“No way, Boss! Have you seen how far down it is? I’m not lettin’ go no matter what you. …”
“. . . because if you don’t,” I continued as if he hadn’t interrupted, “I’m going to start squirming around until either you lose your grip with both hands or Massha loses her grip on me. Whichever way it goes, you’ll fall. Get my drift? Now for once could you just follow orders without a lot of back-talk? We don’t have much time to pull this off.”
There was a stricken silence below as Guido absorbed my ultimatum and weighed the possibilities.
“Pull what off?” Aahz demanded. “Why doesn’t anybody tell me anything? If this master plan of yours is riding on that sorry excuse for a bodyguard, you might as well give up right now. I’ve told you all along that he was too lily-livered to be any good at . . .”
“Who’s lily-livered?!” Guido shouted. “Look, Big Mouth, as soon as we get you out of there, you and me are going to settle this once and . . .”
“First, we’ve got to get him out, Guido,” I interrupted. “The rope.”
“Right, Boss. One rope coming up. We’ll see who’s lily-livered. The last person who called me that was my mom, and by the time I got done with her….”
Our whole formation began to rock dangerously as he fumbled through his coat one-handed in search of the rope. For a minute, I was afraid he was mad enough to let go with both hands to speed his search.
“Easy there, Guido,” I cautioned. “We can . . .”
“Here it is, Boss!” he said, flipping the rope up so violently that it almost whacked me in the face. “I hope you can use it to hang the son of a . . .”