Drowned Hopes

FORTY-FOUR

May stepped off the curb and hailed a cab. Though its off-duty light was lit, this particular cab immediately cut off a bakery van and a black TransAm from New Jersey to swerve across the lanes and yank to a stop at May’s feet. Since the backseat already contained three people, May opened the front door and slid in beside the driver, who was Murch’s Mom. “Right on time,” she said, slamming the door.

“Naturally,” Mom said, and slashed the cab back into the flow of traffic, causing a great tide of imprecation to rise up into the air behind her.

“We would’ve been late,” Stan said from the backseat, “if I hadn’t told Mom to come down Lex and forget Park.”

“Know-it-all,” muttered Mom darkly.

May shifted around in the seat so she could see Mom and Stan and Andy and Tiny all at once. “I want to thank you all for coming,” she said.

“Sure, May,” Tiny said, his voice like a far-off earthquake. “All you gotta do is ask.”

May smiled at him. “Thank you, Tiny.” To Mom, she said, “And thanks for letting me use your cab.”

“My pleasure,” Mom snarled, blatting her horn at a tourist from Maryland, sightseeing out the window of his Acura Silly.

“The problem is,” May said, “John still won’t even talk about it. Not even talk. So we couldn’t meet at my place. If he knew I was—”

Andy said, “May, believe me, I understand John’s position on this. I was trapped inside that car, too. Now, I’m not one of your broody kind of pessimistic guys, you know me, but I got to tell you, May, I had a minute or two there, down in there, when I was seriously rethinking the various choices of my life. ‘What could I have done instead,’ I was saying to myself. ‘What could I have done different, maybe in third grade, maybe last year, that would have me now at the VCR store putting To Catch a Thief in my armpit instead of where I am?’ A situation like that can give you those kinds of thoughts.”

“I know that,” May said. “I know you and John went through a terrible experience. But it’s been two weeks, Andy, and you’ve gotten over it.”

“Well, not entirely, May,” Andy said. “The fact is, I still have to carry a flashlight when I open my closet door. But at least I’m washing my face again, so there’s been some improvement.”

“John washes his face, all right,” May said, “but he will not talk about the reservoir, or the money, or Tom’s plan to blow up the dam.”

“I think,” Andy said carefully, “I think he’s trying to restrict his involvement with the situation.”

“When Tom moved out,” May told them, “I made him promise to let me know where to get in touch with him, just in case John came up with a new idea. Tom was going away to East St. Louis, Illinois, to pick up another of those money caches of his, and he told me when he’d be back, and he promised he’d call me as soon as he was in New York again, and that’s tomorrow. If I don’t have anything to tell him tomorrow, he’s going to find a couple of people to help him, which won’t take long—”

“Not for that money,” Tiny agreed. “Take him an hour, maybe, unless he’s picky. Then it’ll take two hours.”

“By the end of this week,” May said, “he could have that dam blown up and that entire valley destroyed and everybody in it dead.”

“You know,” Stan said thoughtfully, “I looked over that terrain while we were up there, and I’m not sure Tom could get outta there if he goes the dynamite method. The way the roads are, the way the hills are, he might not have an escape. I mean, he’d get the money, drive down in there in a tractor or an ATV or something, maybe a backhoe, yank the casket up outta the ground, drive back up out of the mud, but when he gets to the road I think he’s screwed. I could study the terrain some more, but that’s my first impression.”

“Tom won’t listen to that,” May said. “He’ll go ahead and do it anyway, and he’ll get caught, and they’ll put him back in prison where they should never have let him out in the first place, but all those people in the valley will be dead. It won’t matter then if Tom says, ‘Gee, Stan, I guess you were right.’ ”

“That’s true,” Stan admitted.

“We need another plan,” May told them. “We need some other way to get to that money that isn’t dynamite and that Tom Jimson will go along with. But John won’t even talk about it, and he absolutely won’t think about it. So what I was hoping from this meeting, I was hoping one of us would come up with something I could tell Tom, something that would at least slow him down, some kind of plan, or even an idea for a plan. Something.”

There was a little uncomfortable silence in the cab, punctuated by Mom’s maledictions against the world of drivers and pedestrians and New York City traffic conditions generally. At last Tiny spread his catcher’s-mitt hands and said, “May, that ain’t my field. I pick up heavy things, I move them, I put them down, that’s what I do. Sometimes I persuade people to change their minds about certain things. I’m a specialist, May, and that’s my specialty.”

Stan said, “I’m a driver. I’m the best in the business—”

“He is,” his Mom said, as she swerved around a wallowing stretch limo driven by a Middle Eastern refugee who’d cleared Customs & Immigration earlier that morning. “I’m his mother, but I’ve got to admit it, my boy Stan is a good driver.”

“The best,” Stan corrected. “But, May, I don’t do plans. Getaways I can do. Vehicles I can drive; there isn’t a thing in the world with wheels and a motor I can’t drive. I could give Tom Jimson very professional advice on how he’ll never get away from that county if he blows the dam, but that’s about it from me.”

May said, “Andy? What about you? You have millions of ideas.”

“I sure do,” Andy agreed. “But one at a time. And not connected with each other. A plan, now, a plan is a bunch of ideas in a row, and, May, I’m sorry, I’ve never been good at that.”

“God damn the State of New York!” Mom cried, sideslipping past a pipe-smoking psychiatrist in a Mercury Macabre. “They give anybody a license to drive a car!”

“They also released Tom Jimson,” May pointed out.

Tiny cleared his throat. “Usually,” he said, “what I’d do at this point is go to the guy that’s the problem and give him a little vacation in the hospital for maybe three months. But the truth is, Tom Jimson—I don’t care if he’s seventy hundred years old—he’s the nastiest guy I ever met. I wouldn’t say this about almost anybody else, but I’m not absolutely one hundred percent sure he’s the one would wind up in the hospital. And then you’d never change his mind. He’d go ahead out of spite.”

May frowned, saying, “Tiny, how can he be that dangerous?”

“He doesn’t care,” Tiny said. “That’s what it comes down to. He knows everything there is to know about doing the other guy and not getting done yourself. He’s the only guy I knew, when we were in stir, that could sleep with a twenty-dollar bill stickin out of his hand. See, me,” he went on earnestly, “if I gotta do a little pressure somewhere, I do what I do and that’s it. I mean, unless you really annoy me, I don’t break bones I don’t haveta break. But Tom, he likes to go too far. It’s tough for a normal human being to gear up to that kind of viciousness right away.”

May sighed. “What are we going to do?”

“Well,” Stan said, “I think maybe we shouldn’t watch the TV news much the next few weeks.”

They were all abruptly flung forward when Mom had to slam both feet onto the brake to keep from creaming two bicycle messengers snaking through the traffic with big flat square packages strapped to their backs. One of them looked around over his shoulder through his goggles and surgical mask and rode one-handed long enough to give Mom the finger. Mom stuck her head out the window to give him the verbal finger back, and then turned to glare at May and say, “You want a vacation?”

May blinked at her. “A vacation? No, I want—”

“It’s the same thing,” Mom snapped. “You want to take care of this problem with the dam. I want a vacation. If you’ve got a brain in your head, May, you want a vacation, too.”

Spreading her hands, wondering if traffic conditions had finally driven Murch’s Mom over the brink, May said, “I don’t know what you mean. What’s the connection?”

“I’ll tell you the connection,” Mom snarled. “I’ve got the idea. I know how to stop Tom Jimson.”

FORTY-FIVE

When Dortmunder opened the apartment door and stepped inside to call, “May! I’m home!” and a voice from the living room called back, “In here, John,” that would have been perfectly all right except for two problems: 1) It wasn’t May’s voice. 2) It wasn’t even a woman.

Warily, Dortmunder moved forward to the living room doorway, where he looked in at Stan Murch, seated on the sofa, holding a beer can, his expression troubled. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Dortmunder said.

“I understand that,” Stan told him, “but things have changed.”

“I haven’t changed.”

“Maybe you ought to get yourself a beer,” Stan suggested.

Dortmunder studied him. Stan the driver’s personality usually matched his carrot-colored hair; optimistic, straightforward, a little aggressive. At this moment, though, he was subdued, troubled, almost gloomy; a new Stan, but not an improved one. “I’ll get myself a beer,” Dortmunder decided, and did so, and came back from the kitchen to sit in his normal chair, take a drink from his beer can, wipe his chin, and say, “Okay. You might as well tell me.”

“May moved out,” Stan said.

This was the last thing Dortmunder had expected. He’d been braced for more pressure about that goddamn reservoir, for Stan having been set up to talk to Dortmunder about it by May, but—

May? Moved out? Impossible. “Impossible,” Dortmunder said.

“Well, she did,” Stan insisted without satisfaction. “The cab left about twenty minutes ago. Take a look in the closet, if you want. Look in the dresser.”

“But—” Dortmunder couldn’t bend his mind around this idea. “She left me? May left me?”

“Nah,” Stan said. “She says you can come live with her all you want. Her and Mom both.”

No matter how closely Dortmunder listened, none of this made the slightest, tiniest, least bit of sense. “Your Mom?” he demanded. “What’s your Mom got to do with it?”

“They’re living together,” Stan said. “That was the cab May went in; Mom’s last fare.” Sounding bitter, he said, “It was even Mom’s idea. She got a leave of absence from the cab company on account of traffic burnout, and May said she was due a sabbatical from the supermarket, so they did it. They say we can both go live with them any time we want.”

Dortmunder was on his feet, slopping beer. “Where?” He was ready to go, wherever it was. Go there now, get an explanation he could understand, bring May home again. “Where, Stan?”

“Dudson Center,” Stan told him. With a long sigh, he shook his head and said, “In front of the dam. That’s where they’re living now.”

FORTY-SIX

It’s amazing how many reservoirs there are in upstate New York, all piping their water south. New York City doesn’t look particularly clean, so they must be drinking all that water down there. Or mixing it with something. Or maybe they just leave the faucets on.

Anyway, in addition to the number of reservoirs, there was also the complication of Doug Berry’s regular job and life. It had been tough to get enough time free and clear so he could take several days off from the normal routine, close the dive shop, get into his customized pickup every morning, and barrel north to check out the reservoirs of the Berkshires and the Catskills and the Shawangunks and the Adirondacks and the Helderbergs. So it wasn’t until now, almost two weeks after refilling John and Andy’s air tanks, that Doug at last arrived at North Dudson to check out the Vilburgtown Reservoir.

Was he already too late? Had John and Andy and their unknown friend already reclaimed the drowned and buried loot? They’d had a long time since he’d refilled their tanks. But even so, even if they were ahead of him, if he could just find the right reservoir, find the right trail, he firmly believed he could somehow or other manage to deal himself into whatever was going on. But first he had to figure out which of New York’s myriad reservoirs the loot was or had been under.

This is how his thinking went on that: if you steal a lot of money (something he’d fantasized himself doing more than once in his life), you will either hide it or carry it, but not both; therefore the robbery would probably have taken place somewhere in the general vicinity of the reservoir, but must have happened before the reservoir existed.

So, in each case, he first found out how old the reservoir was, and if it was older than fifty years he immediately crossed it off, because how long ago could the original robbery have been? Then, he would look in the local paper for some big robbery to have occurred in that area not too many years before the reservoir was born. Major robberies are not that common in the kinds of rural areas that succumb to reservoirs, which meant that so far he had only two faint possibilities, both of them extremely unlikely, though he’d go back to both if nothing better showed up.

In the meantime, here he was in North Dudson, pulling to a stop in the parking lot behind the library, ready to do his Vilburgtown Reservoir research. Climbing out of the shiny black pickup in the warm June sunlight, he made a handsome picture, a fine complement to the day. With his tall and well-built frame, in his casual khaki slacks, soft blue polo shirt, and aviator-style sunglasses, with his weathered tan and carelessly wavy dark blond hair, the only thing wrong with the picture was that he didn’t look at all like somebody who would be going to the library, not on such a beautiful day. Nevertheless, that’s where he headed, bounding up the steps with athletic grace, pushing the sunglasses up into the hair on top of his head as he entered the cool dim interior.

The girl at the counter was pretty enough, though not as pretty as he, which he knew without gloating about it; his good looks were simply a fact of nature, a part of who he was. (Pretty men feel differently about their beauty from pretty women, are less proud of it and protective toward it and prepared to display it. Their attitude toward their looks is rather like the attitude of the old rich toward their money: they’re pleased to have it but consider mentioning it vulgar, even in their thoughts.)

Doug approached the pretty-enough girl, smiling a winning smile, and said, “Hi.”

“Hi,” she answered. As women tended to do, she perked up in his presence. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m interested in two things,” he told her, then grinned at himself and shook his head and said, “Let me rephrase that. Right now, there’s two things I’m interested in.”

“Two library things,” she amplified, flirting with him just slightly.

“That’s the key,” he agreed. “I’m interested in your local reservoir—”

“Vilburgtown.”

“Right. And I’m interested in your local paper. Do you have microfilm?”

“Well, that depends how far back you want to go,” she told him. “Before about 1920, we really don’t have much at all.”

“No, that’s fine.” He grinned, showing his white teeth. “I want to read about the building of the dam to begin with, so I need to find out from you how long ago that was.”

“Eighteen years,” she said promptly. “I know because I was in second grade. It was a big deal around here.”

“Eighteen years ago?” He pantomimed thinking hard. “I would have been in fourth grade,” he decided. “So I’ve got two years seniority on you.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and gave him a mock salute.

“At ease,” he told her, and said, “I’ll want the local paper for the year the dam was built, and for about ten years before that.”

She gave him a suddenly watchful look, saying, “That’s a funny thing to ask for.”

The curiosity of small-town librarians knew no limits. Doug had long since had to come up with a cover story for his interest in local histories prior to the construction of dams. “I’m with the Environment Protection Alliance,” he explained. “You probably heard of us?”

“Nnnooooo.” She looked doubtful.

“We’re small, but we’re growing,” Doug assured her with his broadest grin. “A volunteer group, concerned with the environment.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What we’re trying to do,” Doug went on, embroidering the bushwah with a little eye sparkle and tooth gleam, “is help communities avoid getting taken over for things like reservoirs. So I look for local factors that might be a common denominator before the town was lost. Employment, local elections, all of that.”

Doug’s story, if considered with a cold clear eye, made no sense at all, but where is there a cold clear eye in this old world? The present girl, like the victims before her, distracted by his good looks and winning manner and open honest smile, simply heard the buzzwords—environment, volunteer, common denominator, communities, employment—and nodded, returning his smile, saying, “Well, I wish you luck. It was a real trauma around here when all those towns got taken over.”

“I’m sure it was,” Doug agreed. “That’s what we’re trying to help prevent in the future.”

“My mom worked in the library in Putkin’s Corners,” she went on. “That’s the biggest town that got evacuated. And my grandfather ran the funeral parlor there.”

This was more information than Doug absolutely had to possess for his purposes. “Then you know what I mean,” he said, turning down the voltage a bit on his smile.

“I sure do.”

“So, I guess I better get started. Then.”

“Oh!” Seeming to come awake, the girl said, “Of course.” Pointing across the room, she said, “That’s the microfilm viewer over there. I’m sorry it isn’t a very modern one, not like our VDT here.”

He drew a blank: “VDT?”

“Video display terminal,” she explained, and gestured at a small neat computer terminal on her side of the counter. Its dull black screen was blank. “It’s really a wonderful help to us all,” she said. “But I’m afraid we don’t have a modern microfilm viewer yet. You’ll have to crank that one.”

“I took my vitamins today,” he assured her, and grinned as he made a muscle.

She pretended not to look at his arm. “I’ll bring you the microfilm,” she said, and turned away.

Doug walked across the airy quiet room to the old table beating the old microfilm viewer. He was almost the only customer in here this morning; two or three old people read old magazines, and at one reading table sat a lone state trooper bent in agonized intense study over some thick book dense with print.

Doug faltered a second when he saw the uniform, then moved on, realizing the trooper was too deeply involved in his book to care about other patrons of the library. Besides, what did Doug have to fear from state troopers? At this stage of the game, nothing.

He sat in front of the viewer, and a couple of minutes later the girl brought him four rolls of microfilm, saying, “This is the year they built the dam, and these are the three years before. When you finish those, bring them to the desk and I’ll get you some more.”

“Thanks a lot.” Doug leaned toward her, lowering his voice to say, “Listen. Can I ask a question?”

“About the library?”

“Kind of. What’s the cop doing?”

She turned her head, as though not having noticed the state trooper before, then gave an indulgent laugh as she said, “Oh, Jimmy. He’s studying for his civil-service exam.” Bending toward Doug—a nice fresh faint aroma came from her—she lowered her own voice to say, “He’s not very good at studying. It drives him crazy.”

“That’s the way he looks, all right.” Then Doug grinned broadly and stuck out his hand and said, “I’m Doug, by the way. Doug Berry.”

Her hand in his was small and gentle, but disconcertingly bony. “Myrtle,” she told him, and then seemed to hesitate or stumble or something for just a second before she said, “Myrtle Street.”

“Myrtle’s a nice name,” he told her, holding on to her hand, getting used to it. “You don’t run into too many Myrtles anymore.”

“I think it’s old-fashioned,” she said, gently disengaging her hand from his. “But I guess I’m stuck with it. Well, I shouldn’t keep you from your research.” She gestured to the microfilm viewer, smiled, and went away to her counter.

Doug watched her go, pleased by her, then did get to his research. Like most small-town papers, this one didn’t have a useful master index, so it was simply the tedious job of going back through the first pages, week after week; the kind of robbery he had in mind would definitely have made the front page, probably more than once.

Nothing in the first four rolls. Nothing in the first of the second batch of rolls. But then, five years before the dam was built, there it was: a major armored car robbery out on the Thruway near town. Seven hundred thousand dollars stolen! Two guards killed. Police had leads. In later weeks, gang members were found dead. The mastermind and the money had both disappeared. Police had leads. Then the story faded away. Police had no more leads. The mastermind had the money.

This was it. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in Doug’s mind. Seven hundred thousand dollars! That was certainly enough to make a couple of nonathletic types like Andy and John put on scuba gear and walk into a reservoir. And there was possibly a way to find out if they’d actually got their hands on that money as yet.

So let’s check. Taking all the rolls of microfilm back to Myrtle—a pretty-enough name for a pretty-enough girl, he thought unkindly, but then was sorry to have had such a thought because basically he liked girls, and in any event he found Myrtle pleasant and easy to talk to—he said, “Myrtle, I’ve got almost everything I need now, except I’ve got to take a look at the papers for the last month.”

“You mean, this year?” she asked, obviously bewildered by his abrupt leap in time.

“This year, right,” he agreed. “I’m done with the ancient past, I’m ready to get up to date, like that VCR of yours there.”

“VDT.”

“Whatever.”

“The most recent papers,” she told him, “the last six months, aren’t on microfilm yet. They’re on shelves on that aisle over there. See?”

“By golly, Myrtle,” he said, looking over there, “the technology just keeps jumping around in here. Now I’m gonna read actual newspapers?”

Laughing, she said, “You’ll just have to rough it, I’m afraid.”

“I can stand up to it,” he decided.

“Good.” She picked up the microfilm rolls he’d just returned, saying, “I hope this all helped.”

“You and your library have been very good to me, Myrtle,” Doug told her truthfully.

She frowned down at the microfilm rolls, saying, “You didn’t look at these two?”

“Didn’t need to,” he said airily.

“This is the year you finished with?”

“That’s right.”

She kept frowning at the little boxes containing the microfilm. Was she suspicious for some reason? Should he have gone through the motions of looking at the rest of the rolls? But then she shook her head, smiled rather vaguely at him, and turned away, carrying the microfilm back to where it was stored.

Doug crossed to the most recent newspapers and found some old geezer hogging half of them, reading through endless local announcements, keeping other papers firmly under the one he was studying, spread out on the table. Doug made do with the papers the old coot hadn’t commandeered, but found nothing in any of them about any trouble at the reservoir—his idea was that a break-in there might leave traces that would rate a report in the local paper—so at last he turned to the old fart, who hadn’t finished one paper in the last half hour.

“Excuse me,” Doug said, reaching for the papers under the one the old bastard was memorizing.

But the old son of a bitch hunched over his papers, folding his arms around them protectively, saying, “I’m reading these!”

“Not all of them,” Doug insisted, grabbing nether papers and tugging. “You’re just reading the one on top.”

“Wait your turn!” the old monopolist snarled, and pressed his bony elbows down onto the papers.

Doug leaned in close and looked into his ancient opponent’s beady eyes. “When old bones break,” he pointed out quietly, “they take forever to heal.”

The old creep blinked, licked his lips, stared around the room. “I know that cop,” he announced.

“Who, Jimmy?” Doug said, and grinned, not in a friendly way. “Everybody knows Jimmy. He’s one of my best friends. Maybe I’ll tell him about you.”

The old snothead blinked furiously for a second, then abruptly pushed the stack of papers away, crying, “Take them, if it means so much to you!”

“It does,” Doug told him, and slid the papers down the table to a quieter location, while the old hoarder went stumping away to some other part of the library.

It was in the fifth of this batch of papers:

SECOND BREAK-INAT RESERVOIR: Junk Car Abandoned

Almost two weeks ago. They sure hadn’t wasted any time after he’d replenished their air.

Doug settled down to read the story, which was bizarre enough from the newspaper’s point of view, since they didn’t know what had really been going on. Someone, according to the report, or more probably several someones, had cut a great hole in the fence surrounding the reservoir at the site of an old inactive railroad line, which they had apparently used in order to get an old junk car without an engine to the reservoir, where they pushed it into the water and abandoned it.

Why anybody would go to such trouble to throw away a useless car no one could figure out, but police did speculate that the perpetrators were probably the same individuals who, a month earlier, had broken padlocks in order to enter another part of the reservoir property. In that first incident, the perpetrators had apparently done nothing but gone for a midnight swim in the extremely cold water.

Abandoning an old car in the reservoir was considered a much more serious act, though officials reassured the public that the purity of the reservoir’s water would not be adversely affected in any way. This being just about the end of the school year of most colleges in the region, the possibility of a schoolboy prank, possibly a fraternity hazing or some such thing, was not being discounted.

Oh, no? Doug sat back, grinning to himself. He’d found it, all right. The Vilburgtown Reservoir was the place, and the seven hundred thousand dollars was the loot.

And now to figure out how to follow the trail from here. Rising, Doug left the papers on the table—let the doddering news buff put them away, if he loved them so much—and headed for the door, to be intercepted midway by Myrtle Street, her old smiling self again, saying, “Find what you wanted?”

“I’ll have a terrific report to turn in at the office,” he assured her.

“You’re probably looking for somewhere to have lunch now,” she suggested. “Do you want a recommendation?”

She’s picking me up! Doug thought, both surprised and pleased. Seeing by the large digital clock on the wall that it was shortly after one, and aware of no reason why he shouldn’t be picked up by a pretty-enough girl, he flashed her his smile and said, “Only if you’ll join me. When’s your lunch break?”

“Right now.” She matched him smile for smile. “If we can make it dutch treat, I’ll be happy to come along.”

“Lead on,” he said.

Leading on, smiling over her shoulder, she said, “And you can tell me all about your researches.”

Like fun. “I’ll bore you silly with it,” Doug promised.

“I’ll drive and you follow.”

“Anywhere.”

They went out together into the bright sunlight. Trotting down the steps, squinting until he remembered to pull his sunglasses down from his head to cover his eyes, Doug suddenly saw John ride by in a car. He stopped, stumbling, almost falling down the library steps, and when he’d recovered his balance he just stared.

