The Hot Rock

7

At two twenty-five A.M., the morning after Prosker's visit to Greenwood, the stretch of Northern State Parkway in the vicinity of the Utopia Park exit was very nearly empty. Only one vehicle was in the area, a large dirty truck with a blue cab and a gray body, the words "Parker's Rent-a-Truck" in a white-lettered oval on both cab doors. Major Iko had done the renting, through untraceable middlemen, just this afternoon, and Kelp was doing the driving at the moment, heading east out of New York. As he slowed now for the exit, Dortmunder, in the seat beside him, leaned forward to look at his watch in the dashboard light and say, "We're five minutes early."

"I'll take it slow on the bumpy streets," Kelp said, "on account of everything in back."

"We don't want to be there too early," Dortmunder said.

Kelp steered the cumbersome truck off the parkway and around the curve of the exit ramp. "I know," he said. "I know."

In the prison at this same time Greenwood was also looking at his watch, the green hands in the darkness telling him he still had half an hour to wait. Prosker had told him Dortmunder and the others wouldn't be making their move until three o'clock. He shouldn't do anything too early that might tip their mitts.

Twenty-five minutes later the rental truck, lights off, rolled to a stop in the parking lot of an A amp;P three blocks from the prison. Street lights at corners were the only illumination anywhere in this part of Utopia Park, and the cloudy sky made the night even blacker. You could just barely see your hand in front of your face.

Kelp and Dortmunder got out of the cab and moved cautiously around to open the doors at the rear of the truck. The interior of the truck was pitch black. While Dortmunder helped Chefwick to jump down onto the asphalt, Murch handed a ten-foot ladder out to Kelp. Kelp and Dortmunder stood the ladder up against the side of the truck while Murch handed out to Chefwick a coil of gray rope and his little black bag. They were all dressed in dark clothing and they communicated in whispers.

Dortmunder took the coil of rope and went first up the ladder, Chefwick following him. Kelp, at the bottom, held the ladder steady until they were both on top of the truck and then pushed the ladder up after them. Dortmunder laid the ladder lengthwise on the truck top and then he and Chefwick lay down on either side of it, like Boccaccio characters flanking a sword. Kelp, once the ladder was up, went around back again and shut the doors, then got back into the cab, started the engine, and drove the truck slowly around the A amp;P and out to the street. He didn't turn the headlights on.

In the prison Greenwood, looking at his watch and seeing it was five minutes to three, decided the time had come. He sat up, throwing the covers off, showing he was already fully dressed except for shoes. He put his shoes on now, got to his feet, looked at the sleeping man in the top bunk for a few seconds - the old man was snoring slightly, mouth open - and then Greenwood hit him in the nose.

The old man's eyes popped open, round and white, and for two or three seconds he and Greenwood stared at each other, their faces no more than a foot apart. Then the old man blinked, and his hand sidled up from under the blanket to touch his nose, and he said, in surprise and pain, "Ow."

Greenwood, shouting at the top of his voice, bellowed, "Stop picking your feet!"

The old man sat up, his eyes getting rounder and rounder. His nose was starting to bleed. He said, "What? What?"

Still at top volume, Greenwood roared, "And stop sniffing your fingers!"

The old man's fingers were still against his nose, but now he took them away and looked at them, and there was blood on the tips. "Help," he said, in a very quiet voice, tentatively, as though to be sure that was the word he was looking for. Then, apparently sure, he let fly with a raucous string of helps, putting his head back, squeezing his eyes shut, yipping like a terrier, "Helphelphelphelphelphelphelphelp -" etc.

"I can't take it any more," Greenwood raged, taking the baritone part. "I'll break your neck for you!"

"Helphelphelphelphelphelphelp-"

Lights went on. Guards were shouting. Greenwood began to swear, to tramp back and forth, to wave his fists in the air. He yanked the blanket off the old man, wadded it up, threw it back at him. He grabbed the old man's ankle and began to squeeze it as though he thought it was the old man's neck.

