Put a Lid on It Read Online Free PDF Page A

of apples and pears, a basket of different kinds of crackers and processed cheeses in individual clear packaging, and small bottles of apple juice and tomato juice and seltzer.
    Meehan dropped his ditty bag on the bed, grabbed an apple, and went over to look out one of the two wide windows, having to lift a venetian blind out of the way. Down below was the road he'd come in. As he chewed and watched, the Busters came out and got into their car and drove off.
    Okay, what does this door look like? Meehan tossed his apple core in the direction of the wastebasket and walked over to study the egress. Door opens outward, so there's no way to get at the hinges. Lock mounted into the knob on the outside, with no parts visible on the inside. Metal frame with a narrow lip extending over the front edge of the door.
    So we are not going out that way. Meehan went into the bathroom instead, where he found the plumbing service panel low on the wall between the sink and the shower stall. A pop-top ring from one of the soda cans on the table opened the four Phillips-head screws, and the panel came off to reveal white plastic piping with blue or green taps and, as he'd hoped, another panel on the far side for access from the next-door bathroom.
    Unfortunately, the space was too small and the pipes too many and too thick. He could get a foot through to kick out that other panel, but he'd never get his body through that twisty little space.
    Discouraged, he got to his feet and went back to look at the main room. The two sheets on the bed were about five too few to reach from here to the ground even if he could get the window open and even if he felt like playing apeman, which he didn't. Walls, floor, and ceiling were featureless except for that impassable door.
    Well, it looked as though he'd be spending the night.

8
    T HE PHONE HAD a British sound—
bzzt-bzzt
—rather than the American
braaang.
It startled Meehan awake, and he had no idea where he was or what that sound was or why he was seeing daylight through venetian blinds or why the
bzzt-bzzt
wouldn't stop. But then it did stop, when he found the phone on the metal bedside table, and put the receiver to his face, and said, “Whuzz.”
    “Oh eight hundred, sir,” said a chipper female voice. “You'll be called for at oh eight-thirty.”
    “Uhh,” Meehan said, and the phone answered with a dial tone, so he hung up.
    By oh eight-thirty, he was showered and dressed and had eaten a pear. Nobody in his entire life before had ever said anything like “oh eight hundred” or “oh eight-thirty” in his presence, and he found he didn't like it. It made him nervous.
    Click-click, went a key outside the door, which then opened, to show Jeffords himself, in different shirt and jacket but the same smile. Meehan looked past him, saw Jeffords was alone, but then realized he wasn't up to an escape attempt at this moment. Maybe after breakfast.
    “Sleep well, Francis?”
    “Oh, yeah. Thanks.”
    Clang-clang down the stairs they went, to the first floor, and down the hall to the very last door at the end, which opened to a very large office, extending from front to back across the end of the building, windows on three sides. The office was in segments, a desk segment to the left, a conference table segment to the right, a couches-and-armchairs conversation segment in the middle. A tall distinguished silver-haired man who looked like a Shakespearean actor or possibly a stock swindler stood up from the sweeping broad desk in the desk segment and said, “Ah, good morning. Just in time for breakfast. Sit down, you two, I'll make the call.”
    “Thanks, Bruce,” Jeffords said, with a little wave, and told Meehan, “We'll sit here.”
    So they sat on couches in the conversation segment while Bruce murmured into his phone at his desk, and then Bruce came over to join them, so they stood up again and Jeffords said, “Francis Meehan, may I present Bruce Benjamin.”
    “How are you,” Meehan said,