It was John, all right, definitely John, in the passenger seat of a Buick Century Regal, fortunately looking straight ahead and not to the side out his window. Doug stooped to stare past that grim profile, and it seemed to him the driver was not Andy. And when the car went on by, it didn’t have MD plates. But that had been John, all right. That gloomy pan was nobody in this world but John.

At the foot of the steps, shielding her eyes with her hand as she looked back up at him, Myrtle said, “Doug? Are you coming?”

“Oh, sure. Sure.” Grinning again, careless and handsome in the brightness, Doug trotted down the steps.

They didn’t get it. They’re still hanging around. They missed again.

FORTY-SEVEN

“Oak Street,” Stan said as he made the left. “Forty-six, forty-six…”

“There it is,” Dortmunder said, pointing. “Pretty goddamn place,” he grumbled.

It was, too. Behind a neat green lawn stood a one-story-high white clapboard bungalow with yellow trim and shutters. Climbing roses, red and pink and cream and white, grew up across the front, enlaced with the railing of the cosy-looking broad front porch, on which the seating consisted of two rocking chairs and an actual glider, a kind of sofa without legs suspended by chains from the porch ceiling. White lace curtains made proscenium arches of every window, and the number forty-six was spelled out in iron script across the top riser of the stoop. Impatiens had just recently been planted on both sides of the cement walk; small now, they would soon spread and prosper, so that visitors would enter through a field of flowers. “How could anybody live in a place like that?” Dortmunder muttered, squinting at the brightness of it.

“Let’s find out,” Stan said.

A freshly graveled driveway ran beside the house, stopping at a chain-link fence at the rear. So there was no garage—rough in winter, huh? — but the back yard was enclosed. For puppies, no doubt. As Stan steered onto this driveway and came to a stop beside the porch, Dortmunder’s face had begun to look like the first day of a nor’easter.

They climbed out of the Buick, took the secondary slate path across the lawn in front of the roses to the stoop, and went up onto the porch. The mailbox beside the door was an open wicker basket, without even a top on it, much less a lock. Stan pushed the white button beside the front door—doors: wood and screen, the wood with a large curtained window in it—and from inside chimes sounded. Dortmunder growled, deep in his throat.

It was May who opened both doors, smiling at them, saying, “Here you are! Come in, come in. You’re early.”

“Did the GW Bridge and the Palisades,” Stan told her as they entered the bungalow. “Avoided all that stuff with the Tappan Zee.”

May was wearing an apron. Kissing John on the cheek, she said, “Hello, John. I’m really glad you came.”

“Had to,” Dortmunder told her, and did his best to soften his face with a smile. If he was going to talk reason with this woman, if he was going to get her to move out of this crazy place and come back to the apartment where she belonged, he knew he was going to have to be pleasant, reasonable, calm, patient, understanding, and benign. He was going to have to be, in other words, everything he wasn’t. “Had to talk to you,” he said, and tried the smile again. It felt like it was made of wood.

Stan said, “Where’s Mom?”

“Out driving her cab,” May said. “She’ll be back soon. Come on in the living room.”

They were in a kind of entrance hall with a rug on the floor and pictures of flowers on the walls and some kind of complicated chandelier hanging from the ceiling. As they followed May through the archway on the left into the living room—sofa, chair, chair, lamp, lamp, table lamp, coffee table, end table, end table, TV console, area rug, fake marble plant stand, fern, pictures of nymphs-fauns-architecture on the walls—Stan said, “Mom’s back driving her cab? She commutes to New York?”

“No, she’s driving for the cab company here,” May said. “Sit down, sit down.”

Dortmunder looked around, but everything looked too comfortable. He sat in the middle of the sofa, but even that was cozy and soft.

Meanwhile, May was telling Stan, “She loves it, driving here. She says nobody fights back.”

Dortmunder opened his mouth to say something nice about the roses, as a kind of icebreaker. “May,” he said, “what the hell are you doing in this place?”

May smiled at him. “Living here, John,” she said.

“Why?” he demanded, even though he knew the answer.

May’s smile was serene but steadfast. Dortmunder knew that smile, he’d seen her use it on delivery boys, policemen, bus drivers, drunks, sales clerks, and customs inspectors, and he knew it was unbeatable. “It’s good to make a change sometimes, John,” she said, utterly calm. “Move to a different place, get a different slant on life.”

“And when Tom blows up the dam?”

“We can only hope he won’t,” she said.

“He’s going to, May.”

Stan, sounding a little awed, said, “You can see it from here, out the window.”

The sofa on which Dortmunder sat stood in front of the window but faced the other way, at the television set, the paradigm of America. Twisting around, he looked through the draped-back curtains out the clean window and across the clean street and above the clean cottages on the other side to the broad gray wall, far away, curving among the green hills. At this distance it looked small and unimportant, just a low gray wall surrounded by hills taller than itself. But it was definitely aimed this way.

The sight gave Dortmunder a headache. Twisting back to look at May again, he said, “Tom’s back in New York. He’s putting together a string. He gave me what he said was a courtesy call, one last chance to join in with him when he dynamites the dam.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him no.”

May, still smiling, raised an eyebrow and said, “Did you tell him I was here?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t want to hear him laugh.” Leaning forward on the too-comfortable sofa, Dortmunder said, “May, Tom isn’t going to care. His entire family, if he ever had a family, could move to this town, and he still wouldn’t care. He’s gonna blow that dam. You can’t change his mind.”

“I’m not trying to change Tom’s mind,” May said.

So that was it. Dortmunder nodded, knowing that was it. “May,” he said, “I can’t help. I gave that thing two tries, and that’s it, I’m played out. I’m not going down in there again.”

“You don’t give up, John,” she said.

“Sometimes I do. And I won’t go down in that water again because I can’t go down in that water again, and that’s that.”

“Then there’s some other way.”

“Well, I don’t know what it is.”

“You’re not even trying to think about it, John,” she said.

“That’s right,” he said, agreeing with her. “What I’m doing, I’m trying not to think about it. I mean, what are we supposed to do? Have Stan’s friend fix up another car for us, get a lot more scuba stuff from the guy on Long Island, break through the fence all over again that they’ve probably got people watching now, go down in there without Ping-Pong balls? There’ll be something else, May. It’ll try to kill us some brand-new way we haven’t even thought about yet. And if we even get to that goddamn town, we’re gonna have to walk around on the bottom, kick up all this muck, and then try to find one little casket buried in a great big field, where, even if the landmarks are still there we won’t be able to see them. Or anything else.”

“If it was an easy problem, John,” May said reasonably, “we wouldn’t need you to solve it.”

Dortmunder sat back and spread his hands. “I’ll move in here with you, May, if you want. We can go together when Tom blows the dam. But that’s it. I don’t have anything else. Tom and me are quits.”

“I know you can do it,” May insisted. “If you’ll just let yourself start thinking about it.”

Stan said, “Here comes Mom.”

Dortmunder turned to look out the window again and saw the green and white Plymouth Frenzy parked at the curb out there, with the legend TOWN TAXI on its door. Murch’s Mom was getting out from behind the wheel, wearing her usual workaday garb of checked leather cap, zippered jacket over flannel shirt, chinos, and boots. She moved with an unusual and uncharacteristic languor, closing the cab door rather than slamming it, walking toward the house at a normal pace with elbows barely sawing at all, chin hardly even a little bit thrust out.

“Gee,” Stan said, sounding worried. “What’s wrong with Mom?”

“She’s relaxed,” May said.

She sure was. When she came into the house, she didn’t slam the door, didn’t stomp her feet on the floor, didn’t even scream and holler. All she did was hang up her zipper jacket and cloth cap in the hall, amble into the living room, and mildly say, “Oh, hi, Stanley, I’m glad you could come. How you doing, John?”

“Drowning,” Dortmunder said.

“That’s nice.” Murch’s Mom crossed the living room to present a cheek for her son to kiss. He did so, looking astonished at the idea, and she studied him critically but kindly, saying, “Have you been eating?”

“Well, sure,” Stan said, and shrugged. “Like always. You know.”

“Can you stay over?”

Dortmunder cleared his throat. “Uhhh,” he said. “The idea was, we come up here to bring you back.”

Murch’s Mom turned around to frown at Dortmunder. With a touch of her old pugnacity, she said, “Back to the city? Down there with those wahoos and yo-yos?”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

Murch’s Mom pointed a stubby finger at Dortmunder’s nose. “Do you know,” she demanded with a tremor in her voice, “what people do up here when you put on your turn signal?”

“No,” Dortmunder admitted.

“They let you make the turn!”

“That’s nice,” Dortmunder said.

Murch’s Mom planted her feet on the floor, her fists on her hips, her elbows to east and west, and her jaw toward Dortmunder. “Whadaya got to match that in New York?”

“The water isn’t over your head.”

Murch’s Mom nodded once, slowly, meaningfully. “That’s up to you, John,” she said.

Dortmunder sighed.

May, apparently taking pity on him, got to her feet at that point and said, “You’re probably both thirsty after that long drive up.”

“I sure am,” Stan agreed.

“I have tea made,” May told him, and started for the door.

Simultaneously, Dortmunder and Stan both said, “Tea?”

May paused in the doorway, looking back, raising an eyebrow.

Stan, hesitant, said, “I was kinda looking forward, you know, May, to a beer.”

May and Murch’s Mom both shook their heads. It was his Mom who said, “You shouldn’t drink beer, Stanley, if you’re going to drive all the way back today.”

Dortmunder said, “I’m not driving.”

While Stan gave him a dirty look, May said, “John, that wouldn’t be fair. I’ll be right back with the tea. It’s all made.” And she left.

While May was gone, Stan tried to talk his Mom into giving up this ridiculous idea and coming home. His arguments were many and, to Dortmunder’s ear, persuasive:

1) This little vacation would soon pall, and Mom would begin to miss the rough-and-tumble of city life.

2) The longer she stayed up here in the sticks, the more she would lose that competitive edge without which you can’t hope to make it in Big Town.

3) The style of this house would soon begin to grate on her nerves something fierce, being so unlike the nice apartment over the garage in Brooklyn where they’d both been so happy for so long.

4) You can’t make the same kind of money pushing a hick hack as driving a metered yellow cab in New York City.

5) Tom Jimson will blow up the dam.

“That’s up to John,” Murch’s Mom kept repeating at every iteration of No. 5; the other four she just shrugged off, not even arguing back. It was a very depressing performance all the way around.

Then May came back with mugs of tea on a round Rheingold beer tray. (At least, Dortmunder thought, she hadn’t gone all the way to a tea set and little cups and tiny sandwiches with all the good chewy crust cut off. So maybe there was hope.)

Or maybe not. They all sat around the living room with their mugs of tea, like a Poverty Row production for “Masterpiece Theater,” and May said, “If you really want to move up here, John, there’s plenty of room. You, too, Stan.”

“Breathe the good air,” Murch’s Mom ordered her son.

“I’ve never had so much space, John,” May went on, sounding infuriatingly enthusiastic about the idea. “Room after room, upstairs and down. And it all came furnished with very nice things.”

“And you won’t believe the rent,” Murch’s Mom added. “Not after rents in the city.”

“Mom,” Stan said, a plaintive twang creeping into his voice, “I don’t want to live in Dudson Center. What would I do around here?”

“Work with John,” his Mom suggested, “getting that Jimson bastard his money.”

Dortmunder sighed.

May said, “John, I hope you don’t think I’m being mean about this. I’m doing it as much for you as for me.”

“That’s nice,” Dortmunder said.

“If Tom blows up the dam—”

“He will.”

“You’ll feel terrible about it the rest of your life,” May assured him. “Knowing you could have prevented it.”

“I’m not going down in there anymore,” Dortmunder said. “Not even for you, May. I’d rather feel terrible the rest of my life than spend one minute down in there.”

“Then there has to be some other way,” May said.

“You mean some other person,” Dortmunder told her. “I won’t go. Andy won’t go.” Turning to Stan, he said, “How about it? Want to take a turn?”

“Pass,” Stan said.

His Mom frowned at him. “That’s not like you, Stanley.”

“It is like me,” her son told her. “It’s exactly like me. I recognized me in it the minute I opened my mouth. Mom, they told me what it’s like down there. And I saw them come out last time.”

May said, “Isn’t there some way without having to actually walk into the reservoir?”

“Sure,” Dortmunder told her. “Wally’s got a million ways. Giant magnets. Evaporate the water with lasers. Of course, the best is the spaceship from Zog.”

“Not Wally’s ideas,” May said patiently, “and not his computer’s ideas either. Your ideas.”

“My idea,” Dortmunder told her, “is to stay out of that reservoir. May, come away from here.” Twisting around again, he glared out the window at that far-off gray wall in the hills. “He’ll do it in a week,” he said. “Less. You can’t change it.”

The wall seemed to shiver and bulge in the distance. Dortmunder could feel the water pressing on him, all around, black, heavy, holding him pinned like a straitjacket. A mad thought crossed his brain like heat lightning: steal two thousand BCDs, distribute them to everybody in the valley; people, buoyant, floating through the flood.

He turned back to the room. “May, I can’t go in that water.”

“And I can’t leave here,” she said.

Dortmunder sighed, one last time. “I’ll talk to Tom,” he said. “I don’t know what I’ll say, but I’ll talk to him.”

FORTY-EIGHT

Tom Jimson was not an easy guy to get hold of. The phone number he’d given May as a contact was a saloon in Brooklyn with a bartender who at first had no desire to be cooperative. “Never heard of the guy,” he said.

“You’re very lucky,” Dortmunder told him. “Look around under the tables there, see if you find somebody rolling a corpse. That’ll be Tom.”

The bartender thought that over for a second or two, then said, “You a friend of his?”

Dortmunder responded with a hollow laugh.

“Okay,” the bartender said. “I guess you’re all right. Gimme your name and number. If anybody called Tom Jimson comes in, I’ll pass along the message.”

“Tell him it’s urgent,” Dortmunder said.

This time it was the bartender who gave the hollow laugh, saying, “I thought you knew this Jimson guy.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Dortmunder agreed gloomily.

For the next day and a half, Dortmunder hung around the apartment, not wanting to miss the call, trying to convince himself Tom hadn’t had time already to put together his string and collect his dynamite and his all-terrain vehicle and head north. Not enough time. He couldn’t have done it yet.

Stan Murch and Tiny Bulcher and Andy Kelp phoned from time to time, or dropped by, to see how things were going. “I can’t talk,” Dortmunder explained to Kelp over the phone at one point. “I don’t want Tom to get a busy signal when he calls.”

“I been telling you, John,” Kelp said. “You need call-waiting.”

“No, Andy.”

“And a cellular phone you can carry with you, so you can leave the house.”

“No, I don’t, Andy.”

“And a kitchen extension. I could—”

“Leave me alone, Andy,” Dortmunder said, and hung up.

Finally, late on the second day, Tom called, sounding very far away. “Where are you?” Dortmunder asked, imagining Tom in North Dudson, just off the Thruway exit.

“On the phone,” Tom answered. “It’s up to you, Al, to tell me why I’m on the phone.”

“Well, uhhhh, Tom,” Dortmunder said, and listened to hear what he would have to say next, and didn’t hear anything at all.

“Hello? Is this line dead?”

“No, Tom,” Dortmunder said. “I’m here.”

“You’re gonna be all alone there in a second, Al,” Tom warned him. “I got a lot of—Goddamn it!” he suddenly shouted, apparently turning away from the phone to yell at somebody else at wherever he was. Raucous voices were heard in the background, and then Tom’s voice, still aimed away from the phone, snarling, “Because I say so, snowbird! Just sit there till I’m off the phone!” Then, louder again in Dortmunder’s ear, “Al? You still there?”

“Oh, sure,” Dortmunder said. “Tom, uh, is that your, uh, have you got your guys to help on the—”

“Well, naturally, Al,” Tom said, sounding jaunty. “And we’re all kinda anxious to get going, you know. In fact, I’m having a tiny discipline problem at the moment with this one nose jockey here. So if you could just go ahead and spit it out, you know, we could get on the road.”

“Well, the thing is, Tom,” Dortmunder said, gripping the phone hard, willing himself to keep talking whether he had anything to say or not, “the thing is, I’ve been sort of regretting how I gave up on that, uh, reservoir job. I mean, you know me, Tom, I’m not a quitter.”

“Lotta water there, Al,” Tom said, sounding almost sympathetic; for him, that is. “Too much water to get through, you were right about that. No sweat, no problem, nothing for you to feel bad about. Cost me a couple months, but that’s okay, it was kinda interesting watching you and your pals at work.”

“Well, the thing is, Tom—”

“But now, Al, now I gotta do it right. Mexico’s calling, Al.”

“Tom, I want to—”

But Tom was off again, yelling at his companion or companions. Dortmunder waited it out, licking his lips, grasping the phone, and when Tom finally finished with his discipline problem, Dortmunder said, very quickly, “Tom, you know May. She moved up there, to Dudson Center. She’s gonna stay there.”

Was that a mistake? Maybe I shouldn’t have let him know I had a personal stake in the situation. Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it?

Tom, after the briefest of pauses, said, “Well, well. Putting the pressure on you, eh, is she, Al?”

“Kind of,” Dortmunder admitted. It was a mistake.

“You know, Al,” Tom said, “I got a philosophy that maybe might help you at this time.”

“You do?”

“That’s right. There’s more than one woman in this world, Al, but there’s only one you.”

A bad mistake. “Tom,” Dortmunder said, “I really want to make one more try. Just bear with me once more, don’t blow the dam—”

“On accounta May.” Tom’s voice was always icy cold, but somehow right now it sounded even colder.

“On account of,” Dortmunder told him, “my professional, uh, pride is at stake here. I don’t want to be defeated by the problem. Also, you said yourself, you’d be happier without the massive manhunt.”

“That’s true, Al,” Tom said, still with that absolute-zero voice. “But let us say, just for argument, Al, just let us say I’m gonna go ahead and get this over with. And let us say you can’t, no matter what you do, you just can’t yank that woman of yours out from in front of the dam. Now, Al, just for the sake of argument here, would you find yourself tempted to make a little anonymous phone call to the law?”

Dortmunder’s hand, slippery with sweat, trembled on the phone. “I’d hate to have to face that problem, Tom,” he said. “And I just think there’s still a way we can do the job without the, uh, fuss.”

“Uh-huh. Hold it, Al.”

Dortmunder waited, listening. Thunk of phone onto a hard surface. Voices off, raised in anger. Sudden crashing of furniture, heavy objects—bodies? — thudding and bumping. Silence, just as sudden.

“Al? You there?”

“I’m here, Tom.”

“I think I must be slowing down,” Tom said. “Okay, I see your problem, Al.”

“That’s why I want to—”

“And I see my problem.”

Dortmunder waited, breathing through his mouth. I’m his problem, he thought. In the background, at Tom’s end of the line, whining voices complained.

His own voice now like thin sharp wires, Tom said, “Maybe we ought to have a talk, Al, you and me. Maybe you ought to come here.”

I have to talk him out of it, Dortmunder thought. Somehow. Knowing exactly what Tom had in mind, he said, “Sure, Tom, that’s a good idea.”

“I’m on Thirteenth Street,” Tom said.

Well, that was appropriate. “Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

“Off Avenue C.”

“Rough neighborhood, that,” Dortmunder suggested.

“Oh, yeah?” Tom said, as though he hadn’t noticed. “Anyway, between C and D. Four-ninety-nine East Thirteenth Street.”

“Which bell do I ring?”

Tom chuckled, like ice cubes rattling. “There’s no locks around here anymore, Al,” he said. “You just come in, come up to the top floor. We’ll have a good long talk, just you and me.”

“Right, Tom,” Dortmunder said, through dry lips. “See you—koff, kah—see you soon.”

FORTY-NINE

Dortmunder plodded up black slate stairs, his left hand on the rough iron railing, right hand clutching a two-foot-long chunk of two-by-three he’d picked up from a dumpster on the street a couple blocks from here. Not for Tom, but for whomever he might meet along the way.

Which was, so far, nobody. Scurrying sounds preceded him up the stairwell, scuffling noises followed, but no one actually appeared as Dortmunder slogged steadily upward through a building that any World-War-II-in-Europe movie could have been shot in, if nobody stole the camera. Great bites had been taken out of the plaster walls, leaving dirty crumbly white wounds in the gray-green skin. At every level the corridor windows, fore and aft, were mostly broken out, some leaving jagged glass teeth, others patched with six-pack cardboard and masking tape. The white hexagonal tile floors had apparently been systematically beaten with sledge hammers over a period of many months, then smeared with body fluids and sprinkled with medical waste. That the bare light bulbs dangling from the corridor ceilings had once been enclosed in white glass globes was indicated by the amount of white ground glass mixed with the rest of the trash on the floors.

The apartment doors were dented metal, some painted brown, some gray, many without knobs or locks. From the cooking smells emerging through these sprung doorways, most of the tenants planned to have rat for lunch. Rounding the turn at the third floor, Dortmunder heard a baby wailing from some apartment nearby and nodded, muttering, “You’re right about that, kid.” Then he thumped on up.

The building was six stories high, the maximum height when it was thrown up for a building without an elevator. The stairwell, a square shaft cored from its gangrenous center, consisted of two half-flights per story; up to a landing, double back to the next floor. Dortmunder was just rounding the turn at floor five and a half when a sudden fusillade of gunfire roared out above him. “Yi!” he cried, and dropped to the filthy steps, shielding his head with the two-by-three. Wasn’t Tom even going to give him a minute to talk?

The gunfire went on for a few more seconds, then faltered; then there was a scream; then a sudden new rattle of shots. Dortmunder peeked up past the two-by-three but could see nothing except steps and the stairwell wall.

The silence stretched, covering the entire neighborhood; nobody’s home when the guns start banging. Then there was the clear sound of a metal door slammed open against a plaster wall, and an irritated voice that was recognizably Tom’s said, “Assholes. Now see what you made me do.”

Footsteps clattered down the stairs. Dortmunder got his feet under himself, rose quickly upward, and blinked at Tom as the older man reached the landing, right in front of him, concentrating on the fresh clip he was sliding into the butt of the blue-steel.45 automatic held loosely in his right hand.

Dortmunder stared at the automatic, and Tom looked up, saw him, and stopped, his eyes alight with the adrenaline of battle. They stood facing each other on the landing, Dortmunder squeezing the two-by-three in his hand, Tom lifting one eyebrow, silence all around them.

Then Tom relaxed and moved, tension gone as he tucked the automatic away inside his clothing. Casually, he said, “Whadaya say, Al? Glad you could make it.”

“I come right over,” Dortmunder said. His hands and throat were still clenched.

Tom glanced down at the two-by-three. Conversationally, he said, “What’s that for, Al?”

Dortmunder gestured vaguely with it, indicating the building. “People.”

“Hm.” Tom nodded. “You better hope nobody needs a piece a wood,” he said. “Come on, let’s get outta here.”

Dortmunder couldn’t resist looking up the stairs. “Your new partners?”

“I had to let them go. Come on, Al.” Tom started down the stairs and Dortmunder followed, not looking back anymore.

As they descended, Tom said, “The quality of help these days, Al, it’s a real scandal.”

“I guess it is,” Dortmunder agreed.

“You and your pals,” Tom went on, “seem to have a little trouble closing with the problem, but at least you’re steady and reliable.”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

“You don’t put anything in your nose except your finger.”