The big clang came that meant the long iron bar across all the cell doors on this side of the tier had been lifted. Greenwood yanked the old man out of bed by his ankle, being careful not to hurt him, clutched him around the neck with one hand, raised his other fist high, and stood posed like that, bellowing, until the cell door opened and three guards came rushing in.

Greenwood didn't make it easy for them. He didn't punch any of them because he didn't want them to punch him back with truncheons and make him unconscious, but he did keep poking the old man at them, making it difficult for them to come around through the narrow cell and get their hands on him.

Then, all at once, he subsided. He released the old man, who promptly sat down on the floor and began to clutch his own neck, and he stood there slump-shouldered, vague-eyed. "I don't know," he said fuzzily, shaking his head. "I don't know."

The guards put their hands on his arms. "We know," one of them said, and the second said quietly to the third, "Flipped out. I wouldn't of thought it from him."

Not too many walls away, the rented truck had rolled silently and blackly to a stop against the outer wall of the prison. There were towers at both corners of the wall and there was a great deal of light in other parts of the wall, such as the part around the main entrance and the part near the exercise yard, but here there was silence and darkness only intermittently broken by a searchlight sweeping along the length of the wall from the inside. The reason was, there were no cells nor entrances near this part of the wall at all. On the other side of this wall, according to Greenwood's maps, were buildings housing the prison heating plant, the laundry, the kitchens and dining halls, the chapels, various storage sheds and the like. No part of the wall was left totally unguarded, but the guard in this area was the most perfunctory. Besides, with such a transient prison population as that at Utopia Park Prison, escapes were very rarely attempted.

As soon as the truck came to a stop, Dortmunder got to his feet and leaned the ladder against the wall. It reached almost to the top. He hurried up it while Chefwick held it steady, and at the top he peeked over, watching for the searchlight. It came, it showed him a layout of building roofs that matched Greenwood's map, and he ducked out of sight just before it swept past the spot where his head had been. He went back down the ladder and whispered, "It's all right."

"Good," Chefwick whispered.

Dortmunder joggled the ladder to be sure it would hold still with no one at the bottom to mind it, and then he went back up, Chefwick this time following close behind him. Dortmunder carried the coil of rope over one shoulder, Chefwick toted his black bag. Chefwick moved with an agility surprising in a man of his appearance.

At the top, Dortmunder shook out the coil of rope, holding on to the end tied to the metal hook. The rope was knotted every few feet and dangled to about eight feet from the ground. Dortmunder attached it to the top of the wall with the hook and tugged it to be sure it was solid. It was.

As soon as the searchlight glided by the next time, Dortmunder zipped up the rest of the ladder and straddled the top of the wall just to the right. Chefwick hurried up after him, hampered slightly by the black bag, and straddled the wall just to the left, facing Dortmunder. They reached down, grabbed the ladder by the top rung, pulled it up until it would tilt over the wall, and then slid it down the other side. About nine feet down was a flat tar roof, over the prison laundry. The ladder touched the roof and Dortmunder immediately clambered onto it. He took the black bag from Chefwick and hurried down the ladder. Chefwick scrambled down after him. They put the ladder down next to the low wall that edged the roof and then lay down on top of the ladder, where they would be in that wall's shadow the next time the searchlight came by.

Outside, Kelp had been standing beside the truck, squinting to see Dortmunder and Chefwick and the ladder. He saw them vaguely, huddled on the ladder, one time when the searchlight went by on the other side of the wall, but the next time it went by they were gone. He nodded in satisfaction, got into the cab, and drove away from there, lights still off.

Dortmunder and Chefwick, meantime, used the ladder to get from the laundry roof to the ground. They put the ladder on the ground to one side and hurried for the main prison building looming up in the darkness ahead of them. They had to duck behind a wall once, to let the searchlight go by, but then trotted on, got to the building, found the door where it was supposed to be, and Chefwick took from his pocket the two tools he'd known he would have to use on this door. He went to work while Dortmunder kept watch.

