Drowned Hopes

SIXTY-ONE

Then they all blamed him. They all sat around in the living room on Oak Street after Dortmunder finally woke up and came downstairs, and they blamed him. Wouldn’t you know?

“You had us very worried, John,” May said, gently but seriously.

“I had myself a little worried, too,” Dortmunder answered.

His foghorn voice more fogbound than usual, Tiny said, “I think I got a little head cold out there, walkin around in the rain while you were asleep in your bed here.”

Murch’s Mom sneezed and looked at Dortmunder significantly, but didn’t say anything.

“Pretty dangerous,” her son commented, “driving that borrowed truck around in the daytime, hour after hour. And then for nothing.”

“You know, John,” Doug said, “it’s kind of hard to figure out how you missed that monofilament, that line stretching right across the lake, when it was right there and everything.”

“That’s right,” Kelp said. “I saw it, no trouble.”

Dortmunder lowered an eyebrow at him. “In the light from your headlamp?”

“Well, yeah.”

Wally said, “John, while you were asleep up there, I asked the computer, and it couldn’t predict you going to the dam either. That’s the one direction nobody thought of.”

“That’s where the lights were,” Dortmunder told him. “Mention that to your computer next time you run into each other.”

Tom cackled and said, “Looks like everybody’s sorry you made it, Al.”

Then they all changed their tune, and everybody reassured him how happy they all were to see him under any circumstances, even home safe in his bed when they’d expected him to be either dead in the reservoir or half-dead beside it. And that was the end of that conversation.

It was late afternoon now, Dortmunder having slept most of the day, and outside the windows the rain still poured down. The weather forecast, full of stalled lows and weak highs, promised this stage of storms would, at the very least, even the score for the weeks of sunny days and star-strewn nights preceding it, and maybe even throw a little extra rottenness in for good measure.

After everybody got over the desire to be crotchety with Dortmunder for having saved himself from a watery grave, the next topic on the agenda was Tom’s money, plucked at last from its own watery grave but not yet from the water. “From here on,” Doug told the assembled group, “it’s a snap. All we do is go back out to the res—”

“No,” Dortmunder said, and got to his feet.

May looked up at him in mild surprise. “John? Where are you going?”

“New York,” Dortmunder told her, and headed for the stairs.

“Wait a minute!”

“We got it beat now!”

“Piece of cake!”

“We know where the box is!”

“We got a rope on it!”

“We’re winning, John!”

But Dortmunder didn’t listen. He thudded upstairs, one foot after the other, and while he packed people kept coming up to try to change a mind made of concrete.

May was first. She came in and sat on the bed beside the suitcase Dortmunder was packing, and after a minute she said, “I understand how you feel, John.”

“Good,” Dortmunder said, his hands full of socks.

“But I just don’t feel as though I can leave here until this is all over and settled.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It wouldn’t be fair to Murch’s Mom.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And if we walk away now, Tom might still decide he’d rather use that dynamite of his.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So you can see, John,” May said, “why I feel I have to stay.”

Dortmunder paused with his hands in a dresser drawer. “I can see that, May,” he said. “And if you stop to think about it, you can see why I can’t stay. When you’re done up here, you’ll come home. I’ll be there.”

She looked at him, thought it over, and got to her feet. “Well,” she said, “I can see your mind is made up.”

“I’m glad you can see that, May,” Dortmunder said.

Tom was next. “Runnin out, eh, Al?”

“Yes,” Dortmunder said.

Wally followed a couple minutes later. “Gee, John,” he said, “I know you’re not the hero, you’re only the soldier, but even the soldier doesn’t leave in the middle of the game.”

“Game called,” Dortmunder told him, “on account of wet.”

Tiny and Stan and his Mom came together, like the farmhands welcoming Dorothy back from Oz. “Dortmunder,” Tiny rumbled, “I figure you’re the one got us this far.”

“I understand it’s a piece of cake from here on,” Dortmunder said, folding with great care his other pants.

Stan said, “You don’t want to drive to the city on a Wednesday, you know. Matinee day, there’s no good routes.”

“I’ll take the bus,” Dortmunder told him.

Murch’s Mom looked insulted. “I hate the bus,” she announced. “And so should you.”

Dortmunder nodded, taking the suggestion under advisement, but then said, “Will you drive me to the bus station?”

“Cabdrivers don’t get to have opinions about destinations,” Murch’s Mom snapped, which might have been a form of “yes,” and she marched out.

“Well, Dortmunder,” Tiny said, “I can’t a hundred percent blame you. Put her there.”

So Dortmunder shook his hand, and Tiny and Stan left, and Dortmunder’s hand was almost recovered enough to go on packing when Doug came in to say, “I hear you’re really going.”

“I’m really going,” Dortmunder agreed.

“Well,” Doug said, “tomorrow or the next day, sometime soon, I got to go back to Long Island anyway, see to my business, pick up the stuff we need for the next try. You could ride along.”

“I’m leaving today,” Dortmunder told him.

“What the heck, wait a day.”

“Well, Doug,” Dortmunder said, “let’s say I wait a day, a couple of days, everybody having these little talks with me. Then let’s say I get into that pickup with you and we head for the city, and you just can’t resist it, you gotta tell me the plan, the details, the equipment, you gotta talk about the res— the place there, and all that. And somewhere in there, Doug,” Dortmunder said, resting his aching hand in a friendly way on Doug’s arm, “somewhere in there, I just might be forced to see if I know how to do a three-sixty.”

Dortmunder was just locking his suitcase when Andy Kelp came in. Dortmunder looked at him and said, “Don’t even start.”

“I’ve heard the word,” Kelp told him. “And I know you, John, and I know when not to waste my breath. Come on over here.”

“Come on over where?”

“The window,” Kelp told him. “It’s okay, it’s closed.”

Wondering what Kelp was up to, Dortmunder went around the bed and over to the window, and when Kelp pointed outside he looked out, past the curtain and the rain-smeared window and the rain-dotted screen and the rain-filled air over the rain-soggy lawn and the rain-flowing sidewalk to the rain-slick curb, where a top-of-the-line Buick Pompous 88 stood there, black, gleaming in the rain.

“Cruise control,” Kelp said, with quiet pride. “Everything. You gotta go back in comfort.”

Dortmunder was touched. Not enough to reconsider, but touched. “Thank you, Andy,” he said.

“The truth is,” Kelp said, leaning forward, speaking confidentially, “I think you’re right. That reservoir is out to get you.”

SIXTY-TWO

Well, at least there was a little more room at the dinner table, though no one said that out loud in case of hurting May’s feelings. But it was nice, just the same, to have that extra inch or two for the elbow when bringing a forkful of turkey loaf mouthward.

On the other hand, when it came to discussing future plans, all at once Dortmunder’s absence from the table became less positive and pleasant, though that wasn’t obvious right at first, when Doug raised the subject over coffee, saying, “Well, it’s easy from here on. We’ve touched the box. We know where it is.”

“We’ve got a rope on it,” Kelp added.

Nodding, Doug said, “And the other end of the rope is tied to our monofilament, which nobody’s going to see.”

“Especially in this weather,” Tiny said, and sneezed.

“Another good thing,” Tom added. “This last time, you birds didn’t leave a lot of evidence around to alert the law.”

Wally said, “The computer says there’s a million ways to get it now. It’s so easy.”

Stan said, “Good. So let’s do it and get it over with.”

His Mom said, “I’ll go along with that. I want to get back to where driving’s a contact sport.”

“So we’ll just do it,” Doug said, and shrugged at how easy it was.

“Be glad to get it over with,” Kelp said.

Then there was a little silence, everybody drinking coffee or looking at the wall or drawing little fingertip circles on the tablecloth, nobody quite meeting anybody else’s eye. The light in the crowded little dining room seemed to get brighter, the tablecloth whiter, the walls shinier, the silence deeper and deeper, as though they were turning into an acrylic genre painting of themselves.

Finally, it was May who broke the silence, saying, “How?”

Then everybody was alive and animated again, all looking at her, all suddenly eager to answer the question. “It’s easy, May,” Kelp said. “We just winch it in.”

“We tie the rope to the rope,” Doug explained.

“Naturally,” Tiny added, “we gotta get a new winch.”

“Oh, yeah,” Kelp said, nodding. “And a rope.”

Stan said, “Don’t we need some kind of boat?”

“Not one that sinks in the rain,” Tiny suggested.

Wally asked, “Well, when do we do it? Do you want to wait for the rain to stop?”

“Yes,” Tiny said.

“Well, I don’t know,” Doug said. “Depends on how long that is. You know, the engineers in the dam put a little boat in the water every once in a while, run around the reservoir, take samples and so on, and if they ran over our line they’d cut it. Even if they didn’t foul their propeller, even if they didn’t find it, we’d lose the line.”

Tiny said, “They won’t do one of their jaunts in this weather, count on it.”

“That’s true,” Doug agreed.

May cleared her throat and said, “It seems to me, John would point out right here that the instant the rain stops the people in the dam might go right out in their boat so they can get caught up with their schedule.”

“That’s also true,” Doug agreed.

Wally said, “Miss May, what else would John point out?”

“I don’t know,” May said. “He isn’t here.”

Everybody thought about that. Stan said, “What it is, when John’s around, you don’t mind coming up with ideas, because he’ll tell you if they’re any good or not.”

“Dortmunder,” Tiny said, ponderously thoughtful, “is what you call your focal point.”

With his patented bloodless lipless cackle, Tom said, “Pity he tossed in his hand just before the payout.”

Everybody looked uncomfortable. May said, “I’m here to see to John’s interests.”

“Oh?” Tom asked mildly. “Does Al still have interests?”

Murch’s Mom gave him a beady look. “I don’t see what it matters to you,” she said. “It doesn’t come out of your half. You’re just a troublemaker for the fun of it, aren’t you?”

“As long as everybody’s happy,” Tom told her, “I’m happy.”

“The question is,” May insisted, “when are you going to do it, and how are you going to do it?”

“May,” Kelp said, “I’ve touched that box now, with this hand.” He showed it to her, palm out. “From here on, it’s so easy.”

“Fine,” May said. “Tell me about it.”

Kelp turned to Doug. “Explain it to her, okay?”

“Well,” Doug said. “We go out and tie the rope to the rope, and Tiny winches it in.”

Tiny said, “Don’t you have to do something to get the box lighter, so it’ll lift up over the tree stumps?”

“Oh, right,” Doug said. “I forgot that part.”

“And when,” May said. “And what kind of boat. And what are the details?”

“That’s what we need John for!” Kelp exclaimed, punching the table in his irritation.

“We don’t have John,” May pointed out. “So we’ll have to work out the details ourselves. And the first detail is, when do you want to do it?”

“As soon as possible,” Stan answered. Turning to Tiny, he explained, “I hate to say this, but I think we’re better off in the rain. As long as we get ourselves ready for it.”

“And the boat doesn’t sink,” Tiny said.

“Well, a new boat,” Doug said. “That’s gonna be expensive.”

Everybody looked at Tom, who gazed around mildly (for him) and said, “No.”

“Tom,” Kelp said, “we need a certain amount of—”

“No more dough from me,” Tom said. He sounded serious about it. To Doug he said, “Who’m I buying all this equipment from? You. So donate the stuff.”

“Well, not the boat,” Doug told him.

“Steal the fucking boat,” Tom advised.

Doug floundered a bit at that, but Stan rescued him, saying, “Okay, Doug, never mind, we’ll work out the boat.”

“Okay,” Doug said, but he was getting those little white spots on his cheeks again, like when he’d been in shock.

Stan turned to May. “We’ll work it all out, May. We’re just not used to doing this, that’s all.”

May surveyed the table. “I’ll make fresh coffee,” she decided, and went away to the kitchen. She could hear them bickering in there the whole time she was away.

SIXTY-THREE

Dortmunder did not sleep like a baby, home in his own bed at last. He slept like a grown-up who’d been through a lot. He slept leadenly, at times noisily, mouth open, limbs sprawled any which way, bedclothes tangled around ankles. He had good dreams (sunlight, money, good-looking cars, and fast women) and bad dreams (water), and periods of sleep so heavy an alligator would have envied him.

It was during a somewhat shallower stretch that Dortmunder was slightly disturbed by the scratchings and plinkings of someone picking the lock on the apartment door, opening it, creeping in (these old floors creak, no matter what you do) and closing the door with that telltale little snick. Dortmunder almost came all the way to the surface of consciousness at that instant, but instead, his brain decided the noises were just Tom returning from one of his late-night filling-the-pockets forays, and so the tiny sounds from the hallway were converted in his dream factory into the shushings and plinkings of wavelets, and in that dream Tom was a giant fish with teeth, from whom Dortmunder swam and swam and swam, never quite escaping.

Normally, the interloper would have had trouble finding his way around the dark and almost windowless apartment, but Dortmunder’s recent underwater experiences had led him to leave a light burning in the bathroom, by which illumination it was possible for the interloper to make his way all through the place, to reassure himself that the sleeping Dortmunder was the only current resident, and then to go on and make himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the kitchen. (The clinking of knife inside peanut butter jar became, in Dortmunder’s dreams, the oars in the oarlocks of Charon’s boat.)

The interloper was quiet for a long time after ingesting his sandwich and one of Dortmunder’s beers; in fact, he napped a little, at the kitchen table. But then, along around sunup, he moved into the bedroom and threw all Dortmunder’s clothing onto the floor from the chair beside the door so he could sit there, just beyond the foot of the bed, and watch Dortmunder sleep.

The faint metallic click as the interloper cocked his rifle caused Dortmunder to frown in his sleep and make disgusting smacking sounds with his mouth, and to dream briefly of being deep underwater and having his air tank suddenly fall off his back and separate from the mouthpiece hose with a faint metallic click just before his mouth and stomach and brain filled with water; but then that dream floated away and he dreamed instead about playing poker with some long-ago cellmates in the good old days, and being dealt a royal flush—in spades—which caused him to settle back down in contentment, deeper and deeper into sleep, so that it was almost two hours later when he finally opened his eyes and rubbed his nose and did that sound with his mouth and sat up and stretched and looked at the rifle aimed at his eye.

“GL!” Dortmunder cried, swallowing his tongue.

Rifle. Gnarled old hands holding the rifle. Wrinkly old eye staring down the rifle’s sights. The last resident of Cronley, Oklahoma, seated in a chair in Dortmunder’s bedroom.

“Now, Mr. Department of Recovery,” said the hermit, “you can just tell me where Tim Jepson is. And this time, ain’t nobody behind me with no bottle.”

SIXTY-FOUR

No bottle…

When dawn’s sharp stiletto poked its orange tip into Guffey’s eye through the windowless opening in the Hotel Cronley’s bar’s front wall, he awakened to a splitting headache and a conundrum. Either the infrastructure man’s partner had hit him on the head with three bottles, which seemed excessive, or something funny was going on.

Three bottles. All broken and smashed on the bar floor, all with their corks still jammed tight in their cracked-off necks. And all absolutely stinking. They were dry inside, so it wasn’t merely that the wine had gone bad after all these years; and in any event, the stench seemed to come more from the crusted gunk on the bottles’ outside.

