What's The Worst That Could Happen

by Donald Westlake

  “I want a room,” Dortmunder said.

  “I know that,” the woman said, and pointed at the check–in forms. “Fill that out.”

  “Sure.”

  Dortmunder wrote a short story on the form, while the woman looked past him out the front window. She said, “No car.”

  “I just flew in,” he said. “The cab brought me here.”

  “Uh huh,” the woman said.

  Dortmunder didn’t like how everybody around here said uh huh all the time, in that manner as though to say, we’ve got your number, and it’s a low one. “There,” he said, the short story finished.

  The woman read the short story with a skeptical smile, and said, “How long you plan to stay?”

  “A week. I’ll pay cash.”

  “I know that,” the woman said. “We give five percent off for cash, and two percent more if you pay by the week. In front.”

  “Sounds good,” Dortmunder lied, and hauled out his thick wallet. He was paying cash here, and his own cash at that, because the kind of credit card he could get from his friend Stoon might shrivel up like the last leaf of summer before this excursion to Las Vegas was finished. And although it was his own cash at the moment, it had in fact come originally from Max Fairbanks, one way and another, so it seemed right to spend Fairbanks’s money to hunt Fairbanks down.

  Also, the reason he was staying at a motel a little ways off from the Strip, rather than at the Gaiety, was because he knew Fairbanks knew he was coming, so any singleton guy checking into the Gaiety the next few days would be given very close observation indeed. In fact, pairs of guys together, or groups of guys, any combination like that, would be scrutinized right down to their dandruff, which was why none of the people coming out to help Dortmunder in his moment of need would stay at the Gaiety, but would all be around, here and there, somewhere else.

  The mummified woman watched Dortmunder’s wallet and his hands and the money he spread on the counter. He put the wallet away, she picked up the cash and counted it, and then she said, “It’s none of my business.”

  Dortmunder looked alert.

  “I wouldn’t do it if I were you,” she said.

  Dortmunder looked bewildered. “Do what?”

  “Whatever you’re thinking of,” she said. “You seem okay, not full of yourself or nothing, so I’ll just give you some advice, if you don’t mind.”

  “Everybody gives me advice,” Dortmunder complained.

  “Everybody can tell you need it,” she said. “My advice is, enjoy your stay in our fair city. Swim in the pool here, it’s a very nice pool, I say so myself. Walk over to the casinos, have a good time. Eat the food, see the sights. A week from now, go home. Otherwise,” she said, and gestured with the handful of money, “I got to tell you, we don’t give refunds.”

  “I won’t need one,” Dortmunder assured her.

  She nodded. “Uh huh,” she said, and put the money in the pocket of her cardigan.

  So that was the second warning, and the third warning was this morning, in the cafe a block from the Randy Unicorn where he ate his breakfast, and where the waitress, at the end of the meal, when she slid the check onto the table, said, “Just get to town?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Just a friendly word of warning,” she said, and leaned close, and murmured, “Just leave.”

  And now, he’s less than an hour at the Gaiety Hotel, Battle–Lake and Casino, and he’s got security guards in both hip pockets. What’s going on here?

  It was a twenty–minute walk from the Strip back to the Randy Unicorn, through flat tan ground with more empty lots than buildings, and none of the buildings more than three stories tall. And back there behind him loomed those architectural fantasies, soaring up like psychedelic mushrooms, millions of bright lights competing with the sun, a line of those weird structures all alone in the flatness, surrounded by Martian desert, as though they’d sprouted from seeds planted in the dead soil by Pan, though actually they’d been planted by Bugsy Siegel, who’d watered them with his blood.

  Walking in the sunlight through this lesser Las Vegas of dusty parking lots and washed–out shopfronts of dry cleaners and liquor stores, Dortmunder reflected that somehow, once he was out of New York City, he was less invisible than he was used to. He was going to have to move very carefully around this town.

  When he came plodding down the sunny dry block to the Randy Unicorn, he had to pass the office first, with the rental units beyond it, and as he sloped by, the office door opened and the mummified woman stuck her head out to say, “Over here.”

  Dortmunder looked at her, then looked down along the line of motel room doors that faced onto the blacktop parking area between building and street. A silver Buick Regal was parked among the vehicles along there, nose in, probably in front of Dortmunder’s room. It was quite different from the dusty pickup trucks and rump–sprung station wagons in front of some of the other units. Dortmunder couldn’t see the license plate on the Regal, but he could guess. And he could also guess what the mummified woman wanted to say.

  Which is what she said: “Some fella picked his way into your room awhile ago. He’s still in there.”

  “That’s okay,” Dortmunder said. “He’s a friend of mine.”

  “Uh huh,” she said.

  Chapter 44

  * * *

  “Ah, the open road,” Andy Kelp said, at the wheel of the Regal. (The license plates did say MD, as Dortmunder had expected, and were from New Mexico.)

  Interstate 93/95, between Las Vegas and Henderson, was a wide road, all right, but with all the commercial traffic highballing along it Dortmunder wouldn’t exactly call it open. Still, they were making good time, and the Regal’s air–conditioning was smooth as a diaper, so Dortmunder relaxed partly into all this comfort and said, “Lemme tell you what’s been happening here.”

