The Road To Ruin d-11

by Donald E. Westlake

  Mac said, “Beat him up?”

  Oh. Had they been wrong about these three? Mark said, “Os and I, having been aware of you three for some time, had assumed simple physical revenge was your plan. Were we wrong?”

  “That depends,” Mac said, belatedly being cagy.

  “I know there are others in the neighborhood with that sort of idea,” Mark told them. “There’s a fellow sits in the lobby of the Liberty Bell Hotel down in Dongenaide with a horsewhip, tells anybody who’ll listen he’s a former stockholder, wiped out, intends to horsewhip Monroe Hall within an inch of his life. How he expects to horsewhip Hall in the lobby of the Liberty Bell Hotel in Dongenaide I have no idea, but there he is.”

  Os said, “Not to kill him, though. I mean you three. I don’t want you killing him. Not before he lays the golden egg.”

  Mac said to Mark, “You told Ace nobody ever mistook you for a cop. How many people you think mistake us for killers?”

  “Point taken,” Mark said. “But you haven’t been hanging around here for your health. You have some scheme in mind. I tell you what. I’ll tell you ours, and then you tell us yours. Deal?”

  The three looked at one another, then Buddy and Ace looked at Mac, and then Mac looked at Mark and said, “You go first?”

  “That’s the proposal,” Mark agreed. “Right now, if you’d like.”

  “Sure.”

  As the Taurus three adjusted themselves, getting more comfortable because they were about to be told a story, Mark said, “Monroe Hall did not drain the life out of a large and viable corporation out of personal need. He did it out of an excess of personal greed. In truth, Monroe Hall was born rich, as his father had been before him, and his father before him. In truth, despite the devastation he has caused to all around him, Monroe Hall is still rich. Some of his relatives who trusted him have a bit less than the cushion they’d always assumed would be there, but Hall himself is sitting on a pile.”

  Buddy said, “That’s what we want some of.”

  “Good,” Mark said. “It is always a good thing when partners share a goal. Now, our scheme is dependent upon Monroe Hall’s offshore holdings, untouched by the federal prosecutors, untouchable by American courts.”

  Mac said, “Offshore holdings? What’s that?”

  “Bank accounts, real estate, government paper, all in places closed off to American law.” Gesturing at the tinted windows, Mark said, “You’ve heard of them as tax havens.”

  Mac said, “And where those dictators stash their loot, before they get thrown out. Numbered accounts.”

  “Numbered accounts, exactly. Untraceable, untappable, even unprovable.”

  “Not,” the constricted Os said, “with our hands on his throat.”

  “This is the idea, yes,” Mark said. “We know how these money instruments work. Once we get our hands on Monroe, we can force him to make irrevocable transfers from his accounts to our accounts.”

  Shaking his head, Mac said, “The minute he walks into a bank—”

  “No bank,” Mark told him. “In fact, no travel. Really, all the best banking these days is done on the Internet.”

  “You mean,” Buddy said, eyes clouded with confusion, “hack into his bank accounts?”

  “Certainly not,” Mark said. “That’s why we need the physical presence of Monroe Hall. Given Os’s volatile personality, as you have no doubt remarked it, Monroe himself can be persuaded to make the transfers. After all, he knows his passwords, his identification numbers, just where to access which holdings.”

  Mac said, “You’re gonna put his feet to the fire, you mean.”

  “We considered that as a method,” Mark said, “but it’s too hard to explain a fire in June. There are other ways. And Monroe knows Os, he can guess what he’s capable of.” As the trio soberly assessed Os, considering what he might be capable of, Mark said, “But now it’s your turn.”

  Again they all exchanged looks. Ace asked his friends, “Do we tell them? There’s two of them, so they can be each other’s witness, if they wanna turn us in.”

  “There’s three of us,” Mac pointed out, “if we wanna turn them in. Why would we?”

  Ace frowned, searching for an answer, while Buddy shook his head and said, “Oh, go ahead, Mac, tell them.”

  “Sure.” Facing Mark and Os, Mac said, “Hold him for ransom.”