Plumbing. The second invader had gone to the basement to look at the plumbing. So did Guffey, reeling a bit from the aftereffects of the blow on the head, and when he found the dismantled trap he knew. By God, it was Tim Jepson after all! Come back for his fourteen thousand dollars, just as Mitch Lynch had said he would. Fourteen thousand dollars hidden all these years in those wine bottles in this dreadful muck river; wasn’t that just like Jepson?

In my hands, Guffey thought inaccurately, and I let him get away. But perhaps all hope was not yet lost. There was still one slender thread in Guffey’s hand: the license plate of that little white automobile. Could he follow that thread? He could but try.

Before noon on that same day, Cronley became at last what it had for so long appeared to be: deserted. Guffey, freshly shaved, garbed in the best of the professors’ stolen clothing, dismantled rifle and more clothing stowed in the knapsack on his back, marched out of Cronley and across the rock-strewn desert toward his long-deferred destiny.

By early evening, he’d walked and hitchhiked as far as a town with a state police barracks, where he reported the hit-and-run driver, offering a description of the car and its license number, plus the welt on the back of his head for evidence. They took the license number and description and ran them through their computer, and they took the welt on the back of his head and ran him through the hospital, giving him the softest night’s sleep and the best food of his entire life, and almost making him give up the quest right there. All a fella had to do, after all, to live in the lap of luxury like this, was step out in front of a bus seven or eight times a year.

But duty called, particularly when the cops came around the hospital next morning to say they knew who’d hit him but there wasn’t much to be done about it. (He’d been counting on this official indifference.) The car, it seemed, was a rental, picked up at the Oklahoma City airport the same day it hit Guffey and turned back in the next day. The miscreants—“New Yorkers: you might know”—were long gone. There wasn’t the slightest mark on the car, nor were there any witnesses, nor had the hospital found anything at all seriously wrong with Guffey (amazingly enough), so there simply wasn’t enough of a case to warrant an interstate inquiry.

Guffey, humble as ever, accepted everything he was told, and asked only one thing in return: Might he have, please, the name and address of the person who had rented the car?

One of the cops grinned at that request and said, “You wouldn’t think of taking the law in your own hands, would you?”

“I’ve never been out of Oklahoma in my life!” Guffey cried, truthfully. “I just want to write that person and tell him I forgive him. I’m a Christian, you know. Praise the Lord!”

When it looked as though Guffey might intend to start preaching in their direction nonstop, the cops gave him two names—Tom Jimson, who’d rented the car, and John Dortmunder, who’d driven it—plus one address in New York for both of them. (Tom Jimson, huh? Tim Jepson, Tom Jimson, huh? Huh? Huh?)

There was a little glitch when the hospital said they wanted to keep Guffey a few days longer for observation, but when they discovered he didn’t have any insurance they realized they’d already observed him long enough, and he was let go. And then, for the first time in his life, thumb extended, Guffey left Oklahoma.

The trip northeast was fairly long and adventurous, punctuated by a number of crimes of the most cowardly and despicable sort: church poor-boxes rifled, cripples mugged for their grocery sacks, things like that. And here at last was New York. And here was the address. And here was John Dortmunder.

Tim Jepson wasn’t here right at this minute, unfortunately—killing him in his sleep would be the safest way to go about it, after all—but that was all right. John Dortmunder was here and John Dortmunder could tell Guffey how to find Tim Jepson.

And he would, too. Oh, yes.

SIXTY-FIVE

“Well, no,” Dortmunder said, trying to sound like a reasonable person in control of himself and his environment, rather than a terrified bunny rabbit who’s just been awakened by a madman with a rifle. “No, I don’t know where Tom—Tim is.”

“Lives here,” the madman corrected him. “Said so when you rented the car.”

Dortmunder stared, astonished at the madman’s information, and the madman cackled, rather like Tom himself, except that his mouth opened plenty wide enough to see the shriveled and darkened toothless gums. “Didn’t know I knew that, did you?” he demanded, the rifle as steady as a courthouse cannon in his wrinkled old hands.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Oh, I know all sorts of stuff, Mr. Department of Recovery. Tim Jepson calls himself Tom Jimson now. He paid for that rental car. You drove.”

“Well, gee, you’re pretty good,” Dortmunder told him, thinking like mad.

“You know what I’m really good at?” the madman asked him.

“No, what’s that?”

“Shooting.” The maniac grinned, cheek nestled against the cold rifle. “I been shooting for the pot for years now,” he explained.

“Don’t you ever hit it?” Dortmunder asked him.

Which made the old guy mad, for some reason. “Shooting for the pot!” he repeated, with great emphasis. “That means shooting food! Coyotes and rabbits and gophers and snakes and rats! That you put in the pot! And eat!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Dortmunder told him, very sincerely. “I’m a city person, I don’t know these things.”

“Well, I do,” the touchy countryman said, “and let me tell you, Mr. City Person, I’m goddamn good at shooting for the pot.”

“I bet you are,” Dortmunder told him, filling his voice to the gunwales with admiration.

“You get a little squirrel out there,” the madman told him, “it don’t stand still and let you aim, like how you do. It keeps moving, jumping around. And yet, every blessed time I pull this trigger, I hit that squirrel just exactly where I want. I never spoil the meat.”

“That’s pretty good,” Dortmunder assured him.

“It’s goddamn good!”

“That’s right! That’s right!”

“So, then,” the madman said, settling down once more, “what do you think the chances are, if I decided to shoot that left earlobe offa you, that I’ll probly do it?”

“Well, uh,” Dortmunder said. His left earlobe began to itch like crazy. His left hand began to tremble like crazy, thwarted in its desire to scratch his left ear. His left eye began to water. “Uhhhhh,” he said, “I don’t think you ought to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Well, uh, the noise, the neighbors, they—”

“What I hear about New York City,” the madman informed him, “when the neighbors around these parts hear a gunshot they just turn up on the TV and pretend it didn’t happen. That’s what I hear.”

“Oh, well,” Dortmunder said, “that’s just people out in the sticks knocking New York the way they do. This city’s really a very warm-hearted, caring, uh, for instance, people from out of town are constantly getting their wallet back that they left in the taxi.”

“Well, I don’t leave no wallet in no taxi,” the madman told him. “I only know what I hear. And I figure it’s worth the chance.”

“Wait a minute!” Dortmunder cried. “Why do you, why do you want to do such a thing?”

“For practice,” the madman told him. “And so you’ll take me seriously.”

“I take you seriously! I take you seriously!”

“Good.” The madman nodded agreeably but kept the rifle aimed at Dortmunder’s ear. “So where’s Tim Jepson?” he said.

SIXTY-SIX

“Uh,” said the man on the bed.

Guffey frowned at him. “Uh?”

“I don’t know!”

“If you really don’t know,” Guffey told him, in all sincerity, “that’s a pity, because you’re about to lose an ear.”

“Wait a minute!” the man called John Dortmunder cried, waving his arms around, kicking his legs under the blanket. “I do know, but wait a minute, okay?”

Guffey almost lowered the rifle at that, it was so astonishing. “You do know, but wait a minute?”

“Listen,” John Dortmunder said earnestly, “you know Tom Jimson, right? Or Tim Jepson, or whatever you want to call him.”

“I surely do,” Guffey agreed, hands squeezing the rifle so hard he almost shot the fellow’s ear off prematurely.

“Well, then, think about it,” Dortmunder invited him. “Would anybody on this Earth protect Tom Jimson? Would anybody risk their own ear for him?”

Guffey thought that over. “Still,” he said, “Tim Jepson lives here with you, and you know where he is, but you don’t want to tell me. So maybe you’re just crazy or something, and what you need is shock therapy, like me shooting off your ear and then a couple of fingers and then—”

“No no no, just give me a chance,” Dortmunder cried, bouncing around on the bed some more. “I don’t blame you, honest I don’t. I know what Tom did to you, he told me all about it.”

Guffey growled, low in his throat. “He did?”

“Getting you stuck in that elevator and the whole thing.” Shaking his head sympathetically, he said, “He even laughed about it. I could hardly stand to listen.”

Nor could Guffey. “Then how come you hang out with this fella?” he demanded. “And protect him?”

“I’m not protecting Tom,” Dortmunder protested. “There’s other people in it that I do care about, okay?”

“I don’t care about nobody but Tim Jepson.”

“I know that. I believe it.” Dortmunder spread his hands, being reasonable. “You waited this many years,” he pointed out. “Just wait another day or two.”

Guffey gave that suggestion the bitter chuckle it deserved. “So you can go warn him? What kinda idiot do you think I am?”

Dortmunder stared around the room, brow corrugated with thought. “I tell you what,” he said. “Stay here.”

“Stay here?”

“Just till I get my phone call.”

“What phone call?”

“From the friends of mine that’ll say they’re done doing what they’re doing, and then—”

Guffey was getting that lost feeling. He said, “Doing what? Who? What are they doing?”

“Well, no,” Dortmunder said.

“By God,” Guffey said, taking a bead, “you can kiss that ear good-bye.”

“No, I don’t think I could, really,” Dortmunder told him. “And I don’t think I can tell you who’s doing what, or where they’re doing it, or anything about it. But if you shoot my ears off, I won’t be able to answer the phone, and then you’ll never get your hands on Tom Jimson.”

Guffey nodded and said, “So why don’t I forget about your ear and just drop a cartridge into your brainpan there and wait for that phone call myself?”

“They won’t talk to you,” Dortmunder answered. “And what do you want to sit around with a dead body for?”

“They’ll talk to me,” Guffey said. “I’ll tell them I’m your uncle, and they’ll believe me. And the reason I want to sit around with a dead body is, if you’re alive I won’t be able to sleep or turn my back or go to the bathroom or nothing for two, three days until the phone rings. As a matter of fact,” he added, having convinced himself with his own logic, “that’s just what I’m gonna do.” And he adjusted his aim accordingly, saying, “Good-bye.”

“Wait!”

“Quit shoutin things,” Guffey told him irritably. “You throw off my concentration, and that could spoil my aim. I’m givin you a nice painless death here, so just be grateful and—”

“You don’t have to!”

Guffey knew it was rude to sneer at a person you’re about to kill—it adds insult to injury, in fact—but he couldn’t help it. “What are you gonna do? Give me your word of honor?”

“I got handcuffs!”

Guffey lowered the rifle, intrigued despite himself. “Handcuffs? How come you got handcuffs?”

“Well, they kinda come in handy sometimes,” Dortmunder said with a little shrug.

“So your idea is, I should cuff you to the bed there—”

“Maybe to the sofa in the living room,” Dortmunder suggested. “So it’s more comfortable and I could watch television if I wanted.”

Was this some sort of trick? In Guffey’s experience, everything pretty much was some sort of trick. He said, “Where’s these cuffs?”

Dortmunder pointed to the dresser along the wall to Guffey’s left. “Top drawer on the left.”

By standing beside the dresser, back against the wall, Guffey could keep an eye on Dortmunder while he pushed the drawer open and studied its contents by means of a number of quick peeks. And what contents! Mixed in with gap-toothed combs and nonmatching cufflinks and broken-winged sunglasses and squeezed-out tubes of various lotions and ointments were worn-looking brass knuckles, a red domino mask, a Mickey Mouse mask, a ski mask, three right-handed rubber gloves, a false mustache mounted on a white card in a clear plastic bag, a sprinkling of subway slugs, and as advertised, a pair of chrome handcuffs with the key in the lock.

One-handed—the other hand keeping the rifle trained on Dortmunder—Guffey removed the handcuffs, dropped them on the dresser top, and pulled out the key, which he pocketed. Then he tossed the handcuffs at Dortmunder and said, “Good. Put em on, why doncha?”

“Well, hey, you know,” Dortmunder complained. “I just woke up. Could I get dressed? Could I at least go to the bathroom?”

“Just a minute,” Guffey told him. “Don’t move.”

So Dortmunder didn’t move, and Guffey stepped sideways to the doorway, then backed through it and looked to the left (apartment door) and right (kitchen, with stove visible) before saying, “Okay, Mr. Dortmunder. I’m gonna go in the kitchen there and make me some coffee. And I’ll keep an eye down this way. And if your head shows past this door before I say okay, I’ll blow it off. You got that?”

“Oh, sure,” Dortmunder agreed. “I’ll just stay in here until you say.”

“Good.” Guffey started to back away toward the kitchen, then stopped. Grudgingly, he said, “You want coffee?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Okay.” Guffey started to back off again, but Dortmunder raised his hand like a kid who knows the answer. Guffey stopped. “Yeah?”

“If it isn’t too much trouble,” Dortmunder said, “uh, orange juice?”

SIXTY-SEVEN

Shoulders hunched against the steady rain, Myrtle leaned her chest against the side of the house on Oak Street and stood up on tiptoe. Watching through the kitchen window, she could see Doug standing next to the refrigerator, telephone to his ear. Across the back yards and across Myrtle Street, she could hear faintly the sound of her own phone ringing.

When will he give up? she wondered, and at last he did, the ringing sound from the next block cutting off at the same instant. Shaking his head, Doug turned from the wall phone to say something bewildered—“She’s never home!”—to Gladys, who had just marched into the kitchen, wearing a zipper jacket and a cloth cap. But Gladys gave him an unsympathetic shrug, opened the refrigerator, took out a can of beer, and was just popping the top when someone tapped Myrtle on the shoulder.

That touch made Myrtle jump so high that both people in the kitchen turned to look out the window at the movement, and when she landed she sagged back against the rain-wet wall of the house like an overwatered clematis. In growing horror she stared upward at what appeared to be the Abominable Snowman standing before her in a yellow slicker and rainhat that made him look like a walking taco stand. This creature, spreading out massive arms with catcher’s-mitt hands at the ends of them to pen her in and keep her from running away (as though her legs had the strength to run or even, without the help of the house, to hold her upright!), growled low in his throat and then said (in English! like a person, a human being!), “You don’t look like my idea of a peeping Tom, lady.”

“I’m not, I, I, I, I, I—”

The monster lifted one of those hands and waved it back and forth, and Myrtle’s voice stopped. Then he said, “You, you, you, I got that part. Now try me on the next word.”

Never had Myrtle felt so thin, so frail, so vulnerable and defenseless. She stammered out the only words that seemed to suit the case: “I’m sorry.”

“That’s nice,” the giant said. “That’s good. That counts on your side. On the other hand, ‘sorry’ isn’t, you know, an explanation.”

While Myrtle’s brain ran around inside her skull, looking for a bouquet of words that might placate this monster, the monster looked up at the window, raised his monster eyebrows, pointed at Myrtle a monster finger with the girth and toughness of a rat’s body, and mouthed elaborately, “You know this?”

Myrtle turned her head, looking up, and at this extreme angle Doug’s face, seen through the rain-drenched window, looked as scared as she felt. He was scared? Oh, good heavens! And when Doug nodded spastically at the monster, it seemed to Myrtle that her last hope, not even noticed till now, had just fled.