  Kelp glanced away from the semis and vans and potato chip trucks long enough to say, “Happening? You just got here.”

  “And everybody,” Dortmunder told him, “makes me for a wrong guy. Like that. Like that.” The second time he tried to snap his fingers, he hurt something in a joint. “Right away,” he explained.

  Again Kelp gave him the double–o, then looked back at the highway in time not to run into the back of that big slat–sided truck full of live cows. Steering around the beef, which looked reproachfully at them as they went by, Kelp said, “I see what your problem is, John. You don’t have a sense of what we call protective coloration.”

  Dortmunder frowned at him, and massaged his finger joint. “What’s that?”

  “You’ll find out,” Kelp promised him, which sounded ominous. “When we get back from seeing this fella Vogel. But let’s get this part squared away first.” Shaking his head, weaving through the traffic in all this sunlight, Kelp said, “I hope he’s got what we want.”

  “It would help,” Dortmunder agreed.

  • • •

  Dortmunder had phoned Lester Vogel from Vegas to introduce himself and get directions, and they found the place the first try, in a low incomplete tan neighborhood of warehouses and small factories in the scrubby desert, just beyond the Henderson city line. A tall unpainted board fence ran all around a full block here, with big black letters along each side that read GENERAL MANUFACTURING, which didn’t exactly tell you a hell of a lot about what was going on inside there. However, when Dortmunder and Kelp got out of the Regal’s air–conditioning and into Nevada’s air, there was a smell wafting over that fence to suggest there were people somewhere nearby stirring things in vats with one hand while holding their nose with the other.

  Kelp had parked, per instructions, next to the truck entrance to General Manufacturing, a big pair of broad wood–slat doors that looked just like the rest of the fence and that were firmly closed. Now they went over to those doors, banged on them for a while, and at last a voice from inside yelled something in Spanish, so Dortmunder yelled back in English: “Dortmunder! Here to see Vogel!”
/>   There was silence then for a long while, during which Dortmunder tried unsuccessfully to see between the wooden slats of the door, and then, just as Kelp was saying, “Maybe we oughta whack it again,” one side of the entrance creaked inward just enough for a bony dark–complexioned black–haired head to lean out, study them both briefly, and say, “Hokay.”

  The head disappeared, but the opening stayed open, so Dortmunder and Kelp stepped on inside, to find that the interior of General Manufacturing was a lot of different places, like an entire village of busy artisans in different sheds and shacks and lean–tos and at least one old schoolbus without its wheels. Various smokes of various colors rose from various places. Vehicles of many kinds were parked haphazardly among the small structures. Workers hammered things and screwed things together and painted things and took things apart. A number of trucks, mostly with pale green Mexican license plates, were being loaded or unloaded. In an open–sided lean–to off to the right, people stirred things in vats with one hand while holding their nose with the other.

  The bony head that had invited them in belonged to a scrawny body in some leftover pieces of ripped clothing; judging from his size and boniness and the condition of his teeth, he could have been any age from eleven to ninety–six. After he’d pushed shut the door behind them and dropped a massive wooden bar over it to keep it shut, this guy turned toward Dortmunder and Kelp, nodded vigorously, flapped a hand in the direction of the schoolbus, and said, “Orifice.”

  “Got it,” Dortmunder said, and he and Kelp made their way through this dusty busy landscape that would surely have reminded them of Vulcan’s workshop if either of them had ever paid the slightest bit of attention in school, and as they got to the orangey yellow bus its door sagged open and out bounded a grinning wiry guy in a black three–piece suit, white shirt, black tie, and black wing–tip shoes. He looked like he was going to the funeral of somebody he was glad was dead.

  This guy stopped in front of Dortmunder and Kelp, legs apart, hands on hips, chin thrust forward, eyes bright and cheerful but at the same time somehow aggressive, and he said, “Which one’s Dortmunder?”

  “Me,” Dortmunder said.

  “Good,” the guy said, and squinted at Kelp: “So what does that make you?”

  “His friend,” Kelp said.

  The guy absorbed that thought, then frowned deeply at Kelp and said, “You a New Yorker?”

  Kelp frowned right back at him: “Why?”

  “You are!” the guy shouted, and lit up like Times Square. “Lester Vogel,” he announced, and stuck his hand out in Kelp’s direction. “I used to be a New Yorker myself.”

  “Andy Kelp,” Kelp said, but doubtfully, as he shook Vogel’s hand.

  Dortmunder said, “Used to be a New Yorker?”

  Vogel did the handshake routine with Dortmunder as well, saying, “You lose your edge, guys. After a while. I gotta live out here now, this is access to the customers, access to the labor pool, access to the kind of air’s supposed to keep these lungs from goin’ flat like a tire, so here I am, but I do miss it. Say, listen, Dortmunder, do me a — You mind if I call you Dortmunder?”

  “No,” Dortmunder said.