“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

“And nothing at all in your veins.”

“My blood and me,” Dortmunder said as they reached the ground floor and headed toward the smashed defense of the front door, “have an agreement. It does its job, and I don’t pester it.”

“You got it in a nutshell, Al,” Tom said as they stepped out to sunlight that, in this neighborhood, looked like an error. “Don’t second-guess your body, that’s what it comes down to. Those former associates of mine, upstairs, they didn’t understand that. They messed themselves around so much they got it into their heads, since they knew where the reservoir was, they didn’t need me anymore.” Tom’s laugh had an edge to it, like a church bell during the plague. “Lost touch with reality, that’s what they did.”

“I guess so.” Dortmunder looked up toward the top-floor windows of this moldering pile. “Was it their apartment?”

“It is now,” Tom said, and shrugged away all previous associations, turning to Dortmunder on the sidewalk to say, “So you’ve got a new plan, huh?”

“Well, no,” Dortmunder said.

Tom lowered an eyebrow in Dortmunder’s direction. Away from him, it was easy to forget how tall he was, and how bony. “You don’t have a plan?”

“Not yet,” Dortmunder explained. “I wanted to be sure you’d go along with me before I got into any—”

“Al, I’ll tell you the truth,” Tom said. “I’m disappointed.”

“I’m sorry, Tom.”

“You’re right to be. Here I thought your love for a good woman had inspired you to come up with a really first-class notion, and everything was gonna be fine.”

“Everything is, Tom,” Dortmunder assured him. “Now that—”

“I might not have been quite so dismissive of those three fellas upstairs,” Tom went on, “if I’d known you were just blowing smoke.”

“I’m not blowing— Three fellas?” And one old seventy-year-old made of iron bars and antifreeze.

“That’s how many I figured I needed,” Tom said. “Two to carry the dynamite and get blown up with it, one to drive the backhoe and do the work down in Putkin’s Corners.”

“And be left there,” Dortmunder suggested.

Tom’s lips seemed actually to stretch, as though he might be smiling somewhere deep inside. “You know me so well, Al,” he said. But then the ghost smile disappeared, and he said, “And that’s why I’m so surprised you’d come to me empty-handed this way.”

“Not empty-handed,” Dortmunder said. “I’m going to—”

“Yeah, come to think of it,” Tom said, “maybe you should throw that stick away. Those sirens I hear are getting closer.”

Dortmunder had been too distracted by Tom to pay attention to the outer world, but now he did hear that, yes, there were sirens approaching. Fast. From not very far away. “Right,” he said, and tossed the two-by-three into the gutter.

“Let’s take a walk,” Tom said, “since I’m carrying a gun those cops would take a great interest in, and while we walk you can tell me your ideas, and we can discuss where I’m gonna live now.”

They started walking toward Avenue C. Dortmunder said, “Where you’re gonna live?”

Ahead, the first police car came screaming around the corner. “My previous place,” Tom explained, “isn’t gonna be available for a while.”

Dortmunder looked around to watch the police car brake to a stop at Tom’s former address. Cops piled out of it while two more police cars joined the party, one of them coming the wrong way down this one-way street. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”

“This place where May is,” Tom said, “up in Dudson Center. Lotta room there?”

“She says the most she ever had,” Dortmunder said, knowing what was coming but seeing no way out.

“Probably reassure her to have me there where she could see me,” Tom suggested. “Keep an eye on me. Know I’m not blowing the dam when I’m in front of it myself.”

“Probably so,” Dortmunder said.

“Yeah,” Tom said, nodding to himself as they turned the corner away from the scene of excitement. “She’ll probably be glad to see me, in fact, May. Happy to have me around.”

“Probably so,” Dortmunder said.

FIFTY

“I do like you to touch me,” Myrtle told Doug Berry, pushing him away. “And that’s exactly why I shouldn’t let you.”

“That makes no sense at all,” Doug said, continuing to crowd her.

“It makes sense to me,” Myrtle told him, scrinching as far over on the pickup’s seat as possible, keeping her arms folded over her chest as she determinedly gazed out through the windshield at the big outdoor movie screen where Dumbo teetered on a tree branch. “Watch the movie,” she said. “You said you’d never been to a drive-in before, so here we are, so watch the movie.”

“At a drive-in? Myrtle,” Doug said, keeping his hands to himself at last, “you’re driving me crazy.”

Well, if that was true, Myrtle thought, then they were even, because Doug Berry was certainly driving her crazy. Not in the same way, of course; not sexually, or romantically. Though Doug was certainly sexy, and he kept doing his best to be romantic, and if everything else had been okay who knew what might happen?

But everything else was not okay. Everything else wasn’t okay because Doug Berry was a fake, and up to something, and it more than likely had something to do with her father, and she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what it was.

But that he was a fake went without question. When he’d first come to the library, she’d accepted his story about his researches without question, but when he’d suddenly stopped looking at the old microfilm three years before his alleged range of interest was finished, and when he’d suddenly switched to the present day with no explanation, she’d begun to suspect something was wrong. But what?

Lunch with him, at her instigation, had revealed nothing more than that he was fun and flirty and that he wanted to see her again, which was nice, but not enough. That first evening, on her own time, she’d gone through the microfilm of the year when Doug had stopped, the year he’d obviously found whatever he was really looking for, and when she’d come to the armored car robbery out on the Thruway all the pieces had come together. That robbery was almost certainly another of the “jobs” her criminal father had “pulled” before he’d been sent to prison for a different “job” several years later, and Doug Berry was almost certainly on the elder Jimson’s “trail” for some reason. It was a good thing she’d resisted the urge to use the Jimson “moniker” with Doug, as she had—frightening and thrilling herself—with nice little Wally Knurr. (It was television, of course, that had given Myrtle this easy familiarity with criminal argot.)

Suspicions aroused, and fearing at first that Doug might actually be an undercover policeman of some sort, hounding her father like Javert (which would be why he’d asked about the state trooper, Jimmy), Myrtle had looked up the Environment Protection Alliance, the so-called organization Doug was supposedly doing research for, and of course there was no such thing. (The VDT at the library, now that Wally Knurr had made its mysteries plain to her, had been a great help in this study of the Doug Berry problem.)

So he was a fake; some sort of fake, specifics not yet known. His real name was Doug Berry, however, because it said so on the credit card he’d used the first time he’d taken her out to dinner, which was the second time they’d met, now being the third time, at this drive-in movie south of North Dudson, one of the few such enterprises still extant in America. Doug Berry was his name, and this ridiculously childish pickup truck with the offensively childish bumper sticker about divers on the back had a license plate from Suffolk County down on Long Island. The Suffolk County phone book in the library not only listed a Berry Doug but even gave a second business phone number for him which, when she’d dialed it, had produced an answering machine speaking identifiably with Doug’s voice:

“South Shore Dive Shop. Sorry we’re not open now. Our usual hours are Thursday through Sunday, ten to five. Licensed professional instruction, basic and advanced courses. Dive equipment for sale or rent, air refills, tank tests, all your diving needs under one roof. Hope to see you!”

What did a diving instructor from Long Island have to do with retired (presumably) criminal and former “jailbird” Tom Jimson? That Doug’s initial request for information at the library had been connected to the local reservoir had to have some significance—reservoir, water, diving—but Myrtle couldn’t begin to guess what it might be. One thing seemed sure, though; she should keep this connection to Doug Berry alive, without letting it get out of hand.

Or into hand, rather.

And so tonight’s visit to the drive-in; their third meeting, without either of them getting anywhere. Myrtle knew Doug was feeling frustrated, but doggone it, so was she. Her natural tendency would be to find this handsome and easy-going fellow irresistible, but how could she fall into his arms unless she knew whose side he was on? What if he were, in one way or another, her father’s enemy? (On the other hand, he could conceivably be on her father’s side, in which case falling into his arms would be a double pleasure. He might even—remote hope—be the means by which she could actually get to meet her father at last.)

Her researches had done no more than show that Doug Berry was not who he’d claimed; they couldn’t go farther, couldn’t describe who or what he really was. It kept seeming to Myrtle that some sort of subtle indirect questioning during these dates should give her the clues she needed to find out what was going on, but she just couldn’t seem to think what those subtle and indirect questions might be. People in the movies and on television always come up with the appropriate delicate probe, but—

Whoops. Speaking of delicate probes. “Come on, Doug,” Myrtle said, putting his hand back in his own lap.

Doug sighed, elaborately long-suffering.

I wish I knew how to get in touch with Wally Knurr, Myrtle thought. I bet he could help me figure out what’s going on. But except for that one day at the library when he’d opened the cornucopia of the VDT to her wondering eyes, she’d never seen Wally again. Probably a salesman of some kind, she thought, traveling around, maybe even selling computers or something like that. Will his sales route ever bring him back through North Dudson? And would he have any reason to return to the library?

“Doug, please.”

“Myrtle, please.”

“Watch the movie, Doug,” Myrtle urged him. “It’s a nice movie, isn’t it?”

“I never miss it,” Doug said bitterly.

FIFTY-ONE

Tom Jimson boarded the Amtrak train in Penn Station carrying the same small black leather bag he’d carried both to and from prison, the same bag that would be all he’d need to carry when at last he got his money and unloaded his latest partners and took that plane to Mexico. Sweet Mexico.

For now, though, he was going the other way. The criminal returns to the scene of his crime, he thought, and touched the tip of his tongue to his upper teeth behind his upper lip, a gesture he made whenever he amused himself with his interior monologue. (A man no one can trust is a man who can trust no one, and therefore is a man liable to take to the diversion of interior monologue.) He found a comfortable corner of four seats—two facing pairs—and settled in, ass in one seat, bag on a second, feet on a third, hand on a fourth. The train would have to get a lot more full than this midweek offpeak run was likely to before anybody would attempt to enter the principality Tom had carved out for himself.

Before the train started moving, a big lummoxy kid came along to take the seats across the aisle. About nine feet tall, with a big square head covered by wavy blond hair, he was probably twenty years old, and was dressed in huge clunky hiking boots, white tube socks, khaki shorts—his knees were enormous and knobby and covered with fuzz, like the rest of him—a T-shirt with some kind of stupid philosophical statement on it, a red headband, and a monster backpack looming higher than his head.

Tom watched with contemptuous interest as the kid undid all the straps that released the backpack, which then took up two seats all by itself. Glancing at Tom with the self-assurance of somebody who doesn’t know anything yet, the kid said, “Watch my bag?”

“Sure,” Tom said.

The kid went thumping away down the aisle, knees working like hand puppets, and Tom watched him go, then rose to give the backpack a quick efficient frisk. He transferred the two hundred dollars cash and the six hundred dollars in traveler’s checks and the illustrated Kama Sutra to his own black leather bag (which he never asked anyone to watch), but left the kid his dirty socks and the rest of his shit. Settled in his own four seats again, he got out his paperback of W. R. Burnett’s Dark Hazard and settled down.

A few minutes later the idiot came back, carrying a sandwich and a can of beer, and said, “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Tom told him, and went back to his book, and a few minutes later the train jerked forward.

Tom read while the train worked its way through the tunnels beneath midtown Manhattan, and he kept on reading when the train emerged into uptown and became an elevated and stopped at 125th Street, where nobody got on or off. Slum scenery became industrial scenery became, very gradually, countryside scenery, and Tom kept reading. He’d never been really big for nature.

It was nearly two hours, and Tom had almost finished the book—it wasn’t going to be a happy ending, he could see it coming—when at last the conductor’s voice came over the sound system, crying out, “Rhinecliff! Rhinecliff!”

Good. Tom put his book away, shut his bag—two straps and buckles, no zippers—and got to his feet. The schmuck across the aisle gave him a half salute and said, “Have a nice day.”

“Yeah, I will.”

Tom started away, but a devilish urge made him turn back and say, “You, too.” The kid’s fatuous grin was still all over his face as the train stopped and Tom found his exit.

“My Mom knows what you look like,” Stan Murch had assured him back in New York. “Besides, she’s probably the only lady cabdriver there, and the only one all the way from Dudson Center.”

“I’m not worried,” Tom had said, and there she was, no doubt about it, short and chunky, in a cloth cap and zipper jacket and corduroy pants, leaning with arms folded against a green and white car with its name on the door: TOWN TAXI.

She was shaking her head when Tom saw her, apparently arguing with another detrainer who’d wanted to hire her cab. As Tom approached, the frustrated customer raised his voice to say, “For Christ’s sake, aren’t you a taxi?”

“No,” Murch’s Mom told him. “I’m a Duane Hansen statue.”

Tom interposed himself between the statue and the detrainer, saying quietly, “Here I am.”

Murch’s Mom, as promised, did recognize him. “Fine,” she said. “Get in.” And she turned to open the driver’s door.

“Hey!” cried the non-customer as Tom opened the rear door. “I was here first!”

“Pay no attention to him,” Murch’s Mom said.

Of course not. Tom shrugged and started to get into the cab, but the non-customer crowded forward, pushing an attaché case ahead of himself into the space of the open door, blocking Tom’s way, continuing to yell and carry on. So Tom looked at him.

He wasn’t sure what it was exactly about this face of his, but usually when there was some sort of unnecessary trouble, if he just looked at the person making the disturbance, that was almost always enough to take care of the problem. What might be in his eyes or the set of his features to make it work that way Tom didn’t really know, nor did he really care; it did the job, that’s all.

And it did the job this time, too. Tom looked at the non-customer and the man stopped yelling. Then he blinked. Then he looked worried. Then he kind of pulled his jaw back in, trying to hide it behind his Adam’s apple. Then he got the attaché case out of Tom’s way. Then Tom got into the cab.

They were on the wrong side of the Hudson River here, the train tracks running up along its eastern bank, giving occasional beautiful views and vistas that could just as well be from before the European incursion into this continent, not that Tom had noticed, or cared. The Thruway, and the Vilburgtown Reservoir, and drowned Putkin’s Corners, and all the Dudsons living and dead, were over across the river in the main part of New York State.

It happens there’s a bridge across the Hudson right there at Rhinecliff. Steering across it, Murch’s Mom glanced in the rearview mirror at Tom, who had removed his book from his bag and was reading it. “Have a good ride up?” she asked.

Tom looked up from his book, catching Mom’s eye in the mirror. Marking his place in the book with his finger, he said, “Yeah, I did. And the weather’s nice this time of year. And I’m not hungry yet, thanks. And I haven’t been keeping up with the sports teams much lately. And I have no political opinions at all.” Lowering his eyes, he opened his book and went back to reading.

Murch’s Mom took a deep breath, but then held it awhile. With little white spots on her cheeks, she concentrated on the road ahead, looking for somebody to try to cut her off.

Nobody did, though, and Mom fumed in frustration for several minutes until, across the river and onto the Thruway, she saw out ahead of herself a car from Brooklyn, and all her rage transferred itself to that innocent vehicle. Why would anybody come here from Brooklyn, from home, if they didn’t have to?

The reason Mom knew that maroon 1975 Ford LTD was from Brooklyn was the license plate: 271 KVQ. The first letter in New York plates gives the county: Kings, in this case, which is Brooklyn. (Queens is Queens, and there’s no Jacks.)

The driver of the offending vehicle, a curly-haired young guy, was going along minding his own business when all of a sudden this Town Taxi came swooping out of nowhere, cut him off with micromillimeters to spare, and fishtailed away as though giving him the finger with its tailpipe. Apart from slamming on his brakes, clutching the wheel hard with both hands, and staring wide-eyed, he made no satisfactory reply to this opening remark, so Mom dawdled in the left lane until the other car had nearly caught up, then shot across the lanes again, shaving the distance from the Ford’s front bumper even closer than before. There! That’s for nothing! Now do something!

That was when the cold unemotional voice came from the cab’s backseat: “If that guy’s bothering you, I could take him out.”

Which brought Mom to her senses. “What guy?” she demanded, and floored the accelerator, taking everybody out of danger. Half an hour later, with no further incidents, she steered the cab up onto the driveway beside her new home and braked to a stop just shy of the chain-link fence. “This is it,” she announced.

Tom had finished Dark Hazard about eight miles back, and had spent the time since just sitting there, looking at the back of Mom’s head. (He knew this area, knew what it looked like, wasn’t curious about any changes that might have taken place around here of late, and sure wasn’t likely to be keeping an eye out for old friends.) Now he looked out at the house and said, “Fine. Looks pretty big.”

“It is.”

The cuteness that had bothered Dortmunder didn’t bother Tom because he didn’t notice it. Picking up his leather bag, he climbed out onto the gravel and shut the cab door.

Mom, giving him a sour look out the window (which he also didn’t notice), said, without joy, “See you at dinner.” And she backed out of the driveway, spraying gravel, and drove off to become a profit-making industry again.

Tom crossed to the porch, went up the stoop, and May opened the front door for him, saying, “Have a nice trip?” (She was determined to be pleasant, to behave as though Tom were a normal human being.)

“Yes,” Tom said. Then he grinned at May and said, “You got Al on the hop, all right.”

May’s face closed right up. “John doesn’t think of it that way,” she said.

“Good,” Tom told her, and looked around this little hallway. “Where do I bunk?”

“Top of the stairs, second door on your left. Your bathroom is right across the hall.”

“Okay.”

Tom went up and found a small neat sunny room with a view through two windows of the fenced-in back yard and the rears of the houses on Myrtle Street. The bed had been made (May, downstairs, regretted now having done that), with a set of fluffy pale blue towels folded atop it. The drawers in the tall old dresser were all empty, and were still nearly empty when Tom was done unpacking. Once his few clothes were put away, he placed his shaving and toilet gear atop the dresser and hung his old suit jacket in lonely splendor in the closet.

Finally, he salted the place. While certain other armaments remained in the false bottom of the leather bag, the others were distributed in his usual manner:.45 automatic duct-taped to the underside of the box spring, handy when lying in bed; spring knife rolled into a windowshade, so it would drop into his hand when he pulled the shade all the way down; tiny snub-barreled.22 duct-taped to the underside of the water closet lid in the neat old-fashioned bathroom.

There. Home sweet home.

FIFTY-TWO

When the doorbell rang, Wally reassured himself it was indeed John down at the street entrance before pushing the button to let him into the building, and then he hurried off to the kitchen to get the plate of cheese and crackers he’d had in readiness ever since thirty seconds after John’s phone call:

“You free this afternoon?”

“Oh, sure.”

“I thought I’d come over, uh, we could talk, uh, about things.”

“Oh, sure!”

“See you in a while.”

“Oh, sure!”

What could it be? Turning off the random-scream alarm, Wally wondered again for the thousandth time what John might want to come here to discuss. It had been so long since he’d heard from John, or from Andy, or from anybody, that he’d begun to wonder if maybe they’d gone ahead and finished their adventure without him.

Was that possible? What about the princess, the warlord’s daughter? He had only met the princess once; Myrtle Jimson, Wally could see her now in his mind’s eye, clear as anything, though in his imagination she did seem to be wearing a high lacy headdress and some sort of long gown out of King Arthur’s court. But he had rescued her from no one and nothing, in fact, and there’d been no follow-through at all. His relationships with the warlord and the soldier and the rest were barely into chapter one. Could it all have ended, just like that? Could the entire caravan have moved on, leaving him alone in this oasis?

His doubts had increased with the passage of time, even though the computer had constantly reassured him:

The story cannot end until the hero is satisfied.

Which was all well and good, assuming their postulates were correct.

What if I’m wrong? What if I’m not the hero?

Then there is no story.

Wally had begun to think that perhaps the computer didn’t entirely understand the way reality works, and seismic disturbances of disbelief had just begun to shake his compact little universe, when lo and behold, John phoned! Fortunately, computers don’t say, “I told you so.”

The upstairs bell rang, and Wally hurried to open it, surprised to see John by himself out there. Looking around the landing, Wally said, “Isn’t Andy with you?”

“Well, no,” John said. He seemed ill at ease, less sure of himself than usual. “It’s just me,” he said. “Andy doesn’t know about it. I come over to, uh, talk it over with you.”

“Come in, come in,” Wally urged him. “I’ve got cheese and crackers.”

“That’s nice,” John said neutrally, nodding at the plate on the coffee table.

Wally shut the door, gestured John to the comfortable chair, and said, “Would you like a beer?”

“As a matter of fact,” John said, “yes.”

“Gee, you know, I think I would, too,” Wally told him, and hurried to the kitchen to get two cans of beer. When he returned, John was seated in the chair Wally had indicated, gloomily eating cheese and crackers. Wally gave him his beer and sat alertly on the sofa, waiting.

John squinted through his eyebrows in Wally’s direction. For some reason, be seemed to be having trouble looking straight at him. “Well,” he said, “we’re still trying to get that box up out of the reservoir.”

“The treasure,” Wally said.

“Tom really wants that money,” John said.

“Well, sure, I guess he would,” Wally agreed.

“He wants to blow up the dam,” John said.

Wally nodded, considering that. “I guess that would work,” he said. “Only, how does he plan to channel the water?”

“He doesn’t,” John said.

Wally’s wet eyes widened: “But doesn’t he know about the towns? A lot of people live down there! John, we have to tell him about—”

“He knows,” John said.

Wally looked at John’s grim face. The warlord has no pity. Wally whispered, “Would Tom really do that?”

“He’d’ve done it already,” John said, “only I talked him into letting me have one more crack at it.”

Suddenly John did look straight at Wally, and in that instant Wally understood just how difficult it had been for John to come here to ask for help. That’s why he’s here, Wally thought, with a sudden thrill. He’s here to ask for help! To ask me for help! Wally blinked, his mouth sagging open at his sense of the importance of this moment.

John said, “May moved up there. Dudson Center. See, I quit, I couldn’t do it anymore, so that’s what she did.”

Horrified, Wally said, “Tom wouldn’t blow up the dam with Miss May there!”

“Tom would blow up the dam with the Virgin Mary there,” John said.

“Then we have to get that treasure!” Wally cried, bouncing around on the sofa in his agitation. “Before he does it!”

“That’s the situation,” John agreed. “And here’s the rest of the situation. Andy and I went down in that reservoir twice, and that’s twice too much. I can’t do it again. Just take my word for it, I can’t. So it has to be something else. There’s gotta be a way to get the money up out of there without me going down in there.”

Wally nodded, trying to think but still overcome by the wonder of it. John came to me! “But what?” he asked, caught up in the story.

“I don’t know,” John told him, putting his beer can down so he could actually wring his hands. “I thought and I thought and I thought, and I just don’t come up with a thing. I shot my bolt on this one, Wally, there’s nothing left. I’m not finding anything because I can’t get myself even to think about that place. And Tom won’t wait much longer.”

“No, I guess not.” Wally felt very solemn at this moment. John leaned toward him. “So here’s the idea.”

“Yes? Yes?” Wally’s damp face gleamed with excitement.

“Our half of the caper,” John explained, “the profit for everybody except Tom, is three hundred fifty grand.”

“That’s a lot!”

“Not when you start cutting it up,” John told him. “But it’s still some, and those of us in it split it even, all the way down. If we manage, that is, to keep Tom from double-crossing us and getting it all.”

Wally nodded. “He’d do that, wouldn’t he?”

“Nothing else would even occur to him,” John said. “Okay. The way it stands now, there’s four of us in it: Me, Andy Kelp, Tiny Bulcher, and a driver named Stan Murch that you don’t know.” John cleared his throat, hesitated, seemed on the point of flight, then blurted forward, saying, “You come up with the way, Wally, you’re a partner.”

“A partner? Me?”

