What's The Worst That Could Happen

by Donald Westlake

  The desert wind is sometimes strong, sometimes light, but it’s constant. The wind wasn’t particularly strong tonight, but it was very dry, and it had no trouble wafting shreds of burning plastic flowers and burning plastic leaves across to the cottages, which were made of wood.

  In the chaos and confusion, Detective Klematsky tried desperately to keep hold of Max Fairbanks, but it was impossible, particularly after the lights went out. Max moved around in the increasingly smoky darkness, with that acrid petroleum smell of burning plastic, afraid he was doing irreparable damage to his lungs, when all of a sudden, seeming almost to appear out of the bedroom, there was a fireman in front of him, illuminated by the burning lake, dressed in firehat and smoke mask and heavy black rubber coat and heavy black boots. At once he grabbed Max by the arm, his muffled voice professional but urgent as he said, “This way, sir. Let’s get you out of here.”

  “Oh, yes! Thank you! Out of here!”

  “Clear the way,” ordered the fireman, and they moved through the milling guards, while the crackle of the fire grew louder. The cottage roof had caught.

  Somewhere in the darkened rooms, the crazed Klematsky was crying, “Where is he? Where’s Fairbanks? Don’t let him get away!”

  I have to get away, Max thought, blundering forward out the cottage door, clutching to the fireman who was guiding him by the arm. I have to get away, I have to find a phone and find a lawyer. I need a lawyer, two lawyers, maybe ten lawyers, to protect me from that utterly mad detective.

  “This way,” said the fireman’s muffled voice. “The fire’s spreading. This way.”

  “Yes, yes, let’s get away from here.”

  The fireman led him down the path between the cottages, and Max could see that two more of them had now caught fire. This whole part of the hotel complex would burn to the ground soon, if the fire department didn’t get to work on it, didn’t start hosing it down.

  From far away, the sound of fire engine sirens screamed, coming closer.

  The fireman led Max through the gate in the hedge, into the employee’s parking lot, floodlit at night. “Thank you, thank you,” Max babbled, as the sirens got closer. “You saved me —”

  Wait a minute. The fire department is still on its way, it hasn’t got here yet. Who is this fireman?

  Even as Max formed that question, and even as he instantly knew the answer, the false fireman spun around at him in the middle of the employee parking lot, under that garish white light. Grabbing for Max’s right hand, he bellowed, “Give me that ring!”

  “You!” Max cried. “You’re the one!” And he whacked the false fireman across the head, which only hurt his left hand when it struck the smoke mask.

  “Give me that ring!”

  “No! You’ve ruined everything, you’ve destroyed —”

  “Give me the ring!”

  “Never!”

  Max, inflamed by the injustice of it all, leaped on the false fireman and drove him to the blacktop. They rolled together there, the false fireman trying to get the ring, Max trying to rip that mask off so he could bite the fellow’s face, and Max wound up on top.

  Straddling him. Winning, on top, as he always was, as he always would be. Because I am Max Fairbanks, and I will not be beaten, not be beaten.

  You didn’t expect this, did you, Mr. Burglar? You didn’t expect me to be on top, did you, holding you down with my knees, ready now to give you what you deserve, kill you with my bare hands, rip this mask —

  “YOOOOUUUUU!!!”

  Startled, Max looked up, and here came Brandon Camberbridge, tearing across the parking lot, running full tilt and screaming like a banshee: “You! You destroyed my hotel! My beautiful hotel!”

  “I’ve got him,” Max started, to reassure the man, but it was Max that Brandon attacked, hurtling into him headlong, tackling him, the two of them flying over and over across the parking lot, away from the cause of it all, the false fireman, the burglar. The burglar! Him! Over there!

  Max tried to say so, but Brandon was strangling him, pummeling him, beating his head on the blacktop. Max shrieked, and Brandon shrieked louder, and they clawed at one another, and Max felt himself blacking out.

  “Excuse me.”

  The calm voice stopped them both. They turned their heads, and the fireman was there, hat gone, mask dangling from the left side of his face. “This is mine,” he said, and reached down, and plucked the ring off Max’s limp finger. “Thank you,” he said, and straightened. “Carry on,” he suggested, and walked away across the parking lot, and Brandon grasped Max by the throat and screamed terrible words into his nose.

  By the time many hands arrived to drag Brandon free and help Max to his feet and pound his back until he started breathing again, the burglar, of course, was long gone.

  And so was the ring.

  Chapter 63

  * * *

  There were about three days a year, all of them in June, when the sun, if the sun were shining at all over the island of Manhattan, could angle down and shine into the living room of Dortmunder’s apartment on East Nineteenth Street. Thursday, June 8, two and a half weeks after the Las Vegas spectacular, it happened again, at a time when Dortmunder chanced to be present in the living room, still not quite having decided what to do with himself today. The sun shone in through the window near the sofa, bounced off the end table by Dortmunder’s right elbow, and reflected itself in the gray face of the TV set. Becoming aware of that unusual light, Dortmunder put his right hand out to catch the ray, and turned the hand back and forth, watching how warm and yellow everything looked. Then he opened the drawer in the end table and took out the ring.

