Down below, the kid would have gone by now, leaving the ladder in place. He would go back up with Dortmunder and Tiny to wait for Kelp to disarm the door and let them in.
Kelp studied himself and found a new roughened area on the front of his jacket, but no other signs of his recent close embrace of cut glass. He stepped through from the pantry into the kitchen, which was moderately illuminated by all its appliance lights, and crossed it to the dark doorway leading into whatever room was next.
When he felt around this doorway in the dark, he found it came with a door, now open against the wall. He closed the door, so he’d be able to switch lights on in here without being seen from outside, then found the light switch, which worked a ceiling fixture.
With light and privacy, he turned to see where he was, and the man sitting up on the sofa bed pointed a Glock at him and said, “Halt.”
43
KELP HALTED. “Whoa,” he said. “You scared me. I didn’t know anybody was here.”
“No, you did not. You will put your hands on top of your head.” The man was Asian of some kind, not the slender delicate Asian of the coastal countries, but a larger, meatier, mountain country Asian, a guy who looked as though he came from a long line of professional wrestlers. This must be one of the Asians Doug had told them about just today—or yesterday—and now, immediately, here he was, as big and dangerous as promised, plus a Glock pistol, an efficient-looking blue-gray watchdog with its one unwavering eye fixed on Kelp.
Doug had never met these people, and was glad of it. Even Babe, he’d told them, kept out of their way. And here was Kelp, in the guy’s bedroom in the middle of the night.
So how many of them were here? And what could Kelp do about it? Raising his hands to rest palms down atop his head, “I’m sorry,” he said, “I thought I could sleep here tonight.”
The man in the bed wore a white T-shirt and was partly covered by sheet and blanket. His right knee was lifted, beneath the blanket, with the butt of the Glock resting on the knee, the hand holding the Glock as still as a statue.
At the moment, he was in an investigatory phase, before deciding what to do about Kelp’s existence in his bedroom. He said, “Why would you sleep here tonight?”
“I missed the last train to Westin,” Kelp told him. “That’s happened a couple times before, and I crash here for the night.”
“Here,” echoed the man. “And who are you?”
“Doug Fairkeep. I work for Get Real.”
The man shook his head; the Glock didn’t move. “What,” he said, “is Get Real?”
“We produce reality television,” Kelp told him. “This is our building, GR Development. GR; Get Real.”
“That is not the company.”
“Oh, you mean Monopole,” Kelp said.
Now the man nodded, but the Glock still didn’t move. “Yes, I mean Monopole.”
“They own Get Real. But that’s who I work for.”
“Not many persons are permitted to enter this apartment.”
“At Get Real,” Kelp said, “it’s only Babe Tuck and me.”
“I have heard the name Babe Tuck,” the man said.
“I’m glad of that anyway,” Kelp said. “Listen, okay if I put my hands down?”
“Andy!” came a half-whispered cry, muffled by distance and the closed bedroom door but audible just the same.
Kelp decided to react big. Jumping a big sideways step farther from the door, though keeping his hands atop his head, he said, “What was that?”
“I heard that,” the man said. “You have someone with you?”
“No! Do you?”
“I do not.” Frowning with deep suspicion, he said, “You will open the door.”
“Open the door?”
“Andy!”
“I don’t know,” Kelp said. “There’s somebody out there.”
The man climbed out of the bed, the Glock never stopping its surveillance of the space between Kelp’s eyes. He wore tan boxer shorts. His legs were strong and mostly hairless. He said, “Open.”
“I’ll stand behind it, all right?”
Now Kelp lowered his hands, put both of them on the doorknob, and pulled the door slowly open.
This time, the “Andy, what’s happening?” was a little louder, and identifiable as the kid. The goddam kid.
The man with the Glock said, “You go first.”
“Oh, boy,” Kelp said.
It seemed to him a reasonable amount of fear would be the most plausible reaction to show at this point, so slowly he went through the doorway, peering in obvious fright to left and right. The man followed, switching on the kitchen lights, poking the Glock into the small of Kelp’s back to move him along, and Kelp said, “Listen, I need a weapon.”
“A weapon?”
Kelp turned to look at the man, who was even larger and more intimidating when standing up and standing close. “I don’t know what’s out there,” Kelp told him, “and neither do you. Maybe it’s more than you can deal with all by yourself.” He pointed to the row of frying pans hung from hooks above the island in the middle of the kitchen. “Okay if I carry one of those?”
The man gave a very small headshake. “What good would it do?”
“Make me feel better,” Kelp said. “Safer. Let me take that one there.”
Impatient, the man said, “All right, take it. But then you go first. Through that door.” Meaning the pantry.
“Absolutely,” Kelp said. He took down the frying pan, a nine-inch cast-iron model, satisfyingly heavy. “This seems good,” he said, hefting it in both hands, then swung it sidearm with all his might into the side of that head, just above the left ear.
The man dropped like a sudden avalanche. The Glock chittered across the tile floor to smack into the dishwasher. Kelp slapped the frying pan down onto the island, grabbed the Glock, turned it around so he wasn’t aiming it at himself, and paused to look at the man, who had returned to dreamland, lying on the floor on his right side, right arm extended as though showing the way.