“You,” John agreed. “That makes it seventy grand for each of us, including you.”

“Wow!”

“But you gotta come up with something,” John told him. “One of us has gotta come up with something, and I just don’t think it’s gonna be me. Not anymore.”

Wally, excitement bubbling in him like chocolate fudge just on the boil, jumped to his feet, saying, “Let’s see what the computer has to say!”

John looked displeased. “Do we have to?”

“The computer is very smart, John,” Wally said. “Let’s just see.”

So John shrugged, and they both went over to have a chat with the computer, Wally in his usual swivel chair, John standing beside him.

“First,” Wally said, “let’s bring up the model we did of the valley, with the reservoir in, and ask the computer to show us different ways to blow up the dam. Maybe in one of them, the water could be channeled down the valley away from all the towns and things.”

“I don’t see it,” John said.

“Let’s just find out.” Wally sent his little fat fingers flying over the keys, and up on the screen came a side view of the valley, heavy with rich blue, trailing away to green dotted with brown and black; the brown and black dots were towns.

John touched the screen over one of the brown dots. “That’s where May is.”

“Now we’ll see,” Wally said, and proceeded to drown Miss May and a lot of other people seven times in a row. Every single time, the blue area would at first tremble, and then it would spread and suddenly swell, obliterating every last one of the black and brown dots.

After the seventh time, John said, “No more, Wally, no more. I can’t take it.”

“You’re right,” Wally agreed. “There just isn’t any safe way to send all that water downstream. Not all at once.”

“That’s the way dynamite works, though,” John pointed out. “All at once.”

“Let me explain the situation to the computer once more,” Wally said, “and see if it comes up with anything new.”

“Just so we don’t have any more of that killer blue.”

So Wally asked his question, and after a brief pause the computer responded with its green-lettered series of suggestions, crawling slowly up the screen. Wally and John watched, neither saying a word until it was finished, and then John said, quietly, “This computer really has a thing for Zog, doesn’t it?”

Wally cleared his throat. “I don’t have the heart to tell it Zog isn’t real,” he admitted.

“Wally,” John said, “I don’t know that I’m getting anywhere here. I thought I’d come over and talk to a person, but I’m here talking to a machine that thinks a planet called Zog is a real place.”

“You’re right,” Wally said, abruptly ashamed of himself. He felt now as though he’d been using the computer for a crutch, that he was hiding behind it. John had come here for help, and Wally had run straight to his computer. That’s not the way to treat people, Wally told himself, and he reached out to hit the power button, shutting the computer down. Then, standing, turning, he said, “I’m sorry, John, that’s just a bad habit. I always talk things over with the computer. I don’t know why.”

“Yeah, I always talk things over with May,” John told him, “but there comes a time when you got to make your own decision.”

“I’m going to,” Wally said. The excitement he felt now was different from before, more tremulous and frightening. He was going to be on his own! In the real world! “Let’s talk it over some more, John,” he said, “just the two of us. Not the computer at all.”

“Good.”

So they sat around the cheese and crackers, ignoring them, and John told him about the way he and Andy had learned how to do underwater things from a fellow on Long Island, and how they’d tried once to walk into the reservoir and once to drive in, and how the reservoir almost drowned them both times, and all about the turbidity and the flotation power of Ping-Pong balls, and after about twenty minutes Wally said, “Gee, John, why don’t you ask that guy on Long Island?”

John blinked. “Ask him what?”

“He’s a professional diver, John,” Wally said. “And you told me you went to him because he already does some things that aren’t absolutely legal.”

John shrugged. “So?”

“So I realize,” Wally said, “that would mean there were six of us to share the money now, instead of five, but that would still be about sixty thousand dollars each, and—”

“Wait a minute wait a minute,” John said, rearing back. “Bring Doug aboard, you mean.”

“Is that his name? Yes, sure, bring Doug aboard. Wouldn’t he know how to go down into the reservoir and get the box?”

John looked at Wally without speaking for quite a long time. Then he sat back, shook his head, and said, “You know why I didn’t think of that?”

“Well, no,” Wally admitted.

“Because,” John said, “whatever it is I’m doing, I’m used to it I’m the one does it. I figure out how and I do it. I get people to help, but that’s help, that isn’t to do it instead of me.”

Wally wasn’t sure he understood. “Do you mean,” he asked carefully, “it would be like against your principles or something to have somebody else do things instead of you?”

“No, I don’t mean that,” John said. “I’m simply trying to explain to you why I’m as stupid as I am.”

“Oh,” Wally said.

“Why I could never think about anybody going down into that goddamn water except me,” John went on, “and I knew damn well it wasn’t about to be me, not again, so that’s why I was stymied.”

“I see,” Wally said.

“But you took one look,” John told him, “once you got out from behind that machine of yours, you took one look at what I couldn’t see at all, and you said it’s obvious. And it is.”

Wally wasn’t sure exactly how far he was supposed to go in agreement with John’s self-insults, so he made a quick defensive move, shoving cheese and cracker in his mouth so he wouldn’t be able to do anything but nod and say, “Mm. Mm.”

Which was apparently enough. John sat back, his whole body a study in looseness and relief. Pointing over at the computer, he said, “Sell that thing, Wally. You don’t need it.”

FIFTY-THREE

“South Shore Dive Shop. Sorry we’re not open now. Our usual hours are Thursday through Sunday, ten to five. Licensed professional instruction, basic and advanced courses. Dive equipment for sale or rent, air refills, tank tests, all your diving needs under one roof. Hope to see you!”

Everybody in May’s new living room watched Dortmunder’s face as he listened yet again to that goddamn irrelevant infuriating long announcement. At the end, he snarled savagely into the phone, “Don’t you ever listen to your messages? You’re worse than Andy.”

“Aw, come on,” Kelp said from his perch on the sofa arm, beside May.

Ignoring him, Dortmunder told the phone, “This is John again. Call me, dammit. I’ve been out to your place, you’re never there. Time’s running out.”

“And that’s no lie,” Tom said happily, seated primly on the wooden chair in the corner that had become his favorite waiting place. Murch’s Mom gave him a dirty look, which he seemed not to notice.

Laboriously, Dortmunder stated May’s new phone number into Doug Berry’s machine, area code and all, then said, “Call collect, if you want, dammit. Just call. We’ve been trying to reach you for three days now.” And he slammed down the phone.

In the ensuing silence, Dortmunder, Kelp, May, Stan Murch, and Murch’s Mom—everybody but Tom—all sat or stood in the living room, thinking the same furious thought: Where is that waterlogged jerk?

FIFTY-FOUR

How the old glider groaned under their weight! Or was that Doug, moaning as he nuzzled his nose down into the softness at the side of her throat, his lips caressing the pulse that beat so wildly there? Or was it—good heavens! — herself, losing control, giving in to the sensations, the warmth flooding her body from his lips, his tongue, his hands, his body pressed to hers as they half reclined here?

The glider swayed on the front porch in bright daylight, moving rhythmically and suggestively with their movements, and when Myrtle opened her eyes, looking past his ear, past his wavy blond hair, her vision blurred and she could barely see Myrtle Street and the houses across the way and the glimpses beyond them of the houses fronting on Oak Street far away. The glider swayed in the somnolent day, no traffic at all moved on the street, and Myrtle felt again the flutter of a faint moan rise up through her throat, past his warm mouth, out her own trembling lips.

But this was supposed to be safe! Broad daylight! She had nothing to fear, she’d been sure of that, just sitting with him on this front porch in the middle of the day, in front of the world, with the sun beaming down. That’s why she’d agreed.

Suggested. Ohhhhhhhh…

Edna isn’t home.

The house loomed empty behind them. “Myrtle,” he murmured, lips moving against her throat, “Myrtle, Myrtle, Myrtle…”

She closed her eyes. The heat rose from them, rose around them, surrounded them like a sauna, an invisible ball with them inside, steaming. The strength flowed away, out of her shoulders and arms, out of her knees and legs, concentrating in her belly. Her head lolled against the silkiness of his hair, unable to sustain its own weight. Her breath flowed like jasmine through her parted mouth, her lips were swollen and red, her eyelids heavy.

“Doug…”

No. That was supposed to have been a warning, a protest, a command to them both to stop, but she could hear herself how it had come out wrong, how the syllable had stretched, had become languorous and welcoming, had beckoned him on instead of pushing him away. She was afraid to speak again, to say anything else, afraid her voice would betray her once more. But if she said nothing, did nothing, he’d just continue, his mouth, his hands…

“Myrtle, say yes.”

“Doug…”

“Say yes.”

“Doug…”

“Say yes.”

“Ououououououououghhh…”

“Say yesssssssssss…”

“Yesssssssssss…”

He was up on his feet, holding her hand in his, drawing her up beside him. His smile was gentle and loving, his body so strong. “Yes,” he said, and turned them both toward the front door.

“There you are, Doug, goddammit!”

They spun around, and Myrtle’s heart leaped with fear. An extremely angry man, a stranger, stood at the top of the stoop, glaring at Doug.

Who knew him. “John!” he cried in absolute stunned astonishment.

“I hate your answering machine, Doug,” the angry man said. “I just want you to know that. I have a deep personal dislike for that answering machine of yours, and if I’m ever near it with a baseball bat in my hands, that’s it.”

“John, I, I, I…”

What is going on? But Myrtle couldn’t even ask the question, could only stand there, romance forgotten, her body forgotten, and stare from Doug’s ashen amazed face to the other man’s darker angrier unloving face.

“Never mind, ‘I, I, I,’ ” said this unloving face, and the man made a quick impatient sweeping gesture like a traffic cop. “Come on. We gotta talk.”

“John, I— Now? John, I can’t, I—”

“Yes, now! What’s so goddamn important that you can’t—”

“John, will ya?”

Oh! Face burning, Myrtle pulled her hand free from Doug’s, turned blindly, groped for the door, pulled it open, and flung herself into the house as behind her Doug said to the angry man, “John, I’ll never forgive you for this in my entire—”

Slam. Tottering, weaving, Myrtle staggered to the living room and dropped into the nearest chair. Through the front windows she could see them out there, both gesturing, the angry man not letting up, Doug finally assenting, shrugging, shaking his head, turning for one last lost look at the front door—Oh, Doug, how could you? How could you let us be interrupted, let that moment be broken? — before, with obvious reluctance, he followed the angry man off the stoop and across Myrtle Street and up the Fleischbacker’s driveway over there and on out of sight.

It wasn’t until twenty minutes later, when she was calmer, when she’d already had one cup of tea and was sipping a second, when she was already remembering that her involvement with Doug in the first place was because he was a mystery she was trying to solve, that the thought suddenly came to her:

I’ve seen that man somewhere before.

FIFTY-FIVE

Doug basically felt like a person with the bends. He’d never himself had the bends, having always been a careful and professional diver, but the condition had been described to him, and the description fit his current condition to a tee: nausea, anxiety, disorientation, physical pain. That was him, all right.

And to think how happy he’d been just instants before, in the arms of Myrtle Street, rounding the far turn and galloping for home at long, long last. What a wonderful distraction Myrtle had been from his search for John and Andy, from his watch on the Vilburgtown Reservoir; as an excuse to keep visiting Dudson Center she couldn’t be improved on.

In some ways, the pursuit of Myrtle Street had become as important to Doug as his pursuit of John and Andy and the seven hundred thousand dollars from the armored car robbery. And then, just as the one pursuit seemed to be coming to its warm and beautiful and successful close, the other pursuit had made a totally unexpected about-face, the pursued had become the pursuer, and at the worst possible moment in the history of the world, there was John!

Looking back on it all afterward, Doug recalled that traumatic day only in quick bytes, short periods of lucidity floating in a dark menacing swirl of queasiness and panic. And beginning with a living room full of people, men and women, all of them strangers to him except John and Andy, and all of them for some reason very angry with him.

Particularly one mean-looking old guy in a chair in a corner. While everybody else was still shouting, this guy kept saying, quietly and dispassionately, “Kill him.”

Kill him? Kill me? Doug stared around at all these cold faces, swallowing compulsively, afraid that if he threw up it would only give them more reason to kill him.

It was Andy who responded to the mean old guy first, saying, “I almost agree with you this time, Tom.”

Oh, Andy! Doug cried in his mind, but he was too frightened and sick to say anything out loud, not even to save his life. Andy, Andy, Andy, he cried inside himself, I taught you to dive!

But John was saying, “We need him, Tom,” and thank God for that. Even though John didn’t sound at all happy to have to say it; no, nor did he sound entirely convinced that what he was saying was true.

And the mean old guy—Tom—said, “What’s he doing up in this neck of the woods? Long Island boy. He followed you, John, you and Andy. He’s on to the caper. He wants the dough for himself.”

Teeth chattering, Doug found voice at last, saying, “I, I, I, I got a girlfriend, she’s M-M-Myrtle St-St-Street.”

“That’s the next block over,” said a short blunt angry woman in a flannel shirt.

“No-no-no,” Doug stammered, “that’s her, that’s her—”

“His girlfriend can put flowers on his grave,” Tom said. Then he smiled very unpleasantly at Doug and said to the others, “He’s a diver, right? Let’s take him to the reservoir, see how he dives with weights around his neck.”

“We need him to get the money,” John said.

“I don’t,” Tom said.

The other woman in the room, taller, calmer, said, “Tom, you’re letting John do it his way, remember?”

Tom shrugged. “You like this diver?” he asked John. “You want this diver in our lives?”

The other fellow present, a red-haired jaunty guy who looked as though he’d be an excellent street fighter, said, “Let’s see if he likes the deal. Make him the offer, John.”

Offer? “I accept!” Doug cried.

They all stared at him, too surprised to be mad; even Tom looked nearly human for a second. Andy, nodding, said, “That’s what I call low sales resistance.”

John, sounding almost sympathetic, said, “Listen to the offer first, Doug.”

“Okay,” Doug said. He still had to keep swallowing, and pinwheels had started to dance in his peripheral vision. But he would listen to the offer first, if that’s what he was supposed to do. Listen to the offer first.

“You know what we’re going for in the reservoir,” John said.

Panic again! “Oh! Well, uh—”

“We know you know,” John told him, sounding more irritable. “Don’t waste our time.”

“Okay,” Doug said. “Okay.”

“Okay. So here’s the story.”

Then John made the offer, something about this and that, and percentages, and diving, and Doug nodded all the way through the whole thing, and when John finally stopped talking and looked at him for a reaction, he smiled big at everybody in the room, smiling through his nausea, and he said, “Okay. Fine. I agree. It’s a deal. Where do I sign? Sounds fair to me. Hey, no problem. I’m with you. By all means. Sure! With pleasure. What’s to argue? Shake on it! You got a—”

“Oh, shut up,” said the short woman in the flannel shirt.

Then there was the drive to the city. The red-haired guy, whose name turned out to be Stan, drove Doug’s pickup, with Doug as his passenger, following Andy and John down the Thruway in a Cadillac Sedan da Fe with MD plates. (“Listen, I can drive,” Doug had said, but, “No, you can’t,” John had told him, so that was that.) Before leaving the house on Oak Street, a phone call had been made to somebody called Wally, and now they were all going to the city for this Wally to show Doug something. Sure; whatever you guys say.

Along the way, Doug tried to befriend this guy Stan, but it didn’t work out too well. His opening gambit was, “You know John and Andy a long time?”

“Uh-huh,” said Stan. He drove with both hands on the wheel, both eyes on the road.

“I just met them,” Doug said. “Recently. I taught them how to dive.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I could, uh, teach you to dive, too, Stan, if you want. You know, a pal of John and Andy, I wouldn’t charge you any—”

“Did you ever,” Stan interrupted, “see a three-sixty?”

Doug looked at Stan’s expressionless profile. “A what?”

“A three-sixty.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Doug admitted, little flutters of panic starting up again in his stomach.

“No?” Stan nodded. “I’ll show you,” he said, and suddenly floored the accelerator, and the pickup flashed past the MD Cadillac into an empty bit of highway, traffic ahead and behind but none right here, and then Stan flicked the steering wheel left, yanked it right, simultaneously did something fast and tricky with brake and clutch and accelerator, and the pickup spun all the way around in a circle in the middle of the road—still going sixty miles an hour toward New York—wound up facing south again, shivered once, and drove on.

Doug wasn’t breathing. His mouth was open, but he just wasn’t breathing. He’d seen an entire sweep of the outside world flash past the windshield—the grassy center strip, the road behind them with the Cadillac in it, the forest beside the road, and then the proper road again—in just about a second; too fast to panic during it, so Doug was going all to pieces after it.

Stan the driver, without speaking, slowed the pickup and let the Cadillac pass. Andy, driving that other car, grinned and waved at Stan, who nodded with dignity back. And Doug hadn’t breathed yet.

Finally he did, a long raspy vocal intake of breath that hurt all the way down. And then at last Stan spoke. “That was a three-sixty,” he said. “You talk to me some more, I’ll show you some other stuff I know.”

Doug kept very quiet the rest of the way to the city.

Wally turned out to be some sort of freak of nature, short and fat and moist. The only good thing you could say for him was that he didn’t seem to be mad at Doug for any reason. He even welcomed Doug to his weird apartment—it looked like an appliance repair shop—with an eager smile and a damp handshake, as he said, “You want some cheese and crackers?”

“Uh,” Doug answered, not sure the others would permit.

No, they wouldn’t. “No time, Wally,” John said. “Show him the model, okay?”

“Sure,” Wally said.

The “model” turned out not to be an actual toy train set kind of model at all, but a series of pictures on a television screen connected to a computer. Part of it was an animated movie, and much of that was pretty.

Doug stood there behind Wally, unaware of anything except the necessity to do what he was told: look at the model. After this, he’d be told something else to do, and he’d do it. He gazed at the screen, totally unaware of John, beside him, frowning at his profile. He was unaware of John finally shaking his head in irritation, raising one hand, and making a fist, with the knuckle of the middle finger extended. But he was very aware when John suddenly rapped him on the side of the skull with that knuckle.

Ow! That hurt! Doug flinched away, wide-eyed, staring at John, betrayed. He was doing what they wanted!

But John was dissatisfied. “You’re daydreaming,” he said. “You’re asleep here. Your eyes aren’t even in focus.”

“Sure they are! Sure they are!” In his renewed panic, Doug was only grateful that mean old Tom hadn’t come along. Surely, if he were present, he would right now renew his baying after Doug’s blood.

Not that the others were being pleasant. Andy, crowding in on Doug’s other side, said, “What’s Wally showed you so far?”

Doug gasped at him. “What?”

“What did you see on the computer?”

Doug groped for an answer. “The model!”

“Of what?”

Doug stared from cold face to cold face to wet face. Desperate, he blurted, “I didn’t know there was gonna be a test!”

John and Andy looked at each other as though trying to decide how best to dispose of the body. Between them, seated at his computer but twisted around to look up at Doug, Wally suddenly said, “Well, you know what it is; he’s in shock.”

John frowned at Wally. “He’s what?”

“In shock,” Wally repeated. “Look at his eyes. Feel his forehead, I bet it’s cold and wet.”

Andy pressed his palm to Doug’s forehead, made a yuk! face, and pulled his hand back. “Right you are,” he said, wiping his palm on his trouser leg.

Getting to his feet, taking Doug by the unresisting arm, Andy said, “Come on over here and sit down.”

Doug crossed obediently to the sofa and, at Wally’s urging, sat down. But then Wally said, “Bend down. Put your head between your knees.”

“Why?” Doug asked, febrile again. “What are you gonna do to me?”

“Nothing,” Wally assured him, gently pushing Doug’s head forward and down as he turned to say to the others, “What did you do to him?”

“Nothing,” Andy said, but he sounded defensive.

“Offered him sixty thousand dollars,” John said sulkily.

“Hardly anything,” Stan said.

Bent way over with his head between his knees, looking at the bolts, batteries, floppy disks, Allen wrenches, F-connectors, and other electric and electronic debris under the sofa, Doug felt oddly safe, as though he were in a cave, hidden and protected. He even felt brave enough to squeal on Stan. “Three-sixty,” he muttered.

Wally leaned down close; being Wally, he didn’t have to lean down very far to be close. He said, “What was that, Doug?”

“Three-sixty.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Stan said, “that wasn’t anything at all. That was just to amuse him.”

Sounding scientifically interested, Andy said, “Do you think that’s what put him in shock? When Stan popped the wheelie?”

“Tom,” muttered Doug.

Stan said, “What did he say?”

Wally was the translator: “He said, ‘Tom.’ ”

“Well, yeah,” Andy said. “There are times when Tom’s put me in shock, actually.”

“Myrtle,” Doug muttered.

“ ‘Myrtle,’ ” Wally translated.

“That’s the street where his girlfriend lives,” John explained.

“It’s her name,” Doug muttered, but Wally wasn’t listening this time, he was saying, “This poor fella’s had a whole lot of things happen. No wonder he’s in shock.”

John said, “How long till he starts tracking again?”

“Gee, I don’t know, John,” Wally said. “Till he gets over it, I guess.”

Doug rolled onto his side on the sofa, drew his knees up in fetal position, and closed his eyes. Not noticing him, the others kept talking. Soothing sounds. Very soothing. Surprising how soothing a soothing sound can be in its being soothing. Totally soothing.

Doug’s eyes opened. Time had passed. The room was darker. The room was empty.

Doug sat up, memory exploding in his mind like a fragmentation grenade. Myrtle. John. Angry living room. Spinning car. Television model. Soothing. And now: alone.

Alone. Even the cheese and crackers were gone. The door was over there. The apartment was silent.

Doug, pay attention. The door is over there.

Cautiously, he got to his feet, then to his toes. On tiptoe, silent as a moth in a sweater, he crossed the messy living room to the door, silently reached out to the knob, silently turned it, silently pulled the door open.

“Look out!” screamed a voice. “She’s got a knife!”

Doug shrieked and dropped to the floor.

“Goddamn mothuhfuckuh, Ah’m gone cut your mothuh fuckin BALLS off!”

Wally, startled from his dinner in the kitchen by the sudden sound of his scream alarm—haven’t heard the crazed woman with the knife for quite some time, he reflected—hurried into the living room to find the hall door wide open and Doug flat on his face on the floor. Wally crossed to Doug, tapped him on the shoulder, and Doug screamed and fainted.

Light. Voices. Doug, eyes squeezed shut, reoriented himself gradually into space and time, and on this try memory entered like a gamboling lamb, easy and sweet. He remembered everything, and even understood why he was lying on the floor. The only thing he was confused about was why he hadn’t been sliced into tiny ribbons by that crazed woman with the knife.

Don’t argue, Doug; just accept.

He rolled over onto his back, opened his eyes, squinted against the light, and sat up. And Andy’s voice said, “Here he is now. Sleeping Beauty.”

“Slipping Beauty,” said John.

Doug looked over toward the sofa and chair, and the usual four were there, gathered around the cheese and crackers: Wally, John, Andy, and Stan. The maniac woman was nowhere to be seen. “All right,” he said. “Okay. Enough.”

“I’ll go along with that,” John said. “You sane now?”

“I think so,” Doug told him. “And I’ll make a deal with you. I don’t know who that woman was, or what her problem is, or where she is now, but I’ll do whatever you want if you keep her away from me. I never want to see her again. Okay?”

They all looked at one another, as though baffled. Then they all shrugged at one another. Then John said, “It’s a deal.”

“Good,” Doug said, feeling vast relief. “Now I can do it. I’ll pay attention to the model, I’ll think about the salvage job—”

John said, “The what?”

