He glanced at Malone, wondering how sensitive the Australian was. “And maybe you and the Mayor can be of some comfort to each other.”
    “He would be more comforting if he agreed to release those blokes you are holding.”
    Then John Jefferson had come down the carpeted corridor to them. “I’ll take the Inspector off your hands, Mr Pearl. I’m on my way over to The Tombs. Maybe he’d like to come.”
    “What’s happening?” Pearl asked.
    “We gotta work quietly - that’s all we can do for the time being. There are two guys from the Department over at The Tombs now with an FBI man -