Dortmunder saw the searchlight coming again, running along the face of the building. "Hurry it up," he whispered, and heard a click, and turned to see the door opening.

They ducked inside, shut the door, and the searchlight went by. "Close," Dortmunder whispered.

"I'll take my bag now," Chefwick whispered back. He was completely unruffled.

The room they were in was totally black, but Chefwick knew the contents of his bag so well he didn't need light. He squatted on the floor, opened the bag, put the two tools away in their appropriate pouches, took out two others, closed the bag, stood, and said, "All right."

Several locked doors away, Greenwood was saying, "I'll come quietly. Don't you worry, I'll come quietly."

"We're not worried," one of the guards said.

It had taken them all quite a while to get everything sorted out. After Greenwood had suddenly gotten calm the guards had tried to find out what had happened, what it was all about, but all the old man could do was sputter and point, and all Greenwood would do was stand around looking vague and shaking his head and saying, "I just don't know any more." Then the old man said the magic word "feet" and Greenwood erupted again.

He was very careful about how he erupted. He did nothing physical, all he did was scream and shout and thrash a bit. He kept it up while the guards held on to his arms, but when he saw they were about deciding to apply a local anesthetic to his head he calmed down again and became very reasonable. He explained about the old man's feet, being totally lucid, explaining to them as though he thought once they understood the situation they would thoroughly agree with him.

What they did was humor him, and that was what he wanted. And when one of them said, "Look, fellow, why don't we just find you someplace else to sleep?" Greenwood smiled in honest pleasure. He knew where they would take him now, to one of the cells over in the hospital wing. He could cool off there until morning, and then be handy for the doctor to see.

That's what they thought.

Greenwood said a smiling goodbye to the old man, who was holding a sock to his bleeding nose now, and out he marched amid the guards. He assured them he would go with them quietly and they assured him they weren't worried about that.

The early part of the route was the same as when he'd gone to see Prosker. Down the metal corridor, down the metal spiral stairs, along the other metal corridor and through two doors, both of which had to be unlocked by people on the outside and both of which were locked again in his wake. After that the route changed, going down a long brown corridor and around a corner to a nice lonely spot where two men dressed all in black, with black hoods over their heads and black pistols in their hands, came out of a doorway and said, "Don't nobody make a sound."

The guards looked at Dortmunder and Chefwick, for indeed it was they, and blinked in astonishment. One of them said, "You're crazy."

"Not necessarily," Chefwick said. He stepped to one side of the doorway and said, "In here, gentlemen."

"You won't shoot," the second guard said. "The noise would attract a lot of attention."

"That's why we have silencers," Dortmunder told him. "That's this thing like a hand grenade on the front of the gun. Want to hear it?"

"No," said the guard.

Everybody went into the room and Greenwood shut the door. They used the guards' belts to tie their ankles, their ties to tie their hands, and their shirttails to gag them. The room they were in was small and square and was somebody's office, with a metal desk. There was a phone on the desk but Dortmunder ripped the cord loose.

When they left the office, Chefwick carefully locked the door behind him. Dortmunder said to Greenwood, "This way," and the three of them loped down a corridor and through a heavy metal door that had been locked for several years until Chefwick had gotten to it. As Chefwick had said the other day, "Locks in prisons are meant to keep people in, not out. The outsides of the doors are much easier, that's where all the bolts and chains and machinery are."

They retraced the route that Dortmunder and Chefwick had taken coming in here. Four more doors stood in the way, each having been unlocked by Chefwick on the way in and each now being locked again on their way out. They came at last to the exit from this building and waited there, clustered around the doorway, looking at the black cube of the laundry across the way. Dortmunder checked his watch and it was three-twenty. "Five minutes," he whispered.