“Salvage job,” Doug said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Bring up something from the bottom of the reservoir. That’s a salvage job.”

Andy, with a happy smile, said, “There, you see? A professional. As soon as you get the right guy, you got a vocabulary and everything.”

“I remember about salvage jobs,” John said, sounding irritated again. “From that book I got. Marine Salvage.”

“Great book,” Doug commented.

“You just mumbled when you said it, that’s all,” John told him. “So, okay, it’s a salvage job. So let’s get to it.”

So they got to it, and this time Doug could absorb the computer model, see how clever it was, and also see what some of the problems were going to be. At one point, he said, “How did you guys figure to find one little box buried somewhere in a field? What were you gonna do, dig up the whole field? Underwater?”

John, a little huffy, said, “We got a fix on the place from Tom. And we had a poker with us, to help find it.”

“Great,” Doug said ironically. Now that they were dealing with his area of expertise, he was losing the last remnants of panic and insecurity, was unconsciously becoming a little arrogant and dismissive. Shaking his head at John, he said to Wally, “How close a fix is this?”

Wally explained about the three streetlights that Tom had used to mark the location of the buried casket, and Doug said, “Can you give me an accurate reading on distance to the box from the back wall of the library?”

“Sure.”

John, a bit nastily, said, “What are you gonna do, pace it off when you get down there?”

“I’ll bring a line with me,” Doug told him, “the same length as the distance from the wall to the box. Okay?”

“Mrp,” John said, and stopped interrupting after that, so finally Doug could close with the problem.

At last, when Wally had shown him everything he had, Doug stepped back from the computer screen and said, “Okay. I got the picture now.”

Andy said, “And it can be done?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Andy said.

“But,” Doug said, “it can’t be done without a boat.”

“Gee, Doug,” Andy said. “That’s a reservoir, you know? No boating.”

Doug frowned at him. “I didn’t think you guys worried about laws that much.”

John said, “What Andy means is, we can’t be seen with a boat.”

Doug shrugged. “So we do it on a cloudy night. All we need is a small rubber boat with a little ten-hp motor.”

John said, “A motor? We shouldn’t be heard with a boat either.”

“You won’t hear it,” Doug promised him. “But the main thing is, we have to go in from above, and that means a boat.”

“Expensive,” John suggested.

Doug waved that away. “A couple thou. For the boat and the motor, I mean. Then there’ll be other stuff. Maybe four or five thou altogether.”

John nodded. “Well,” he said, “time to go tell Tom the good news. We need more money.”

FIFTY-SIX

“Goddammit, Tom,” Dortmunder said, strapping on the safety harness, “why didn’t you ever stash your goddamn money anywhere easy?”

“Easy places other people find,” Tom pointed out. He sat on the ground beside the coil of rope.

“What the hell were you doing in South Dakota anyway?” Dortmunder demanded. This whole thing made him mad.

“Robbing a bank,” Tom said. “You ready?”

“No,” Dortmunder said. “I’m never gonna be ready to step out into thin air from on top of a mountain.” Taking one cautious step out onto Lincoln’s forehead, he looked down, way down, at the tops of pine trees. The whole world was out there. “Somebody’s gonna see me,” he said.

“They’ll think you’re a ranger.”

“I don’t have the hat.”

“So they’ll think you’re a ranger that his hat blew off,” Tom said. “Come on, Al, let’s do it and get it over with. We gotta drive all the way back to Pierre, turn in the car, catch the plane.”

“Pierre,” Dortmunder said in disgust, studying Lincoln’s eyebrows. Would they provide handholds? “Who calls a city Pierre?”

“It’s their city, Al. Come on, will ya?”

So Dortmunder dropped to his haunches and slid forward out of Lincoln’s hair, his feet reaching for those bushy thick eyebrows. Behind him, Tom paid out the rope. “How the hell,” Dortmunder complained, “did you ever stash the stuff here in the first place?”

“I was a lot younger then, Al,” Tom told him. “A lot spryer.”

Dortmunder stopped to look back and say, “Young people aren’t spry. Old people are spry.”

“You’re stalling, Al.”

He was. Oh, well. His waggling feet found the eyebrows, he slid down farther, his legs straddled the bumpy nose.

He was now out of sight of Tom, in safety up there on top, calling down, “You there yet?”

“No!”

“It’s the left nostril.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Dortmunder slid off the nose, dangled briefly in space—the pitons they’d pounded into the ground up there damn well better hold—clutched a naris, and hauled himself in to Lincoln’s upper lip.

Left nostril. Jeez, it was like a cave in there, it was so big. Dortmunder inched up into the thing, standing on Lincoln’s lip, and saw the oilcloth-wrapped package tucked behind an irregularity of rock. Reaching for it, he dislodged a few pebbles, raised some dust. Inside Lincoln’s nostril, Dortmunder sneezed.

“God bless,” called Tom.

“Oh, shut up,” Dortmunder muttered inside the nostril. He grabbed the package and got out of that nose.

FIFTY-SEVEN

One Monday in June, the reservoir gang converged on 46 Oak Street in the peaceful upstate rural community of Dudson Center. Already in residence at the house were May Bellamy, Tom Jimson, and Murch’s Mom. Coming from Islip, Long Island (home of the lobotomy; known in psychiatric circles as Icepick, Long Island), was Doug Berry, his custom-packaged pickup laden with gear for the job ahead: diving equipment, a 10hp outboard motor, uninflated inflatable boat, lots of other stuff. In a borrowed bakery van, driving up from New York City, were Stan Murch and Wally Knurr, with Wally’s computer components strapped down on the bread shelves in back. Also coming from the city, in a silver Cadillac with California MD plates, equipped with cruise control, a/c, cassette player, reading lights and extremely woodlike dashboard trim, traveled Andy Kelp (driver), John Dortmunder (front-seat passenger), and Tiny Bulcher (all over the rear seat). Of these vehicles, only the Cadillac was being followed, by a large roughhewn shambling fellow named Ken Warren, wedged with his tow bar into a small red two-door Toyota Chemistra.

The travelers in the Cadillac remained unaware of the intense interest seven car-lengths behind them and chatted mostly about their upcoming task. “I’ve been wrong before,” Dortmunder conceded, “but I just have a feeling. This time, we’re gonna get that box.”

“The reason you’re feeling good,” Kelp told him, ignoring the red Toyota in all three rearview mirrors, “is the same reason I’m feeling good. We are not going into that reservoir. Not you, and not me.”

“Let Doug go in the reservoir.”

“Right.”

“He likes that kind of thing.”

“He does.”

“We don’t.”

“We don’t.”

In the backseat, Tiny wriggled around, uncomfortable, and finally reached underneath himself to pull out a tambourine, which he stared at in irritated astonishment. “Hey,” he said. “There’s a tambourine in this car.”

“A what? You sure?” Kelp looked in the interior rearview mirror as Tiny held up the tambourine, blocking the view of the red Toyota. “It looks like a tambourine,” he admitted.

“It is a tambourine,” Tiny said, and shook it. Tambourine music filled the air.

“I remember that sound,” Dortmunder said. “They used to have those in the movies.”

“Wait a second,” Tiny said, and from the crevice between seat and back he brought out a small cardboard box. “Now we got a deck of tarot cards.” Putting down the tambourine (jing!), he took the cards out of their box and riffled them. “Looks like a marked deck,” he said.

Dortmunder said, “Andy, what kinda doctor did you get this car from?”

“I dunno,” Kelp said. “He was making a house call, I think. It was in front of a Reader and Advisor on Bleecker Street.”

“I don’t want this doctor doing any operations on me,” Tiny said. He shuffled the cards. “John, you want me to tell your fortune?”

“Maybe not,” Dortmunder said.

The red Toyota, still unnoticed, was a block behind the Cadillac when it made the turn onto Oak Street and pulled up onto the gravel driveway beside the house. Stopping just shy of the chain-link fence, Kelp said, “Looks like we’re first.”

“Yeah?” Dortmunder looked interested. “What do we win?”

“Just the glory,” Kelp told him.

Ken Warren steered the red Toyota past 46 Oak Street, watching the trio from the Cadillac unload luggage from the trunk. He drove on by, made the next right, took the next left onto Myrtle Street and parked near the far corner there. Leaving the tow bar behind—it would be easier to tow the Toyota with the Cadillac than the other way around—he locked up and retraced his route on foot, shambling along round-shouldered and thrust-jawed like a bad-tempered bear.

The Cadillac had been left unlocked, and he was seated behind its wheel, door open, looking through his keys for the one to fit this ignition, when a bread company van pulled in behind him, filling the rearview mirrors and blocking his exit.

Now, Ken was the big silent type, not because he had nothing to say but because of his deep nasal twang and severe glottal stop. He preferred to be thought of as a silent tough guy rather than a geek who couldn’t talk right. But there were moments when speech was necessary, and this looked like one of them. “Hey,” Ken said, and leaned out to look back at the van’s driver, who he assumed was just making a delivery. “Moo fit!” he called.

Stan Murch, who was not exactly making a delivery, and who knew from the MD plates that (1) Andy Kelp had driven this car here, and (2) that ugly mug at the wheel wasn’t Andy Kelp, switched off the van’s engine, pulled on the emergency brake, and stepped out to the driveway, calling toward the house, “Andy! Mayday!”

Wally, climbing over the driver’s seat to get out on the same side as Stan, said, “Who is he, Stan?”

“No idea.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“No idea.”

There is one rule in Ken Warren’s profession: If you’re in the car, it’s yours. Therefore, he slammed the driver’s door of the Cadillac, hit the button that locked all four doors, and went back to his methodical run-through of his keys. Once he got this vehicle started, he’d use it to push the van out of his way.

People erupted from the house; first Andy Kelp, then Dortmunder, May, Tiny, and Tom. While May and Tom stayed on the porch, observing, Kelp and Dortmunder and Tiny went over to join Stan and Wally in looking at the beefy man inside the Cadillac.

“What’s going on?” Kelp asked.

“No idea,” Stan said.

“That man was in the car,” Wally said in great excitement, “when we got here.”

“He’s still in the car,” Kelp pointed out, and rapped on the glass in the driver’s door. “Hey! What’s the story?”

Got it! The Cadillac engine caught, and Ken looked over at the right-door mirror just in time to see a heavy-laden pickup pull into the driveway behind the van, filling the driveway and blocking the sidewalk as well. A handsome blond guy in cut-off jeans and a T-shirt that said WORK IS FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T SURF got out and strolled curiously forward.

“What’s the story here?” Doug asked.

“No idea,” Stan said.

Hell! Could he push both the van and the pickup? Deciding he had no choice, he could but try, Ken shifted into reverse and watched a green-and-white taxi pull up to the curb, parking crossways just behind the pickup.

Murch’s Mom got out of her cab and joined the crowd beside the Cadillac, saying, “What’s happening?”

“No idea,” said her son.

Ken considered the chain-link fence. Drive through it? Unlikely; the metal pipe supports were embedded in concrete. It wouldn’t be any good to make the Cadillac inoperable.

Murch’s Mom went into the house for a potato. Kelp leaned close to the glass separating him from the stranger. “We’re gonna put a potato in the exhaust!” he yelled. “We’re gonna monoxide you!”

Ken was feeling very put-upon. And also, come to think of it, a little confused. This mob around the Cadillac just didn’t look right. Could he have made a mistake?

No. The car was right: make, model, and color. The license plate was right. There was a tambourine on the backseat.

Still, something was wrong. As the woman cabdriver came out of the house carrying a big baking potato in her hand, Ken cracked the window beside him just far enough to make conversation possible, and announced through the crack, “Ngyou’re gno gnipthy!”

Kelp reared back: “What?”

“Gnone of ngyou are gnipthyth!”

“He’s a foreigner,” Stan decided. “He doesn’t talk English.”

Ken glared at him. “Ngyou makin funna me?”

“What is that he talks?” Murch’s Mom asked, holding the potato. “Polish?”

“Could be Lithuanian,” Tiny said doubtfully.

Dortmunder turned to stare at him. “Lithuanian!”

“I had a Lithuanian cellmate once,” Tiny explained. “He talked like—”

Ken had had enough. Pounding the steering wheel, “Ah’m sthpeakin Englisth!” he cried, through the open slit in the window.

Which did no good. Dortmunder said to Tiny, “Tell him it’s our car, then. Talk to him in Lithuanian.”

Tiny said, “I don’t speak Lith—”

“Ikn’s gnot your car!” Ken yelled. “Ikth’s the bankth’s car!”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Kelp said. “I understood that.”

Dortmunder turned his frown toward Kelp: “You did?”

“He said, ‘It’s the bank’s car.’ ”

“He did?”

“Fuckin right!” Ken yelled.

Murch’s Mom pointed the potato at him. “That was English,” she said.

“He’s a repo,” Stan said.

“Ah’m a hawk!” Ken boasted.

“Yeah, a car hawk,” Stan said.

Wally said, “Stan? What’s going on?”

Stan explained, “He’s a guy repossesses your car if you don’t keep up the payments.” Turning to Kelp, he said, “Andy, you stole a stolen car. This guy wants it for the bank.”

Ken nodded fiercely enough to whack his forehead against the window. “Yeah! The bank!”

“Oh!” Kelp spread his hands, grinning at the repo man. “Why didn’t you say so?”

Ken peered mistrustfully at him.

“No, really, fella,” Kelp said, leaning close to the window, “no problem. Take it. We’re done with it anyway.”

Handing Doug the potato, Murch’s Mom said, “I’ll move my cab.”

Handing Stan the potato, Doug said, “I’ll move my pickup.”

Handing Wally the potato, Stan said, “I’ll move the van.”

Wally pocketed the potato and smiled at the man in the Cadillac. He’d never seen a repo man before.

Ken, with deep suspicion, watched all the other vehicles get moved out of his way. Everybody smiled and nodded at him. The other woman and the mean-looking old guy came down off the porch to hang out with everybody else. The woman seemed okay, but the old guy suddenly said, “Kill him.” His voice was thin and reedy, and his lips barely moved, but everybody heard him, all right. Including Ken.

The others all turned toward the old guy, and several of them said, “Huh?”

“Drag him out through the crack in the window,” the old guy suggested. “Bury him in the back yard in a manila envelope. He knows about us.”

Everybody blinked at that, but then Dortmunder said, “He knows what about us?”

The mean-looking old guy kind of shifted position and looked at various pieces of gravel, but he didn’t have anything else to say. So the others all turned back to Ken with their big smiles on again.

Smiles that Ken mistrusted; none of this behavior was traditional. Lowering his window another fraction of an inch, he said, “Ngyou dough wanna argnue?”

Kelp grinned amiably at him. “Argue with a fluent guy like you? I wouldn’t dare. Have a happy. Drive it in good health.” Then he leaned closer, more confidentially, to say, “Listen; the brake’s a little soft.”

The other vehicles were all out of the way now, but people kept milling around back there. The van driver returned from moving his van to lean down by Ken’s window and say, “You heading back to the city? What you do, take the Palisades. Forget the Tappan Zee.”

Ken couldn’t stand it. Trying hopelessly to regain some sense of control over his own destiny, he stared around, grabbed the tambourine, shoved it into the van driver’s hand: “Here. This ain’t the bank’s,” he said, the clearest sentence of his life.

The blond guy stood down by the sidewalk and gestured for Ken to back it up; he was going to guide him out to the street. Ken put the Cadillac in reverse again, and the woman from the porch came over to say, “You want a glass of water before you go?”

“Gno!” Ken screamed. “Gno! Just lemme outta here!”

They did, too. Three or four of them gave him useful hand signals while he backed out to the street, and then all nine of them stood in the street to wave good-bye; a thing that has never happened to a car hawk before.

Ken Warren had his Cadillac but, as he drove away, he just didn’t look very happy about it. Much of the fun seemed to have gone out of the transaction for him.

FIFTY-EIGHT

Two solid weeks of beautiful weather. Clear sunny days, low humidity, temperature in the seventies, air so brisk and clean you could read E PLURIBUS UNUM on a dime across the street. Clear cloudless nights, temperature in the fifties, the sky a great soft raven’s breast, an immense bowl of octopus ink salted with a million hard white crystalline stars and garnished with a huge moon pulsing with white light. It was disgusting.

The problem was, to take the boat out on the reservoir, they needed darkness, clouds, no moon. They didn’t need nights so bright you could read a newspaper in the back yard (Kelp did, which Dortmunder hated). They didn’t need nights so bright that the local drive-in movie shut down because people couldn’t see the screen. “In darkness deep the darkest deeds are done,/And villains all retreat before the sun,” as the poet put it. Dortmunder didn’t know that particular verse, but he would have agreed with it.

It was a big house, 46 Oak Street, but it had never expected to house nine people and a computer. Dortmunder and May occupied the master bedroom, upstairs front over the living room. Stan and Tiny shared the other front bedroom, Stan sleeping on the box spring and Tiny tossing uncomfortably on the mattress on the floor. Kelp and Wally and the computer filled the large bedroom at the rear, Wally being the one on this mattress on the floor (he didn’t seem to mind), while Doug had been shoehorned into the last bedroom, with Tom. Since Tom would not divide his bed, Doug had brought up a sleeping bag; when it was open and occupied, the room was so full the door couldn’t be opened. And, finally, the small utility room off the kitchen downstairs contained a cot which was Murch’s Mom’s portion. The three bathrooms—two up, one down—were fought over constantly.

Idle days in Dudson Center aren’t exactly the same as idle days in Metropolis. Wally still had his computer, still could spend his days and nights battling unambiguous enemies in far-flung galaxies, but for the rest of them certain adjustments had to be made. Doug had a local girlfriend, whom he kept scrupulously away from the others (not even telling her he had a place to stay here in town), and with whom he spent as much of his free time as he could, and other than that he commuted four days a week to his Dive Shop, three hours each way, driving doggedly back to Dudson Center every night just in case the weather should break. Tiny traveled with him as far as New York about half the time, not liking to be for very long away from his own lady friend, J. C. Taylor.

Other than that, though, time hung heavy.

The regulars in the Shamrock Family Tavern on South Main Street were talking about the railroad. “I worked for the railroad,” one unshaved retiree announced, “when it was the railroad. You know what I mean?”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said the guy to his right. “New York Central. D&H. Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western. Those were railroads.”

Down at the end of the bar, Dortmunder and Kelp drank beer.

“Union Station up in Albany,” the first regular said, with a little catch in his voice, holding up his bourbon and Diet Pepsi. “Now, that was a beautiful station. That station was like a church.”

“Grand Central Station,” intoned his pal. “Crossroads of a million private lives.”

“You know,” said a third regular, joining the conversation, “some people confuse that line with the Naked City motto.”

A fourth chimed in: “There are eight million stories in the naked city.”

“Exactly,” said the third.

“Let’s get outta here,” Dortmunder said.

Stan had brought home a dark blue Lincoln Atlantis, a huge old steamboat of a car, which he was “fixing up” in the driveway beside the house. Along about the third day, May came out onto the porch with her hands in a dish towel—she’d never done that before, was doing it unconsciously now—and looked with disapproval at what Stan, with help from Tiny, was wroughting. On newspapers spread on the lawn squatted any number of automobile parts, all of them caked with black oily grime. The Lincoln’s huge hood had been removed from the car and now leaned against the chain-link fence like a Titan’s shield. The moth-eaten old backseat was out and lying on the gravel between the car and the street in plain sight of the entire neighborhood.

“Stan,” May said, “I’ve got two phone calls already today.”

Stan and Tiny lifted their heads out of the hoodless engine compartment. They were as grimy and oil-streaked as the auto parts. Stan asked, “Yeah?”

“About this car,” May told him.

“Not for sale,” Stan said.

“One, there’s no papers,” Tiny added.

Stan was about to dive back into his disassembled engine when May said, “Complaints about the car.”

They looked at her in surprise. Stan said, “Complaints?”

“It’s an eyesore. The neighbors think it detracts from the tone.”

Tiny scratched his oily head with an oily hand. “Tone? Whadaya mean, tone?”

“The quality of the neighborhood,” May told him.

“That’s some quality,” Stan said, getting a little miffed. “Down where I live in Brooklyn, I got two, three cars I’m working on at a time, I never get a complaint. All over the neighborhood, guys are working on their cars. And it’s a terrific neighborhood. So what’s the big deal?”

“Well, look around this neighborhood,” May advised him, taking one hand out from under the dish towel to wave it generally about. “These people are neat, Stan, they’re clean. That’s the way they like it.”

Gazing up and down the street, Stan said, “How do they fix their cars?”

“I think,” May said carefully, “they take them to the garage for the mechanic to fix, when something goes wrong.”

Appalled, Stan said, “They don’t fix their own cars? And they complain about me?”

Tiny said, “May, I tell you what we’ll do. On accounta the fence, we can’t move the car around in the back, but we’ll put everything in front of it, so you won’t see all this mess and stuff from the street. Okay?”

“That would be wonderful, Tiny,” May said.

Stan still couldn’t get over it. “Hand your car to some stranger,” he said, “then take it out, drive it sixty, sixty-five miles an hour. They got no more brains than that hood over there, and they’re complaining about me.”

“Come on, Stan,” Tiny said, picking up auto parts from the lawn. “Help out.”

Stan did so, muttering and griping all the time. Before going back into the house, May leaned out from the porch and looked up. Not a cloud in the sky.

Murch’s Mom came stomping in to dinner late and bugged. “They don’t fight back, dammit,” she said, flinging herself into her chair.

They were seven tonight, crowded around the dining room table, all but Doug and Tiny, who’d be back up from the city later. Kelp looked over at Murch’s Mom and said, “I thought that’s what you liked about driving the cab up here.”

“I’m losing my edge,” she snarled. “I’m getting soft, I can feel it.”

“I told you so,” her son said.

She gave him a look. “Don’t start with me, Stanley. And pass the white stuff. What is it?”

“Mashed potatoes,” Dortmunder said, passing it to her.

“Oh, yeah?” She looked at the creamy white mound in the oval bowl, then shrugged and spooned a couple plops of it onto her plate.

The cooking was being done by an ad hoc committee chaired by May, with Wally, Stan, and Tiny as primary committee members, and noncommittee members responsible for clean-up. The opening of packages was the principal culinary method. The result was acceptable, but no one was anxious to prolong the experience.

Tom broke a silence composed of munching and swallowing to say, “Anybody hear the weather report?”

“I did, in the cab,” Murch’s Mom told him. “It’s gonna be fair forever.”

“Aw, come on, Mom,” Stan said.

“Extended forecast,” his Mom said, implacable, “sun, moon, sun, moon, sun, moon, sun and moon. Pass the round green things.”

“Peas,” Dortmunder said, passing her the bowl.

Murch’s Mom rolled a bunch of peas onto her plate, then held them down with bits of mashed potato. “I met an old lady in the cab today,” she said, “lives the next block over. I’m gonna go play canasta with her tonight. Not for money, just for fun.”

She ate a pea—she couldn’t get more than one of the little devils onto her fork at a time—then looked up at the silence and the surprised eyes. “Well?” she demanded.

Dortmunder cleared his throat. “Maybe the weather forecast’s wrong,” he said.

The worst of it for Doug was, he didn’t have anyplace to take her. Myrtle, that is. He couldn’t take her to the house on Oak Street, of course, not with it full of people all the time, and not with his own bed being merely a sleeping bag on the floor of Tom’s room. And that incident of the horrible interruption from John was the only time he’d been at Myrtle’s house when her mother was away.

