Drowned Hopes d-7

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Was what? Mother?”

  “That was your father in that car!”

  Myrtle’s head spun about. She too stared after the car with the two men in it; but it was long gone. She said, astonished, “Mr. Street, Mother? Mr. Street’s come back?”

  “Mr. Street?” Edna’s voice was full of rage and contempt. “That asshole? Who gives a fuck about him?”

  Myrtle had never heard such language from Edna. “Mother?” she asked. “What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” Edna said, hunching forward, staring hollowly out the windshield, all at once looking plenty old enough to be a member of the Senior Citizens Center. “It couldn’t happen, but it did. The dirty bastard son of a bitch.” Bleakly, Edna gazed at the sunny world of Dudson Center. “He’s back,” she said.

  FIVE

  “They should never have let him out of prison,” May said.

  “They shouldn’t have let him out of the cell,” Dortmunder said. “As long as I’m not in it with him.”

  “You are in it with him,” May pointed out. “He’s living here.”

  Dortmunder put down his fork and looked at her. “May? What could I do?”

  They were in the kitchen together, having a late lunch or an early supper, hamburgers and Spaghetti-Os and beer, grabbing their privacy where they could find it. After the run back from Vilburgtown Reservoir, after they’d actually given the rental car back to its owners (yet another new experience today for Dortmunder), Tom had said, “You go on home, Al, I’ll be along. I gotta fill my pockets.” So Dortmunder had gone on home, where May had been waiting, having come back early from her cashier job at the supermarket to meet him, and where, with a hopeful expression as she’d looked over Dortmunder’s shoulder, she’d said, “Where’s your friend?”

  “Out filling his pockets. He said we shouldn’t wait up, he’d let himself in.”

  May had looked alarmed. “You gave him a key?”

  “No, he just said he’d let himself in. May, we gotta talk. I also gotta eat, but mostly and mainly we gotta talk.”

  So now they were eating and talking, sometimes simultaneously, and May wasn’t liking the situation any more than Dortmunder. But what were they to do about it? “May,” Dortmunder said, “if we leave Tom alone, he really will blow up that dam and drown everybody in the valley. And for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, he’ll find guys to help.”

  “John,” May said, “wherever he is right now, your friend Tom, filling his pockets—”

  “Please, May,” Dortmunder interrupted, “don’t do that. Don’t keep calling him my friend Tom. That’s unfair.”

  May thought about that and nodded. “You’re right, it is. It’s not your fault who they put in your cell.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But, John, still, what do you think he’s doing right now? Filling his pockets; how do you suppose he does that?”

  “I don’t even want to know,” Dortmunder said.

  “John, you’re a craftsman, you’re skilled labor, a professional. What you do takes talent and training—”

  “And luck,” Dortmunder added.

  “No, it doesn’t,” she insisted. “Not a solid experienced person like you.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Dortmunder said, “since I’ve been running around without it for quite a while.”

  “Now, don’t get gloomy, John,” May said.

  “Hard not to, around Tom,” Dortmunder told her. “And, as for what he’s doing outside right now, that’s up to him. But I was at that dam, I looked down the valley at all those houses. It’s my choice, May. I can try to figure out something else to do, some other way to get Tom his money, or I can say forget it, not my problem. And then some night we’ll sit here and watch television, and there it’ll be on the news. You know what I mean?”

  “Are those the only choices?” May asked, poking delicately at her Spaghetti-Os, not meeting Dortmunder’s eye. “Are you sure there’s nothing else to do?”

  “Like what?” he asked. “The way I see it, I help him or I don’t help him, that’s the choice.”

  “I wouldn’t normally say this, John,” May said, “you know me better than that, but sometimes, every once in a great while, sometimes maybe it’s just necessary to let society fight its own battles.”

  Dortmunder put down his fork and his hamburger and looked at her. “May? Turn him in? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “It’s worth thinking about,” May said, mumbling, still not meeting his eye.