“Okay,” the monster said, and lowered his cold gaze on Myrtle once more. “It’s raining out, little lady,” he said. “Let’s us be smart. Let’s get in out of the rain.”

“I want to go home now,” Myrtle said in her tiniest voice.

For answer, the monster lifted his right hand and made a little move-along gesture. Myrtle, not knowing what else to do, obeyed, preceding the monster around to the back of the house and through the door and into the kitchen, where Doug and Gladys both looked at her with surprised disapproval.

The monster shut the door, and Doug said, “Myrtle, what are you doing here?”

Desperate, betrayed, feeling that Doug at least should be on her side, Myrtle said, “What are you doing here? You and the computer man and the so-called environment protection man and Gladys and my f-f-f-f—everybody else? You were here all along, lying to me, waiting for rain!”

The looks these three people gave one another at that outburst suggested to Myrtle, somewhat belatedly, that she might have revealed a bit more knowledge there than she should have. (At least she’d had sense enough not to mention her father.) Confirming this fear, the monster said, “This friend of yours knows a lot about us, Doug.”

Doug shook his head, protesting with a tremor in his voice. “Not from me, Tiny! Honest!”

Tiny? Myrtle stared, but was distracted from this exercise in misapplied nomenclature by the sudden appearance in the kitchen of her father.

Yes. No question. She knew it at once. And almost as quickly she also knew, after one look in those icy eyes and at that gray, fleshless, hard-boned face, that this wasn’t a father into whose arms one threw oneself. In fact, as instinctively as she’d grasped their relationship, she also grasped that it might be a very bad idea to inform him of it.

It was already a bad idea merely to have attracted his attention. After a quick but penetrating glare at Myrtle, her father swiveled his eyes to the monster and said, without moving his bloodless lips, “Tiny?”

“Peeking in the window,” Tiny told him succinctly. “Doug’s girlfriend, only the idea was she didn’t know about this house or we’re here or what’s going on. Isn’t that right, Doug?”

“I thought so,” Doug said, sounding desperate. Spreading his arms in a gesture of appeal, he said to Myrtle’s father, “Whatever she knows, Tom, she didn’t know it from me. I swear!”

“And she knows a lot,” the monster called Tiny said. “Including we been here waiting for weather.”

Surprised, her father looked full at Myrtle (now she could see why Edna’s reaction had been so extreme when she’d seen this man again after so many years) and said, “Know everything, do you? Where’d you learn it all?”

“I, I saw you all come out on the lawn,” she told him in her little voice. “You were so happy when the clouds came.”

Tiny said, “She’s been keeping an eye on us, this girl.”

Myrtle’s father gave Doug a look of icy contempt, saying, “You gave it away, all right. You are as stupid as you look.”

While Doug was still trying to decide what if any answer to give that, her father turned back to Myrtle and said, “Who else knows about us?”

(Keep Edna out of this!) “Nobody!”

Doug said, “That’s gotta be true, Tom. She wouldn’t tell her mother, and there’s nobody else she hangs out with. She’s just a librarian here in town!”

(How empty he makes my life sound, Myrtle thought. And how little he cares about me, really.)

Her father nodded slowly, thinking things over, and then he said, “Well, the back yard’s nice and soft after all this rain. We’ll plant her when it gets dark.”

Everyone else in the room got the import of that remark before Myrtle did, and by the time she’d caught up they were all making objections, every one of which she heartily seconded.

Gladys spoke first, in tones of outrage: “You can’t do that!”

Then Doug, in tones of panic: “I can’t be involved in anything like that!”

And then Tiny, calm but persuasive: “We don’t need to do that, Tom.”

“Oh, yeah?” Her father—Tom Jimson—shook his head at all three of them. “Where does she go from here, then? Straight to the law.”

“We keep her,” Tiny said. “We’re making our move tomorrow night, anyway. After that, what do we care what she says or where she goes?”

“Then her mother goes to the law when she doesn’t come home,” Tom Jimson said. (It was easier to think of him by his name, and not as father at all.)

Gladys said, “She can phone her mother and say she’s gonna spend the night with Doug.”

Myrtle gasped, and Doug had the grace to look embarrassed, but Gladys turned and gave her a jaundiced look and said, “It’s better than not spending the night anywhere,” and Myrtle knew she was right.

But Tom Jimson hadn’t given up his original plan. “Where do we keep her?” he demanded. “Who’s gonna stay up with her all night? Anywhere we put her she’ll go out a window.”

“Not the attic,” said a voice from the door, and they all turned, and Wally was there (if that was his name).

How long had he been there? Was he the criminal mastermind Myrtle had been imagining, or merely the inoffensive little round man he seemed? Or something between the two?

Myrtle stared at him, but Wally didn’t meet her eye. Instead, he came farther into the kitchen, saying to Tom Jimson, “There’s a room up in the attic with a door we can lock. And I kind of stay up all night anyway, so I can check from time to time, make sure she isn’t trying to break out or anything.”

“She can yell out the window,” Jimson objected.

Wally shrugged that away with a little smile. He must be the mastermind, he was the only one who didn’t exhibit any fear of Tom Jimson. “In this rain?” he said.

Gladys said, “Wally’s right. Nobody’s out there, and if they were they couldn’t hear her.” So Wally was his real first name, at least.

Tiny said, “Look at it this way, Tom. Up to now we haven’t done anything that’s gonna get the law all excited about finding us. But if we start bumping off local citizens, everything changes.”

“I don’t do things like that,” Doug said with shaky insistence. “I’m a diver. That’s all I came here for.”

A brisk discussion ensued, everybody arguing against Tom Jimson’s bloodlust, and under it—behind the conversation’s back, as it were—Wally kept staring fixedly at Myrtle, as though trying to convey some private message to her. But what? Was he threatening her? Warning her? Maybe he didn’t want her to tell the others she’d met him before.

Well, that was all right. She didn’t want to tell anybody anything. Every one of these people scared her, even Gladys.

The discussion was still raging when three more people crowded into the kitchen, demanding to know what was going on, and the story of Myrtle’s capture and the controversy over her disposal was told all over again. These were two men and a woman, but neither man was the one who’d come raging and angry to pull Doug away from Myrtle’s front porch that time. So how many people were there in this…

… gang.

It’s a gang, Myrtle thought. I’ve been kidnapped by a gang. But what in heaven’s name is a gang doing in Dudson Center?

The woman who’d just arrived, a taller and younger and friendlier-seeming person than Gladys, said at one point, “I wonder if I should phone John, see if he has any ideas for what to do.”

“My idea is,” Tom Jimson told her, “Al’s out of this story,”

“The attic,” Tiny said, quiet but emphatic. “Wally’s right.”

There was general agreement on this, except of course for Tom Jimson, who said, “I’ll tell you one thing, and listen with all your ears. If she gets away, it’s dynamite. Now.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” everybody said, and then they all gestured to Myrtle, a little impatient and irritated with her. “Come on, come on,” they all said, and the whole crowd escorted her upstairs.

SIXTY-EIGHT

The warlord and the princess do not recognize each other!

The princess, stolen by gypsies/crows/Merlin/the childless peasant woman, will have a birthmark in an intimate location.

Not in Real Life. Or, even if she does, it doesn’t matter, because there isn’t any inheritance.

A princess has her father’s realm. A warlord has a cache of valuables.

Oh, the money in the reservoir. I think Tom intends to take that with him. The point is, the princess is in peril!

Naturally.

I arranged to have her placed under my protection.

Naturally.

And now I wait, and I’m patient, and I see what transpires, isn’t that right?

Naturally.

SIXTY-NINE

When Dortmunder opened one eye, everything was wrong. Opening the second eye didn’t improve the situation. He was still in the same condition, lying on the floor in the living room, facing a television set on which Raquel Welch wore a lab coat and discussed microbiology. Raquel Welch. Microbiology. Microbiology.

Feet. Feet entered the living room, dressed in scuffed old brown boots and raggedy-cuffed faded blue jeans. Seeing the feet, Dortmunder realized it had been the opening of the apartment door that awakened him, and then he remembered it all: 1) Guffey. 2) Tom/Tim Jimson/Jepson. 3) Handcuffs. 4) Pizza, which Guffey had gone out for.

“Got it,” Guffey announced from way up there above the feet.

“Great.” Dortmunder used his left hand to push himself to a seated position, since his right wrist was through a loop of the handcuffs, whose other loop was closed around a segment of the radiator. Dortmunder felt dizzy, woozy, and now he recalled that the reason Guffey had gone out for pizza in the first place was because they both had begun to feel they’d put somewhat too much beer into empty stomachs.

Companionably, Guffey opened the pizza box on the floor, within easy reach of Dortmunder’s left hand, and then said, “I got us some more beer, too.”

“Good.”

Guffey also sat on the floor, democratically, and they both rested their backs against the sofa while they ate pizza and drank beer and watched Raquel Welch run around inside somebody’s bloodstream. She was in a jumpsuit now, more sensibly, but she was still talking about microbiology.

After a while, Guffey said wistfully, “You know, John, this is about the nicest party I’ve been to in, oh, forty, uh, lemme think, forty-four years.”

“Well, it’s not a real party, Guffey,” Dortmunder pointed out. “It’s just the two of us.”

“For me,” Guffey told him, “two’s a crowd.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

They sat in easy silence together awhile longer, and then, during a National Guard commercial—it was really very late at night, damn near morning already—Guffey said doubtfully, “Maybe it’s Matt.”

“You think so?”

“I dunno. Try me on it.”

Filling his voice with enthusiasm and good cheer—or at least giving it the old dropout try—Dortmunder said, “Hey, Matt, whadaya say? How ya doing, Matt? Hey, look, fellas, it’s Matt Guffey!”

Guffey listened to all that, listened to the echoes, thought it over, then shook his head. “Don’t think so,” he said.

“It’ll come to you,” Dortmunder assured him.

“Yeah, sure it will.”

That had been a kind of embarrassing moment, much earlier this evening, when Dortmunder, in a psychologically clever ploy to get Guffey to relax his vigil and lower his guard, had said, “Listen, if we’re gonna be stuck together a couple days, let’s at least be friendly. My name’s John.” And it had turned out that Guffey couldn’t remember his first name.

Well, you couldn’t blame the guy, really. For the last couple of decades, nobody had talked directly to Guffey at all, and during the prison years prior to that people all called one another by their last names to demonstrate how manly they really were despite whatever sexual practices incarceration might have reduced them to, so it had probably been some time in the waning days of the Second World War that anybody had last addressed Guffey by his first name.

Guffey had been embarrassed, of course, at this lapse in his memory, and Dortmunder had volunteered to help him find the missing name, so now Guffey spent a part of his time—that part not learning about microbiology—thinking about potential names, and whenever he came across one that seemed a possibility Dortmunder would try it out on him. So far, no success.

A while later, the microbiology movie came to an end and Guffey managed to get to his feet on the second try and go over to switch around the channels till he found Raquel Welch again, this time not discussing anything at all because she was a cavewoman.

The lack of discussion didn’t seem to harm the impact of the picture.

“Sam. Try Sam.”

“Hey, Sam! Sam Guffey! Come over here, Sam!”

“Nope. Makes me sound like a dog.”

After another little period of time, Dortmunder came out of a half snooze to realize he had to make room for more beer. (The pizza was all gone, but a couple beers were left.) “Guffey,” he said.

Guffey looked away from the prehistoric landscapes. “Nurm?”

“Listen, Guffey,” Dortmunder said. “I gotta go the bathroom.”

“Gee, so do I,” said Guffey.

“Yeah, but I’m, uh, I got this, this thing here. The whatchamacallit.”

“Oh, that thing,” Guffey said, and frowned.

In previous similar circumstances, Guffey had sat across the room and tossed the key to Dortmunder, who’d unlocked the cuffs and tossed the key back before Guffey permitted him to go away to the bathroom. Then it had been Dortmunder’s responsibility, under Guffey’s watchful gaze and steady rifle, to lock himself to the cuffs again on his return.

But this time, Guffey made no move to get up and cross the room to where the rifle leaned against an armchair. “Listen, Guffey,” Dortmunder said. “It’s kind of urgent.”

Guffey frowned at Dortmunder, doubling every wrinkle on his wrinkled face. He said, “You won’t try to run away, will you?”

“Run? I can barely walk.”

“Here, take the goddamn thing,” Guffey said, and yanked the handcuff key from his pocket and slapped it into Dortmunder’s palm.

“Thanks, Guffey,” Dortmunder said, the gravity of the occasion causing him to pay insufficient attention to what Guffey had just done. So he simply unlocked the cuffs, climbed the sofa and the wall to his feet, and lurched a circuitous route to the doorway and the hail and the bathroom.

While he was in there, Guffey’s voice sounded from the other side of the door: “Try Jack.”

“Hey, Jack!” Dortmunder yelled, trying to keep his aim true on a sneakily shifting bowl. “I’m fulla beer, Jack! Hey, Jack Guffey, you fulla beer?”

No answer. Dortmunder finished, flushed, washed, opened the door, and Guffey was standing there, nodding slowly, his eyes at half mast. “No,” he said, “and yes.”

Dortmunder went back to the living room and sat on the floor in front of the sofa but didn’t put the cuffs back on. He gazed at the Neanderthals—what casting! — and then at the rifle leaning against the armchair beside the television set, and thought things over. He could move, if he wanted to, no question about that. He just didn’t want to, that’s all.

After a while, Guffey came back into the room, bouncing off the doorposts. He gazed blearily at Dortmunder. Sounding maybe worried, maybe dangerous, certainly drunk, he said, “You didn’t put the cuffs on.”

“No, I didn’t,” Dortmunder told him. “And I didn’t grab the rifle either. What the hell, Guffey. Any enemy of Tom’s is a friend of mine. Come over here and watch the movie.”

SEVENTY

What Doug was, was terrified. Petrified. He had so many things to be terrified about that it petrified him just to try to list them all. That after they let Myrtle go she’d report him to the authorities, for instance. Or that they wouldn’t let her go, but instead would do something dreadful to her and he’d be a party to it. Or that Tom would do something awful to everybody else at the last minute in order to keep all the money for himself. Or that after all these assaults on the reservoir the authorities would have the place staked out and would arrest everybody the minute they showed up for the fourth and final attempt. That Stan Murch, once more at the wheel of Doug’s pickup (because Doug was too nervous to drive), might take it into his head to do another three-sixty just for the high-spirited fun of it. That Andy Kelp, seated on Doug’s other side in the pickup on this run to Long Island, would realize he was proficient enough now to do the rest of the job himself and didn’t need Doug anymore, and so would unload him profitless from the job, via methods ranging from telling him to get lost to killing him.

But all of these paled into insignificance beside the big one, the main fear, the thing he was at this particular moment the most terrified about, which was: he was going to steal a boat.

A crime. A felony. An active robbery or theft, in which he was the principal figure. Or at least that’s the way it would look to the law. True, his companions in crime were hardened criminals while he was still so soft he was practically runny, but in fact his expertise was necessary to the selection of just the right boat; his equipment from his shop would fill out the required gear; his pickup truck would tow the stolen boat halfway across New York State; and he would be present throughout the entire event.