Movie theaters and the interior of the pickup both allowed for a certain amount of personal interaction, but by no means enough. Nor could he convince Myrtle to grab a blanket one day and come with him for a nice picnic in the woods. It was extremely frustrating.

Well, at least he didn’t have to lie to her anymore; or anyway not so much. Her curiosity about the environmental protection group he’d claimed to be a volunteer researcher for had been so intense and so unrelenting that first he’d told her it was merely a minor part of his life, not as important as she’d at first thought, that he was mostly a diving instructor out on Long Island. And then he’d told her he’d quit his volunteer work with that group because he didn’t like their attitude. (John, in this scenario, became a demanding regional head of the environmental group, an autocratic ideologue who Doug had simply been unable to stand anymore, the last straw having been that unfortunate scene on Myrtle’s front porch.)

So now, as far as Myrtle was concerned, Doug was in fact who he really was, and his trips up to Dudson Center from Long Island three or four days a week were simply because he was crazy about her. Since Myrtle seemed to be more or less crazy about him as well, the situation should progress swimmingly from here, and it would, too, if there were only someplace they could be alone together.

Now, after another evening of sweet hot frustration at the movies—the one local movie house was never more than half full, mostly old people and kids, people who didn’t have VCRs—they were walking home, hand in hand, and Doug was trying yet again to figure out some way to get Myrtle alone.

If only the weather would break so he and the others could make the descent into the reservoir and salvage Tom’s money, life would surely become easier. Doug would no longer have anything active to conceal from Myrtle, and with time and leisure and full attention to devote to this project, surely he could make it all happen. After all, summer was fast approaching; high season in his line of work. From Fourth of July weekend through Labor Day, he was going to be busy, far too busy to make six-hour round trips in pursuit of some girl.

It was a beautiful night in Dudson Center, clear and crisp, a velvety sky with a great milk-glass moon, temperature in the low sixties, humidity nonexistent. A playful breeze rustled and breathed in the dark green branches of trees, and below the mysterious upper reaches of those trees the old-fashioned streetlamps spread a yellow glow on sidewalks flanked by green lawns. Gentle music sounded from open windows here and there, late sprinklers could be heard whispering their rhythmic secrets, and the romantic in Doug just swelled with sensual delight.

But when he approached Myrtle’s front porch, expecting at least to spend a little time with her on the glider, the porch light was on and someone was already out there. In fact, two people. With a table in front of them, doing something there, playing some kind of game.

Doug hadn’t been present at dinner the other night when Murch’s Mom had announced the news of her new local pal, so it was with a real sense of dislocation that he recognized who that was on the glider with Myrtle’s mother. Oh, my God, he thought, am I supposed to know her? What’s she doing here? What does Myrtle know?

“There you are,” her mother said. “How was the movie?”

“Okay,” Myrtle said, a bit listlessly. She’d been rather quiet and withdrawn all the way home, come to think of it.

“Gladys,” the old bitch said to Murch’s Mom (Gladys?), “this is my daughter, Myrtle.”

“How do you do.”

“Hello.”

“And a beau of hers.” Smiling like a shark at Doug, she added, “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

She never did. Doug had met Myrtle’s mother half a dozen times in brief passages at the beginning or ending of dates, and Myrtle always introduced him, and her mother always immediately cast his name out of her memory bank.

This time, before Myrtle could say anything, Doug smiled hugely at the nasty old witch and said, “That’s okay, Mrs. Street.” To Murch’s Mom, he said, “It’s Jack Cousteau. Nice to meet you.”

All three women gave him funny looks, which he affected not to notice, turning his smile on Myrtle, saying, “See you in a couple days?”

“Sure,” she said, but still looked confused.

“I’ll call you at the library,” he promised, shook her hand as though they’d just finished a really productive Kiwanis meeting together, and turned to say, “Nice to see you again, Mrs. Street. Nice to meet you, Gladys.” And he went whistling away in the dark.

“One word!”

“Okay, okay!”

“One word to anybody about ‘Gladys,’ and I run you down with the cab!”

“Okay, okay!”

Murch’s Mom released the bunch of Doug’s shirt she’d held clutched in her fist and stepped back, aiming her glare out the kitchen window instead. “If it doesn’t cloud up soon,” she said, “I may run you down anyway.”

FIFTY-NINE

Driving herself home from work and her mother home from the Dudson Combined Senior Citizens Center, Myrtle brooded about Doug Berry and, as usual, came to no conclusion. Was there really an Environment Protection Alliance, even though she could find it in absolutely no reference books or directories? Or was Doug completely and totally false, some sort of con man engaged in some secret nefarious pursuit (other than the nefarious pursuit of her body, that is)?

His having called himself Jacques Cousteau with Edna and Edna’s new friend the other night had really brought the whole problem into focus. Myrtle had been feeling more and more depressed, not even noticing the change in herself, just sliding away into gloom; and all, of course, because she couldn’t make up her mind about Doug Berry. And he’d used that false name, she understood, because her mother refused to remember his real name, which she did because she didn’t trust him, either. And Edna was very often right about such things.

If Myrtle could be sure Doug wasn’t a fake—or at least not a fake about anything except his extravagant claims of desire for and obsession with her own self—they would have progressed beyond the get-acquainted stage long ago. The weather was perfect, for instance, for a nice picnic up on Hochawallaputtie Hill, overlooking the reservoir. But how could she go up there with him when her heart was so full of mistrust?

“Go down Oak Street,” Edna suddenly said, breaking their long silence.

Surprised, Myrtle glanced at her mother and then out the windshield toward Oak Street, still two blocks ahead. “But that’s out of our way,” she said.

“Some gypsies moved in there,” Edna told her. “They’ve got a wrecked old car out front and everything. We’re all calling and complaining. We’re going to get up a petition next. Can’t have gypsies here running down the neighborhood.”

“Gypsies,” Myrtle repeated with a laugh. “Oh, Mother, what makes you think they’re gypsies?”

“Mrs. Kresthaven found a tambourine in their garbage,” Edna said. “Go on, Myrtle, turn. I want to see if that awful car is still there. It’s in the second block.”

As they made the turn onto Oak Street, the world ahead suddenly grayed, losing color and tone. Myrtle leaned forward over the steering wheel to look up at the sky. “Cloud,” she reported.

“Never trust the weather report,” Edna commented. “Slow down, now, it’s up there on the right. See that blue car?”

“It looks perfectly ordinary to me,” Myrtle said, slowing as per instructions, looking at an ordinarily neat house with an ordinarily plain automobile parked beside it.

“They moved some of the junk,” Edna said with mixed satisfaction and regret. Clearly, she was both glad the small-town peer pressure had done its job and sorry she couldn’t keep exerting it. “But you can still see some by the fence,” she added hopefully.

“It’s hidden by the car,” Myrtle said, slowing more and more so she could look at the place as they went by.

As they came abreast of the house, its front door opened and people abruptly started to emerge. Lots of people. They came pouring out of the house as though it were on fire, except that their expressions were happy, delighted, surprised. Running down the stoop and onto the lawn, they pointed skyward, laughing and capering and patting one another on the back.

Astounded, Myrtle watched the people cavort in her rearview mirror. Beside her, Edna said in doubtful surprise, “Was that Gladys?” but Myrtle paid no attention. She had recognized others among that group of people.

Doug? And Wally Knurr? Together? Holding hands and dancing in a circle, like something in a Breughel painting? What’s going on?

“Couldn’t be Gladys,” Edna decided, and craned around to look back. “What are they doing out there?”

“Looking at the cloud,” Myrtle told her, distracted.

Back there, too far away for identification, an older man, who had probably been napping upstairs, came hurrying out of the house, looked up, and nodded in agreement with the sky.

“Maybe they’re farmers,” Edna said, but she sounded doubtful.

SIXTY

With mixed feelings of relief and guilt, Dortmunder watched Kelp, in the living room of the house on Oak Street, work himself yet again into a wetsuit. “I couldn’t do that, Andy,” he said.

“I know you couldn’t,” Kelp said, zipping zippers. “It’s okay, John, don’t worry about it.”

“I just couldn’t do it.”

“It’s gonna be fine,” Kelp said. “Doug’s a real pro. We’ll be perfectly fine down there. And he’s right about one thing: even a total professional like he is shouldn’t make a dive like this by himself.”

“A dive,” Dortmunder echoed. Then he was sorry he’d said it, because maybe Kelp hadn’t thought about that part of it yet.

The fact is, this time into the reservoir was going to be different, unlike anything either Dortmunder or Kelp had ever done. On both previous attempts, they’d walked in. This time, Doug and Kelp were going to plop out of a boat in the middle of the reservoir and sink in. Only of course when a professional does it, the word for sink is dive.

Sure.

Tiny came back in from the porch, having just finished shlepping out all the equipment. “The track’s here,” he said.

“All set,” Kelp told him. Carrying his flippers under his arm, he followed Tiny out of the living room, Dortmunder trailing, and all three went out to the porch, where May, Murch’s Mom, Wally, Tom, and Doug (he had also suited up for the dive) were watching Stan maneuver a large slat-sided open-topped truck backward up on to the driveway in the dark.

The very dark. Today’s single cloud had by now become a cloud cover stretching from horizon to horizon like an extra-thick icing on the birthday cake of the Earth. Not a glimmer of light reached the surface of the planet from the heavens. Stan’s only visual aid, in fact, beyond the truck’s own back-up lights, was a streetlight some little distance away; it was by that faint gleam he was doing his best to bring the rear of the truck reasonably close to the porch without either driving on the lawn (his Mom had warned him about that) or ramming the Lincoln he still hadn’t quite finished fixing up (she hadn’t bothered to warn him about that). The porch light would have helped, but it would also have attracted unwelcome attention if it were on with all this activity around it at one-thirty in the morning. Small-town people are so nosy.

With confusing and at times contradictory advice from Tiny, Stan managed at last to place the truck where he wanted it, and then he climbed down from the cab to help load the equipment. Once all the gear was aboard, Stan got back into the cab, this time with Tom, while Dortmunder and Kelp and Doug and Tiny all clambered up into the back, which smelled faintly of several things: pine trees, possibly sheep, maybe one or two less pleasant things.

May and Murch’s Mom and Wally stood on the dark porch and watched the slat-sided truck bounce and jounce back to the street and drive away toward the reservoir. None of them waved, but all of them thought of it.

Once the truck was out of sight, May sighed and said, “I hope we know what we’re doing.”

“No, you don’t,” Murch’s Mom told her, and nodded after the truck. “You hope they know what they’re doing.”

Wally said, “The trouble with real life is, there’s no reset button.”

Why did they care about the weather? What in the world did Doug Berry and Wally Knurr have in common, and how did they even happen to know each other? And had Edna’s new friend Gladys been among those capering on the lawn beneath the cloud?

Myrtle couldn’t sleep. Her digital clock’s luminous numbers told her it was 01:34 in the morning, which would be later than she had ever been awake in her life. But the questions were so many, and so insistent, that they just wouldn’t let her go.

What did it all mean? First, a couple of months ago, Edna had seen a man she was sure was Tom Jimson ride by in a car. Then Wally Knurr had made himself known to Myrtle, in a way she now realized must have been planned and deliberate. Then Doug Berry had done the same thing and had made himself suspect to her as well by seeming to have some sort of hidden link to her father. And then Gladys had just happened to strike up an acquaintance with Edna.

Could all four of these be coincidence? Four people, apparently separate and having nothing to do with one another, but then three of them are suddenly together among a weird group dancing on a lawn, pointing at a cloud.

New Age cultists? The dawning of the age of… What comes after Aquarius? Pisces. Fish. A water sign, that’s why they were pointing at the cloud, waiting for rain.

No, her night thoughts were getting outlandish. She’d be seeing those people as aliens from another planet next, scheming against the human race.

Hmmmmm…

No. More realistically, they could all be part of some giant conspiracy. James Bond, or Robert Ludlum? Neither seemed quite right. That big blubbery blue Lincoln in their driveway was no Aston Martin, nor could she imagine anyone in that crowd on the lawn playing baccarat or using a cigarette holder. On the other hand, Doug and Wally both lacked that manic manliness, that completely daft take-charge self-assurance of Ludlum characters. (The ultimate Robert Ludlum character, of course, being Al “I’m in charge here” Haig.)

The old man. The old man who’d come out of the house just before Myrtle and her mother had turned the corner, the old man just barely glimpsed in the rearview mirror… would that have been her father?

This last thought agitated Myrtle right out of bed, but when she found herself standing on the floor in her white cotton knee-length nightgown, she was at a loss what to do next. Floundering, disoriented, she turned and looked out the window at the darkness of Dudson Center.

And saw lights in it. Over there, the next block over, seen past the shoulder of the Fleischbacker’s house, were lit rectangles of light. Upstairs windows, in rooms with lights on. Over on Oak Street. That house?

Quick, the bird-watching binoculars; where were they? It had been years since… moving swiftly, but silent as possible so as not to wake Edna in the next room, Myrtle felt in the dark through dresser drawers until her fingers closed on the remembered blunt weaponlike heaviness of the binoculars.

Now! Hurrying to the window, she put the binoculars to her eyes, adjusted the focus, and there, swimming into view, with its flat light and muted colors and foreshortening like a Hopper painting, astonishingly close, all of a sudden there was Wally!

What was he doing? He sat in that room very intently, bent forward, hands moving at… at a computer terminal. Look at the tension in that pudgy face! Look at the hobnails of perspiration on that broad low forehead!

Conspiracy. Was Wally the mastermind? Or was he even now in contact with the mastermind, either in an experimental laboratory concealed within Mount Shasta (Bond) or in an unknown cavern deep beneath the Pentagon (Ludlum)? Absorbed by Wally’s absorption, feeling that secret pleasure known to peeping Toms everywhere, Myrtle rested the front edge of the binoculars against the window and watched that round, gleaming, wet-eyed, passionate face. Aliens? SPECTRE? A conspiracy at the very highest levels of government?

Or could it, could it somehow be… the Mafia? Good God! Was she going to have to read Jackie Collins?

It seemed a good idea to approach the reservoir this time at a different spot, far from the sites of the first two attempts and also far from the dam itself, with its nighttime staff of employees. A minor county road crossed Gulkill Creek over a one-lane bridge not far from the upper end of the reservoir, and Gulkill Creek was one of the four small waterways that had in the old days meandered through the now-drowned valley, the four eventually combining into Cold Brook, which was still the name of the runoff stream below the dam. Where it passed under the narrow bridge on the county road, Gulkill Creek was about six feet wide, perhaps three feet deep, lined with bagel-sized rocks, and icy, all year. About forty yards downstream, having widened a foot or two, the creek passed beneath the fence encircling the reservoir, continued to widen and deepen as it sprinted down a gradual slope through scrub forest, and after another thirty yards entered the reservoir at a point just about opposite the dam, which even on a sunny day was barely visible from way over here. On a cloudy night, forget it.

All the way out from town, sitting in the back of the truck, Kelp and Doug went over the plans for the night, including their signal system. This time, their primary light sources would be underwater miner’s lamps worn on their foreheads, though they’d have regular flashlights hooked to their utility belts as well. The signals they’d use to communicate with each other underwater involved switching the forehead lamp off and on while facing the other guy: One off-and-on meant, “Come help me,” while two off-and-ons meant, “Ascend to the surface.” That was it; there wouldn’t be much by way of small talk at the bottom of the reservoir.

There was no traffic along this road at this hour. Stan stopped the slat-sided truck right on the one-lane bridge, and everything was off-loaded onto the weedy roadside. At this point, their boat was merely a bulky package looking something like extra blankets folded on a shelf in the closet, plus a bottle of compressed air. Guiding themselves by light spill from the truck’s head- and taillights, Doug and Tiny carried these components down beside the creek. Doug untied the boat package, inserted the bottle onto the nipple, and a low windy rushing sound started, soon joined by muffled thaps and boops as the boat uncreased itself, stretching and twisting like an Arabian Nights genie waking up.

Meantime, Stan took the empty truck away. Once it was gone, the overcast night was as dark as the inside jacket pocket of a suit that’s worn only at funerals. Doug put on his headlamp and lit it so they’d be able to see what they were doing.

The whoosh of wind inside the boat grew stronger, the pops and whaps louder, and before their eyes appeared the kind of rubber raft in which people survive miraculously for eighty-three days in the open sea. Or not.

The boat was pushed into the shallow rapid water and held in place by Tom while a number of long pieces of rope, the winch, the scuba tanks, the 10hp motor, and a lot of other stuff were piled inside. Then they headed toward the reservoir, Doug holding the boat by its rope like a large frisky dog on a leash, finding his way through the underbrush at the edge of the stream by aiming his forehead light almost straight down at his feet. The others, following, were a little less lucky in their illumination, and therefore frequently in their footing. Splashes, curses, stumblings, and anonymous thumps and oofs punctuated their way.

At the chain-link fence, Tiny went to work with the wire cutters, announcing, “I’m having déjà vu again.”

It took almost twenty minutes to cut away enough fence so that the boat could go through on the stream and the people could go through more or less on dry land. Once they were all past that obstacle, Dortmunder called softly, “Doug. Hold on a second.”

Doug turned his head, the forehead light flashing around the dark forest. “Yeah?”

“From here on,” Dortmunder told him, “we better go without light. We’re getting too close to the reservoir.”

Tom said, “Al? How do we find the reservoir, if we don’t have any light?”

“The boat knows the way,” Dortmunder explained. “Doug follows the boat, the rest of us follow Doug. We each hold on to the shirt of the guy in front of us.”

“Sounds good,” Kelp said.

It turned out to sound considerably better than it was. The level of splashing, thumping, cursing, and stumbling to one’s knees increased dramatically behind the boat as it bobbed along, happily in its element, followed by Doug, trying to hold on to the boat’s rope while not getting decapitated by tree branches he couldn’t see, followed by Kelp clutching the back of Doug’s wetsuit, followed by Tiny clutching both of Kelp’s shoulders, followed by Tom with a bony finger hooked into one of Tiny’s belt loops, followed by Dortmunder holding gingerly to the back of Tom’s collar.

Finally, in exasperation, Tiny called out, “Are we going the right way? Doug, where the hell’s the reservoir?”

“Uh,” Doug said, and splashed around a bit. “I think I’m in it.”

He was. For a minute or two, they all were, but then they got themselves sorted out once more and refound the land.

The shore here, where stream met reservoir, was very wet and soft and mucky. They had to range a ways off to the left before they found solid enough ground for Tiny to set up the winch and other equipment. The boat was emptied there, the motor attached at the stern, and at last the three seafarers—Doug, Kelp, and Dortmunder—prepared to set off. It was necessary for somebody to be in the boat while the other two were on their dive, and Dortmunder was the only one available for that job, unfortunately. Also, with Kelp volunteering to join Doug in the descent, there hadn’t been much Dortmunder could do to complain.

They got into the boat, which rocked and wriggled as though they were tickling it. But the thing was completely dry inside, to Dortmunder’s astonishment. The bottom was rubberized canvas that moved sluggishly with you, like a waterbed, but the bulbous sides, taut with air, gave a sense of real solidity.

Dortmunder sat on the bottom in the middle, feeling the water’s coldness seep upward, while Kelp sat in the front and Doug knelt beside the steering rod of the motor in back. Tiny gave them a little push away from shore, instantly disappearing back there, and Doug started the motor, which went pock-thrummmmm. Very quiet sound, really, after that explosive onset. You wouldn’t be able to hear it very far at all.

“Everybody set?” Doug asked.

It was so dark you couldn’t tell the difference between water and land. Dortmunder said, “I hope you can see where we’re going.”

“As a matter of fact,” Doug said, “I can’t see a damn thing.” And he accelerated the little thrumming motor, steering them somewhere.

Look at him, Myrtle thought, watching Wally Knurr through the binoculars. The little man’s eyes gleamed with green highlights as he stared at the computer screen.

Myrtle’s own eyes were getting heavier and heavier. She knew she’d have to go to sleep soon. But, watching him, even though his stance and manner and expression never changed, was still repellently fascinating.

Look at him, she thought. What nefarious scheme is he planning over there?

But I’ve already met the princess.

Disguised as a commoner.

Well, not really.

You did not meet her in your true guise.

Wally sat back to digest that thought. Was it accurate? When he’d met Myrtle Jimson he’d told her his true name, and he’d told her the truth about his interest in computers and about where he lived and all of that. He had not, of course, volunteered the information that he knew her father, nor that he was involved with her father in a major…

Robbery? Well, no, actually, this wasn’t a robbery, the robbery had taken place almost twenty-five years ago. There were still illegal elements in the affair, to be sure, such as breaking and entering the reservoir and the fact that the money did still technically belong to some bank or some armored car outfit or some insurance company or somebody other than Tom Jimson, but these seemed to Wally technical crimes at the level that caused toaster companies to pay fines in Federal court but no executives to go to prison.

His fingers padded once more over the keys.

I still don’t see why I can’t just go over to the library and just happen to see her again and just say hello.

The princess does not at this time require rescue.

Not to rescue her. Just to say hello. I only saw her once. I want to see her again.

If the princess meets the hero in his true guise before it is time for the rescue, she will reject him, misunderstanding his role.

I don’t think this princess is going to need to be rescued from anything. She works in the library, she lives with her mother, she’s in a small town where everybody knows her and likes her. What is there to rescue her from?

The hero awaits his moment.

But I want to see Myrtle Jimson again.

She must not see you at this time.

(A block away, sleepy eyes closed behind drooping binoculars. Weary feet moved toward bed.)

Why mustn’t she see me?

She will misunderstand, and the story will end in the hero’s defeat.

I’ll risk it.

Remember the specific rule of the game of Real Life.

Of course I remember it. I entered it into you myself.

Nevertheless. It is:

I know. I know. I know.

Why any hero would wish to play such a game is incomprehensible.

“It sure is,” Wally muttered aloud, and looked sadly out the window at the sleeping village.

Thrummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmm…

There were dim lights visible way down at the dam. Those were the only landmarks at all worth mentioning. Once the three men in a boat were out a ways from shore, it became roughly possible to distinguish between the grayer flatter surface of the reservoir and the darker and more tangled landscape all around them, but that was it for orientation.

Their first goal was the scene of the second disaster, over by the railroad tracks, which turned out to be extremely difficult to find when no moonlight gleamed off them. “I think it’s here,” Kelp or Dortmunder said, four or five times each, before one of them happened to be right.

When they’d definitely found the railroad line, Doug steered them in close to shore, then reduced the motor to idle while he went smoothly and gracefully over the side, standing in knee-deep water as he felt around with his feet for one of the tracks. Finding it, he stooped to tie to it one end of a long reel of monofilament, a high test fishing line, thin and colorless and strong.

Then they reversed positions, Doug getting into the front of the boat, Kelp moving back to the middle, and Dortmunder going all the way back to the motor, since Doug wanted him to get some practice driving and steering before he was left alone with the boat.

“I’m not sure about this,” Dortmunder said, touching the motor’s handle with gingerly doubt.

“It’s easy,” Doug assured him, and repeated the simple operating instructions one more time, at the end saying, “You just want to be sure to keep it slow, that’s all. So Andy can unreel the monofilament, and so you don’t run into a root or a drifting log or the other shore.”

“I won’t speed,” Dortmunder promised.

Thrummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmm…

Dortmunder kept the dam’s lights to his left, moving them forward very slowly indeed, while Kelp dangled his arms out over the water and let the monofilament unreel.