Four blocks away, Kelp looked at his watch, saw it was three-twenty, and got out of the truck cab again. He was finally getting used to the fact that the interior light didn't go on when he opened the door, he having removed the bulb himself before they left the city. He closed the door quietly, went around back, and opened the rear doors. "Set," he whispered to Murch.

"Right," Murch whispered back and began pushing a long one-by-twelve board out of the truck. Kelp grabbed the end of it and lowered it to the ground so the board leaned against the rear edge of the truck body in a long slant. Murch pushed out another board and Kelp lined it up beside the other one, with a space of about five feet between the two.

They had chosen the most industrial area of Utopia Park for this part of the plot. The streets directly contiguous with the prison were all shabby residential, but starting two or three blocks out the neighborhoods began to change. To the north and east were residential neighborhoods, steadily improving the farther away they got, and to the west was a poorer residential area that got progressively slummier till it petered out in a flurry of used car lots, but to the south was Utopia Park's industry. For block after block there was nothing but the low brick buildings in which sunglasses were made, soft drinks were bottled, tires were recapped, newspapers were printed, dresses were sewn, signs were painted, and foam rubber was covered with fabric. There was no traffic here at night, there were no pedestrians, a police car prowled through only once an hour. There was nothing here at night but all the factories and, parked in front of them, hundreds of trucks. Up this street and down that, nothing but trucks, bumpy-fendered, big-nosed, hulking, dark, empty, silent. Trucks.

Kelp had parked his truck in with all the other trucks, making it invisible. He had parked just beyond a fire hydrant so there would be room behind the truck, but other than that one open space the rest of the block was pretty well full. Kelp had had to drive around half a dozen blocks before he'd found this space, and it pleased him.

Now, with the two boards slanting out from the truck to the street, Kelp stepped up on the curb and waited. Murch had disappeared into the blackness inside the truck again, and after a minute there was the sudden chatter of an engine starting up in there. It roared a brief second, then settled down to a quiet purr, and out from the truck nosed a nearly new dark green Mercedes-Benz 250SE convertible. Kelp had run across it earlier this evening on Park Avenue in the Sixties. Because it wasn't going to be used very much, it still bore its MD plates. Kelp had decided to forgive doctors.

The boards bowed beneath the weight of the car. Murch, behind the wheel, looked like Gary Cooper taxiing his Grumman into position on the aircraft carrier. Nodding at Kelp the way Coop used to nod at the ground crew, Murch tapped the accelerator and the Mercedes-Benz went away, lights out.

Murch had spent some of his idle time in the back of the truck reading the owner's manual he'd found in the car's glove compartment, and he wondered if the top speed of one hundred eighteen miles an hour was on the up and up or not. He shouldn't test it now, but coming back maybe he'd have enough of a straightaway to find out.

Back in the prison, Dortmunder had checked his watch again, found that five minutes had passed, and said, "Okay." Now the three of them were trotting across the open space toward the laundry, the searchlight having flashed by just before they started.

Dortmunder and Chefwick put up the ladder and Greenwood led the way up it. The three got to the roof, pulled the ladder up after them, lay down in the lee of the low perimeter wall, held their breaths while the searchlight went by, and then got to their feet and carried the ladder over to the outer wall. Chefwick went up first this time, toting his black bag, went over the top, and went down the rope hand over hand, the handle of the black bag clamped in his teeth. Greenwood followed him and Dortmunder came last. Dortmunder straddled the top of the wall and began pulling the ladder up. The searchlight was coming back.

Chefwick dropped to the ground just as Murch arrived in the convertible. Chefwick took the bag from his teeth, which were aching from the strain, and climbed over the side into the convertible. The interior lights of this vehicle hadn't been tampered with, so they couldn't open the door.

Greenwood was coming down the rope. Dortmunder was still pulling up the ladder. The searchlight reached him, washed over him like magic water, passed on, stopped dead, quivered, and shot back. Dortmunder was gone, but the ladder was in the process of falling onto the laundry roof. It went chack when it hit.