Not that he wanted to be, God knows. He didn’t want to have anything to do with this entire operation. And yet, here he was. At just around the same time that—unknown to those in the pickup—Dortmunder and Guffey were sociably and comfortably observing Raquel Welch in that cozy living room in Manhattan, here was Doug in the middle of the seat of his pickup, flanked by these hardened criminals here, and heading toward his first major crime through a pelting rain that even sounded like doom, thundering on the pickup’s tin roof.

Somehow or other, by a wandering and purposeless journey he barely remembered and had never understood, Doug’s very first purchase of off-the-back-of-the-truck merchandise from Mikey Donelli (or Donnelly) had led, by minuscule gradations and unnoticeable slippages and the tiniest of forward steps, to this: piracy. On dry land.

Well, not that dry, really; it was raining just as hard here on Long Island as back upstate. “This is good for us,” Andy announced. “Nobody’s gonna be out and about to observe us.”

“It’s a well-known fact,” Murch added, racing them along a Long Island Expressway that was virtually empty for almost the only time in that clogged roadway’s existence, “that cops are afraid of water. They never come out in weather like this. That’s why we can make such good time.”

Very good time, unfortunately. The sign for the Sagtikos Parkway loomed out of the wet dark, and Murch took the ramp and swung them around onto the southbound highway without in the least slackening speed, leaving a double wake and a million dancing water specks in the oversoaked air behind them.

From there it was a quick run down to the south shore, Doug’s home area, where they would find their boat. (In one way, it seemed kind of dumb to do his first major criminal act in his own back yard, but on the other hand it would be even dumber to do it where he didn’t know the territory. Also, this way he could get back at a boat dealer who’d shafted him half a dozen years ago, too far back for anybody to think of Doug in connection with that dealer now.)

The Sagtikos took them to Merrick Highway, and then Doug directed them along that shopping artery through its various name permutations in several identical little south shore towns (identical even by day, when it wasn’t raining) until at last he pointed to the left, across the empty road, and said, “There’s the son of a bitch, right there.”

It was a revelation to see how professionals handled themselves in this situation; much, he supposed, as he handled himself when working underwater. The danger simply made you more methodical.

While Murch waited in the pickup, Andy and Doug got out into the pouring rain and Andy collected the short stepladder from the bed of the pickup. Then he and Doug approached the boat dealership, a long two-story building with large showroom and repair shop downstairs and offices up, plus a good-sized yard down at one end containing a number of new and repaired boats and enclosed by a chain-link fence with razor wire on the top.

Stopping in front of the triply bolted double gate in this fence, Andy peered into the darkness of the yard and said, “Where’s this dog, do you suppose?”

“Maybe he’s afraid of water,” Doug suggested. “He’s a police dog.”

“Well, he’ll be along,” Andy said, and opened the stepladder and climbed to its top. While Doug watched, he used the rubber-cowled alligator clips on the long length of wire to bypass the alarm system and make it possible to open the gate.

The dog, half German shepherd and half crocodile, came trotting out from under a large boat as Andy started picking the first of the padlocks. He didn’t bark, but simply looked at Andy and Doug the way heavyweight boxers look at each other. “Nice doggy,” Andy said, and took the aluminum foil package from his pocket. “Here’s a nice gift for you from Mickey Finn,” he said, opening the foil. Putting it on the pavement and using his boot-shod foot, he nudged the hamburger patty on its foil bed under the bottom of the gate and into the dog’s realm.

The dog sniffed once, chomped once, and the meat and half the aluminum foil disappeared.

Doug winced. “How can he do that?” he said, “D’jever get aluminum foil on your teeth? It’s terrible.”

“You know what’s worse than that?” Andy asked, returning to the padlock. “Eating a grapefruit and drinking milk at the same time.”

Oog; that was worse. Doug decided not to try to outgross Andy, and so the lock-picking was finished in silence, during which the dog wandered unsteadily back under the large boat and went to sleep.

What a complex moment it was for Doug when at last Andy pulled open the swinging gates! Mad elation swirled in tandem with redoubled terror in his brain, leaving him so shaken he almost lost his balance and fell when he stepped onto the boat dealer’s property. But he clutched at the breached gate for support, regained control, and went on to study the available boats while Andy put the stepladder back in the bed of the pickup, which Murch then backed into the yard.

“This one,” Doug had decided when Andy rejoined him.

Andy looked up at it. “Gee, Doug, we don’t wanna go to Europe.”

“This boat won’t sink in the rain,” Doug told him. “It’s quieter than an outboard. We can do the winching right on it.”

Andy said, “You mean, bring the box up and put it on the boat?”

“Yes. Much easier, Andy.”

“Gee, Doug, I think you’re right,” Andy said. “At night, in the rain, nobody’s gonna see us anyway. So why not be comfortable, right?”

“Sleeps two,” Doug told him, and couldn’t repress a giggle. The mad elation combined with a completely unexpected exhilaration were beginning at last to conquer his fear.

“Is that right? Sleeps two?” Andy stepped back and surveyed the boat with a kind of proprietary pride. “Pretty good, Doug,” he agreed. “Pretty good.”

And it was. The boat Doug had selected, already swapped to a three-wheel hauler, was a twenty-four-foot Benjamin inboard cabin cruiser with a Fiberglas top and Lucite sides around the wheelhouse amidships, an open deck at the rear, and a narrow cabin below in front containing two single-person sleeping sofas, minimal kitchen facilities, and a very basic head. In comparison with the QEII, say, it was merely a tiny pleasure craft for weekend fishermen, but in comparison with their previous rubber raft it was the QEII.

Nodding happily in the rain, Andy said, “Stan’s gonna have a lot of fun towing this upstate.”

Startled, Doug said, “Andy? Stan, he won’t, uh, my truck…”

Andy reassuringly patted him on the arm. “Don’t worry, Doug,” he said. “Stan’ll be good. I’ll tell him to be good.”

“Uh,” said Doug.

SEVENTY-ONE

Myrtle awoke to a scratching sound. She opened her eyes and saw that it hadn’t been just a bad dream, after all. It had been true and real. The monster called Tiny, the tough gang members, her own icy-eyed father, all real, and she in their grasp, imprisoned here on this narrow old canvas cot in the attic of the house on Oak Street, under one holey sheet and one threadbare blanket, with a lumpy pillow under her head and a lock on the door.

It was amazing, really, that she’d been able to sleep at all. The cot was so lumpy, with one giant hard bump in particular, in the small of her back, that she just hadn’t been able to either prod out of the canvas or ignore. And there was also her situation, of course, as desperate as it could be, with the gang downstairs including among its members two people—Doug and Wally—that she’d thought of at one time as her friends, in their very different ways. Friendly, in any case.

So the fact that sleep had come to her at any time in the course of this night was just a proof of her exhaustion in the face of all this peril. And now, some sort of scratching noise had awakened her. Rats? Ooo!

Staring around at the bare wide-planked floor, Myrtle saw no rats, saw nothing alive or moving at all. Then she realized what it must be: rain. Very dim light showed at the one window in the end wall, meaning it must now be very shortly after dawn, and in that gray light she watched the raindrops pelt the window glass as hard and unceasing as ever.

So it was the rain, that’s all; too early to wake up. Myrtle closed her eyes again, and listened, and heard the scratching sound once more, and it came from the other direction. Not from the window at all. From the other way.

Reluctantly, Myrtle opened her eyes and looked the other way. Down there was the unfinished interior wall, closing off this room at the end of the attic. Centered in the wall was the old wooden door with its old worn brass round knob.

Skritch. Skritch. Someone was at the door.

Myrtle sat up on the creaky old cot. Though she’d slept in all her clothes—wouldn’t you? — she held the ragged sheet and blanket up to her throat as she stared wide-eyed toward the door.

Who is it? She whispered that: “Who is it?”

Skritch. Skritch.

Well, she hadn’t slept in all her clothes. Tentatively putting her legs over the side of the cot, she felt around with her toes, found her shoes, slipped them on, and now was completely dressed. As armored as possible under the circumstances, she crept across the rough wood floor and bent her ear to the door. “Hello?”

“Myrtle!” An excited but unidentifiable whisper.

“Who is it?”

“Wally!”

She recoiled. The mastermind! Her own whisper became increasingly sibilant, with falsetto breakthroughs: “What do you want?”

“I don’t dare rescue you yet!”

She frowned at the wood panel of the door: “What?”

“Tonight,” his faint whisper came, “when they’ve all gone— Myrtle?”

“Yesss?”

“Can you hear me?”

“I think so,” she whispered.

“Get down by the keyhole!”

Poison gas. Pygmy dart in her eye. Bending nearer the keyhole but not all the way in front of it, she whispered, “I can hear you.”

“Tonight,” came that rustle of his whisper, “they’ll all be going to the reservoir.”

Devil cults, black masses. Mass poisonings. “Why?”

He ignored that (of course!). “Only May and Murch’s Mom and I will be here. The compu—”

“Who?”

“The two ladies.” Then, his whisper somehow closer, more insinuating, as though his astral person had shinnied through the keyhole and up onto her shoulder, he asked, “Is her name really Gladys?”

“I don’t know anything anymore,” Myrtle wailed, half whispered and half in that screechy falsetto. “I don’t know what anybody’s doing, I don’t know anybody’s real name—”

“You know my real name.”

“Do I?”

“And I know yours.”

That brought her up short. She leaned her palm against the door, its wooden surface surprisingly warm and comforting to her touch. Her mind ran like watercolors.

“Myrtle?”

Nobody can be trusted, she thought hopelessly. Not even me. Bending closer to the keyhole, she whispered, “No, you don’t.”

“I don’t what?”

“Know my real name. My real name is Myrtle Street.”

“That’s where you live.”

“That’s partly why I lied. And partly, just before I met you, I just found out Tom Jimson’s my, my, my… father.”

“You just found out?”

“You’re the only person I ever said that name to. And now that I’ve seen Tom Jimson…”

His whisper awash in sympathy, Wally told her, “I guess he’s not much what people think of when they think ‘father.’ ”

“I sure hope not,” Myrtle whispered back.

“Well, listen. The computer says we can rescue each other!”

“Wally,” she whispered, bending closer and closer to the keyhole (oh, chink!), “who do you talk to when you use the computer?”

“What do you mean?”

“Where is it connected?”

“It’s just plugged in,” he whispered, sounding baffled. “Like any computer.”

“You aren’t giving orders to a gang? Or getting orders from a boss? Or anything like that?”

“Well, gee, no. Myrtle, it isn’t a VDT, not like your terminal at the library, it isn’t connected to a mainframe anywhere.”

“It isn’t?”

“No, honest. It’s my personal personal computer.”

Could she believe him? What could she believe? What could she believe? And, given her present circumstances, what did it matter what she did or did not believe? She whispered, “Wally, I don’t know what’s going on.”

“I’ll tell you,” he promised. “Tonight, they’re all going out to the reservoir to get some money that’s hidden there. I think Tom’s going to try to cheat everybody once they get the money.”

Well, that sounded believable. Myrtle whispered, “Then what?”

“Tom might come back here to, uh, make trouble.”

Myrtle had the feeling she knew what he meant. She had a quick vision of herself pleading for mercy—I’m your daughter! — and she pressed herself closer to the door, imagining the little, squat, round, moist, reliable form of Wally Knurr on its other side. “What should I do?”

“After everybody else leaves,” he whispered, “I’ll get you out of there and we’ll go over to your house. We’ll be able to see what happens from there.”

My house. My house. No other part of the plan mattered. “That’s wonderful, Wally,” Myrtle whispered, patting the door. “I’ll be waiting, whenever you say. I’ll be right here.”

SEVENTY-TWO

“More coffee?”

“Yeah.”

“Another English muffin?”

“Yeah.”

“Marmalade again?”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay? Yeah!”

“Fine, fine, fine. Listen, try Frank.”

“Frank? You think so? Okay: Hey, Frank! I always want marmalade on my English muffin, Frank! Hey, Frank Guffey, you got that?”

Guffey, watching the English muffins in the toaster oven little by little turn brown, like Larry Talbot becoming the wolfman, pondered and pondered and then shook his head. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t be a Frank.”

“I didn’t think so, either,” Dortmunder admitted.

“I might of been better off if I was a Frank,” Guffey decided, taking out the English muffins and going to work on them with the marmalade. “More self-assertive. Not so much of a patsy.”

“Hey, Patsy!” Dortmunder called. “Give me more marmalade, Patsy! Hey, Patsy Guffey, bring that English muffin over here.”

“Could be my sister,” Guffey said, bringing the plates over to the kitchen table, where Dortmunder sat hunched over his planted elbows, contemplating his hangover. Guffey went back to the counter for the coffee cups, brought them over, and placed them on the Formica with two loud ticks that made Dortmunder flinch.

They sat in silence together while the kitchen clock moved from three-twenty P.M. to three-forty P.M. without anybody noticing or caring. Then, Dortmunder, lifting his head and his eyes while draining the last of his now lukewarm coffee, noticed the clock and found himself thinking about what was or was not going on upstate. Putting down his cup (tick, flinch), he said, “I think I’m gonna phone them.”

Guffey looked semialert. “Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?”

“You make more coffee,” Dortmunder told him. “I go to the living room and make my phone call.”

“Hey, come on, Dortmunder,” Guffey said. (He wouldn’t use Dortmunder’s first name, he’d announced, until he found his own.) “That isn’t fair.”

“I’m not trying to be fair,” Dortmunder said, getting with some difficulty to his feet. “I’m trying to protect my interests.”

“Well, I got interests, too,” Guffey exclaimed.

“Not that I am trying to protect,” Dortmunder told him. “I don’t want you listening when I make my call.” Then, seeing Guffey try to be surreptitious about looking around the kitchen, he smirked a little, as much as his hangover would permit, and said, “No, there aren’t any extensions, though a particular friend of mine keeps trying to load them on me. I always said no, I didn’t want the goddamn things, and now I’m gonna be very happy to tell him I know why.”

Sitting at the table, Guffey shook his head and said, “Somehow or other, I lost the advantage around here. I mean, I had it. I had the rifle in my hands, I had the drop on you, I had you scared shitless, I had—”

“Well.”

“Never mind ‘well,’ ” Guffey told him. “I had you scared shitless, admit it.”

“You had me worried for a while,” Dortmunder allowed. “But we’re both reasonable men, so we worked things out. Or we’re working things out. Like right now, I’m gonna make my phone call and you’re gonna make more coffee.”

“It isn’t that I’m reasonable,” Guffey was saying, as Dortmunder left the room, “it’s that it always happens that way. I always lose the advantage. It’s a hell of a thing to live with.”

In the living room, Dortmunder called the number up in Dudson Center, hoping May would answer, and astonishingly enough it was May who answered. Recognizing her voice, he said, “May, it’s me.”

“John! Where are you?”

“Home, like I said I’d be.”

“Safe at home,” she said, sounding wistful.

Looking at the rifle, which still leaned against the wall beside the television set, Dortmunder said, “Well, kinda safe. Safer now, anyway. What’s happening up there?”