Finding the railroad line on the other side was even harder, since they’d never been over there before and so were operating with neither memory nor light, but after several useless passes back and forth Doug said, “That looks like a cleared spot. Let’s try it.” And he was right.

According to the old maps, the railroad had run along pretty straight through the valley, and so, once Doug had tied the other end of the monofilament to the rail on this side, they had a thin surface line that more or less paralleled the tracks crossing down below.

Now Dortmunder thrummed them even more slowly than earlier back out from shore, Doug guiding them with one hand on the monofilament. “Here, I think,” he said at last, when they were well out in the middle of the reservoir and presumably directly above Putkin’s Corners.

“Right,” Dortmunder said, and turned the handle to idle. He was beginning to feel pretty good about his relationship with this motor, in fact. It was small, it was quiet, and it did what he asked it to do. What could be bad?

Doug used a short piece of white rope to tie them to the monofilament, then reached out to drop over the side a small iron weight with a ring in it through which one end of a long thin nylon cord had been tied. He kept feeding out the cord until it was no longer being pulled, meaning the weight had hit bottom. Inspecting the amount of cord that was left as he tied it to the rope lashed around the upper edge of the boat, he said, “Hmmm. Closer to sixty feet, I think. You ready, Andy?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been that deep,” Kelp said. It was hard to see what he looked like in the dark, but he sure sounded nervous.

“Nothing to it,” Doug assured him, lifting himself up to sit on the rounded doughnut of the boat’s side, facing inward, feet on the bottom of the boat. “Now, Andy, you remember the best way to leave the boat, right?”

“Backward.” Yep; nervous, all right.

“That’s right,” Doug told him, lowered his goggles, put his mouthpiece in place, and toppled backward out of the boat. Plash. Gone, without a trace.

Dortmunder and Kelp looked at each other, as best they could in the dark. “You can do it, Andy,” Dortmunder said.

“Oh, sure,” Kelp said. “No problem.” Scrambling a bit, hampered by the scuba tank on his back, he pulled himself up to a seated position on the boat’s round rim. “See you, John,” he said, and, forgetting to put the goggles and mouthpiece in place, backward he went over the side.

All the fellas were so nice to Bob now. “Great to have you back, Bob,” they said, grinning at him (a trifle uneasily) and patting him on the back.

“It’s really nice to be here,” Bob told them all with his new sweet smile. Looking around the big office inside the dam, he said, “Gee, I remember this place. I really do.”

“Well, sure you do, Bob,” Kenny the boss said, grinning harder than ever, patting him softer than ever. “You were only gone a few weeks.”

Bob nodded, a slow drifting motion very akin to his new smile. “I forgot a lot, you know,” he told them. “A lot of stuff from before. Dr. Panchick says that’s okay, though.”

“Whatever the doctor says,” Kenny said, nodding emphatically.

The other guys all nodded and smiled, too, though not as sweetly as Bob. They all said they agreed with Dr. Panchick, too, that it didn’t matter about all that old stuff Bob had forgotten.

Gee, it was nice to be back with these nice fellas. Bob almost thought about telling them how he’d even forgotten that girl, whatsername, the one he was married to, but how Dr. Panchick had told him he’d definitely start to remember her again pretty soon. That and a lot of other stuff, too. Not the bad stuff, though. Just the good stuff.

Like the girl; whatsername. After all, there she was around the house all the time, looking red-eyed and smiling so hard it seemed sometimes as though the edges of her mouth must have been tied back to her ears. Having her around all the time like that, calling him Bob and so on, pretty soon he’d remember her just fine. And then she wouldn’t have to keep going off into other rooms and crying and then coming back with that smile on. Which was anyway a nice smile, even if kind of painful-looking.

Anyway, he was almost about to kind of mention that, the lapse of memory that included whatsername, but as he was taking one of his slow deep breaths, the slow deep breaths he took these days before he made any kind of statement at all, just as he was taking that breath, he remembered he wasn’t supposed to talk a lot to other people about his symptoms.

That’s right. “They needn’t know you’ve forgotten XXXX,” whatever her name was, Dr. Panchick had said just today. Or yesterday. Or sometime. So he didn’t say any of that about whatsername after all, but just smiled and breathed out again, and nobody noticed.

“Well, uh, Bob,” Kenny said, still grinning fitfully, washing his hands, looking around the big open office, “uh, we thought maybe you could, uh, get back into the swing of things by maybe doing some of the filing, getting caught up on some of this paperwork here. Do you think you could do that?”

“All right,” Bob said, and smiled again. He was very happy.

Kenny continued to grin but looked doubtful. Peering at Bob as though this new sweet smile made him hard to see, he said, “You, uh, remember the alphabet, huh?”

“Oh, sure,” Bob said, very relaxed and easy, very happy to be here in this nice place with all these nice fellas. “Everybody knows the alphabet,” he said.

“Sure,” Kenny said. “That’s right.”

Then Bob’s watch went BEEP, and everybody jumped and looked scared. Everybody but Bob, that is. He raised his left arm to show everybody his watch, and smiled from watch to people to watch, saying, “Dr. Panchick gave me this. It reminds me when to take my pill. I have to take my pill now.”

“Then you better, I guess,” Kenny said.

“Oh, sure,” Bob said, and smiled around at all the nice fellas, and went away to the men’s room for water to wash down his nice pill.

(“Doped to the eyes!” a fella named Steve said, and a fella named Chuck said, “You could sell those pills on the street down in New York City and retire,” and Kenny the boss said, “Now, leave him alone, guys. Remember, it’s up to us to help Bob get his head out of his ass,” and all the fellas said, “Oh, yeah, sure, naturally, of course, you got it.”)

Mouthpiece in; breathe normally: well, breathe, anyway. Sinking like a stone. Goggles on. Goggles off; full of water.

Oh, boy. Feeling the water rush upward into his nose as his body rushed downward toward the bottom of the reservoir, Kelp stuck his left arm straight up, pressed the button, and filled the BCD. Immediately he stopped sinking, started soaring instead, and suddenly broke through into air.

But where? Anonymous reservoir in the dark. Dortmunder and the boat were nowhere to be seen. I am not going to get lost, Kelp told himself sternly. Ignoring the tiny voice telling him he was already lost, he emptied the water from the goggles, put them on, reassured himself the headlamp was in the right place, released some of the air from the BCD, and floated down through the black water like a discarded love letter.

During the descent, he switched on the headlamp and kept turning his face this way and that, hoping either to see Doug’s light or show Doug his own. But when his flippered feet finally found the bottom, he still had seen nothing, and in fact he couldn’t even see what he was standing on until he bent almost double. Then, through the brown water, he saw he was on a flat pebbly surface covered with hairy slime. Yuck.

Still, when he straightened again and stomped both feet around, flippers flapping, he could tell he was on something solid, and not even very muddy. A road? Wouldn’t that be good luck!

Kelp walked back and forth, noticing the evenness of this surface, noticing how little he was increasing the turbidity by his movements, and wondering if he were actually on a street in the town. And if so, where was the curb? Where was the side of the road so he could get some sense of where he was and where he should go?

Treading slowly, having to lift each knee unnaturally high because of the drag of the flippers on his feet, Kelp walked in ever-widening circles, looking for the side of the road or whatever this was. A parking lot? It could take him an hour to find the edge of a parking lot.

Wall. Low brick wall, about knee height. Kelp bent down, resting his hands on its slimy surface, and tried to see what the bottom was like on the other side before stepping over.

At first, he just couldn’t see a thing. Brown water drifting and floating, but then also the bricks. Row after row of brick, on down out of sight.

What the heck? Kelp leaned lower, one arm still clutching the wall, most of his body over its edge now as he aimed the headlamp down, trying to see, following the lines of brick wall down, down… to some sort of dark rectangular opening, several feet below.

So hard to see through this murk, everything so distorted and deceptive, if Kelp didn’t know better he’d think this brick wall went right on down and down, and that black rectangle there was…

… a window.

AAA!! Flailing back across the wall, flinging himself to the safety of the roof—the roof! — Kelp overshot and drifted upward, turning slowly, absolutely helpless for just an instant, but then floating back down to the roof again and standing there, gasping through the mouthpiece, staring around, trying to think what he could possibly do next.

I’m on a roof! What miserable luck. I don’t even know how tall this building is. How am I going to get down off—

Wait a second. I floated down here. The roof was under me. What do I care how tall this building is?

Moving now with long penguinlike hops, like astronauts on the moon, Kelp made his way back to the edge of the roof, added just a teeny bit more air to his BCD, and floated off into space, actually putting his arms out to the sides like a kid playing airplane.

Superman! The feeling of exhilaration was suddenly so intense that Kelp laughed out loud into his mouthpiece. Kicking his legs, waving his arms, ducking his head downward, he made a complete forward roll in the middle of the water, beside the roof, heels over head. Leveling out afterward, he looked around, the headlamp beam flashing this way and that, and stared out through his goggles like a kid in a playground looking for somebody to ride the seesaw with.

This was so much fun! All the practice sessions, both times descending into the reservoir with Dortmunder, and neither of them had ever known how much fun this was. Oh, if only John knew it was like this, Kelp thought, he’d change his mind completely. Even John would. Even John.

Kelp cavorted beside the brick building for maybe five minutes before remembering Doug and the buried money and the job he was down here to perform. Okay; time to quit playing hookey and get to work.

With more control over his movements every second, Kelp swam back to the brick wall of the building, and made his way down its face, learning it was three stories high and that he was probably on the side of it, since there was nothing here but windows; no doors.

Choosing arbitrarily to go to the right, he kicked steadily and easily, the fins doing all the work of moving him along as he made his way to the corner, then turned left and discovered he’d guessed right: this was the front of the building, with gunk-covered slate steps leading up to a big blank opening where an elaborate doorway must once have stood. And above that opening was a broad stone lintel with words carved into it. Moving very close, putting the headlamp directly on the scum-filled letters, Kelp read:

PUTKIN’S CORNERS MUNICIPAL LIBRARY

This was it! He’d jumped out of the boat any old way, and he’d landed exactly precisely on top of the very building they were looking for. Tom’s stash was buried in the field right behind here. So all he had to do now was find Doug, and they could go collect the money.

Well, that should be easy. Their first goal had been the railroad track, and then they’d intended to follow that down to the railroad station in Putkin’s Corners, because the library—this library right here—was directly across the street from that station. So if he went over there, sooner or later Doug would show up.

Fine. Kelp turned away from the library and sailed across a street he couldn’t see to the front wall of the railroad station, which he could see, once he was right on top of it. Or it was on top of him. A big old stone building, from back when people hadn’t yet known that the railroads were a transitional technology. Again, the window and door frames and other useful parts were gone, but the stone pile was still there, easily identifiable as railroad architecture.

Unwilling to swim—sail, fly—through the building, Kelp made his way around it instead, and there was the concrete platform, much the worse for wear; and beyond it the tracks. Kelp floated over there and descended almost to the ground to study the tracks and then to look all around. No Doug, not yet. But gee, it would have been fun to pole in here in that car! Kelp could just see it.

Oh, well, it wasn’t going to happen, that’s all. Still, Kelp thought, we’re here. One way or another, we’re here. At least I am. Here, and raring to go.

Come on, Doug.

This, Dortmunder thought, is what I don’t like about fishing. One of the things. Sitting here in a boat, pitch-black darkness all around. Getting cold. All alone. Not a sound.

SPLASH!

Dortmunder about jumped out of the boat, staring around in frenzy, and when he first saw Doug’s head in the water below his right elbow he had no idea what it could be. A bomb? A coconut?

The coconut removed its mouthpiece and goggles and spoke: “Where’s Andy?”

“Oh, my God, it’s Doug!”

“Of course it’s Doug,” Doug said. “Andy isn’t here?”

“No,” Dortmunder told him, “he went in right after you.”

“Shit,” Doug commented.

Dortmunder said, “You don’t think something’s wrong, do you?”

“He didn’t hold on to the guideline, that’s all,” Doug answered, wriggling for demonstration the white nylon cord that was tied to the boat and that then angled straight down into the water, its other end tied to the weight at the bottom.

Dortmunder nodded, saying, “Oh. He was supposed to hold on to that, was he?”

“That’s how we keep together,” Doug pointed out. “That’s how I found you, coming back up.”

Dortmunder said, “Probably he was thinking mostly about his mouthpiece.”

“His mouthpiece?”

“And his goggles,” Dortmunder added. “He forgot to put them on before he went over.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Doug said. “Listen, if he comes up or anything, give two tugs on this line here, okay?”

“Right,” Dortmunder said. “But you don’t think anything happened, do you?”

But Doug was gone, shooting back down into the depths. Dortmunder looked over the side, seeing nothing. Not even his own reflection. Poor Andy, he thought.

That could be me, he thought.

Kelp sat on the stone bench on the westbound platform like the last-ever passenger waiting for a train that will never come. Legs crossed, arms folded, body pushed slightly forward by the bulk of the scuba tank, he sat mostly at his ease; vaguely visible in the diffuse glow from his headlamp, water lazily ebbing and flowing around him, and if he could have seen himself there, in the drowned town, in the brown water, waiting on the ruined platform for the nonexistent train, he would definitely have scared himself.

But he couldn’t see himself, nor was there anyone else to observe him seated there. Minute after minute there was nobody else, and after a while Kelp began to fidget, began to feel a little cold and uncomfortable on this stone bench, began, in fact, to feel quite alone here in Putkin’s Corners.

Where was Doug? Wouldn’t he have to follow the tracks to the station? Wasn’t that the most logical, the only thing, he could do? And then—

Light. Vague, dim, barely discernible inside the muck, made harder to see by the diffusion of his own light. Hard even to be sure it truly existed, wasn’t merely some refracted ray of his own headlamp’s gleam, but wasn’t that, over there, not along the track but over on the far side, on the east bound platform, where he hadn’t expected to see anything at all, some sort of light?

I should reach up, Kelp thought, and switch off my lamp to make it easier to see that light over there; if there’s really a light over there to be seen. The problem was, he’d had plenty of time by now to get himself good and spooked, which he hadn’t realized until that other light—if it existed—had come swimming more or less into view from a completely unexpected direction. What if it was a— Well, there aren’t any ghosts, really, but— Underwater, somehow, the regular rules didn’t seem to apply. Maybe anything that wanted to exist could exist, down here, at the bottom, away from people. Maybe that light was… anything at all.

Kelp managed to lift his right hand and touch the switch on his headlamp, but he never did summon the strength to turn it off. He just sat there, hand to head, while the light across the way floated and swayed, moved into nonexistence, flowed back again, disappeared once more, and then suddenly came straight at him! Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

It was Doug. Kelp felt vast relief and didn’t even mind when Doug hauled him to his feet and shook a stern finger at him, which he then pointed at the white nylon cord wrapped around his other wrist. This cord drifted away upward into the dark, and the second Kelp saw it he remembered what he was supposed to have done first thing out of the boat.

Of course! Dummy! Elaborately, he demonstrated to Doug his understanding, embarrassment, apology, by throwing both hands up in the air, then smacking himself on the ear, shaking his head, punching himself on the jaw, pounding his right fist into his left palm…

Doug grabbed both his wrists. When Kelp looked inquiringly at him, Doug released the wrists and made down-patting gestures: take it easy.

Oh. Sure. Kelp nodded, flashing his headlamp up and down Doug’s person.

Next, Doug selected one of several more nylon cords hooked to his weight belt and tied the other end to Kelp’s belt. Now they could be up to eight feet apart but wouldn’t lose each other.

Great. Kelp expressed his pleasure in this move by firmly shaking Doug’s hand with both of his. Doug nodded, a bit impatiently, pulled his hand free, and made walking movements with his fingers.

Right. Kelp nodded emphatically again, and would have turned and walked from here to the library but that Doug suddenly lifted up into the air—into the water—and started swimming away. Hastily, before the rope linking them could get taut, Kelp launched himself off the platform and followed.

The thing about needing a cloudy night to do whatever it is you want to do, that means you have to be prepared to accept clouds with all their implications.

Dortmunder sat in the rubber boat, bored, sleepy, a little chilly, also apprehensive about Andy Kelp. Was he okay down there? Would Doug find him? If there was some sort of trouble, wouldn’t Doug have come back to say so by now?

Plip, on the back of his hand. Thinking it was some kind of splash from the water all around him, he brushed it off.

Plip. Forehead this time. Plip-plip-plip.

No. Dortmunder lifted his head toward the completely beclouded sky. Plipliplipliplplplppppppp…

“Of course,” Dortmunder said, and hunched his shoulders against the rain.

They kept off the bottom as much as possible to limit turbidity, but they were near the bottom all the time. First, the end of the measuring cord with the red ribbon tied around it was placed by Doug at the right rear corner of the library, while Kelp ranged as far as the connecting rope would permit, found a rock, brought it back, and used it to hold the red-ribboned cord in place. Then they moved along the rear wall like wasps under a house eave, setting the cord against the base of the building, till they came to the knot.

This time it was Kelp who held the cord in position, while Doug swam this way and that, exactly like a fish in a too-small aquarium, and eventually came back with a rock of his own, which was placed atop the knot.

The next part would be tricky. They wanted to mark a distance out across the field at right angles to the library wall. They’d rehearsed this in daylight, on dry land, in the back yard at 46 Oak Street, but doing it under present conditions was still kind of strange. For instance, they hadn’t spent all their time flying over the back yard.

First, Kelp stood straddling the knot, his back—or the scuba tank, actually—against the library wall, his face turned outward so the beam from his headlamp marked the right angle. Then Doug, paying out the cord as he went, swam eight feet away along that light beam and paused there with the new line of cord resting on the bottom. Kelp now lifted into the water, kick-swam forward about four feet, and put his second flashlight on the ground beside the cord, switched on, the beam running out along the rest of the cord. Then he came forward to where Doug waited, straddled the cord again, and Doug backed away slowly, paying out more cord, keeping his alignment with the two lights until he’d gone another eight feet. Then they repeated the procedure all over again.

According to Wally’s calculations, the center of the buried casket would be thirty-seven feet out from the library wall, which meant they had to go through their slow underwater gavotte five times before they reached the second knot in the measuring cord, the one that said, Dig here.

At last. Floating over the spot, heads close, haloed in sepia illumination, Kelp and Doug grinned around their mouthpieces at each other. Victory was in their grasp.

What happens when the boat fills with rainwater? It can’t sink, can it? These doughnut sides are filled with air.

But the damn thing can sure wallow, all right. In fact, with Dortmunder’s weight in it, the boat’s attitude seemed to be that if it filled with water it would be perfectly happy to loll around just a few inches below the surface, soaking Dortmunder to the bone and ruining the little 10hp motor.

Number one, he wasn’t dressed for this crap. He’d known he was going to be outdoors, on the reservoir, in a boat, in the dark, in June, with the temperature fairly cool, so he’d worn solid thick-soled shoes and wool socks and black chinos and a zipper-front weatherproof jacket. But none of that was enough. Not in this rain. Not underwater.

And that was number two. NO UNDERWATER. That was the deal this time, that’s why Dortmunder wasn’t suited up like Kelp and Doug. He would go along with everybody else, he would even go on the water if it would help, but in the water, no.

Also, number three, the gas tank. A small red metal five-gallon tank attached to the motor by a black flexible hose, up till now it had been content to nestle in under the doughnut curve of the side of the boat, back near the rear, where the doughnut was replaced by a solid square piece of fabric-covered wood to which the motor was clamped.

But gasoline is lighter than water, and as the interior of the boat turned itself inexorably into a wading pool the gas tank wanted to come out and play. Dortmunder had no bailing can, nothing to bail with except his cupped hands, and it was both annoying and painful to have those cupped hands constantly banging into a passing gas tank. He kept pushing it back into its corner, muttering at it as though it were a playful puppy being playful at the wrong time, but the damn thing just kept bobbing back out again.

The boat was shipping water, that’s why it was sinking so fast. It was happening around the motor. The top of the flat piece the motor was clamped to was a little lower than the top of the doughnut anyway, and with the weight of the motor pulling that end down it was lower yet, so now, with the boat wallowing half submerged, water lapped in around the motor every time Dortmunder moved, and still did when Dortmunder didn’t move because the boat moved. The reservoir moved. The air moved. And the water chuckled in.

He had to shift the weight somehow, get that goddamn flat rear of the boat higher than the rest. But how? There wasn’t much time left; the water inside the boat kept rising, and of course the higher it rose the lower the boat sank and the more rapidly more water came in at the back.

He had shifted his own weight forward; it wasn’t enough. The gas tank moved all over the place, but didn’t seem to matter much. The only really heavy thing left, the thing that was causing all the trouble, was the motor. Move that, temporarily, move it to the front of the boat, and then the back would be higher and he could bail steadily for a while and maybe get ahead of this thing, at least until Doug and Kelp came back.

The important thing, he told himself, is not to drop the goddamn motor over the side. That would be tough to explain to the divers. He’d watched Doug install the thing, however, and it seemed to him he could uninstall it without disaster, so he set to work, at once, before the boat sank any lower.

First, release the gizmo on the side that permitted him to tilt the motor forward, bringing the propeller out of the water but, more importantly under these circumstances, also bringing some of the weight of the motor into the boat.

Then remove the fuel hose from the motor, in the front, just under the housing, where it attached by sliding on over a kind of thick bright-metal needle.

Then, one-handed, holding the motor with the other hand, very slowly and carefully loosen the two wing nuts holding the clamps on both sides.

Then, gripping the wet metal of the motor housing as tightly as possible, lift the motor out of the groove, shift it forward into the boat, lose balance on the wobbly unreliable bottom of the god-damn-it-to-hell boat, lunge away from the back and toward the front with the damn motor grasped tightly in both of one’s arms to keep it inside the boat, and sprawl lengthwise on top of the motor as it lands heavily on the front part of the doughnut, fuel needle first. Fuel needle first.

What’s that hissing noise?

Things were going so well!

Just as both Wally and Doug had said, from their different backgrounds and kinds of expertise, the bottom of the reservoir in the area of the field behind the library was so soft and mucky they didn’t need any heavy complicated tools to do their digging for them. All they had to do was not mind getting their hands a little dirty.

And that’s the way it worked, all right. They got their hands very dirty, but the water in which they worked constantly washed them clean again; and besides, it was kind of fun.

Floating just above the spot marked by the knot in the measuring cord, suspended on a slant with their heads lower than their feet, they kept reaching down into the muck, one hand after the other, and flinging the sludge backward like dogs preparing to bury a bone. The turbidity became intense, so that soon they could barely see what they were doing directly in front of themselves, even with both headlamps lit, but it hardly mattered. They could feel what they were doing: they were throwing mud, three feet worth of mud.

Boom-boom. They both hit it at the same instant, their grasping fingers jabbing down through the muck and running straight into something solid. Heavy. Wood. Didn’t want to move.

Their pleasure made them both forget themselves for an instant, and they started to drift away from the spot, but both immediately compensated, kicking with their flippers, nosing down toward the messy muddy hole they’d made, reaching down into the mire, one on either side. Their questing fingers slid along the wood, then found the coffin rails. They pulled themselves right down next to the hole and spent awhile removing more and more mud, until the whole top of the casket was more or less clear and they could slip the cord connecting them beneath it, pulling up the slack. Then they added air to their BCDs and gripped the rails. Slowly, reluctantly, after so many years alone and asleep in the deep, the casket began to lift.

All they wanted to do at this point was get the casket up out of its hole and maybe drag it around to the firmer base of the steps or sidewalk in front of the library. Once they had it accessible, they’d tie to one of its handles the cord that linked them with the boat, and from there on it would all be easy.