  Still the same ring. Shield–shaped top with those little glittery lines on it. Dortmunder held the ring in the ray of sunlight, and gave it a good long look.

  Funny. He hadn’t worn that ring once since he’d got it back, just never exactly felt like it. On the plane home, it had been in his pocket, and ever since, it had been in this drawer here. Now he looked at it, and thought about it, and he was just about to put it on when the phone rang. So he put the ring on the end table in the sunlight and leaned over the other way to pick up the phone and say, “Yeah?”

  “A.K.A., John.”

  “Oh, A.K.A. How you doing?”

  “Well, I’m fine. Remember the Anadarko family?”

  “No,” Dortmunder said.

  “John, would you like to remember them? That deal’s comin’ alive again, same as before.”

  May walked by the doorway, home from work, carrying her daily bag of groceries from the Safeway, headed for the kitchen. She and Dortmunder nodded to each other, and Dortmunder said into the phone, “I don’t think so, A.K.A.”

  The whole idea of rememorizing life on Red Tide Street in Carrport just didn’t appeal. Also, there was the fact that he was flush these days. After expenses, the return on the Las Vegas trip had worked out to just over seventy–two thousand dollars a person, which was a lot more than Dortmunder was used to realizing from a job. In fact, most of the time, just getting himself out of a heist with not too many rips and tears and dog bites was what he considered a good return on investment, so this was a pretty nice feeling to have, being flush. He didn’t need to remember the Anadarko family for five hundred bucks, so why do it? “Sorry, A.K.A.,” he said. “I’m in semiretirement at the moment.”

  “Well, I understand what you’re saying, John,” A.K.A. said. “I’ll get somebody else. I just thought, you know, you went down that road the once.”

  “That was enough for me,” Dortmunder said, and hung up, as May came in, empty–handed. “How are things?” he asked her.

  She sat down, said, “Whoosh,” and said, “Ah. The feet do get tired.”

  “I told you, you know,” he said, “you could quit there for a while.”

  “Then what do I do with my day? There’s all these people working there, John, they’ve got lives you wouldn’t believe, they’re like soap operas, that’s what we talk about all day, I w
ouldn’t want to miss any chapters. So I’m okay, John. Is that the ring?”

  “Yeah,” he said, picking it up, turning it again in the sunlight. “I was just looking at it.”

  “You don’t wear it.”

  “I don’t,” he agreed. “That’s what I was thinking about. Now, you know I’m not superstitious.”

  May knew he was superstitious, deeply superstitious, but she also knew he didn’t know he was, so she said, “Uh huh.”

  “But this was supposed to be the lucky ring, right?” He looked at it, and shook his head. “And what happened the first time I put it on? Bang, right out of the chute, I got caught, I got arrested. It wasn’t till Max Fairbanks stole the thing from me that I started to get some luck. Good luck, I mean. And once he had it, look what happened to him.”

  “He’s still in trouble,” May said, “and he doesn’t have the ring any more. It was in today’s paper.”

  Dortmunder frowned. “For what? They don’t still think he set up all those robberies, do they?”

  “That’s kind of on the back burner,” she told him. “What it is, he’s one of those guys, he could go along for a long time, pull a lot of stuff, get away with it all, because nobody ever looked close. Now they’re looking close. He’s gonna be in jail the rest of his life, for stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with the robberies. They just started the cops looking.”

  “Well, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,” Dortmunder said, as Andy Kelp walked in, saying, “You mean me?”

  May said, “We were talking about Max Fairbanks.”

  Dortmunder said, “Why don’t you ring the bell?”

  “I don’t want to startle you,” Kelp said. “What I was wondering, you wanna go out to the track?”

  Dortmunder looked at May, who spread her hands and said, “It’s your money, John.”

  “At the moment,” Dortmunder said. “Maybe I’ll go and just watch.”

  Kelp said, “Is that the ring?”

  “Yeah. We were just looking at it.”

  “I never saw it,” Kelp said, and picked it up, turning it in the ray of sunlight. “Doesn’t look like such a big deal, does it? How come you don’t wear it?”

  “Well, here’s what I think,” Dortmunder said. “I think it used up all the good luck it ever had keeping Uncle Gideon solvent. I think the only luck it has left is the other kind.”

  “Oh.” Kelp put it down, and went over to sit in the chair by the TV, saying, “So what are you gonna do? Give it away?”

  “If I find somebody I really don’t like,” Dortmunder said. “Otherwise, it can just stay in the drawer there.” And he put it back in the drawer, away from the sunlight.

  May said, “John, it’s all right with me if you want to go to —” and the phone rang.

  “Second,” Dortmunder said, reaching for the phone, wondering if this was A.K.A. again, having failed to find another Fred Mullins, but Kelp said, “John, no, that’s me.”

  Dortmunder looked at him. Kelp pulled a small telephone out of his pocket, a thing that folded together to become hardly anything at all. Opening this machine, putting it to his face, he said, “Hello?” Then he smiled all over. “Hi, Anne Marie,” he said. “What’s up?”