  “Thanks,” Vogel said. “Say, Dortmunder, do me a favor and say something New York to me, will ya? All I get around here is Mex, it’s like livin’ in the subway, I hear these people jabberin’ away, I look around, where’s my stop? East Thirty–Third Street. But this is it, fellas, this is the stop. Dortmunder, say somethin’ New York to me.”

  Dortmunder lowered his eyebrows at this weirdo: “What for?”

  “Oh, thanks,” Vogel cried, and grinned all over himself. “You ask these people a question around here, you know what they do? They answer it! You got all this por favor comin’ outa your earholes. Sometimes, you know, I pick up the phone, I dial the 718 area code, I dial somebody at random, just to hear the abuse when it’s a wrong number.”

  “So that was you, you son of a bitch,” Kelp said, and grinned at him.

  Vogel grinned back. “Kelp,” he said, “we’re gonna get al — Oh. Okay I call you Kelp?”

  “Sure. And you’re Vogel, right?”

  “Waitresses around here,” Vogel said, “they’re all named Debby and they all wanna call me Lester. I sound like a deodorant. Well, anyway,” he said, still being cheerful in manner no matter how much he complained, “A.K.A. tells me I can maybe help you boys, maybe so, and if I help you boys I’m gonna help myself, and that’s what I like. So what can I do you for?”

  Dortmunder pointed. “Those big tall metal canisters over there,” he said. “They’re green.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Vogel said. “You’re an observant guy, Dortmunder, I like that. I’m an observant guy myself, not like these laid–back putzes they got around this part of the world, and I’m observing you being an observant guy also, and I can see we’re gonna get along.”

  “Green,” Dortmunder said, “is oxygen.”

  “Right again!” Vogel cried. “Green is always oxygen, and oxygen is always green, it’s a safety measure, so you don’t put the wrong gas the wrong place, even though they got all these different fittings. We use oxygen here in a number of things we do, we got a supplier up in Vegas, the Silver State Industrial and Medical Gas Supply Company, they give us all this different stuff we got here.”

  “That’s right,” Dortmunder said. “You use some other gases around here, too.”

  “If it hisses out of a big torpedo–shaped canister,” Vogel said, “we got it. I take it this is the area where you got an interest.”

  “It is,” Dortmunder said.

  “Well, come along, Dortmunder, and you come along, too, Kelp,” Vogel said, starting off, not seeming to care that his shiny shoes were already getting dusty out here, “let me show you fellas what we got here, and you can tell me what you want, and then you can tell me what’s in it for me.”

  Chapter 45

  * * *

  Anne Marie undertipped the bellman, because she knew women are expected to undertip and she didn’t want to call attention to herself. The bellman, seeing she’d lived down to his expectations, wrote her off as another cheap bitch, and had already forgotten her before he was well out of the room.

  Once she was alone, Anne Marie went over to draw the drapes back from the room’s all–window end wall, and there it was. The Gaiety Hotel, Battle–Lake and Casino. Well, no, not the casino, that part was somewhere down underneath her.

  Twelve stories down. They had given her a room on what they called the fourteenth floor, because there are no thirteenth floors almost anywhere in America, and certainly none in Las Vegas. But they could call it fourteen all they wanted; it was the thirteenth floor, and Fate knew it.

  And so, from here, thirteen stories up, Anne Marie looked out and down, and there was the Battle–Lake, looking more like a Battle–Pond, flanked by its bleachers, with the cottages beyond, all laid out like a model in a war room, ready for combat. A swimming pool was also out there, and a wading pool, and miniature golf, and miniature plantings, and many tourists, most of them far from miniature. From up here, the tourists looked like rolling blobs of Playdoh in their bright vacation colors.

  Also from up here, the many many security people in their tan uniforms stood out like peanuts in a bowl of M&M’s. Looking down at them, watching their steady progress through the dawdling crowd, Anne Marie was convinced more than ever that the scheme was doomed.

  The trip to Washington, on the other hand, had been a lark. It had seemed as though it would be a lark beforehand, and it had turned out to be a lark while it was going on, and John’s friend May had been just the perfect companion for those times when Andy and John were off doing their thing. But when Andy had told her about this! When Andy had explained to her that they were all off this time to rob a casino in Las Vegas as a diversion from their attempt to get John’s ring back, Anne Marie had understood, finally and completely, that these people were crazy. Bonkers. Nuts. Rob a La
s Vegas casino, a place more determinedly guarded than Fort Knox, as a diversion.

  I’m getting out of this, Anne Marie told herself. I am definitely leaving these March hares. But not quite yet.

  The fact was, she did enjoy being with Andy, no matter how crazy he was. So, at least until everybody was in Las Vegas, and the diversion failed, and the whole crowd of them except her was carted off to jail, she would continue to pal around with Andy, and just watch the scene unfold. And at the same time she would do what was necessary to protect herself.

  The reason was, she’d changed her mind about Court TV. It wasn’t so much that she minded making an appearance on Court TV — that might also be fun, in a way — it was the eight–and–a–third to twenty–five years that would follow her appearance that she didn’t care for. If there was one destiny open to her that was likely to be worse than marriage to Howard Carpinaw, it was a woman’s prison for approximately a quarter of her life. No; not worth it.