  “But it isn’t,” Dortmunder told her. “Even if it was—even if it ever was, I mean—even then, it isn’t worth thinking about, because what are we gonna do? Call up this governor with the birthday presents, say take him back, he’s gonna drown nine hundred people? They can’t take him back.” Dortmunder picked up his fork and his hamburger again. He said, “A crime isn’t a crime until it happens.”

  “Well, that’s stupid,” May said. “With a character like that walking around loose—”

  Dortmunder said, “May, some famous writer said it once: The law’s an asshole. For instance, what if I was still on parole? Tom Jimson’s living here, no matter what we think. If I was still on parole, and that parole officer of mine, what was his name? Steen, that was it. If he found out a guy with Tom Jimson’s record and history was living here, they’d put me back inside. But him they can’t touch.”

  “Well, that’s crazy,” May said.

  “But true,” Dortmunder told her. “But let’s say I do it anyway, I’m feeling this desperation or whatever it might be, and I go and do it. And then it’s done. I’ve gone and told the law all about Tom and his stash under the reservoir. So what happens next? At the very best, what they can do is go tell him they heard he had these dynamite plans and he shouldn’t do it. And he’ll take about a second and a half to figure out who’s the blabbermouth. You want Tom Jimson mad at you?”

  “Well,” May said carefully, “John, it’s you he’d be mad at, actually.”

  “People who play with dynamite don’t fine tune,” Dortmunder said. He filled his mouth with hamburger and Spaghetti-Os, and then composted it all with beer and chewed awhile.

  May had finished. She sat back, didn’t light a cigarette, didn’t blow smoke at the ceiling, didn’t flick ashes onto her plate, didn’t cough delicately twice, and did say, “Well, I just hope you can come up with something.”

  “Me, too,” Dortmunder said, but his mouth was still full of food and drink, so it didn’t come out right. He held the fork up vertically, meaning just a second, and chewed and chewed and swallowed, and then tried again: “Me, too.”

  She frowned at him. “You too what?”

  “Hope I come up with something. To get the money out from under the reservoir.”

  “Oh, you will,” she said. “I’m not worried about you, John.”

  “Well, I wish you would be,” he said. Gazing across the room, frowning at the perfect white blankness of the refrigerator door, he said, “I think it’s time I got some help on this.”

  SIX

  Andy Kelp, a sharp-featured, arrow-nosed skinny kind of guy in soft-soled black shoes and dark gray wool trousers and a bulky pea coat, tiptoed through the software, quietly humming “Coke, It’s the Real Thing.” Hmmmmm, he thought, his fingers skipping among the bright packages. WordPerfect, PageMaker, Lotus, dBaseIII, Donkey Kong. Hmmmmm. From time to time a package was scooped up into his long slim fingers and stowed away in the special pocket in the back of his pea coat, and then he would move on, humming, eyes darting over the available wares. The exhibit lights left on all night in the store gave him just enough illumination to study the possibilities and make his choices. And shopping three hours after the store had closed was the sure way to avoid crowds.

  Blip-blip-blip. The faint jingling sound, like Tinkerbell clearing her throat, came from the left side of Kelp’s bulky pea coat. Reaching in there, he withdrew a cellular phone, extended its antenna, and whispered into its mout
hpiece, “Hello?”

  A suspicious and bewildered but familiar voice said, “Who’s that?”

  “John?” Kelp whispered. “Is that you?”

  “What’s goin on?” demanded Dortmunder’s voice, getting belligerent. “Who is that there?”

  “It’s me, John,” Kelp whispered. “It’s Andy.”

  “What? Who is that?”

  “It’s Andy,” Kelp whispered hoarsely, lips against the mouthpiece. “Andy Kelp.”

  “Andy? Is that you?”

  “Yes, John, yes.”

  “Well, what are you whispering about? You got laryngitis?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Then stop whispering.”

  “The fact of the matter is, John,” Kelp whispered, hunkering low over the phone, “I’m robbing a store at the moment.”

  “You’re what?”

  “Ssssshhhhhhh, John,” Kelp whispered. “Sssshhhhhh.”

  In a more normal voice, Dortmunder said, “Wait a minute, I get it. I called you at home, but you aren’t home. You’ve done one of your phone gizmo things.”

