Get Real

22

NOBODY WAS HAPPY with the meeting just past. Once Doug and Marcy had walked away southward, waving and smiling, cheered by recent events, and once Ray had hailed a cab to take himself and Darlene somewhere else, the two of them also expressing pleasure at the unfolding of their adventure, the other five stood on the sidewalk on Varick Street and frowned together.

“Dortmunder,” Tiny said, “this is not good.”

“I know that,” Dortmunder said.

“Nothing is happening,” Tiny said.

Dortmunder nodded. “I know that, too.”

Kelp said, “The trouble is, these clowns are in no hurry to get their reality up and running.”

“And meanwhile,” Stan said, “what are we doing on our own plan? Nothing.”

“We don’t have a plan,” the kid said. “We have a door we can’t get through, to something we don’t know what it is behind it.”

“I can feel,” Tiny said, “discouragement creeping on. We gotta sit and meet.”

Kelp said, “You mean tonight, at the OJ?”

“No,” Tiny said, “I mean now, at Dortmunder’s. Stan, use your cell, order out a pizza, extra pepperoni, I’ll whistle up the limo.” And he stomped off around the corner, to the limo he never left home without, due to his size and his disinclination to rub shoulders with the civilian world.

“Tiny’s right,” Stan said, breaking out his cell.

“Well, yes and no,” Kelp said. “Get two pizzas, one with hold the pepperoni.”

Midafternoon at the Dortmunder abode, May still at her supermarket checkout register, pizza shreds and beer cans creating their festive litter across the living room, and Tiny saying, “We don’t have all the time in the world like those reality geeks.”

“We’ve only got,” Kelp said, “until they try to check the IDs we gave them.”

“I do have this situation,” Stan said, around a mouthful of pepperoni. “On account of my Mom, they got my last name and her home phone number.”

“That’s an easy one,” Tiny said. “I already got that one scoped.”

Everybody wanted to know how, so Tiny told them. “They’re not gonna come back at us about the phony names and the phony Social Security numbers until the earliest Tuesday, so before then, we see Doug, we explain we threw Murch out.”

“Hey, wait there,” Stan said. “Threw me out?”

“Everything,” Tiny told him, “takes place in that building on Varick, everything they know about and everything they don’t know about. Where’s the driving?”

“Gee, you’re right,” Kelp said.

“Hold on a minute,” Stan said. He was about to get on his feet.

The kid said, “No, wait, Stan, you don’t get it. Monday we tell them you’re out, and anything that happens after that you aren’t part of. You set up an alibi for whenever it is we do whatever it is we’re gonna do—”

“About which,” Dortmunder said, “it wouldn’t hurt to do some thinking.”

Stan said, “But I’m not out. Not out out. Just as far as those people I’m out.”

“There’s gonna be driving, Stan,” Kelp told him, “only they don’t know about it.”

“We can say,” the kid said, “this new guy means the pot’s smaller all the way around, so we gotta unload somebody to bring the numbers up, and Stan, you’re the guy. We’ll tell him Monday.”

Tiny said, “Quicker than that. Dortmunder, you and Kelp go by his place tonight, tell him the story. Then he’s got days and days to get used to it. Murch is out, the human fly is in.”

Kelp said, “Speaking of, whadawe thinka this human fly?”

“He’s a human plant,” Tiny said.

“Yeah,” Kelp agreed. “They put him on us to watch us, but why?”

“Because,” the kid said, “they’re afraid we might start thinking about Combined Tool, as long as we’re in the building, and they wanna know if that happens.”

“Which brings me,” Dortmunder said, “back to my point. When do we start to think about Combined Tool?”

“Tonight,” Tiny decided. “When you’re done with Doug, and later on tonight, we all come to Varick Street. I’m not gonna run around on roofs, so at one o’clock I’ll be at the front door. In the limo.”

Dortmunder said, “Tiny, would there be room in that limo for an extension ladder?”

Tiny lowered a gaze on Dortmunder, thought a moment, then smiled, an unusual and not an entirely comforting sight. “That would be a first, wouldn’t it?” he said. “You’re on.”

They didn’t stay to help with the cleanup.