“John,” May said, all at once sounding excited, even admiring, “Stan and Andy and Doug came back with a boat! It’s huge! You wouldn’t believe how big it is!”

“Oh, yeah?”

“John, it sleeps two!”

“Sleeps two!” Dortmunder, visualizing the QEII, said, “What are they gonna do with it? Is it gonna go in the reservoir?”

“John,” May said, “it’s going to look like a toy boat in a bathtub. But Doug says it’s better, it’s quieter than an outboard motor and they can put the winch right on the boat and winch the box straight up out of the water and take it to shore on the boat.”

“Well, that part sounds okay,” Dortmunder admitted.

“On the other hand,” May said, lowering her voice, “we’ve had a little trouble around here.”

“Tom?”

“Not yet. He will be trouble, but not yet.”

“What, then?”

“There’s a girl,” May said. “Tiny found her peeking in the kitchen window. Turns out, she’s the girl Doug’s been seeing up here, and she was spying, and she knows a lot about us. And her mother’s the one Murch’s Mom’s been playing canasta with. John, did you know Murch’s Mom’s name was Gladys?”

“Go on.”

“No, it really is. Anyway, that’s what she told this girl’s mother that she plays canasta with.”

Dortmunder said, “Wait a minute. Tiny found the daughter spying?”

“Looking in the kitchen window.”

“Then what?”

“Well, one thing led to another, and now she’s locked in the attic until we’re finished.”

“And then what?”

“Well, we say we let her go. I don’t know what Tom says.”

Dortmunder could guess. He said, “What about her mother? Won’t she call the cops when her daughter doesn’t come home? Won’t they first look around the neighborhood?”

“We made her call home last night,” May said, “and say she was going away overnight with Doug. I listened on the extension, and—”

“Huh,” Dortmunder said.

“What?”

“Never mind, something I’ll tell you later about extensions. What happened next?”

“Well, John, I was astonished at that mother, let me tell you. The daughter—her name’s Myrtle Street, would you believe it?”

“Why not?”

“Because she lives on Myrtle Street.”

“Oh. No kidding.”

“Anyway, her mother said, ‘Good. About time you got your blood moving.’ Did you ever hear such a thing?”

“Weird,” Dortmunder agreed.

“Then she wanted to talk to Doug. The mother did. So Doug got on, expecting to have to say how he was going to respect the daughter and all that, and the mother wanted to talk to him about condoms.”

“Ah,” Dortmunder said.

“I don’t know who was more embarrassed, the girl or Doug. Particularly since, you know, nothing like that was going on anyway. Apparently, Doug hasn’t been too successful with this girl. So she wasn’t even spending the night with him, she was spending the night locked in the attic.”

“I don’t know, May,” Dortmunder said. “That doesn’t sound to me like a good situation up there.”

“Well, it’ll be over soon,” May said. “And John, I do understand your feelings about all this, I’m not going to argue with you or try to change your mind or anything, but we sure could use you up here.”

“What I think is,” Dortmunder said, “I think everybody should just walk away from it right now.”

“That’s impossible, John, you know that. Besides, they’re going to go do it tonight, and then it’ll be all over with. One way or the other.”

“It’s the other that bothers me,” Dortmunder said. “You keep your back against the wall, May.”

“I will. And I’ll see you tomorrow, John.”

Dortmunder was very thoughtful when he went back to the kitchen, where Guffey offered him a fresh cup of coffee, plus two more names to try: Harry and Jim. Neither did the trick, and then Dortmunder said, “Guffey, I’m gonna have to go up there.”

Guffey looked alert. “Up where?”

“Not near the water,” Dortmunder said. “Just to the town.”

“What town?”

“Now, here’s the deal,” Dortmunder went on. “If you wait until Tom’s got his money, then maybe Tom gets away and you don’t get to meet up with him at all. Which is maybe just as well.”

Guffey rested a scrawny fist on the kitchen table. “That man ruint my life,” he said. “And I mean that, Dortmunder. I was just a young fella when he got his hooks into me, and he ruint my entire life. My destiny is to catch up with that son of a bitch, or why would you and him come all the way out to Cronley, Oklahoma? What happens after I catch up is between him and me, but I got to have him in my sights one time before I die.”

“I guess I can understand that,” Dortmunder said. “So this is what I offer. You give me your solemn word you won’t make a move on Tom until this other business is over with, and you can come along with me upstate.”

“Where to?”

“But you have to swear you won’t do anything till I say it’s okay.”

Guffey thought about that. “What if I won’t swear?”

“Then I go out to the living room and get your rifle,” Dortmunder told him, “and bring it back in here, and wrap it around your neck, and go upstate by myself.”

Guffey thought about that. “What if I swear, only I’m lying?”

“I got a lot of friends up there where I’m going, Guffey,” Dortmunder said. “And all you got up there’s one enemy.”

SEVENTY-THREE

It hadn’t been easy for Andy Kelp to find a large station wagon with both MD plates and a trailer hitch, but he’d persevered, not settling for second best, and so it was a big solid Chrysler Country Square with woodoid trim that he sat in the front passenger seat of as Stan Murch steered off the county road an hour after alleged sunset that wet evening, towing the big boat (containing Doug, back there familiarizing himself with the controls) onto the same dirt lane they’d used for their very first assault on the reservoir, months ago. “This time we get it!” Kelp said. “I can feel it!”

Tiny got out of the backseat he was sharing with Tom. Carrying the wire cutters through the pouring rain, he lopped the new padlock at the same old barrier, then lifted the barrier out of the way. “Another déjà vu,” he muttered as he put the barrier back in position after car and boat had passed, then returned to his place in the wagon.

Last time on this road, in the motor home, Kelp had been the driver, mostly by ear, keeping the lights off and the windows open so he could listen to the bushes as they scraped past. This time, the downpour meant not only that no one in the car had any desire for the windows to be open, but also that Stan felt he could safely drive with the parking lights on. The rain both obscured the lights and lessened the likelihood of observers wandering the nearby vicinity. So the windshield wipers slashed back and forth, flinging water left and right, and through the sporadically clear glass they could dimly see the rutted dirt road and its surrounding trees and shrubbery, all muddily illuminated in a smoky amber glow.

After a while they reached, and this time saw, the second barrier, at the reservoir property’s perimeter fence, the one Kelp had not quite driven into the first time. Tiny climbed out again and cleared the way again, and when he got back into the car, dumping the wire cutters onto the carpet-covered storage space in back, he said, “I might as well go underwater this time. I couldn’t get any wetter.”

“Soon be over,” Kelp told him.

“That’s right,” Tom said mildly.

“According to the computer,” Wally said, “as soon as they get their hands on the money, Tom is going to try to betray everybody.”

“I’m afraid that’s true,” May agreed.

Murch’s Mom sniffed. “You don’t have to be a machine smarter than a human being to dope that out,” she said.

May said, “The guys out there with Tom know he’s got something in mind. They’ll keep an eye on him.”

“That’s right,” Murch’s Mom said. “They aren’t cream-puffs, you know. My boy Stanley can take care of himself.”

“And Tiny,” May said. “And Andy.”

Wally cleared his throat. “Just in case,” he said.

Murch’s Mom gave him an irritable look. “Are you talking against my boy Stanley?”

“What I’m saying is,” Wally assured her, “we ought to think about all the possibilities. That’s what the computer says we should do, and I agree with it.”

“You always agree with that computer,” Murch’s Mom told him. “You got a real mutual admiration society going there, that’s why you keep it around.”

May said, “Wally, what are you getting at? What possibilities?”

“Well,” Wally said, “let’s just say Tom does something really underhanded and nasty—”

“Sounds right,” Murch’s Mom said.

“And let’s just say,” Wally went on, “that he wins. He’s got the money and he’s, you know, harmed our friends.”

“Killed them, you mean,” May said.

“I don’t really like to say that.”

“But it’s what you mean.”

Wally looked pained. “Uh-huh.”

“Hmp,” said Murch’s Mom. But then she shook her head and said, “All right, go ahead, what then?”

“Well, that’s the question,” Wally told her. “Is Tom just going to take the money and run? Or is he going to say to himself, ‘I don’t want any witnesses left behind?’ ”

May looked at the storm-battered front windows. “You mean he might come back here.”

“The computer thinks so.”

Murch’s Mom said, “And you agree with it.”

“So do I,” May said. She looked very worried.

Wally said, “And then there’s Myrtle.”

Both women were taken aback by this abrupt change of subject. Murch’s Mom said, “Myrtle? That little ninny upstairs? What’s she got to do with anything?”

“Well, that’s just it,” Wally said. “Nothing.”

“That’s what I figured,” Murch’s Mom agreed.

“What I mean is,” Wally told her, “the rest of us got into this because we wanted to, we chose to be here. But Myrtle didn’t. And if her father comes back and—”

May said, “Who?”

“Tom’s her father,” Wally said. Nodding at Murch’s Mom, he said, “That lady Edna you play canasta with—”

“The girl’s mother. I know.”

“She worked in the library in Putkin’s Corners when Tom buried the casket behind it. She was the one told him they weren’t going to put in the parking lot after all. And her father was the town undertaker; it was from him that Tom got the casket.”

May said, “Why didn’t Tom say anything when Tiny caught her?”

“He doesn’t know. And I don’t think he’d care.”

Nodding thoughtfully, Murch’s Mom said, “Not a sentimental kind of guy, Tom.”

May said, “Wally? Do you and your computer have an idea what we should do?”

“Go to Myrtle’s house.”

They stared at him. May said, “For heaven’s sake, why?”

“It’s just one block over,” Wally explained. “We can see this house from there. If we turn off all these lights and go over there, then we can keep an eye on this house, and when the lights turn back on I’ll come over and look in the window and make sure everything’s okay.”

May said, “Doesn’t this mean letting Myrtle and her mother in on the whole thing?”

“Well, Myrtle’s already in on a lot of it,” Wally pointed out. “And her mother already knows Gladys, and—”

“I don’t particularly,” Murch’s Mom said through gritted teeth, “like that name.”

“Oh.” Wally blinked. “Okay, sorry. Anyway, you know Myrtle’s mother, and she knows Tom’s in town. She saw him go by in a car, and that’s what started Myrtle trying to find out things.”

May and Murch’s Mom looked at each other. Murch’s Mom said, “Well? What do you think?”

“I think I wish John was here,” May said.

“There’s never anybody home in this goddamn place,” Dortmunder said, fifteen minutes later, as he and Guffey pulled to the curb in front of the darkened 46 Oak Street. Sitting behind the wheel of the Peugeot Dormant he’d borrowed three hours ago from a cross street in the theater district back in New York, Dortmunder gazed discontentedly through the rain at the house where half the people he knew were supposed to be in residence, and where not one light was shining. Not one.

“Something wrong?” Guffey’d been getting increasingly nervy over the course of the trip, which could only be partially explained by the miserable highway conditions and Dortmunder’s less than professional driving skills. He hadn’t offered any first names for Dortmunder to try since way down by exit 2 on the Palisades Parkway. (George: No.) And now he sat hunched beside Dortmunder, chin tucked in as he blinked out at the night and the rain and the old dark house. He looked like one of the three little pigs watching for the wolf; the straw-house pig.

“Well, I suppose something’s wrong,” Dortmunder answered. “Something’s usually wrong. So what we’re gonna do, you stick close to me, and we’re gonna go in there and not turn on any lights.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And we’ll see what we see.”

Guffey frowned. “With the lights off?”

“Yes,” Dortmunder said. “We’ll see what we see with the lights off. Out.”

They got out of the car into the downpour and ran to the comparative safety of the porch. Guffey shied at the sight of the glider swinging back and forth with nobody on it. Approaching the door, Dortmunder muttered, “Last time they left the place a hundred percent unlocked. Quiet, now.”

Guffey, who hadn’t been saying anything, remained quiet.

Dortmunder gently opened the screen door, gently turned the knob of the inner door, gently pushed, and the door yawned open. Dortmunder slid silently in, followed by Guffey, and they quietly closed both doors.

“Stick close to me,” Dortmunder mouthed into Guffey’s ear, and Guffey nodded, a movement barely visible in the faint glow that was all that could reach here through the rain from the nearest streetlight.

They moved through the house, found nothing, found nobody, and found no explanation. “I should have known this,” Dortmunder said aloud, back in the living room, Guffey still so close to his right elbow it was like wearing a sleeve guard.

“You should have?” Guffey asked. “Should have known what?”

“That I’d have to give that reservoir one more whack at me,” Dortmunder said.

Soft ground. Heavy boat. Stan finally got the station wagon and boat turned around in the restricted area of the clearing at the end of the access road, but when he tried to ease down the muddy slope into the water everything immediately bogged down. The two rear wheels of the hauler virtually disappeared into the mud, and the rear wheels of the station wagon spun messily in place.

“Well, hell,” Stan said. “Everybody out.”

“Hell it is,” Tiny agreed, and everybody but Stan climbed out into the rain and the dark and the mud and the mess and a kind of nasty little needle-tipped wind.

The station wagon was lighter now, but the boat was still heavy and all the wheels were still stuck. Kelp and Tiny pushed against the front of the wagon while Tom stood off to the side and observed. The wagon’s big engine wailed and whined in competition with the wailing and whining of the storm, but nothing happened except that the pushers got extremely muddy.

Finally, Stan put the wagon in neutral, opened his window, and called Kelp and Tiny over. They slogged around to talk to him, looking like the defensive line in the final quarter of a particularly hard-fought football game, and Stan said, “We aren’t getting anywhere.”

Tiny said, “You noticed that, too, huh?”

“What we gotta do,” Stan said, “is get up on dry land and start again.”

“There isn’t any dry land,” Kelp told him.

“Drier,” Stan explained. “A little more solid, I mean. If I get up there all the way to where the road comes in, up at the top of the clearing, then I can get up some speed, run it backward fast as I can, get some momentum on shoving that goddamn boat into the water.”

“Without jackknifing,” Kelp pointed out.

“I gotta give it the try,” Stan said.

“Very tricky on this messy surface,” Kelp suggested.

Tiny said, “I hate having ideas like this, because I know who they make work for, which is me, but I think maybe we oughta drag it up to the end of the clearing like you say, and then turn this blessed car around and put the trailer hitch on the front bumper instead of the back, so you can drive frontward in low-low.”

“Now that is an idea,” Stan told him.

“I was afraid it was,” Tiny agreed. “And now I got another one. Doug can get down off that boat and help push.”

Kelp grinned at the idea. “Doug’ll love that,” he said.

“We all will,” said Tiny.

They went around to the prow of the boat and yelled at Doug for a while, and after he gave up pretending he didn’t understand what they wanted, he very reluctantly came down off his high boat and helped.

At first the station wagon didn’t want to move forward either, but then its rear wheels came struggling up out of the holes they’d dug, and the hauler’s wheels grudgingly began to lumber along through the mire, and movement took place. At the top of the clearing, Stan brought the wagon and the boat to a stop. The V tongue on the hauler was removed from the trailer hitch, and then Tiny lay down in the mud and Kelp stood by to hand him tools while Tiny, his work illuminated by the station wagon’s back-up lights, with some difficulty removed the muddy hitch from the muddy bumper. Then Stan turned the wagon around and Tiny bent over the front bumper with the trailer hitch in his hands and studied the situation. “It doesn’t want to fit,” he decided.

