Free Riding the Rap by Elmore Leonard

himself I had nothing to worry about.” Harry paused. “Wait. Am I talking to Nicky Testa?”
    No answer.
    â€œWhat’re you treating me like this for? What do you want, for Christ sake?”
    No answer.
    Only the sounds they made fooling with the chains.
    He had to get himself calmed down. Thought about it a minute and said, “I didn’t quit on you guys. I was put out of business by the U.S. attorney. I get busted again, I do five years straight up and not at one of those country-club joints either. I’m retired, okay? You mind?” Harry becoming agitated.
    No answer.
    â€œYou people can’t talk? What’s the problem, I might recognize somebody’s voice?”
    Still no answer
    â€œOkay, I’ll keep quiet. You guys are running some kind of game on me. Fine, I’ll wait. Sooner or later you’re gonna have to tell me what this is about.” He paused. An obvious reason for being here hit him and he said, “Wait a minute. Is this a kidnapping? Jesus Christ, you better talk to me if it is. You know what I’m saying? I’m a friend of Nicky Testa’s. If you guys are smart . . . Or you’re part of his crew and he finds out, Jesus, what you’re doing . . . ?”
    He waited.
    â€œI said I’m gonna keep quiet,” Harry said, and did, kept his mouth shut after that, sitting there chained and blindfolded. Minutes passed. He thought he heard them moving around and did hear a door close. Harry listened, pretty sure he was alone before reaching down to find a light chain wrapped around each ankle and padlocked, about twelve inches of chain between his legs and the rest of it extending along the floor. Harry got down on his hands and knees and followed the chain, about eight feet of it, to a metal ring bolted to the floor, through the deep-pile carpeting. He stood up and began to shuffle around, touched the wall by the cot, then shuffled off across the room and banged his shin on another metal cot. He felt along the wall and got as far as an open doorway before the chain stopped him.
    He wondered if it was the way he came in. If it was . . . He began to imagine them on the other side of the doorway watching him, some guys hemight even know, Harry becoming more sure of it. He said, “You’re right there, aren’t you, you fucks.” He said, “Will you say something, for Christ sake?”
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    â€œTalking to somebody he thinks is in the bathroom,” Louis said that first day, watching Harry on the TV screen in the study. “Uh-oh, he’s trying to lift up his blindfold.”
    â€œHe’ll learn quick,” Chip said.
    They watched, on the screen, the door open and now Bobby was in the room, Harry turning toward the sound, getting all the way around as Bobby clobbered him with a right hand—Chip saying, “Pow, right in the kisser”—and Harry stumbled and went down.
    â€œSo now he knows,” Louis said, “no peeking.”
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    They watched the monitors all that weekend, cutting from the patio to the front entrance to the driveway—watching the driveway more than the other areas now—to the bedroom upstairs, Harry sitting on the cot with his head raised, listening, like a blind man looking around.
    Whenever Louis or Bobby got ready to go up to the room Chip would say, “Be sure you don’t speak, okay?”
    They both went upstairs one time and Bobby said, “He tells me that again, I’m gonna get the tape and shut his mouth with it.”
    Louis said, “I’ll hold him.”
    They put a plastic bucket in there next to the cot by Harry’s feet and he got the idea he was touse it to piss in. So they wouldn’t have to run in there every time he had to go.
    Bobby said, “Why don’t we give him more chain, he can go in the bathroom?”
    â€œThat would make too much sense,” Louis said. “Then he could go in