First, they’d go up to the surface, attach the marker cord to the monofilament, then run back to shore where Tiny and Tom were waiting. They’d get the fresh scuba tanks, pick up the extra BCD and take the end of the rope from the winch. Then they’d go back out to the monofilament, find the marker cord, and tie it to the rope from the winch. Then Kelp and Doug would go back down to the casket, wrap it in the extra BCD, fill the BCD with air, and as Tiny winched from the shore, ride herd on the buoyant casket. Simple.

The first part was certainly simple, though not particularly easy. The casket was heavy, even with their buoyancy to help. They never did lift it clear of the mucky ground, so turbidity roiled and rolled in their wake, but they managed to haul it along as they followed the measuring cord back to the library, then worked their way around to the front of the building, where they put their burden down at last on the crumbling concrete between the old sidewalk and the library steps.

Doug removed the marker cord from his wrist and tied it to the coffin rail, then drifted up beside Kelp. They both looked down at the box, just lying there. Captured. Tamed. With a leash on it. They looked at each other again, smiling, elated with what they’d done, and a shoe drifted slowly downward between them.

A shoe? Naturally, they both looked down, following its descent, and so the shoe remained in the amber gleam of their lamps until it hit the casket, hesitated there, seemed to stumble over the box, and then fell slowly on down to the ground.

Doug moved first, swooping downward, snagging the shoe on the way by, bringing it back up to where Kelp hovered. They hung there together in the water, half a dozen feet above the casket, and studied the shoe as Doug turned it slowly in his hands. Then they stared at each other again, wide-eyed.

Dortmunder. His shoe. No question.

“Taking them a long time,” Tom said.

“Seems long cause we ain’t doing anything,” Tiny told him. “And because it’s raining.” Then he twisted around, seated on the damp ground in the rain-streaked dark, to peer into the sopping night and say, “How come you’re behind me?”

Tom cackled. “You don’t have to worry about me, Tiny.”

“I don’t worry about you,” Tiny promised him. “Just come around and sit down here beside me.”

“Too wet to sit down there.”

“It’s wet everywhere. Okay, I’ll come back and sit beside you.”

“Naw, never mind, here I come,” Tom said, and Tiny heard the old bastard’s bones crack as he got to his feet. Sounded like rifles being cocked.

In a minute, Tom slid out of the dripping darkness like a half-starved fox and sat down within Tiny’s range of vision but just out of reach of Tiny’s hands. “That better, Tiny?”

“I like you, Tom,” Tiny lied. “I like to look at you.”

Tom cackled, and then they were quiet awhile, the two of them sitting on the ground in the rather heavy rain beside Gulkill Creek, the reservoir spread out a murky gray-black in front of them, pebbled with a million raindrops.

“Hope everything’s okay,” Tiny said.

Now, here was a mess. Kelp and Doug followed the marker cord up to the surface, and when they got there, what did they find? A steady rain. The boat, deflated and empty, drooped down into the wet darkness of the reservoir, still attached to the monofilament but pulling it four or five feet lower below the surface than it had been before. The gas tank was floating around loose. The motor was gone. So was Dortmunder.

With full buoyancy in the BCD, Kelp could pull the mouthpiece out and cry, “Where’s John?”

“I dunno.” Doug was also at full buoyancy, paddling in a circle, trying to see in the dark.

“Jeepers, Doug,” Kelp said, “what happened up here?”

“Rain swamped the boat,” Doug told him. “I dunno what happened to the motor. Or John.”

“He didn’t drown,” Kelp cried, staring all around, bobbing on the surface in his agitation, water from time to time lapping into his mouth. “We didn’t see him coming down, Doug. Only the shoe, that’s all.”

“Well, no, he wouldn’t drown,” Doug said. “He’s got a line here, the monofilament. All he has to do is pull himself along that until he gets to shore.”

“Hey, you’re right!” Kelp thrashed around in the water in his relief because, despite what he’d said, he’d been thinking privately that maybe John did drown.

“We’ll catch up with him, help him,” Doug said. “He can’t have much of a start on us.”

“Good idea!” Kelp looked left and right into two equally impenetrable darknesses. “Which way?”

Doug considered the problem. “I tell you what,” he said. “You follow the line that way, I’ll go this way. Go underwater, it’ll be faster. And the light’ll show on the monofilament.”

“Right,” Kelp said, and put his mouthpiece back in. Releasing a little air from the BCD, he sank a few feet below the surface, switched on the headlamp, and saw the gleaming silvery-white line stretch away through the black water. Kicking easily, he followed the line, really pleased at how good he was getting at this and looking forward to seeing John flounder along ahead of him like a wounded walrus.

But no such luck. Kelp went almost all the way to shore, close enough to see the railroad tracks emerge along the slanted bottom, and still no John. When he was in near enough to stand on the railbed with his head and shoulders out of the water, he even risked a quick flash of his headlamp at the tangled brush along the bank. “John?” he called in a half whisper.

Nothing. But John wouldn’t have had time to get this far anyway, not as slow as he’d have to travel and as fast as Kelp had sliced through the water. So Doug must have found him in the other direction.

No. Doug was waiting again by the boat, head out of the water, and he was alone. When Kelp surfaced beside him, Doug said, “No?”

“Oh, wow,” Kelp said.

Oh! May, suddenly awake, stared at a gray rectangle in the wrong place in the dark, and listened to a toilet flushing and flushing and flushing. Jiggle that thing! And what’s the window doing over there?

Shifting in the bed, she suddenly realized she was alone, remembered where she was (that’s why the window’s there instead of there), and understood that the sound she could hear through the window was rain falling. Oh, those poor guys, out there at the reservoir, they’re going to get soaked.

Well, Andy and Doug were going to get soaked anyway, but now the rest of them— May sat up, suddenly wondering what time it was and what had awakened her. A bad dream? A thought about John? Some sound? Were they back? Had they finally succeeded in getting the money? What time was it?

03:24.

She listened, but other than the rush of rain she couldn’t hear a thing. Shouldn’t they be back by now? Or soon, anyway?

In any event, she was absolutely wide awake. No chance to get back to sleep, not right away. Climbing out of bed, she found her robe in the dark, put it on, and stepped out to the hall, faintly illuminated by an ankle-height night light plugged into an outlet near the head of the stairs. She looked over the rail, but the downstairs was completely dark. She was about to start down when she noticed the line of light under the door of Andy and Wally’s room.

Was Wally still up? May crossed the hall and knocked softly on the door. “Wally? You awake?”

There were scraping, rustling noises within, and then the door opened and there was Wally, as short and round and moist as ever, and fully dressed. Blinking wetly up at May, he said, “Are they back?”

“No. I just woke up, I thought I’d have a glass of warm milk. Want some?”

Wally smiled. “Gee,” he said, “that sounds…” He looked around, at a loss for a simile. “That sounds like this house,” he decided. “Gosh, I would I’d like some warm milk, Miss May, thank you. I’ll just switch off the computer, and I’ll be right down.”

He plays with that computer too much, May thought as she descended to the ground floor, switching on lights along the way. Then she thought, well, it could be worse. Then she thought: Wait. I’m not his mother.

It is this house. It’s changing us. If we stay here much longer, we’ll start buying one another birthday cards.

Before putting the milk on to warm, May opened the back door and looked out at the yard. Rain was steady, unrelenting, falling straight down through a world without wind. This isn’t going to let up for days and days, she thought. The poor guys. I hope everybody’s okay.

Two mugs full of gently steaming milk were on the kitchen table when Wally came into the room, his wet smile gleaming in the overhead fluorescent light. “This is really nice, Miss May,” he said, and sat across from her to cup both hands around the mug. “I was just thinking,” he said, “how really nice this all is, everybody living together here like this. It’s almost like we’re a family.”

“I was just thinking something like that, too,” May told him.

“I’ll miss it when it’s over,” Wally said.

May sipped milk in lieu of responding, and they sat in fairly companionable—but not familial, dammit—silence for a few minutes, until all at once Murch’s Mom walked in, wearing big gray furry slippers, a ratty long robe, and a lot of green curlers in her hair. Squinting balefully in the light, she said, “I thought they were back.”

“Not yet,” May said.

“We’re just waiting here,” Wally told her happily. “We’re having warm milk.”

“Oh, that’s what it is.”

“I could warm you some,” May offered.

“You’d waste it, then,” Murch’s Mom told her, and marched across the room to the refrigerator, where she got out a can of beer, popped the top, and took a deep swig. Wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her robe, turning to the table, she said, “Raining.”

“I hope everybody’s okay,” May said.

“Rain never hurt anybody,” Murch’s Mom decided. “A little water’s good for you.” She came over and sat at the table between them, saying, “Might as well stay up till they get back.”

May watched Wally watching Murch’s Mom drink beer. She knew Wally was loving that, loved the two of them with their warm milk and the crotchety aunt—that would be Murch’s Mom’s role in the affiliation Wally was constructing—with her beer. If he says like a family, May promised herself, I’ll pour bourbon into this milk. A lot of bourbon.

However, he didn’t.

“I never did much like rain,” Tiny said.

“Good for covering your tracks,” Tom said.

Tiny wrung water out of his eyebrows. “What tracks?”

“When the dogs are after you.”

Tiny was feeling the need to put his hands around something and squeeze. “Been on this job too long,” he muttered.

“—h—”

Tiny frowned, making a lot of water cascade down his face. Wiping it away, he said, “You hear something?”

“The motor, you mean? No.”

“Not the motor,” Tiny told him. “Sounded like a voice.”

“—hehhh—”

“You won’t hear any voice,” Tom said, “all you’ll hear is—”

“Shut up,” Tiny requested.

“What was that?”

Tiny was in no mood. “This ground’s wet, Tom,” he said. “Maybe I’ll sit on you for a while.”

“Well, we’re all getting testy,” Tom told him, forgiving him.

Tiny said, “Just be quiet, while I listen to this voice.”

“Joan of Arc,” Tom commented, sotto voce, but then he was quiet, and Tiny listened, and heard no voice.

Was it something he’d made up? Was it just something the rain did? But it had sounded like a voice out there in the water somewhere.

At last, restless and uneasy, Tiny lumbered to his feet and plodded down the soggy bank to the water’s edge, listening, not even caring that Tom was behind him.

“—eye—”

By God, that is a voice. “Hey!” Tiny yelled.

“—eye?—”

“Over here!” Tiny yelled, and saw a dim light out there on the water.

Tom had come down to stand beside him at the lip of the reservoir. At this moment, neither was being wary of the other. Tom said, “What the hell is that out there?”

“The boogie man.”

“No, it isn’t,” Tom said. “I’m the boogie man.”

“Tiny!”

“Over this way!” Tiny shouted, and the light out there bobbled and disappeared.

Tom said, “Which one is it?”

“Couldn’t tell. His voice was full of water.”

Splashing sounded out there, and then the voice called again: “Tiny! Where are you?”

“Over here! Come this way! Can you hear me! Hey, here I am! We’re both here! Can you—”

“They’re here,” Tom said quietly.

They were. Andy Kelp and Doug Berry came stumbling and wading out of the reservoir, still in their full diving gear. Berry said, gasping, “I thought we’d never find the right place.”

“Where’s the boat?” Tiny asked him. “Where’s Dortmunder?”

Kelp and Berry stood panting in front of him. Berry said, “We were hoping he was here.”

Driving around all night, and in the rain. Stan didn’t mind driving usually—he was a driver, after all—but on tiny country roads, at night, in the rain, with no other traffic, nothing to look at or think about, no passenger in the vehicle, not even a destination, just driving aimlessly around until everybody else was finished work, that could get old. Very old.

Finally. Finally. Finally, at quarter to five in the ayem, when Stan made yet another pass by the bridge over Gulkill Creek, Andy Kelp appeared at the side of the road and gave him the high sign, and Stan pulled to a stop just past the bridge.

Sliding over to the right side of the seat, he opened the passenger door, stuck his head out in the rain, and watched Tiny and the others come up out of the woods and climb into the rear of the slat-sided truck. Too bad it didn’t have a roof back there. He called back, “How’d it go?”

Andy came squidging forward through the rain. “Well, yes and no,” he said. “Good news and bad news, like they say.”

“You found the money?”

“That’s the good news,” Andy agreed. “It’s still down there, but we got it dug up and we got a rope on it.”

“Great,” Stan said. “So that’s the good news; you found the money. What’s the bad news?”

“We lost John.”

From the instant she saw Stan’s face, May knew. She didn’t know exactly what she knew, but she knew she knew. That much she knew; that she knew.

“Now, we’re not giving up hope,” was the first thing Stan said, when shortly after sunup he walked into the kitchen where May and Wally and Murch’s Mom were still sitting around, bleary-eyed and weaving but unwilling to go to sleep before the word came. And now the word was this.

May said, “Stan? Not giving up hope about what?”

“Well, about John,” Stan said.

His Mom said, “Stanley, tell us this second.”

“Well, what happened, as I understand it—”

“This second!”

“The boat sank. John was the only one in it. Nobody knows where he is.”

May leaped to her feet, spilling cold milk. “At the bottom of the reservoir!” she cried. “That’s where he is!”

“Well, no,” Stan told her. “At least, that’s not the theory we’re working on. See, there was this line stretched across the reservoir over the railroad track, up by the top of the water, and that’s where John was, so the theory is, he held on to that line and followed it to the shore on one side or the other, and got out before Andy and Doug could catch up with him. So now Andy and Doug are going in along the railroad line from the road on one side, and Tiny and Tom are going in from the other side. And I come back to tell you.”

“I’m going there!” May said.

“We’ll all go,” Murch’s Mom said.

“Sure!” Wally cried, jumping up, eyes agleam.

“It’s raining, May,” Stan pointed out.

“I just hope it’s raining where John is,” May told him.

Of course, Bob couldn’t drive a car yet, not just yet. Of course, he understood that completely, in fact, everybody understood that completely, and that’s why Kenny the boss had said he’d drive Bob back and forth from now on, that is, just until Bob was ready to drive a car again. Kenny always drove Chuck anyway, because Kenny and Chuck lived right near each other over in Dudson Falls, and Kenny said it wasn’t really out of the way much at all, and he didn’t mind anyway, and in fact everything was perfectly fine about picking Bob up from his house in Dudson Center where he lived with that girl, whatsername, the one he was married to, and then dropping him off there again every morning after work. And Chuck said, “Hey, good idea. That’s easy, man.” So that’s what was going to happen.

Bob was filing the Ws, taking his time, feeling the texture of each sheet of paper, enjoying the even rows of words across all the sheets of paper—look at all those letters, making up all those words, filling up all those pieces of paper—and he was all the way to the Ws when Kenny came by and said, “Hey, there, buddy, how you doin, pal, everything okay, Bob? Good, that’s good. Listen, it’s almost six and—”

BEEP.

Kenny jumped back, then nodded at Bob’s watch, laughing nervously as he said, “Time for another pill, huh?”

“Oh, yes,” Bob said. “We don’t know what would happen to me, Dr. Panchick and me, we don’t know what would happen to me if I didn’t take my pills.”

“You take a lot of them, huh?”

“Well, we’re going to taper off,” Bob explained. “But not yet,” he said, and went away to the bathroom for water and took his pill.

When he came back out to the office, it was after six o’clock and everybody was ready to go. “Here I am,” Bob said, smiling happily at all these nice fellas, really liking how they all were just good pals together, working together, having all these nice times together. “All ready, Kenny,” he said, and just beamed.

The crew went out to their cars, their usual exchanges of low humor with the day crew muffled a bit by the presence of this ethereal creature among them. Bob didn’t notice any of that; he was noticing how pretty the rain was. When he looked up at the sky, raindrops fell on his eyeballs and made him blink. Nice!

“Ready, Bob?”

“Oh, sure, Kenny, here I come.”

Chuck was in the passenger seat in front, so Bob got in the backseat with the naked man on the floor. “Hello,” he said.

The naked man on the floor—well, he wasn’t completely naked, he was wearing underpants and one sock—wasn’t as happy as Bob’s friends. In fact, he glared at Bob and shook his fist, and then he put his finger to his lips and pointed at himself with his other hand and emphatically shook his head.

Well, gee, all right. The naked man didn’t want Bob to talk about him being there. Well, gee, that’s okay. With the pill he’d just swallowed now stamping out every little brushfire of fear or excitement or panic in his entire neural network, Bob said, “Okay.”

Kenny was just then getting into the car, slipping in behind the wheel. Pausing before putting the key in the ignition, he looked in the rearview mirror at Bob and said, “What’s that, Bob?”

Giggling, Chuck said, “He’s talking to his imaginary playmate back there.”

Kenny gave Chuck a warning look. “Watch that.”

But the naked man on the floor was nodding emphatically, pointing now in the direction of Chuck. So that was the true explanation after all. “That’s right,” Bob said placidly. “I’m talking to my imaginary playmate.”

Kenny and Chuck exchanged another glance, Kenny exasperated and feeling his responsibility, Chuck guilty but vastly amused. Kenny shook his head, and irritably watched himself insert the key in the ignition. “Get well soon,” he muttered.

As they drove away from the dam toward Dudson Center, Bob sat way over on his side of the backseat, his smile kind of raggedy around the edges, his eyes shooting out very teeny tiny sparks. His fingertips trembled. He didn’t like looking at the naked man on the floor, but there he was, all the time, in the corner of Bob’s eye.

Gazing straight ahead as the scrub forest ran backward past the windows on both sides, Bob could see the firm back of Kenny’s head and a small segment of Chuck’s profile. Chuck was giggling and smirking and at times pressing his palm to his mouth. Kenny’s back radiated the lonely obligations of command.

Bob was very happy, of course, very placid, very content. All these little feathery feelings in his stomach and behind his eyes and in his throat and behind his knees didn’t matter at all. It would be easier, of course, if the naked man weren’t there on the floor next to him, but it wasn’t important. It didn’t change anything.

After a long period of silence in the car, Bob leaned forward a little and said, confidentially, to the back of Kenny’s authoritative head, “I never had an imaginary playmate before.”

This set Chuck off again, curling forward, collapsing against his door, various snorts and grunts squeezing out through the hands he held clamped over his mouth. Kenny, pretending Chuck didn’t exist (the same way Bob pretended the naked man didn’t exist), looked mildly in the rearview mirror and said, “Is that right, Bob?”

“Yes,” Bob said. He felt as though there was more he wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come.

Kenny smiled in a big-brotherly fashion: “I bet it’s fun,” he said. “To have an imaginary playmate.”

Bob smiled back at the face in the rearview mirror. Slowly he nodded. “Not really,” he said. (The naked man’s fist, in the corner of Bob’s eye, was shaking again. The naked man’s face, in the corner of Bob’s eye, was enraged.)

Kenny hadn’t actually heard Bob’s answer. He’d gone back to concentrating on his driving.

Bob wanted to turn his head away so he could look out his side window and not see anything in the car at all, but it was hard to do. His upper body was made of one solid block of wood; it was hard to make one part of it turn separately from the rest. Slowly, very slowly, strain lines standing out on the sides of his neck, Bob turned his face away. He looked out the window. The first houses of Dudson Center went by. Very interesting. Very nice.

In the middle of town, Kenny had to stop for a red light. Bob gazed fixedly at the windows of a hardware store. The other rear door slammed. Kenny said, sharply, “What was that?”

Bob swiveled his head on his painful neck. Chuck said, “Bob’s imaginary playmate just got out.”

“Goddammit, Chuck!”

“That’s right,” Bob said. “He went away.”

Chuck twisted around to grin at Bob. “He probably went on ahead to your house,” he said. “Waiting there for you now, with Tiffany.”

“Uh-huh,” said Bob.

Through clenched teeth, Kenny said, “Chuck, your job is on the line.”

Chuck gave Kenny an excessively innocent look. “Bob’s happy,” he said. But he faced front after that and didn’t say any more.

Five minutes later, they reached Bob’s house. “Here we are, Bob,” Kenny said.

Bob didn’t move. The lower half of his face smiled, but the upper half around the eyes had worry lines in it.

Kenny twisted around, frowning at him. “You’re home, Bob,” he said. “Come on, guy. I gotta get going.”

“I’d like to go back to the hospital now, please,” Bob said. And that was the last thing he said for three weeks.

The small-town habit of leaving doors unlocked had even begun to affect the residents of 46 Oak Street, and that was just as well. Reaching there at last, cold, wet, naked, in the downpour, and finding nobody even home to hear his complaints, Dortmunder might just have bitten his way through the front door if it had been locked.

He was feeling like biting his way through something, God knows. What a night! That reservoir was out to kill him, there was no question about that anymore. Every time he went near that evil body of water, it reached out damp fingers and dragged him down. If he so much as thought about that reservoir, waters began to close over his head. No more. He was through now. Three times and out.

This last time had been the closest shave yet. The goddamn rubber boat suddenly shrinking and deflating and sinking beneath him, and him sitting there not knowing what to do, the goddamn little 10hp motor clutched in his arms, resting on his lap. It wasn’t till the boat had reduced itself to a two-dimensional gray rubber rag, dumping him into the reservoir, and he’d found himself heading straight for the bottom, that he finally got his wits about him enough to let go of the motor and let it proceed into eternity without him.

Then it was his own clothing that dragged him down. The shoes were pulled off first, one sock inadvertently going as well, then the jacket, then the trousers, then the shirt, taking the T-shirt with it.

By the time all that underwater undressing was done, he had no idea where he was, except in trouble; the boat, the line of monofilament, everything was gone. His head was above water, barely and only sometimes. Turning in ever more frantic circles, he’d finally seen the dim lights way over by the dam and had known that was his only hope. If he didn’t have some target to aim for, he’d just swim around in circles out here in the dark and the wet and the rain and the deep and the horrible until his strength gave out.

So he swam, and floated, and swam, and floundered, and flailed, and at last staggered ashore down at the end of the dam near the little stone official structure and its attendant parking lot. An unlocked car there—nobody locks anything out in the sticks—provided some small shelter from the storm, and Dortmunder even napped in there occasionally, cold and wet and scared and furious as he was.

He’d been asleep, in fact, when the weird kid with the poleaxed smile came in and sat beside him and gave him a completely drugged-out look and just said, “Hello.” He isn’t going to turn me in, Dortmunder had thought. He isn’t going to holler or get excited or do anything normal. He barely even knows I’m here.

And so he’d stuck tight, ignoring his first impulse to jump from the car and make a hopeless run for it, and the result was they’d given him a ride all the way back to Dudson Center. The last four blocks after he left the car, walking along almost completely naked, in daylight, with people on their way to work all around him, had not been easy. But anything was easier than being in the——. (He wasn’t going to say the R word anymore, wasn’t even going to think it.)

But now here he was, home at last, and where was everybody? I don’t even get a sympathetic welcome, Dortmunder thought, feeling very sorry for himself as he padded with his one bare foot and one socked foot to the kitchen, opened a can of tomato soup, added milk (no water!), heated it, drank the whole thing serving after serving out of a coffee cup, and packed crackers in around it in his stomach for body. Then, beginning at last to feel warm and dry, and knowing how tired he was, he went back through the empty house and slumped upstairs one heavy foot at a time and got into bed without even bothering to take his sock off.

The return, hours later, of the other eight residents of the house, cold, wet, discouraged, shocked, unhappy, and bickering, didn’t wake him, but May’s scream when she opened the bedroom door and saw him there did. Briefly. “Later, May, okay?” Dortmunder said, and rolled over, and went back to sleep.