  “That’s right,” Kelp agreed. “I put the phone-ahead gizmo on my phone at home to transfer my calls to my cellular phone so I wouldn’t miss any calls—like this one from you, right now—while I was out, and I brought the cellular phone along with me.”

  “To rob a store.”

  “That’s right. And that’s what I’m doing right this minute, John, and to tell you the truth I’d like to get on with it.”

  “Okay,” Dortmunder said. “If you’re busy—”

  “I’m not busy forever, John,” Kelp said, forgetting to whisper. “You got something? You gonna meet with the guys at the OJ?” He was remembering to whisper again now.

  “No,” Dortmunder said. “Not yet, anyway. Not until I figure the thing out.”

  “There’s problems?” In his eagerness, Kelp’s whisper went up into the treble ranges, becoming very sibilant. “You want me to drop over there when I’m done, we can talk about it?”

  “Well,” Dortmunder said, and then he sighed, and then he said, “Yeah. Come on over. If you feel like it.”

  “Sure I feel like it,” Kelp whispered, in falsetto. “You know me, John.”

  “Yeah, I do,” Dortmunder said. “But come on over anyway.” And he hung up.

  “Right, John,” Kelp whispered into the dead phone. Then, retracting his antenna, putting the phone away in its special pocket inside his pea coat, he looked around again at the various counters and shelves and product displays here inside Serious Business, that being the name of the store. Most of the exhibit lighting was in pastel neon, giving the place a fairytale quality of pink and light blue and pale green, washing faint color onto the gray industrial carpet and off-white shelves. In the fifteen minutes since effecting entry in here via the men’s room of the coffee shop next door, a window to the basement of this building and a brief squirm through an air-conditioning duct (pushing his pea coat ahead of himself), Kelp had pretty well browsed completely among all the treasures available here. Time to call it a night, probably.

  John should have a personal computer, Kelp thought, but even as he thought it, he knew just how hard a sell John was likely to be. Tough to get him to accept anything new; like his attitude toward telephones, for instance.

  But a personal computer, a good PC of your very own, that was something else. That was a tool, as useful, indeed as necessary, as a Toast-R-Oven. Wandering back over to the software displays, Kelp picked up a copy of Managing Your Money. Surely, even John would be able to see the advantage in a program like that. If he seemed at all interested, they could go out together tomorrow, or maybe even later tonight, and shop for a PC and a printer and a mouse. Maybe come back here, in fact. Kelp, so far, had enjoyed doing business with Serious Business.

  SEVEN

  May brought in three more beers and they popped the ring opener on the cans: Pop. Pop. Splop. “Well, hell,” said Dortmunder.

  “Oh, John, that’s too bad,” May said. “Should I get a towel?”

  “Naw, that’s okay, it didn’t spill much,” Dortmunder told her, and turned to Kelp to say, “Well? Whadaya think?”

  “Hmmmm,” Kelp said, and swigged beer. Then he said, “If it isn’t bad manners to ask, John, what was this pal of yours in for?”

  “He’s not my pal.”

  “Sorry. Ex-cellmate of yours. What was he in for, do you know?”

  Dortmunder drank beer, thinking back. “As I remember it,” he said, “it was murder, armed robbery, and arson.”

  Kelp looked surprised: “All at once?”

  “He wanted a diversion while he pulled the job,” Dortmunder said, “so he torched the firehouse.”

  “A direct sort of a fella,” Kelp said, nodding.

  May said, “Like with this dam.”

  Kelp nodded, thinking, frowning. “You see, John,” he said, “I don’t really follow how you’re involved here. The guy says come help me blow up a dam, you say I don’t want to kill a lot of people in their beds, you say good-bye to each other.”

  “He’ll find somebody else,” Dortmunder said.

  “But isn’t that up to him?”

  “John doesn’t see it like that,” May said, “and I agree with him.”

  Dortmunder finished his beer. “I know,” he admitted. “It ought to be that way; I say no and it’s done with. But I just have this feeling, there’s got to be some way to get at that money without killing everybody in upstate New York.”

  “And?”

  Dortmunder frowned so massively he looked like a plowed field. “This is gonna sound egotistical,” he said.