“Make it fit,” Kelp advised.

“Yeah, that’s what I figured.”

Doug, sounding scared, his voice cutting through the ongoing roar of the storm, said, “Stan, turn off your lights!”

Stan didn’t ask questions. The heel of his hand slapped the headlight control on the dashboard. Their clearing became abruptly black, pitch black, and they all turned their heads to watch the bright lights approaching down the access road through the rain and the night and the sopping trees.

“Still no light,” Myrtle said, coming back down to the living room from her own bedroom, where she had the best view past the intervening buildings to the house on Oak Street.

“Oh, I think they’ll take another hour, maybe even more,” Wally told her.

“Plenty of time,” Edna said, “to tell me what’s going on. Myrtle, you begin.”

“I think I see a car,” Dortmunder said, peering through the windshield and out at the storm-tossed night. “They’re probably all out on the reservoir in that big boat May told me about.”

He braked the car to a stop at the beginning of the clearing. It was hard to see anything at all through the sheets of rain, even with the headlights on; the zillion raindrops just bounced the light right back at you.

Guffey said, “What’s three thousand, seven hundred fifty dollars compounded at eight percent interest for forty-three years?”

“I give up,” Dortmunder said. “What is it?”

“Well, I don’t know.” Guffey sounded surprised. “That’s why I was asking you.”

“Oh,” Dortmunder said. “I thought it was one of those puzzle things.”

“It’s what Tim Jepson owes me,” Guffey said grimly. “So I figure a lot of that money you say is down there in that reservoir comes to me.”

“You can discuss that with Tom,” Dortmunder advised him. “And remember, half of it belongs to the rest of us.”

“Sure, sure. Sure.”

Dortmunder switched off the headlights. “Can’t see a goddamn thing,” he said.

“Sure you can’t,” Guffey said. “You turned the lights off.”

“I’m looking for their lights,” Dortmunder told him. “We better get out of the car.”

The interior light went on when they opened the doors, illuminating the inside of the car but nothing else, and only making the surrounding blackness all the blacker once the doors were shut.

Dortmunder and Guffey, two bulky huddled figures in the night, met at the front of their car, and Dortmunder pointed past Guffey’s nose, putting his hand up close so Guffey could see it. “The reservoir’s that way, and I thought I saw a car over there. That’s where we’ll look.”

“Uh,” Guffey said, and fell down.

“Uh?” Dortmunder turned, bending, to see what had happened to Guffey, and therefore spoiled Tiny’s aim. The sap merely brushed down the side of his head, not quite removing his ear, and bounded painfully off his shoulder. “Ow!” he yelled. “Goddammit, who is that?”

“Dortmunder?” came Tiny’s voice out of the dark. “Is that you?”

“Who the hell did you expect?”

“Well, we didn’t expect nobody, Dortmunder,” Tiny said, sounding aggrieved. “Who’s this with you?”

Out of the darkness, Tom’s voice said, “So you couldn’t keep away, huh, Al?”

“Looks like it,” Dortmunder admitted.

“Who is this guy?” Tiny wanted to know, prodding the fallen Guffey with his toe.

Aware of Guffey’s helplessness and of Tom’s presence, Dortmunder said, “Um. A hitchhiker.”

The others had gathered around now, and it was Kelp who said, “John? You brought a hitchhiker to the caper?”

“Well, I couldn’t leave the poor guy out there in the rain,” Dortmunder said. At the same time, he was inwardly furious with himself, thinking: Why did I say hitchhiker? Well, what else would I say? Aloud, he said, “It’s okay, Andy. Trust me, I know what I’m doing. You guys finished already?”

That changed the subject, with a vengeance. Everybody vied to tell him how much fun they were having, even Tom. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Dortmunder said. “Let’s see this monster boat.”

After all the build-up, when he finally got face-to-face with the leviathan, it wasn’t really that big. On the other hand, it did look as though a person could survive a voyage on it. Looking at it in the splattered gleam of the station wagon’s headlights, while Tiny banged the trailer hitch into a shotgun wedding with the front bumper, Dortmunder said, “A lot of boats like this have funny names. Does this one?”

There was a brief awkward silence. Dortmunder turned to Kelp, who was nearest. “Yeah?”

“It has a name,” Kelp agreed.

“Yeah?”

Tom, on Dortmunder’s other side, did his cackle thing and said, “It’s called Over My Head.”

“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

Doug came over and said, “Uh, John, that hitchhiker of yours.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, he isn’t dead.”

“Course not,” Tiny said. “I just gave him a lullaby.”

“But he is unconscious,” Doug said, “and I’m afraid he might drown.”

Dortmunder frowned at that. “In the water?”

“In the rain. What should we do with him?”

Kelp said, “Leave him. He’ll wake up.”

Tom said, “And go straight to the law before we can get finished and outta here. I don’t know about you sometimes, Al. Maybe we should just help him drown.”

“Aw, hey,” Doug said.

Dortmunder said, “He can come with us.”

Everybody hated that idea. Dortmunder listened to all the arguments, wishing he’d thought of some other explanation for Guffey, and when they were all finished yammering he said, “Put it this way. I don’t wanna kill him. We can’t leave him. So we’ll take him with us. I got reasons with this guy, and I’ll explain them later. Tiny, how you coming?”

“Done,” Tiny said, lumbering to his feet. “Dortmunder,” he commented, “you get weird notions sometimes.”

“Maybe so,” Dortmunder said. “We’ll put him in the boat now, with Doug.”

So Guffey’s limp light body was picked up by Tiny and handed up to Doug, who would ride the boat out into the water so they wouldn’t lose it once it was finally launched.

Which this time at long last happened. Dortmunder, Kelp, Tiny, and Tom all stood to one side; Doug braced himself against the wheel of the Over My Head; and Guffey lay like a bag of laundry on the floor around Doug’s feet. Stan put the station wagon into low-low, tromped the accelerator, and the double vehicle lunged down the slope. The hauler wobbled left and right, slowing down as it hit the muck, wanting to jackknife, but Stan kept correcting with tiny movements of the wheel, and steadily and inexorably the boat backed down through the mud and the ooze and into the reservoir.

Stan never let up on the accelerator till the headlights were underwater and wavelets were breaking on the hood, and the instant he lifted his foot the engine died; probably never to live again. But the Over My Head was, just barely, in water deep enough to float.

Now Doug went to work unattaching the straps that held the boat to the hauler, and Stan climbed through the foundered wagon to exit out the tailgate and go wait in Dortmunder’s car. At the same time, Kelp and Tiny and Tom waded out to climb aboard. Halfway there, Kelp looked back: “John? Aren’t you coming?”

The rain beat down. The nasty little wind pressed wet clothing against cold flesh. You couldn’t even see the reservoir out there. But a man’s gotta do— Well, you know.

“Shit,” said Dortmunder, and waded into the water.

Edna said, “When I think of the foolish young girl I was then, I could slap my face. And when I think, Myrtle, of the foolish young girl you’ve never been, I could slap both our faces. I know it’s partly my fault for stifling any impulse you ever might have had to fly from the nest, and I know it’s partly Tom Jimson’s fault for turning me into a bitter old woman before my time, but good heavens, girl, don’t you have one single rebellious bone in your body? Whatever happened to heredity? Don’t interrupt when I’m talking. The point is, Tom Jimson may, just may, be doing some good for once in his life, even if he didn’t intend it and doesn’t know about it. If all this hadn’t happened, you and I could have just drifted along the same way, day after day, year after year, all the way to the grave, you just another dim little obedient country spinster taking care of her bad-tempered nasty old mama—now just let me finish, if you don’t mind—but we’ve been shaken out of that, the two of us, and that’s good. That diving fella’s no good for you, Myrtle, and you know it as well as I do. He’s just a paler Tom Jimson, that’s all, less cold-blooded but just as untrustworthy. If you’re going to have your head turned by a pretty face, go right ahead, but please try to reassure yourself that there’s some sort of reliable brain behind it. Which brings me to you, Wallace. I know your type, and don’t think I don’t. I used to see little boys like you all the time when I ran the library at Putkin’s Corners. Intelligent little boys who weren’t any good at sports, boys the other children used to make fun of, and they’d come into the library for a refuge and a fantasy. But you aren’t a child anymore, Wallace. It’s true you’re still funny-looking, but most adults are; it’s time for you to come out of your shell. Fantasy has led you into dangers you can’t possibly deal with, and you know it. Never mind, never mind, there are things that computer of yours doesn’t know, either. I say it’s New York City did it to you, having to lock yourself away for protection all the time, and what you should do is move to a real place, a good small town where you could get to meet people and know people and be part of the real world. Now, we have that spare room upstairs. Myrtle and I have been talking forever about fixing it up and renting it, and—yes, we have, Myrtle, don’t be a goose—and I know Mr. Kempheimer at the bank, I’m sure they could use a computer expert there, he’s always complaining about modern times, you know how men get. Well, you’ll look into that when you make your mind up.”

Murch’s Mom said, “Edna—”

Edna said, “Now about the money. It’s dirty money. I don’t care how long it’s been in the water, it’s still dirty. Myrtle and I don’t want any part of it, and you shouldn’t want it either, Wallace, and you certainly won’t need it if you’re working at the bank, and however would you report it on your income tax? Gladys, I understand your son is a professional in this sort of thing and therefore he would want his share of the money, and I accept it if you say he isn’t a vicious monster like Tom Jimson but simply a very good professional driver, but I’m really afraid he should never have gotten involved in this. Tom Jimson will be going to Mexico, all right, and glad to see the back of him, but he’ll take all that money with him when he goes. Miss Bellamy’s friend John was right when he left, and I think your son Stanley should have gone with him, because there is simply no depth to Tom Jimson’s wickedness. I’m sure, by now, out there on that dark water, he has started doing something terrible.”

Tom went down into the cabin of the Over My Head to have a look around. The curtains had been shut over the windows down here and one dim light over the sink switched on, in which glow he saw they’d put Dortmunder’s hitchhiker, still out cold, on the sofa where Tom had stashed the Ingram Model 10 when he’d left the house briefly and surreptitiously much earlier today. That was all right; when the time came, the hitchhiker could be target number one.

The Ingram Model 10, named for its designer, Gordon Ingram, was manufactured from 1970 in the United States by the Military Armament Corporation. A machine pistol less than a foot long and weighing only 6.5 pounds, the Model 10 fires.45-caliber ammunition from a 30-round magazine that fits into—and juts down from—the pistol grip. It fires in fully automatic mode, using the blowback principle, has fixed sights fore and aft, and the cocking handle, mounted on the top (convenient for both right- and left-handed shooters), is grooved down the middle so as not to interfere with sighting. It is factory-fitted with a suppressor to reduce noise.

Tom had removed from his copy of the weapon its usual retractable metal-pipe shoulder butt that, when extended, just about doubled the weapon’s length. After all, he didn’t expect ever to use it for targets more than a couple of feet away, so he would never have to aim from a shoulder stance. Like tonight, for instance; how far can a target go on a boat?

Tom gave off contemplating the unconscious hitchhiker, and the equalizer concealed beneath his sleeping head, when Doug came bounding down the narrow steps, filling the cabin as much by his energy and sheer physicality as by his simple presence. “Gotta suit up,” he explained.

“I’ll get out of your way then, Popeye,” Tom said.

“Naw, that’s okay, Tom,” Doug said. “It’s miserable up there on deck, not enough room for everybody to get in under the tarp. Sit on the other bunk, why doncha?”

“Good idea,” Tom said, and did so.

Doug frowned at the sleeper. “He’s been out a long time,” he commented. “Tiny doesn’t know his own strength.”

“Oh, I think he does,” Tom said.

“Think he’ll be all right?”

“We’ll all be all right, Popeye. Very soon, now.”

If Doug minded this nickname Tom had recently found for him, naming him after a blowhard comic-strip sailor, he hadn’t yet said so. Of course, it was possible he didn’t get it; Tom had found, in his long life, that an astonishing number of people had just about no sense of humor at all.

Doug was still frowning in worry at Dortmunder’s unconscious friend. “See, the thing is,” he explained, “up till now, we maybe broke a few laws and all, trespassing and stealing this boat and like that, but nothing really major, you know? If we got caught—”

“You won’t get caught,” Tom told him. “I guarantee it.”

“Hope you’re right,” Doug said, and turned his attention to the wetsuit and other gear he had to change into, stowed in the forward storage area beyond the bunks.

Meantime, up on deck, Dortmunder had been left by Doug in charge of the wheel, with somewhat more assistance from Kelp and Tiny than he felt he absolutely needed. “Remember,” Kelp said, for about the thousandth time, “you don’t want to run across that monofilament and bust it.”

“The boat isn’t even moving,” Dortmunder pointed out.

Tiny said, “Well, Dortmunder, it’s not exactly not moving, either. Up and down and side to side count.”

“I’m holding the position,” Dortmunder answered, with just a soupçon of asperity in his voice. “Doug said hold the position, I’m holding the position.”

“We’re only saying,” Kelp said.

Doug came flap-footing in his flippers up from below at that point. He was changed into his diving gear, which made him the only person here properly dressed for the weather. He said, “Holding the position?”

“Yes,” said Dortmunder, in lieu of a lot of other things.

“Good. Might as well get it over with.”

Doug picked up a coil of line, one end of which was knotted to the side rail. Seating himself on that rail next to that knot, he used his free hand to adjust the mask and mouthpiece over his face, waved sideways like Queen Elizabeth, and flipped backward over the side.

“Gee,” Kelp said. “Just like that.”

“I see his light down there,” Tiny said, leaning his head briefly out into the full blast of the rain. “Nope; now it’s gone.” And he crowded back in with Dortmunder and Kelp and the wheel.

The position that Dortmunder was holding was into the wind, somewhere between where the monofilament line should be and where the dam should be. So long as he faced the Over My Head into the wind this way, the canvas-and-Lucite temporary wheelhouse provided a certain mount of protection from the elements.

The idea was, they would stay here while Doug moved along just below the surface of the reservoir, shining his forehead lamp out ahead of himself, looking for the thin white line of monofilament to glow back at him from out of the watery dark. Once he’d found it, he would search along it until he came to the marker rope leading down to the casket at the bottom of the reservoir. The line he’d carried with him, which he would have been unreeling all along, would be tied to the monofilament at the same place as the marker rope, and then Doug would swim back to the boat and guide them very slowly to the proper place.

Once boat and marker rope had been brought together, the rest would be easy. They would use the Over My Head’s own power winch to raise the casket from the bottom of the reservoir up out of the water, where they’d be able to wrestle it aboard like Moby-Dick; Tiny’s particular skills would come strongly into play at that point. Then it would be back to the clearing where Stan awaited; run the Over My Head aground, prow in; shlep the casket ashore; carry it home, divide the money, get into warm clothes, and have a beer.

