The Road To Ruin

52

I GOTTA GET OUTA HERE, Dortmunder thought. But how? This was a kind of a nice bedroom—guestroom, he figured, with its own small attached bath—but it wasn’t rich with forms of egress, and yet, Dortmunder didn’t want to be in it any more.

He really needed to get out of here. The car heist was supposed to go down tonight; his life as a butler was supposed to be finished by now. But here he was in this room.

I should be able to beat this thing, he told himself. What I do is get in and out of places. So this is a place, and I’ve got to get out of it.

What do we have in here? What are the possibilities? Like most bedrooms, this one had a door that opened inward from the hall, so the hinges were on this side, and that should mean he could pop the pins out of the hinges and yank the door open that way. Worry about what was on the other side of the door when he was on the other side of the door.

The only trouble was, these hinges had been painted so many times over so many years they were absolutely stuck solid. Maybe if he had pliers, wrenches, hammers, probably a hacksaw, he could make some headway with these hinges, but not with bare fingers. Not after bending one fingernail a little too far back.

So what else do we have here? Two windows, both good-sized, and one smaller window in the bathroom, and all three of them sealed up with plywood attached on the outside. Push on that plywood, nothing happens. Punch it with the heel of your hand, then you get to walk around the next five minutes saying, “Ow, ow, ow,” with your right hand stuck in your left armpit.

What else? Anything else? The door is locked, with a kind of ordinary old-fashioned lock, the kind where you can bend down or kneel down and look through the keyhole and see some length of wall and another closed door across the way. Maybe Hall was in there. Anyway, there’s no getting at this lock in this door, just no way.

And yet, somebody was inserting a key, he could hear it, inserting the key, and turning it.

Damn! If he’d known somebody was coming, he could have positioned himself behind the door with a chair poised over his head. Now, it was all happening too quick: key in lock, knob turn, door open.

Oh. Five of them, all in those different kinds of masks. The one with the bandanna around his nose and mouth like a bank robber in the old West must have been the driver on the trip here. Anyway, a chair was not going to deal with all five of these people, no matter how much advance warning he got.

“Listen,” he said, as they tromped in, “I gotta get outa here.”

One of them handed him a piece of paper. What? What’s this? A handwritten note? Don’t these people speak English? Well, of course they do, he’d heard them in the trailer.

Two others were putting things on the low dresser. A sandwich, on a paper plate. Soup in a waxed-paper cup. Ice cream in another waxed-paper cup, with a plastic spoon. They nodded at him, pointed at the food, and turned away.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, wait a minute. I’m not the one you want, what’s the edge in holding on to me like this?”

They weren’t here to talk. They left, closed the door, turned the key in the lock, took the key away with them.

Damn those people! How could they louse things up so—

What time was it, anyway? He couldn’t see out, he didn’t have a watch, he had no way to tell if it was day or night or what it was. But the sandwich and the soup and the ice cream suggested—and his stomach was going along with the idea—that it was dinnertime. How long did they figure to keep him in here?

Maybe the note would give him a clue. Opening it, he read:

Meatheads. Eating the sandwich—ham and swiss on sourdough, with honey mustard and mayo, not bad—Dortmunder brooded at the room, this solid cube he was shut inside.

How?