  “Go for it,” Kelp advised.

  “Well, it’s just I think, if there’s any way at all to get to that money without emptying the reservoir, I’m the guy who should think of it.”

  “The only one who could, you mean,” Kelp said.

  Dortmunder didn’t want to go quite that far in his egotism: “The only one who’d put in the effort,” he amended.

  Kelp nodded, accepting that. “And what have you come up with so far?”

  “Well, nothing,” Dortmunder admitted. “But this is still the first day I’m on this thing, you know.”

  “That’s true.” Kelp sloshed beer in his can. “You could tunnel, maybe,” he said.

  Dortmunder looked at him. “Through water?”

  “No, no,” Kelp said, shaking both the beer can and his head. “I don’t think there’s a way to do that, really. Tunnel through water. I meant you start on shore, near the water. You tunnel straight down until you’re lower than the bottom of the reservoir, and then you turn and tunnel across to this casket, or box, or whatever it is.”

  “Dig a tunnel,” Dortmunder echoed, “under a reservoir. Crawl back and forth in this tunnel in the dirt under this reservoir.”

  “Well, yeah, there’s that,” Kelp agreed. “I do get kind of a sinus headache just thinking about it.”

  “Also,” Dortmunder said, “how do you aim this tunnel? Somewhere out there under that reservoir is a casket. What is it, seven feet long? Three feet wide, a couple feet high. And you gotta go right to it. You can’t go above it, you can’t go below it, you can’t miss it to the left or the right.”

  May said, “You particularly can’t go above it.”

  “That’s the sinus headache part,” Dortmunder told her, and to Kelp he said, “It’s too small a target, Andy, and too far away.”

  “Well, you know,” Kelp said thoughtfully, “this kind of connects in with something I meant to talk to you about anyway.” Casually glancing around the living room, he said, “You don’t have a PC yet, do you?”

  Dortmunder bristled. He didn’t know what this was going to turn out to be, but already he knew he didn’t like it. “What’s that?” he demanded. “Another one of your phone gizmos?”

  “No, no, John,” Kelp assured him. “Nothing to do with phones. It’s a personal computer, and it just may be the so
lution to our problem here.”

  Dortmunder stared at him with loathing. “Personal computer? Andy, what are you up to now?”

  “Let me explain this, John,” Kelp said. “It’s a very simple thing, really, you’re gonna love it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

  “There must be maps,” Kelp said, “old maps from before the reservoir was put in. We use those to do a program for the computer, see, and it makes a model of the valley. Your pal shows us—”

  “He’s not my pal,” Dortmunder said.

  “Right,” Kelp agreed. “Your ex-cellmate shows us—”

  Dortmunder said, “Why don’t you just call him Tom?”

  “Well, I don’t really know the guy,” Kelp said. “Listen, can I describe this thing to you?”

  “Go right ahead,” Dortmunder said.

  “The maps I’m talking about,” Kelp explained, “I don’t mean your gas station road maps, I mean those ones with the lines, the whatchacallit.”

  “Topographical,” May said.

  “That’s it,” Kelp said. “Thanks, May.”

  Dortmunder stared at her. “How come you know that?”

  “Why not?” she asked him.

  Kelp said, “I’m trying to explain this.”

  “Right, right,” Dortmunder said. “Go right ahead.”

  “So the computer,” Kelp said, “makes a model of the valley from before the water went in, with the towns and the buildings and everything, and we can turn the model any way we want—”

  “What model?” Dortmunder demanded. He was getting lost here, and that made him mad. “You wanna make like a model train set? What is this?”

  “The model in the computer,” Kelp told him. “You see it on your screen.”

  “The television, you mean.”

  “Very like television, yes,” Kelp agreed. “And it’s this detailed three-dimensional model, and you can turn it around and tilt it different ways—”

  “Sounds like fun,” Dortmunder said acidly.

  “And,” Kelp insisted, “you can blow up part of it bigger, to get the details and all, and then your, uh, this, uh, this fella who buried it, he shows us on the model where he buried the box, and then we input the reservoir and—”