A definite plan.

There. The nearly straight line of monofilament, just a foot below the surface of the reservoir, gleamed with a ghostly pale radiance where Doug’s lamp beam touched it. He ranged along that shimmery line and soon found the marker rope, still in place.

He quickly tied the new line from the new boat to the monofilament, then looked down at the marker rope, extending away into the murk below, and he just couldn’t resist. Flippered feet kicking strongly, he swooped down through the dark, headlamp picking up the marker rope along the way, and there he was at the bottom, and there it was, waiting.

Standing on end, a casket has a less restful, more problematic appearance than in its more usual lying-down posture. Standing on end in fifty feet of mucky water, in front of a slime-covered brick wall, its own once-glossy surface dulled and dirtied and covered with goo, a casket looked like a doorway to a different world. Not a better one.

He could imagine that door opening.

Superstition, Doug thought, ignoring the little chills running through his body, inside the warm wetsuit. There are no premonitions, he told himself. The whole thing’s a piece of cake. Taking the light with him, leaving the blackness, he swam powerfully toward the surface.

Tom sat on the narrow bunk in the gently rocking boat, back against a pillow against the wall, and listened. Doug wasn’t back yet. It was nowhere near time to make the move.

Beside him on the bunk, nestled against his bony hip, was the hammer he’d found in a storage drawer beside the sink, for use in case the hitchhiker regained consciousness before Tom was ready. But he doubted now that he’d need it; the hitchhiker’s even breathing and relaxed face suggested he’d moved on from unconsciousness to sleep. He was probably good till morning, if nothing disturbed him.

Tom shifted position on the bunk, fluffing the pillow behind his back. He figured he had half an hour or more to wait. And then the timing would have to be perfect.

The thing was, Dortmunder and his pals would expect Tom to make a move. Everybody always did, that was written into the equation. Tom’s job was to figure out the earliest point at which they’d expect something from him, and the earliest point before that when he could usefully make his move, and then pick his spot between the two.

This time, it seemed to him, they wouldn’t really expect much trouble before they got the loot ashore, but they would probably start being tense and wary once the casket was actually inside the boat. But now that they had a boat with its own winch attached to its own motor, so that Tiny was no longer needed to drag the casket up out of the reservoir, Tom’s actual first potential moment was much earlier than that.

Not when Doug found the marker rope.

Not when he led the boat to it.

Not when he untied the marker rope from the monofilament and handed it to someone in the boat.

When the marker rope was attached to the winch: then.

Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny huddled their heads together over the wheel so they could hear one another above the storm without having to shout loud enough to be heard by Tom down in the cabin. “Once we get that box ashore,” Kelp was saying, “we’ve got to keep a very close eye on Tom because you just know he’s gonna pull something.”

“Before that, if you ask me,” Tiny growled. “Once we get that box in the boat, once he sees it, there’s no way he’s gonna control himself. He’ll make his move. That’s when we gotta be on our guard.”

“You ask me,” Dortmunder said, “the time to be on your guard with Tom is all the time.”

“Pflufh!” said Doug, appearing at the rail, spitting out his mouthpiece.

They all turned to watch as Doug, who had hoisted himself up out of the water onto the narrow platform jutting out from the stern of the boat, climbed over the rail and stood on the exposed rear deck for a second, face mask still on, dripping in the rain. Then he pulled off the face mask and grinned and came over to speak to Dortmunder, his large wet presence forcing Tiny to back down two steps into the cabin.

“I got it,” Doug said. “So all you do is keep us moving just barely forward, okay?”

Doug had given Dortmunder a quick orientation course in operating this vessel on their way out from shore, not enough to take it on a round-the-world cruise, but maybe enough to keep it moving just barely forward for a few minutes. “Sure,” Dortmunder said.

“I’ll be up on the prow,” Doug told him. “You’ll be able to see me up there through the windshield. If I want you to steer to the right or the left, I’ll wave my arm out like this.”

“Got it,” Dortmunder said.

“Forward, I point that way. Stop, I hold my hand back to you like this.”

“Got that, too.”

“Now, take it real slow and easy,” Doug told him, “because I’m going to be bringing in the line while we move.”

“Very slow, very easy,” Dortmunder promised.

Tom, sitting up on the bunk, heard the conversation through the narrow open doorway where the bottom half of Tiny now stood. He heard Doug’s footsteps move forward on the deck just above his head, and saw Tiny’s legs recede back up to the wheelhouse level. One on the prow, he thought. One on the bunk down here. Three around the wheel.

Doug, seated cross-legged on the prow, waved for Dortmunder to ease them forward, and then began to draw in the line as they moved, coiling it in his lap so it wouldn’t drift under the boat. Getting fouled on one of their lines was, as he saw it, their greatest danger at this point.

They were less than ten minutes easing their way across the rainswept reservoir, and then Doug, still tugging gently on the line, saw the knot rise dripping and swaying out of the water dead ahead. The monofilament was invisible in these conditions, so the white knot of rope seemed to be levitating itself. He waved to Dortmunder to stop, looped the rope in a quick knot over the davit on the prow, and went back to the wheelhouse.

(One down here, four around the wheel.)

Dortmunder said, “Now I hold the position, right?”

“You bet,” Doug told him. “Tiny, let me show you the winch.”

Tiny said, “That includes going out in the rain, huh?”

Doug went to the rear, and Tiny followed. (One down here, two at the wheel, two at the stern.) Opening a floor panel at the stern, Doug shone his headlamp in and pointed out the machinery. “There’s the switch. That’s the spool. It runs off the same shaft as the propeller, so John can make it go slower or faster up there at the wheel.”

“Gotcha,” Tiny said.

“Be right back with the rope,” Doug told him. Straightening, he adjusted face mask and mouthpiece and then backflipped out of the boat.

Tom shifted on the bunk, putting both feet on the gently rocking floor. One down here, two at the wheel, one at the stern, one in the water. That one’s the duck in the barrel.

Doug swam to the monofilament, untied the marker rope, tied it to his wrist instead, and made his way back to the boat. He came up on the small platform at the rear, but Tiny was looking the other way. “Tiny!” he called. “I got it here!”

Right, Tom thought. He stood, leaned forward, reached over the sleeping hitchhiker, slid his hand in under the mattress, and it wasn’t there.

What? Tom moved his hand left, right… Cold on wrist. Click.

Tom blinked, and the hitchhiker sat up, the Ingram just visible beyond him under his pillow. Wild-eyed, glaring in triumph, raising their right wrists handcuffed together, the maniac cried, “Now, Tim Jepson! Now!”

“Oh, shit!” Dortmunder cried. “It’s started!”

Kelp yelled, “What—” But the rest of his words were blotted by a sudden chatter of automatic gunfire.

Everybody stared at everybody else. Doug looked ready to jump back into the water. In fact, everybody looked ready to jump into the water, even Dortmunder.

“Al?”

The wheel forgotten, Dortmunder concentrated on keeping well away from the opening into the cabin. “Yeah, Tom?”

“It’s a wash, Al,” Tom’s voice called. “You were cuter than I thought.”

Dortmunder had no idea in what way he’d been so wonderfully cute. He said, “So now what, Tom?”

“I’m coming up,” Tom called. “I won’t bother none of you, none of you bother me.”

“Hold it a second, Tom.”

Dortmunder pushed frantically at Kelp, gesturing to him to get up on the forward deck, above the cabin and ahead of its entrance. Tiny handed the end of the marker rope back to Doug and moved swiftly to the opposite side of the cabin entrance from Dortmunder. Doug, clutching the marker rope in one hand and the rail in the other, crouched down on the platform sticking out behind the boat at the stern.

“Jesus Christ, Al,” Tom called, “how much time do you need? I told you, I’m no threat.”

“You kinda sounded like a threat a minute ago,” Dortmunder called back. “Why don’t you toss that Uzi or whatever it is out ahead of yourself?”

“You’re still a joker, Al,” Tom said. “Here I come.”

Here he came, moving in an odd crablike fashion like Quasimodo on his way up to his bells. The Ingram, looking like a particularly mean example of plumbing supplies, was grasped in his left hand, held out in front of himself for balance. His right hand was down behind him at his ankle, as though he were dragging something.

And, in fact, when he came farther up out of the cabin, it could be seen that he was dragging something. Guffey, a dead weight, bleeding onto the steps, his blood then swirling away once Tom had dragged him out into the rain.

Tom, at a fast scuttling lope, rushed past Dortmunder and Tiny, dragging Guffey behind him. Then he turned around, already drenched, and stared back at Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny, in a triangle facing him. “Where’s Popeye?” He had to shout over the storm.

“Diving,” Dortmunder yelled back. “Over to the monofilament.”

Tom waved the Ingram in the air like a terrorist announcing a victory, but in his case he was only showing it off, because he said, “A trade, Al. This for the key.”

That was when Dortmunder saw that it was, in fact, his own handcuffs that Guffey had brought along, without Dortmunder’s knowledge, and had used to attach himself to Tom. But Guffey had the key. Wishing Doug would use the advantage he had that Tom didn’t know there was anyone behind him—but knowing damn well Doug would never do one blessed thing—Dortmunder said, “What if it’s no trade, Tom?”

Raging, Tom grimaced, his teeth shiny in the rain. “I’ll kill the bunch of you!” he snarled, “and use the bread knife down there to cut this idiot’s hand off!”

“You won’t get your seven hundred thousand,” Dortmunder pointed out.

“That’s right, Al,” Tom said. “And neither will you. But I’ll be the only one worried about it. Goddammit! Get this idiot off me! Half the money’s yours, Al, it’s yours, I don’t care, just get this—”

And Guffey, not dead yet after all, suddenly came surging up off the deck, left hand reaching for Tom’s scrawny neck, closing around it. The Ingram in Tom’s hand spattered once more, spraying bullets as he pounded its butt against Guffey’s head, and Dortmunder and Tiny both dove down into the cabin as Kelp jumped headfirst into the reservoir.

Doug, terrified, reared up on the little platform as Tom and Guffey, struggling in each other’s grasp, toppled over the rail and crashed into him. All three flailed and toppled and splashed into the water, Tom losing the Ingram, Doug losing the rope.

Guffey, weak, swallowing water, slumped down below the surface, unable to keep afloat. Tom, tangled with him, hoarsely screamed out, “Al! The key! For Christ’s sake, the key!”

“The rope!” Doug shrieked, and dived, jamming his mouthpiece in, face mask on. Kicking hard, he reached up, and when his fumbling hands found the headlamp’s switch and turned it on, he could see nothing around him but dirty water. Ahead, it must be; lower; out there ahead. He dived.

Dortmunder and Tiny came stumbling up out of the cabin. “Where—” Tiny said. “Where is everybody?”

“Help!”

They rushed to the side rail, and there was Kelp floundering in the water. Tiny bent down, grabbed one of Kelp’s wrists, and yanked him aboard. Then, while Kelp sat on the wet deck wheezing and coughing and gasping, Dortmunder and Tiny looked out at the speckled black surface of the reservoir.

Nobody.

Can’t lose the rope, can’t lose the rope, can’t lose the rope. Doug quartered like a hungry fish, slicing through the murky water, straining to see that rope, floating somewhere, nearby, drifting, attached to seven hundred thousand dollars, the only link to seven hundred thousand dollars.

And I was just there with it, he thought.

Movement in the water. Doug turned and saw a leg descending, then another, then a cluster of limbs.

The two bodies floated down past him, entwined, Tom’s face almost unrecognizable with those staring eyes and wide open mouth.

Shuddering, Doug turned away. More money for the rest of us. More money for the rest of us. The rope, the rope, the rope.

“Dortmunder,” Tiny said, “this is a mess.”

“I never expected anything else,” Dortmunder told him.

The two stood over the wheel, rain beating down all around them as Dortmunder held the position, waiting for Doug to reappear. He was, they’d realized, off looking for the rope to the money, which he’d managed to lose in the general excitement. Kelp was lying down in the cabin, recuperating from his unexpected plunge. And Tom and Guffey were gone, no question about that.

Dortmunder had explained to Tiny who Guffey was, and Tiny commented, “I guess it was only a matter of time, with Tom, till one of his pasts caught up with him.”

“He was safer in jail,” Dortmunder agreed. “But what bothers me, Guffey never did find his first name.”

“Tom must of known it,” Tiny said. “Maybe he told him on the way down.”

Kelp came up from the cabin then, looking a lot greener than usual. “Listen,” he said. “Is it okay for the floor down here to be full of water?”

Find the railroad tracks. Then you find the town. Then you find the railroad station. Then you find the casket and the rope.

For the first time in his diving life, Doug was being stupid underwater. Greed and panic had combined to make him forget everything he knew. He was down here alone, an incredibly dangerous thing to begin with. He was improperly equipped for the kind of search he’d suddenly started to undertake. And, most stupid of all, he was paying no attention to the passage of time.

He’d had an hour of air when he started.

“The fucking boat is sinking,” Dortmunder said. “I’m not going to stand here and have conversations.”

“John, John,” Kelp said, “all I’m saying is, think about it. You hardly know a thing about how to run this boat, and—”

“Of course I do.”

“You know how to hold the position. And how to ease it forward a little bit. Doug knows the whole thing. Even if we’re sinking—”

Bitterly, Tiny said, “Tom and his goddamn machine gun, shot the bottom full of holes.”

“Even so,” Kelp said, “we’re sinking slowly. We can wait for Doug.”

“No way,” Dortmunder said.

“He needs us.”

“He’s a pro,” Dortmunder insisted. “He’s dressed for what he’s doing. When he comes up and we aren’t here, he can swim to shore. I can’t swim to shore, not again.”

Then, to cut through all the crap and get out of there, Dortmunder stepped to the wheel and pushed the accelerator level hard forward. The boat surged ahead and cut through both the monofilament and the rope Doug had been coiling so carefully on the prow. That’s the rope that now wrapped itself tightly a dozen times around the propeller and shaft and stopped the Over My Head dead in the water.

Standing in the heavy rain, Stan listened and listened but heard no more gunshots. What’s happening out there? He rested one hand on the rear window of the station wagon, looked out over its forward-slanted roof and submerged hood and saw nothing. But nothing.

So Tom made his move before they got ashore, did he? And did it work?

Whoever came out ahead out there, the winner or winners will want wheels. For themselves, and for the money. Not this station wagon, this heap will never go anywhere on its own again, but Dortmunder’s car, the Peugeot.

Just in case; okay? Just in case Tom managed to catch everybody by surprise out there, Stan should do something to defend himself. So he turned and walked upslope to the Peugeot, got behind the wheel, and started the engine. Better than half a tank of gas; good. He switched on the headlights, then got out of the car and splashed through the rain over to the right side of the clearing and in among the trees.

There were no dry places out here, not after two days and nights of steady rain. Wet and cold but unwilling to make a sitting duck of himself, Stan hunkered down against a tree where he could see the Peugeot’s lights, the clearing, even a bit of the station wagon.

Hell of a position for a driver.

“Got it!” Tiny cried. “Pull me up outta here.”