  “Ransom?” Mark considered that. “You mean a straight kidnapping?”

  “Almost.” Mac nodded at his friends. “We’re all members of ACWFFA, and—”

  “I’m sorry, the what?”

  “Our union,” Mac explained. “There’s over twenty-seven hundred union members just from ACWFFA lost everything with SomniTech. So the idea is, we grab him, we hold him for ransom, but we don’t want the ransom for us. The ransom goes to the union.”

  “Ten mil,” Buddy said.

  “What that is,” Mac said, “it’s a little over three grand for each and every union member.”

  “Outa his pocket,” Ace said, “and into ours.”

  “I know three grand doesn’t seem like a lot to you guys,” Mac said, “but our union members could use it, and it would be like a symbol. Justice got done.”

  “Admirable,” Mark said, and meant it. “I admit you surprise me, Mac, I hadn’t expected selflessness. I admit I’m feeling abashed. But I’m afraid there are problems with your idea.”

  “Yeah,” Ace said. “We can’t get our hands on him.”

  “In addition to that,” Mark said.

  Os made one of his rare appearances, saying, “Who’d pay for the son of a bitch? Not ten mil, ten bucks. Who’d pay for him?”

  “His wife,” Mac said.

  Mark said, “It’s possible you’re right about that, Mac, but if her, surely she’s the only one.”

  “One will do,” Mac said.

  “Except not,” Mark told him. “If she tried to raise the ransom, what assets would she use? Her husband’s.”

  “That’s the idea,” Ace said.

  “But,” Mark said, “if Alicia Hall—that’s her name—if she reached out to her husband’s unseized holdings, if she withdrew ten million dollars from anything at all belonging to him, and brought it into the country, the courts would take it away from her long before she could get it to you and the … your union.”

  “ACWFFA,” Mac said, helpfully.

  “Yes, them,” Mark said. “The money might get to Alicia Hall, if she asked for it, but it would never get through her. Our idea has a much better likelihood of success.”

  Mac said, “Then why’d you want to talk to us? If you’ve already got your success.”

  “Because,” Mark said, “while we have the likelihood of success, which you do not, so far we do not have the actuality of success. But with three strong, gifted, imaginative, and, if I may say so, noble fellows like yourselves joined to us, success might still be in the offing.”

  “An extra ten mil to you,” Os threw in.

  “Exactly,” Mark said. “So long as we’re having our way with Monroe’s offshore accounts, there’s no reason we can’t drop an additional bundle into the coffers of, uh, the, your union.”

  “ACWFFA,” Mac said.

  “Exactly.”

  “What we’ve been thinking recently,” Mac said, “is, it might be what we got to do now is go in there into that compound and just bring him out.”

  Mark turned a hugely beaming countenance upon Os, who himself was very nearly smiling. “There, you see?” Mark said. “Great minds do think alike.”

  9

  ANDY KELP TRUSTED DOCTORS. Not so much on the medical side, though some of them were pretty good at that, too, but on the question of automobiles. As far as he was concerned, if you trusted a doctor’s judgment when it came to his personal wheels, you were not likely to go far wrong.

  Doctors have a deep understanding, for instance, of the difference between comfort and pain, so they’re unlikely to choose a car with a badly designed driver’s seat or misplac
ed steering wheel or one of those accelerators where your knee begins to hurt after a hundred miles. Also, doctors have a perhaps too-vivid picture in their minds of the aftereffects of high-speed physical impacts, so they’re mostly going to wrap themselves in products that will (a) avoid accidents where possible, or (b) survive them when necessary. Thus, when Andy Kelp went shopping in the streets and parking lots of greater New York for transportation, he always went for the sign of the MD plate.

  Today, however, Kelp had a second criterion to include in his search, which was that he needed not just a car and not just a doctor’s car, but a large car currently owned by a doctor. This wasn’t because the car would be carrying five travelers, but because one of the travelers would be Tiny.

