“Not a bad idea, was it!” Charlie said admiringly.
Lester never answered. He went out of the garage on the dead run to arrest Willard Platt.
Later, Charlie was sitting in his boat, a few hundred yards off the Andersons’ dock, fishing patiently, when Lester Gilman appeared and waved for him to come in. He started the motor, cruised slowly back alongside the pier, tied up his boat and climbed up on the weathered dock.
“Platt confess?” Charlie asked.
“Not right at first,” Lester told him. “But when that little gal of his finally realized she was getting mixed up in first degree murder, she really started talking. After that, he told us the whole thing. You figured it perfectly. Seemed kind ’a proud of his plan and pretty impressed we worked it out.”
“We!” Charlie yelped.
“That’s the official ‘we’,” Lester grinned. “Don’t forget, I’m the sheriff. I gotta get elected. Not you.”
Charlie said a very bad word, crawled back in his boat and took off for the center of the lake. He still needed one more fish for supper.
As the motor hummed rhythmically, Charlie’s mind wandered back in time, trying to remember what had happened to him in the past that helped him recognize Platt’s plan. “Must’a been Chicago,” he decided. “Not much difference in brickin’ a body in than brickin’ yourself out.”
Bad Guys Are Nice
by Anita Zelman
The young woman fell for the hijackers — but the older woman beside her knew the bitter truth.
“Isn’t he wonderful,” Marcia said as she looked adoringly into the eyes of the hijacker who was passing our seats, his gun at the ready.
I waited until he was well past us and had gone back to the pilot’s cabin.
“No, he’s not wonderful. He’s a rotten Dead End kid.”
“What’s a Dead End kid?”
Served me right for using references from the past. Marcia was such a young woman and I such a middle-aged one. I explained who the Dead End kids were.
“But he’s not like that. He’s polite and humanitarian and really believes in his cause.”
This is the sort of thing that my own daughter would have said and I wanted to shake this young woman sitting next to me, a girl who had been a stranger to me before I had boarded the plane.
“You didn’t think that when these hoodlums, these thugs, first took over,” I said. “You were as scared-and-angry-at-the-same-time as the rest of us.”
“But that was before they explained why they were doing it.”
“You’re experiencing a common idiocy now that we’re into our eighth hour, if my watch is right. It may have gone into shock when I did. Most hijackees are angry but a lot, like you, begin to think their captors are wonderful. Why do you think they’re great, Marcia? Just because they haven’t killed you yet?”
“I... well, I think they’re so beautifully idealistic. They’re willing to blow up the plane and themselves with it for the sake of their country if their demands aren’t met. I liked what that one — you know, the one with the drooping mustache, who speaks with such spiritual intensity — said about his homeland.”
“Oh, God, you mean that awful lecture he gave, on his scroungy little country? I couldn’t even point to it on a map if my life depended on it.” I laughed bitterly at what I had just heard myself saying.
“I’ll admit,” Marcia said, “that I hadn’t heard of it before today. My fault. We should learn to be more loving and caring about other places in this world, especially moneyed people like you and me.”
“What makes you think I’m rich?”
This is a sensitive subject with me. I always pride myself that I don’t announce my money with clothes or jewelry. My diamonds, usually in the safe deposit box, are hopefully not getting dimmer by their confinement.
“We’re both here in first class,” Marcia said.
“True. But I could be an executive or a saleswoman of a corporation, traveling on company money.”
“But you aren’t,” Marcia said. “You give away your wealth with that simple hairstyle. It takes time and money to get hair to fall like that.”
“Guilty as charged. Do you think they’ll treat us any the worse because we’re in first class?” I asked.
“Oh, no, they’ve been terribly nice so far.”
“Poor Marcia. You’re brainwashed. Someone should do a study on whether rich hijackees are more apt to undergo identification with the aggressor than the people in coach. We rich carry a larger burden of guilt on our shoulders. I wonder if Mansley and Heisman, who did the study on Bullying, Building Admiration Through Menace, would be interested in doing such a piece?”
“You sound so knowledgeable. Is psychology of kidnap victims your hobby?”
“My dear, I’ve read every bit of information I can get on the subject. Yes, it’s a hobby, I suppose, but one that was forced on me by ugly circumstance.”
Before Marcia could ask what ugly circumstance, our present ugly circumstance pressed in on us. We heard one of the hijackers clearing his throat over the loudspeaker system. Everyone in the cabin tensed. Would it be another of his political speeches, another tirade against oppressors? Perhaps it would be better to be blown up here and now than hear one of those speeches. No. I valued my life. I listened.
“You’ll be glad to hear that the plane is about to descend,” the hijacker said. “When we land, we’ll be met with food and comfort. Do not attempt to leave the plane until Ché and Ben make arrangements. I’ll let you know when that will be.”
They had called each other by first names only from the beginning of the hijacking.
“I hope Ché and Ben are greeted with a swift kick in the pants,” I said to Marcia.
“You don’t mean that.” She looked shocked. “I mean, not only for their sakes but for ours.”
She would have put that in reverse eight hours earlier but now she was clearly rooting for them and I was reminded of the studies done about the airline passengers in Mindanao in the Philippines, who shielded their hijackers from police trying to rescue the hijackers.
The wheels of the plane touched the ground and a collective sigh went up from the passengers. Our droopy-mustached hijacker, the one Marcia thought so humanitarian and idealistic, came out of the pilot’s cabin and stood with his back to it, facing us, gun trained in the general direction of the passengers. Marcia was smiling gently, almost maternally, at him.
I looked out the window.
“What do you see?” Marcia asked, straining to peer over my shoulder.
“A couple of negotiators, I hope.”
Two unarmed men dressed in business suits were approaching the plane across the spotlighted field. My shoulder was blocking Marcia’s view and I was about to pull back in my chair to let her have a chance to see when something caught my attention, a feeling of movement rather than movement itself somewhere on the ground, in the dark, past the nose of the plane.
Then I saw him, a man crouched and coining forward — no, several men — coming out of the darkness. I prayed that the hijackers hadn’t seen them. But, of course, logic told me, they hadn’t. I could account for all four of them. Our idealist was standing right in front of us, Ché and Ben were standing at their open door somewhere in second class, getting ready to receive the two negotiators. The fourth hijacker had to be standing with a gun trained on the coach class passengers.
The only people who could have seen the stealthy movements were the pilot up in front and I. It would be our secret. I kept my shoulder in front of the window, continuing to hog the view. Let Marcia think I was rude and selfish in my excitement.