There had been no more Andy’s since the kitchen lights had been switched on. Now, carrying the Glock, Kelp raced to the pantry, and there was the kid, on the ladder, just outside the breached window. He waved the Glock. “Get outa there!”
The kid stared wide-eyed at the pistol. “What’d you—Where’d you—”
“Go, dammit! I’ll tell you at the door.”
And Kelp raced away, to be sure his patient was still sleeping—and still breathing—and then to hurry on to the apartment door.
44
DORTMUNDER AND TINY had grown tired of each other’s company, seated here on the hard stairs outside Combined Tool. Dortmunder himself was fairly slow to impatience, but it wasn’t comfortable to be around Tiny when that gentleman was beginning to feel fed up, so what Dortmunder wished, he wished they could get on with it.
They had waited what already seemed a long time before the kid came back up the stairs to report that Kelp had cut through the window with no problems and was on his way now to open this door here. And then they waited some more. And then they waited some more.
And then Tiny said, “Kid, go see what’s up.”
“Okay, Tiny.”
And now they were waiting some more.
“If we could get that motorcycle up here,” Tiny said, “maybe we could drive it through the door. Or maybe the wall beside the door. Sometimes walls are easier.”
“That might work,” Dortmunder said. “We’ll get the kid to drive it. I think there’s a helmet with it.”
“No matter.” Tiny looked down the stairwell. “I don’t think he could drive it up the stairs,” he said. “We’d have to push it.”
And the apartment door opened and Kelp stood there, waving a Glock. “Come in, come in,” he said, as though they’d been the ones dawdling. “Prop the door open for the kid.”
So they entered the living room and, as Dortmunder put a table lamp on the floor to block the door from closing, Tiny said to
Kelp, “You have a gun. In your hand.”
“The Asians Doug told us about,” Kelp said. “One of them’s here.”
“Where?”
“Right now, asleep on the kitchen floor.”
“An odd place to sleep,” Tiny suggested.
“That’s where we were,” Kelp said, “when I hit him with the frying pan.”
The kid, out of breath, barreled into the room and shoved the lamp out of the way of the door. “You have a gun,” he told Kelp.
“I know that,” Kelp said. “Come on, I don’t wanna leave him alone.”
So they trooped through a few more rooms, all as tasteful and anonymous as the living room and all, being interior rooms, comfortably air-conditioned. Dortmunder went second into the kitchen, following Kelp, and there on the floor, as advertised, was one of the largest Asian men he’d ever seen. Not in the Tiny league, but big enough so you wouldn’t want to argue with him.
Dortmunder noticed the frying pan on the wooden island in the middle of the room and said, “You hit him with that.”
“Right.”
“Is he alive?”
“Yeah,” Kelp said. “I checked. I figure he’ll be out for a while.”
“So we should find the money,” Tiny said, “and go.”
“It’ll be in some sort of safe,” Dortmunder said, “disguised as something else.” Looking around, he said, “I think it’ll be in the kitchen.”
Nobody else liked that idea. Tiny said, “Why?”
“Because,” Dortmunder told him, “everybody will think it’s in the bedroom.”
“I think it’s in the bedroom,” Tiny said. “So I’ll look in there, and you can look around at this kitchen here all you want.”
“Thank you.”
“And,” Tiny said, “you two guys look around the rest of the place.”
“I kind of like that living room,” Kelp said.
“I have no opinion,” the kid said, “so I’ll just look around.”
So the three of them left Dortmunder with the unconscious Asian. He considered the man. Find something to tie him up? No; the guy seemed really out, and the quicker they found the cash and got out of here the better. So, merely glancing from time to time at his silent companion, to be sure nothing had changed over there, Dortmunder considered the room.
It was a well-appointed kitchen. A wide double sink, with doors beneath fronting stored cleaning products. A big refrigerator, with two doors above, freezer on the bottom A big six-burner gas stove with two ovens beneath, both of them really ovens. Two dishwashers, one large and one small, next to one another. Cabinets mounted on the walls above the counter, and more cabinets under the counter. A broom closet, full of brooms.
Dortmunder opened all the cabinet doors, and behind every one of them was a cabinet, most of them less than half full, a couple empty.
The island was a rectangular wooden block on wheels. He moved it to the side and studied the tile floor under it, and it was nothing but a tile floor. He opened both dishwashers and they were both dishwashers.
Had he been wrong? He’d just believed that people wanting to conceal a safe in this apartment would use the kitchen. It was little more than a matter of faith, but it was a faith he didn’t want to give up.
He checked everything again. All the cabinets were cabinets, none with a false back. Refrigerator refrigerator. Freezer freezer. Dishwashers dishwashers. Stove stove. Broom closet broom closet.
Wait a minute. He opened both dishwashers for a third time, and this time he pulled out the top racks of both, and the top rack of the smaller dishwasher was only half as deep as the other.