  It was, therefore, a distinct pleasure to him when, the morning after the meeting at the O. J., while roving the outer reaches of long-term parking out at Kennedy International Airport, a place where you’re pretty much guaranteed to have a few days’ head start if you choose a vehicle with no dust on it, he saw ahead of him a Buick Roadmaster Estate, seven or eight years old, an antique the day it was built, a nine-passenger station wagon with not only room enough inside for a bowling team but room enough for that team to bowl. And proudly below that broad rear window and door, a … yes! MD plate.

  This grand vehicle was a color not seen in nature, nor much of anywhere else except certain products of Detroit. It was a metallic shimmering kind of not-chartreuse, not-gold, not-silver, not-mauve, with just a hint of not-maroon. It was in effect a rendering in enamel of a restaurant’s wine list descriptions. But even better, from Kelp’s point of view, the Roadmaster was dust-free.

  It’s amazing how many people don’t want to carry their parking lot ticket with them when they travel, preferring to “hide” it behind the sun visor instead. Even some doctors. Kelp was happy to pay the two-day parking fee, explaining to the ticket-taker’s surprised look, “Emergency at the hospital.”

  “Oh, too bad.”

  Kelp took his change, took the Van Wyck Expressway toward the city, and while stopped by the monorail construction phoned the troops. “I’m on my way,” he told them, not completely accurately.

  Still, they didn’t have that long to wait, at Ninth Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, before Kelp slid the Roadmaster in at the curb next to them. Once he got there, it didn’t take them long to sort themselves out. Chester and Stan, of course, had to ride up front with Kelp, because they’d be the drivers on the day and Chester knew how to find Hall’s place. Tiny, of course, had to sit on the back seat; all of the back seat. And Dortmunder, of course, had to open the rear door and climb over the tailgate and sit on the backward-facing final seat, as though he’d been bad in class.

  “Been waiting long?” Kelp asked, after everyone was in and the door closed.

  “A while,” rumbled Tiny from behind him.

  “They waved down a couple real doctors,” Chester said, between Kelp and Stan. “I think one of them’s gonna send a bill.”

  “We’ll fight him to the Supreme Court,” Kelp said, and accelerated to and through the Lincoln Tunnel and across New Jersey without looking at it, and halfway across Pennsylvania.

  •

  “There it is,” Chester said.

  “There what is?” Kelp asked.

  “The compound. Hall’s land, it started just back there.”

  Tiny said, “Pull off, let’s look at this.”

  “Right,” Dortmunder said, from way in the back.

  This was a fairly straight county road, rolling along with the low hills to either side, some of it farmed and some of it forested. This stretch was forested on both sides. The right shoulder was wide enough for a car to pull off, but just beyond the shoulder was an old low stone wall that suggested this land too had at one time been farmed, or at least settled. Beyond the wall was second-growth forest, tall but skinny-trunked trees with a lot of bramble and shrubbery underneath.

  “This is it here,” Chester said. “The main entrance—well, the only entrance now—is a couple miles farther on.”

  Kelp peered past Chester and Stan at the empty forest. “Where’s the security start? Down by the entrance?”

  “No, it’s here,” Chester said. “Not right out by the road, in behind the wall about ten feet. Stan, open the window, would you?”

  So Stan, next to the door, rolled the window down and said, “I don’t see anything.”

  “You can’t see the wires,” Chester told him, “but you can see the uprights.” He pointed past Stan’s nose at the trees. “See them?”

  Stan sighted along Chester’s forearm, closing one eye. “Oh, yeah,” he said.

  Kelp squinted, looking past Chester and Stan, glance roaming among the trees; then all at once he realized he was looking at a slender black metal pole, about six feet tall. Off to the left, a little farther, a little farther, there was another one. “I see them,” he said. “Very discreet.”

  “They didn’t want it to look like a penitentiary or something,” Chester explained.

  Dortmunder, from way back there, said, “I don’t see them.”

  Tiny said, “What kinda wire?”

  “Electric,” Chester said. “Not enough to kill you, but enough to make you go away. Like a deer fence. But if a wire gets broken, there’s a signal in the guardhouse, tells them exactly where, between which two posts. And there’s lights in the trees, you can’t see them from here, but if the wire gets broken at night, they can switch the lights on, it’s like high noon in there.”

