Nechemias hurried out the door.
“tgi Friday’s will be covered by APd undercover officers. Just take the money, Mr. Van Horn, and drive it out there and do like the caller said. Do you know your way out there?”
“To Stuyvesant Plaza? Girl, of course I do.”
“We still don’t know where the caller was located — it was a cell — but Verizon is working on that. We do know the number of the cell and who the subscriber is. Does the name Elton Steckenfinger mean anything to you?”
“Steckenfinger?”
“Yes.”
“No. I’d remember that one. ‘Ooo, I think my finger is stecken. Just try to relax.’”
Sanders stared at Hunny. He must have been thinking that celebrities are a species unto themselves, but in America we have to love them no matter what.
Officer Nechemias came back into the kitchen carrying a bulging paper sack.
Art said, “I’ll fetch the suitcase, Hunny,” and headed out the door.
Sanders asked Hunny for his cell phone number and added the number to his phone. He said, “I’ll follow you, about a block behind. Strachey, you ride along with me. Mr. Malanowski, you should stay here with Officer Nechemias in case the kidnappers call with the location of Mrs. Van Horn’s drop-off. We will not pick anybody up until Mrs. Van Horn has been rescued. But we will surveil the Dumpster and tail whoever leaves with the money bag.”
Sanders suggested a particular route to the Stuyvesant Plaza shopping center, and Hunny said, “Doll-face, that is how I would go anyways. I grew up in Albany, sweetheart.”
When Art arrived with the travel bag, Sanders stuffed the stacks of hundred-dollar bills into it. He also retrieved from his jacket pocket a small metal object with a Velcro back and inserted it into one of the bag’s zippered side pockets.
“What’s that?” Hunny said. “Some kind of explosive?”
“It’s a small radio transmitter,” Sanders said. “In case these bozos somehow get away from us.”
“Oh, this is just like The Bourne Supremacy. Too bad Missy Matt Damon isn’t here. Mom thinks Missy Matt is just fab- ulous, and what a thrill it would be for Mom if Matt Damon rescued her in person.”
“Or even just his boyfriend,” Antoine said. “What’s-his-name.”
“Is it Brad Pitt?” Art asked.
“No, he’s straight,” Hunny said. “Or so we are expected to believe.”
“Now I remember, it’s Ben Affleck,” Antoine said. “I’ve heard that there is a video of those two going at it that is hot.”
“Matt and Ben, or Matt and Brad?”
“Miss Matt and Miss Ben. But Lord, what a sandwich all three of those would make. Ooo-eee.”
Sanders said, “You should be on your way, Mr. Van Horn.
Do you feel up to doing this? Just keep in mind that I will not be far behind you. And I can also tell you that plain clothes officers are already positioning themselves out at Stuyvesant Plaza. We’re going to make this work.”
“Oh, it’s only a matter of minutes then before Mom will be free. Praise de lawd! In fact, whoever picks her up, I think they should bring her over to the house here for a victory imbibulation.
Artie, don’t we still have some champagne in the fridge from the other night? Of course, Mumsie might go for something a little stronger, and let me tell you, so might I.”
Hunny, in fact, had been sipping from a glass of amber fluid, and as he stood up he wobbled just a bit.
“Are you okay to drive?” Sanders asked, wondering perhaps if he was about to enable a dui.
But Hunny slapped himself twice on his own cheeks and strode confidently toward the living room and the front door.
“Don’t forget the ransom,” Art said, handing Hunny the travel bag.
“Oh, heavens to Betsy, my mind is a sieve!”
We all followed Hunny through the living room and out the front door.
“Where are you off to, darling?” Marylou asked.
“I can’t say,” Hunny replied. “But our hugest problem is about to be solved. Then I guess I’ll get busy solving the other ones. Girl, there is just no rest for the weary!”
“Will you be gone overnight?”
“I shan’t think so, snookie-ookums. But if I don’t return,”
Hunny added with a wink, “make sure the twins do their homework so they can get into Dartmouth and make Nelson and Lawn proud.”
Marylou smiled agreeably, and we all moved down the front steps and toward the TV crews lined up on the sidewalk. They had their microphones poised, and Hunny turned and asked Schuyler and Tyler if he might borrow one of their T-shirts.
Tyler whipped his off his well-formed frame and flung it to Hunny, who moved past the reporters and cameras with the shirt draped over his lowered head, as he cried out, “No pictures! No pictures!”
Hunny got into his old Ford Explorer with its all-but-treadless tires — the suv‘s blue finish was grainy and dull but the tires were so shiny they looked waxed — and placed the travel bag with the money on the front seat next to him. Sanders’ newer Ford sedan had been double-parked nearby, and he and I climbed into it.
As we followed Hunny down Moth Street, a couple of the TV people jumped into their vehicles and gave chase. But at the corner of Moth and Transformer, two APD patrol cars pulled into the intersection and cut off the press while Hunny sped up and 98 Richard Stevenson moved on down the hill, with us not far behind.
I said, “If the First Amendment is suspended for thirty seconds, the republic will survive.”
“Yeah,” Sanders said, “Or thirty years wouldn’t hurt either.
Just kidding.”
Sanders got on his cell phone and told somebody that we were on the way, and we should get to Stuyvesant Plaza at about six-fifty-five if traffic didn’t bog down.
I said, “So who is this Elton Steckenfinger? Any idea?”
“Not yet. It’s his cell phone, and it hasn’t been reported stolen. Steckenfinger lives in Watervliet, and we’ve got officers on the way up there. They’ll be cool till we see what happens at Stuyvesant.”
“Does your experience suggest that these people will pick up the bag and then release Mrs. Van Horn?”
“I have very limited experience with abductions. But my training tells me that this thing has all the earmarks of dumb amateurs. The twenty thousand figure, for example. What’s that about, for cryin’ out loud? Why not a hundred thousand? Why not a million? These dickheads have to know that Mr. Van Horn won the Instant Warren. Half the people on the face of the earth have heard about Huntington Van Horn, the gay billionaire. And then there’s the thing that whoever did the snatch is so confident that Mr. Van Horn wouldn’t bring APd into it. Haven’t these people ever been to the movies? The cops nearly always get called in the movies, and this is also true in reality. So, all the signs are, these are not well-organized geniuses we’re dealing with here. They’re dummies, I think, and the thing with dumb amateurs is, they’re unpredictable. So, I really don’t know what to expect, and we’ll just have to see what we see.”
We swung onto the interstate and headed west. We could see Hunny’s Explorer two cars ahead of us. Hunny was doing fifty-five in the far right slow lane as the Sunday evening traffic roared by in the multiple lanes to our left. It was good that Hunny was dawdling, for he would need to exit I-90 at Route 85, and also CoCkeyed 99 in case one of his bald tires blew. The mid-August early evening sunlight was strong but shot through with the kind of tar-colored shadowyness that lets you know summer is not going to last forever and neither is anything else. Sanders had the windows up and the air conditioner on medium. Hunny had driven off with his car windows open — maybe because his Explorer’s AC was shot, or because his was a cheaper model that had never had any.
Sanders gave our location to somebody on his phone — cops seemed to be exempt from the New York State prohibition against driving with a hand-held cell phone — and then he said to me, “Who are the Brienings?”
“Good friends of Hunny,” I told him.