Aha. He closed both dishwashers, tugged on the front of the smaller one, and nothing happened. He studied the controls on the front of the thing. One control turned it on and off, the other two dealt with the length and purpose of the cleaning cycles. Leaving the on/off off, he turned each of the other two controls forward and back, slowly, bent over the counter, listening very hard.
There. A satisfying little click.
Now he tugged on the front of the machine and it rolled out into the room, trailing wires and flexible pipe. And behind it, across the rear half of the space, was the front wall of the safe. A dial in the middle of that square face asked him if he knew the combination.
Not yet, but don’t go away.
Dortmunder left the kitchen, moved through the apartment, and found the kid in the very soothing pastel-colored dining room, turning the large heavy dining room chairs one at a time upside down, staring at all those identical bottoms, and putting them back.
When Dortmunder walked in, the kid looked at him, maintaining his stoop, and Dortmunder said, “Get everybody. I found it. In the kitchen.”
He didn’t even bother to gloat.
45
NOW THEY ALL deferred to Kelp. Seated cross-legged on the floor in front of the safe, the displaced dishwasher next to his left elbow, he removed various small tools from here and there in his jacket and arrayed them on the floor in front of himself.
Dortmunder said, “You know this kinda safe?”
“I would say,” Kelp said, “the conversion in here was about fifteen years ago. That’s when this kind of safe was popular. Well, it’s still popular with me.”
“Can you get in without leaving any marks?”
“It’ll take a little longer that way, but sure. How come?”
“Let’s see what’s in there.”
So Kelp donned his stethoscope, ooched himself a little further in under the counter, and, while pressing the stethoscope to the face of the safe, began slowly to turn the combination dial.
Clong. They all turned to look, and Tiny was putting the frying pan back on the island. “He was stirring,” he said.
“He shouldn’t have done that,” Dortmunder said.
“Quiet,” Kelp said.
So they shut up and watched, and Kelp painstakingly did his turns and his listenings, then ooched back out from under the counter and said, “I think so. Let’s see.”
A handle stood to the left of the dial. Kelp grasped it and turned it down to the right, and the safe said chack, and yawned open.
“There we go.” Kelp sounded pleased, but not full of himself.
“Nice job,” Dortmunder said.
They all stooped to look in at the metal box, which was three-quarters full of greenbacks. They were all neatly banded into stacks, but the pile of stacks was thrown in there every which way, making it hard to get a sense of what they had.
“They’re pretty messy, these guys,” the kid said.
Dortmunder said, “When Doug described them, I thought they wouldn’t be people to clean up after themselves a lot. Andy, what are they? Hundreds?”
Kelp reached in to root around among the stacks. “A lot of hundreds,” he said. “Some fifties. Some twenties.”
Tiny said, “Dortmunder, you have something in mind.”
Dortmunder said, “We take half of it.”
Nobody could believe that. Tiny said, “All that cash, and we leave half of it?”
“They don’t know how much they’ve got in there,” Dortmunder said. “Andy didn’t mess up their safe. We were always gonna put that window back together anyway, so we do that. We take half, we put everything back the way it was, and there’s no sign anybody was ever here except a little glass cutter line on the window nobody’s ever gonna notice and the bump on that guy’s head.”
“Two bumps,” said Tiny. “Three, if he stirs again.”
Kelp said, “Your idea is, they don’t know we found the money, so nobody’s after us for anything.”
“And,” Dortmunder said, “we can still collect the other money from the reality people.”
“I like this,” Kelp said.
“Just a second,” Dortmunder said, and turned to the under-counter cabinets, where he’d seen a clump of supermarket plastic bags. He took out four, doubled them for more strength, and passed them to Kelp. “Take most of the hundreds,”
he said, “a lot of the fifties, and some of the twenties. Leave it still looking kinda full and very messy.”
“You know,” Kelp said, “I’m getting a little cramped under here.”
“I’ll do it,” the kid said.
“Good.”
Tiny lifted Kelp to his feet by his armpits. As the kid got into position to transfer bundles of cash to the plastic bags, Kelp said, “If we’re gonna go ahead and finish the reality thing and take stuff out of the storage rooms, I’ve been thinking, I might have a guy to take it all off our hands.”
Dortmunder said, “What kinda guy is this?”
“He does big box stores full of crap,” Kelp said. “He can always take a consignment.”
“What’s his name?”
“He doesn’t have a name, that anybody knows. He’s called My Nephew.”
“I’ve heard of this guy,” Tiny said. “He’s not somebody you ask to hold your coat.”
“That’s true,” Kelp said. “On the other hand, he doesn’t pay by check.”
“How’s that look?” the kid said.
On the floor beside him now, the two pairs of plastic bags bulged with cash. The interior of the safe, depleted, still contained a lot of cash, messily arranged.
“Good,” Dortmunder said. Slowly, he smiled. “You know,” he said, “every once in a while, things work out. Not exactly the way you thought they would, but still, they work out. Not bad.”
When they counted it all later that night in Dortmunder’s living room, counting it quietly because May was asleep elsewhere in the apartment, the total came to 162,450 dollars. After some quick computations, the kid informed them this meant 32,490 dollars apiece.
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