  “I don’t see them,” Dortmunder said.

  Stan said, “Just one wire?”

  “No, three,” Chester said. “At two feet, four feet, and six feet.”

  “Hey,” Dortmunder called. “I’m back here, remember me?”

  Kelp looked in the mirror and saw him way back there, waving for attention. “Oh, hi, John,” he said. “Almost forgot about you.”

  “I noticed that,” Dortmunder said. “What I don’t notice is these posts you’re all talking about.”

  “They’re right there,” Tiny said, and waved a paw at the woods.

  “I don’t see them,” Dortmunder insisted.

  Chester said, “Okay, John, you and I can get out, I’ll show it to you.”

  So that’s what they did. Stan had to get out first, to let Chester out; then he leaned against the side of the car, leaving the door open, while the other two stepped over the stone wall and walked in among the trees. The occasional vehicle went by, mostly pickup trucks, but nobody paid any attention to the parked car or the strolling men.

  With the door open, Kelp could hear Chester as he said, “Closer in, they’ve got motion sensors, but not way over here. So we can walk right up to it. See it, John? See it there? Stop, you’re gonna walk into it!”

  “What? There’s—I can’t—Oh, this! It’s metal!”

  “Sure,” Chester said, and pointed away to the right. “Metal poles. See them? Every so often, all the way to the cornfield back there, that’s where Hall’s property stops.”

  “I thought it was gonna be wood,” Dortmunder said. “I was looking for wood.”

  “They did it in metal.”

  “Yeah, sure, I get it.”

  Dortmunder now squinted off to the right, holding a hand up to his brow to shade his eyes even though he stood under a whole lot of trees in full leaf. He said, “So then it makes the turn and goes along next to the cornfield, is that it?”

  “All around the property,” Chester said. “Miles of it.”

  “What happens if I touch the wire?” Dortmunder asked, and he could be seen to lean toward where the fence must be, as though touching it might be a good idea. “Does it tell the guards?”

  “Not unless you break it. But it’ll give you a hell of a wallop, John, knock you back a few feet, probably give you a sore arm for a few days.”

  Kelp called, “Don’t do it, John.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” Dortmunder said, and the two of them came bac
k to the car, where he said, “Now that we’re here, maybe Chester or Stan would like to switch with me, I can ride up—”

  “No, John,” Kelp said. “We need Chester to describe it to us.”

  Stan said, “And I gotta keep my eye on the routes.”

  Dortmunder sighed. “Fine,” he said, and stumped away to get into the third tier again.

  When they were all aboard and Kelp had them rolling once more, slowly, beside the forest and the stone wall, Dortmunder called to them, “It’s amazing to me how many grown men and women, if you’re sitting back here, make faces at you. Stick their tongue out. Grown-up men and women, driving, think they’re funny.”

  “Pretend you don’t see them,” Kelp advised.

  “I do,” Dortmunder said. “But I do see them. Waving their hands, thumbing their nose, yukking it up. It wears you down after a while.”

  “If we find a store,” Tiny suggested, “we can buy some carpet tacks, you can toss them out your window back there.”

  “That’s a very good idea, Tiny,” Dortmunder said. “Thank you.”

  Looking ahead, Kelp said, “What’s happening, now?”

  The forest was coming to a ragged end, followed by a very large expanse of weedy barren land, with a few farm buildings very far back. The low stone wall continued, and so did the black metal poles bearing the electric wires, the poles more visible now that they weren’t in among trees.

  Chester said, “They used to lease this part to commercial tomato growers every year. These people would come in, a little earlier in the spring than this, plant a million plants, put chemical shit everywhere, go away, come back at the end of August for one harvest, middle of September for another, leave the rest of the tomatoes right where they are, you had this whole carpet of red here until frost. Very pretty.”

  Kelp said, “But they don’t do that any more.”

  “Well, they can’t, with the security,” Chester said. “Also, I understand it, the company didn’t want to do business with Hall any more.”