Meantime, Greenwood had reached the ground and jumped into the front seat of the convertible, Chefwick being already in back. Dortmunder was coming very fast down the rope.

A siren said, Rrrrrr - and began its climb.

Dortmunder kicked out from the wall, let go the rope, dropped into the back seat of the convertible and called, "Go!"

Murch hit the accelerator.

Sirens were starting up all over the place. Kelp, standing by the truck with an unlit flashlight in his hands, began to chew his lower lip.

Murch had turned on the headlights, since he was going too fast now to depend on the occasional street lights. Behind them, the prison was coming to life like a yellow volcano. Any minute it would start erupting police cars.

Murch made a left on two wheels. He now had a three-block straightaway. He put the accelerator on the floor.

There are still milkmen who get up very early in the morning and deliver milk. One of these, standing at his steering wheel, put-putted his stubby white traveling walk-in closet into the middle of an intersection, looked to his left, and saw headlights coming at him too fast to think about. He yipped and threw himself backward into his cases of milk, causing a lot of crashing.

Murch went around the stalled milk truck like a skier on a slalom, and kept the accelerator on the floor. He was going to have to brake soon, and the speedometer hadn't broken a hundred yet.

No good. He'd have to brake now, or overshoot. He released the accelerator and tapped the brakes. Four-wheel disc brakes grabbed and held.

Kelp didn't hear the engine over the screaming sirens, but he did hear the tires shriek. He looked down at the corner and the convertible slid sideways into view, then leaped forward like Jim Brown going around end.

Kelp switched on his flashlight and began madly to wave it. Didn't Murch see him? The convertible kept getting larger.

Murch knew what he was doing. While his passengers clung to the upholstery and each other he shot down the block, tapped the brakes just enough at the right split second, nudged the wheel just enough, rolled up the boards and into the truck, tapped the brakes again, and came to a quivering standstill two inches from the far wall. He shut off the engine and switched off the lights.

Kelp, meanwhile, had put away his flashlight and was quickly shoving the boards back into the truck. He slammed one of the doors, hands reached down to help him up into the truck, and then the other door was shut.

For half a minute there was no sound in the blackness inside the truck except five people panting. Then Greenwood said, "We've gotta go back. I forgot my toothbrush."

Everybody laughed at that, but it was just nervous laughter. Still, it helped to relax them all. Murch turned the car's headlights on again, since they'd already proved no light from in here could be seen outside the truck, and then everybody shook hands with everybody, congratulating everybody on a job well done.

They got quiet and listened as a police car yowled by, and then Kelp said, "Hot on our trail," and everybody grinned again.

They'd done it. From here on it was simple. They'd wait here in the truck till around six, and then Kelp would slip out, get into the cab, and drive them all away from here. It was unlikely he'd be stopped, but if he was he was perfectly safe. He had legitimate papers for the rental truck, legitimate-looking driver's license and other identification, and a legitimate-sounding reason for being abroad. In a quiet spot in Brooklyn the convertible would be removed from the truck and left with its keys in it invitingly close to a vocational high school. The truck would be driven to Manhattan and left at the garage where Major Iko's man would pick it up and return it to the rental agency.

Everybody was feeling pleased and happy and relieved. They sat around in the convertible and told jokes and after a while Kelp brought out a deck of cards and they started to play poker for high paper stakes.

Along about four o'clock Kelp said, "Well, tomorrow we go get the emerald and collect our dough."

Greenwood said, "We can start working on it tomorrow, I guess. Three cards," he said to Chefwick, who was dealing jacks or better.

Everybody got very quiet. Dortmunder said to Greenwood, "What do you mean, we can start working on it?"

Greenwood gave a nervous shrug. "Well, it isn't going to be all that easy," he said.

Dortmunder said, "Why not?"

Greenwood cleared his throat. He looked around with an embarrassed smile. "Because," he said, "I hid it in the police station."