Dortmunder and Kelp heaved on the rope. The other end of it was tied around Tiny under the armpits, and Tiny was lying half on and half off the platform at the rear of the Over My Head. He’d been reaching farther and farther down under the boat, trying to find an end of rope or—for preference—monofilament, and now at last he’d done it, and once Dortmunder and Kelp’s combined efforts got him completely back up on the platform he rose and held up a jumble of monofilament in his left hand like a serving of angel hair pasta.

“Beautiful stuff,” Kelp prayed.

Tiny tied the monofilament to the rail, then climbed over onto the deck and removed the rope from around himself.

“Tiny, I’m sorry,” Dortmunder said.

Tiny pointed a fat finger at him. “Dortmunder,” he said, “I want this to be a lesson to you. This is what happens to a person that’s rude. You break off a little discussion before it’s finished, before everybody’s done talking, maybe there’s something you oughta know that you don’t know.”

“I just didn’t like,” Dortmunder explained, “the idea of being on a sinking ship.”

“How about,” Tiny asked him, “being on a sinking ship that can’t go nowhere?”

“That’s worse,” Dortmunder admitted.

Kelp said, “But we’ll go now, won’t we? We got the monofilament, right?”

“I got the monofilament,” Tiny reminded him.

“That’s what I meant,” Kelp agreed. “And the other end of it’s tied to the railroad track in by shore, right? Over where we tried the first time. So now all we do is just tow ourselves in.”

“If it doesn’t break,” Tiny pointed out. “It’s awful skinny stuff.”

“It’s supposed to be very strong,” Dortmunder suggested. He was feeling unusually humble. “For bringing in big fish like tunas and marlins and things,” he said.

“Well, let’s see.” Tiny reached over the side, lifted the monofilament, wrapped it once around his fist, and tugged gently. Then he stopped. “Not bare-handed,” he said. “This stuff’ll take my fingers off.”

“I’ll get you a rag or something, Tiny,” Dortmunder offered, and went away to the cabin, where the water was almost knee deep now, despite the laborings of the boat’s automatic pump. Ignoring that, or trying to, Dortmunder searched around and found two oven mitts hanging from hooks beside the stove. He waded back up on deck and offered the mitts. “Try these.”

With some difficulty, Tiny jammed his hands partway into the mitts, then picked up the monofilament and pulled with a slow and even pressure. “Much better, Dortmunder,” he said.

“Thank you, Tiny.”

A sound of sloshing was heard from the cabin. Sounding surprised, Kelp said, “I think we’re moving.”

“So far,” Tiny said. Hand over hand, he reeled in the monofilament.

Kelp looked over the side. “You’d think Doug would of come up by now,” he said.

Tree stumps, tree stumps, tree stumps. Doug flew back and forth like an underwater bat over the drowned hillsides, his meager light playing in sepia tones across the devastation. There had to be some sort of landmark around here somewhere, but all Doug could see, every which way he turned, was these rotting tree stumps.

His turns, in fact, were slower now, less coordinated, as the strain of constant underwater exertion began to take its toll. These are signs he would normally have heeded, but at this moment there was no room in his brain for anything but this:

I saw the casket full of money, I saw it tonight, I swam down to it, just a little while ago. I held the rope in my hand. I have to be able to get it all back. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise. I have to get it all back.

No tree stumps. Doug in his weariness almost flew on over the spot, but then his laggard brain caught up with his eyes and be reversed, awkwardly, like a manatee, and shone his light on the spot again, and it was true. A clear swath cut through the forest of decayed stumps.

A road; it must have been a road. So it has to lead somewhere, and once there I can orient myself.

This way, or that way? I think it should be that way. Doug set off along the faint line of road, kicking doggedly.

Stan didn’t hear anybody coming, and then all at once people were moving around in the Peugeot’s headlights. People. The boat hadn’t come back, he knew that much for sure. So who were these people?

Maybe the law did have the reservoir staked out, after all. Cautious, doubtful, apprehensive, Stan straightened stiffly from his hunkered-down position and stalked the people moving around out there in the clearing. Who were they? What were they up to?

It was Tiny’s shape he recognized first, and right after that the sound of John’s complaining voice: “Now, where the hell is Stan?”

“Here,” Stan said, stepping forward into their midst and causing all three to jump like little kids in a haunted house. “What’s going on?” Stan asked them. “Where’s the boat?”

“Down there by the railroad tracks,” Andy told him, pointing vaguely away along the shoreline. “We walked here from there.”

“Waded here,” Tiny corrected. He was holding his hands in his armpits, pressing his arms against his sides as though the hands were cold or sore or something.

John said, “Can we go now?”

“Go?” Stan looked around. “Aren’t we missing a couple people?”

“And seven hundred thousand dollars,” Tiny said.

Andy said, “It’s a long story.”

John said, “Let’s tell it tomorrow, okay? Today is finished.”

SEVENTY-FOUR

“The lights are on!” Myrtle cried, in great excitement.

So then Wally crept over to see what was happening, and after that everybody including Myrtle and Edna had to go over to Oak Street, and the whole long story did have to be told tonight, after all. But at least they were all indoors and warm, and the stay-at-homes were willing to wait until the returnees had changed into dry clothes. By then, May had made soup, Myrtle had made toast, and Edna had made a pitcher of what she called “Bloody Marys that’ll iron your socks.” Under those conditions, it was possible to recount the night’s events without too many qualms or expressions of disgust. Kelp did most of the talking, with amplifications by Tiny and occasional color reportage from Dortmunder.

Tom Jimson’s lady friend and daughter bore up very well under the news of his death. “Well, that was overdue,” Edna commented. “I thought I was done with that man years ago, and now I am.”

“I so wanted to meet my father,” Myrtle said with a little shiver, “and then I did. He’ll be much better as a memory.”

The news about Doug was a little harder to take. “Well, I don’t hold much brief for that young man,” Edna said, “as Myrtle well knows—”

“Mother!”

“—but I certainly don’t wish him ill.”

“Doug’s a pro,” Dortmunder said for about the thousandth time. “He’ll be okay. But there was no point our hanging around. He wouldn’t of found us anyway.”

“That’s really true,” Kelp said.

“And John did get back by himself last time,” May said doubtfully.

“Darn right I did,” Dortmunder said. “Without wetsuits and air tanks and all of that.”

“We’ll hope for the best,” Edna said.

“I hope for the best,” Myrtle agreed.

“We all do,” Wally said, but his eyes were on Myrtle.

SEVENTY-FIVE

Gray day was returning, seeping back into a sopping world, and still they hadn’t gone to bed. Dortmunder was ready, more than ready, but now everybody else wanted to talk about the future. “There isn’t any,” Dortmunder stated, as definitively as he could. “Not between me and that reservoir.”

“The thing is, Dortmunder,” Tiny said, “we invested so much in this already.”

“Including,” Dortmunder pointed out, “two, maybe three people. I’m in no hurry to go with them.”

Kelp said, “I’ve touched that box with these hands. That’s what gets me.”

“And,” Stan said, “we don’t have Tom to worry about anymore.”

Dortmunder said, “We don’t have anything else, either. Doug lost the rope that leads down to the casket, and I lost the monofilament. Also, we don’t have a boat. Also, we don’t have a professional diver anymore.”

“He could still show up,” Murch’s Mom said.

“Even so.” Dortmunder spread his hands. “The only reason I got into this was to keep Tom from blowing up the dam and drowning everybody—”

“So like him,” Edna said.

“Well, that danger’s past,” Dortmunder said. “It’s Tom’s money. He’s down there with it. Let them stay together. I’m going to sleep. And then I’m going to New York. And then I’m gonna think about something else for the rest of my life.”

The Batesville Casket Company is quite properly proud of its Cathodic System^® steel casket. A bar of magnesium is welded to the bottom of the casket with a resistor attached that detects rust as it develops anywhere on the casket surface and sends the magnesium to that spot. Eventually the magnesium will degenerate, but Batesville still guarantees the internal integrity of its Cathodic System^® caskets in air or ground for a minimum of twenty-five years.

In air or ground. In water, who knows?

SEVENTY-SIX

Morning. All morning the rain poured down, as before. The night shift left the dam with heads down and chins tucked in, running for their cars and climbing in and driving away with none of the usual horsing around. The day shift, arriving, ran the other way, crowding into the dry safety of the dam with nothing on their lips but curses. The weeks of beautiful weather were forgotten: “Won’t this crap ever let up?”

In the course of the morning, only three cars passed by on the road over the dam, and Doug opened his eyes in time to see the third go by just above him. I’m alive, he thought, lying there on the rocks at the east end of the dam, barely clear of the water and a little below the roadway, and he was amazed.

He was right to be amazed. His last clear memory from the night before was that exhilarating moment when he had seen the railroad tracks! Exhilarating in part because, he now realized, his brain had already begun to suffer oxygen starvation. But exhilarating anyway, after all his desperate searching, when the road he’d been following had suddenly crossed those two rusty black lines leading toward seven hundred thousand dollars.

And death.

He’d actually started to follow the tracks, he remembered that now. Even though in some still-rational corner of his brain he’d realized he was running out of air, that he didn’t dare stay down one second longer, he had turned and obstinately kicked himself not upward but downward at a long slant, closer to the tracks.

That’s all he could remember. Somewhere in there, he must have blacked out, or partially blacked out, and once his greedy stupid conscious mind had gotten out of the way his professional knowledge and diver’s instincts had taken over and, at long last, he had started doing the right thing.

A diver out of air is only out of air at his current depth. Ascending alters pressure, and more air becomes available; not much, but every little bit helps.

Still, at some point Doug must have done an emergency ascent, because he no longer had either his weight belt nor his air tank. In an emergency ascent, the diver simply tries to get to the surface as rapidly as possible, slowly exhaling into the water along the way to prevent injuries caused by his lungs expanding too rapidly with the decreasing pressure. The partly inflated BCD would have helped speed his ascent, and would have kept him afloat and alive once he’d made it all the way up to air. And some remaining flicker of intelligence had made him swim toward the dam’s lights (as John had done the last time), and had helped him drag himself up above the water line, where he’d been lying ever since.

The wetsuit had kept him from hypothermia, but he was incredibly weary and achy and hungry and cold and, now that he stopped to think about it, scared. I could have died down there!

I should have died down there. How could I have been so dumb?

Slowly Doug sat up, moaning in pain. Every joint and muscle in his body ached. Despite the wetsuit, he felt cold, chilled to the bone. Warmth, he thought. Warmth, food, bed. Too bad he’d never really connected with Myrtle; bed with a woman right now would be exactly what the doctor ordered.

Moving as stiffly as the Tin Woodman when he needed oil, Doug bent down over his knees and removed the flippers from his feet. Then he crawled up the rocks and boulders to the parking area beside the dam entrance. After a couple of minutes of limbering-up exercises there, bending and twisting and kicking (all the time hoping a car would come by so he could thumb a ride), he started walking along the road. Too bad he didn’t have Andy Kelp’s skill at commandeering cars.

At least with movement he wasn’t so cold. On the other hand, his bare feet didn’t like the rough road surface at all. Still, he was alive, and that counted.

He’d walked a bit more than half a mile when he heard the car coming along behind him. Turning, trying his best to smile like a friendly and innocent hitchhiker, he stuck his thumb out and was quite surprised when the car, a Chevy Chamois, actually came to a stop.

His surprise was doubled when he opened the passenger door to climb in and saw that the driver was a good-looking girl. A very good-looking girl. “Thanks a lot,” he told her, shutting the door. “Pretty bad out there.”

“Well, you’re dressed for it,” she commented, giving his wetsuit a crooked grin as she shifted into gear and the car rolled forward.

Oh, it was nice to watch the countryside go by at forty miles an hour instead of four. Doug said, “Nobody should be out in this stuff.”

“You bet,” she said. “I wouldn’t be out here, believe me, if I wasn’t such a good little wifey.”

The word wifey sent one signal to Doug, but the ironic tone sent another. Looking at her more closely, he said, “Your husband sent you out in this weather? For what? Get him a sixpack?”

“He didn’t send me,” she said. “He doesn’t send anybody anywhere, believe me. I was just visiting him in the hospital.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“The bug hospital,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. “He’s wiggy, you know?”

“That’s terrible,” Doug said. “A good-looking girl like you, stuck with a nutcase?”

She gave him a gratified smile. “You think I’m good-looking?”

“You know you are.”

“Would you believe I’m pregnant?”

“No! Really?”

“I don’t show, do I?”

“Not a bit,” Doug told her truthfully, wondering if he dared pat her belly. Probably not. A ride was more important than anything else at this point.

The gift sighed theatrically. “I should have listened to my mother,” she said. “She knew there was something wrong with him from the beginning, but I just never listened.”

“Why not?”

Another sigh. “I guess I just like sex too much,” the poor girl said.

“Mmm,” said Doug, in sympathetic understanding. “Uh, what’s your name?”

SEVENTY-SEVEN

Dortmunder raised his cup. “My last coffee for a year,” he said, and drank.

May, with him in the kitchen of the house on Oak Street, said, “Why’s that?”

“Because I’m going back to the city,” he explained, “and I won’t be drinking anything out of a faucet there for a good long time.”

“What about taking showers?”

“I haven’t doped that out yet.”

May said, “John, they do all kinds of things to purify that water before it ever gets to the city. Animals and birds and fish and things die in it all the time.”

“Still,” Dortmunder said. “Every time I turn the faucet and the water splashes in the sink, you know what it’s gonna sound like? ‘Al.’ ”

Murch’s Mom came in and said, “Wally’s off.”

Dortmunder and May went out to the living room, where the front door was open, letting in cold damp air and giving a great view of the rain-drenched world outside. Tiny carried the components of Wally’s computer in white plastic trash bags to protect them from the weather, and Wally carried his bulgy green vinyl bag. He was grinning from ear to ear, which made him look more than ever like a novelty item for sale on the Jersey shore. “Miss May, John,” he said. “It’s been wonderful. I learned so much from you all.”

“It was nice to meet you, Wally,” May said.

“You and the, uh, computer,” Dortmunder said, coughing slightly, “were a real help.”

“I hate long good-byes,” Tiny said. “Especially when I’m carrying three hundred pounds of shit.”

So they had a short good-bye, and Wally and his equipment went out to Murch’s Mom’s cab for the run around the corner to Myrtle Street. Uh, Myrtle Street. On Myrtle Street.

A little later, Kelp and Stan Murch came back with transportation for the trip back to the city; Stan a Datsun S.E.X. 69 for his Mom and himself, Kelp an MD-plated Pontiac Prix Fixe for himself and Dortmunder and May and Tiny. They packed the two cars, running back and forth in the rain, and when they were about to leave, Dortmunder shut the front door and turned to see May frowning in worry at Doug’s pickup, still parked on the gravel drive beside the front lawn. Dortmunder said, “What’s up?”

“I wish I knew Doug was all right,” she said. “And don’t say, ‘He’s a pro.’ ”

“I wasn’t going to,” Dortmunder lied. “I was going to say he’s a big boy. Come on, May, it’s raining.”