The Hot Rock

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Well, I’m intrigued, naturally,” Chefwick said. “I suppose it’s too complicated to go into over the phone.”

  “It sure is,” Dortmunder said. “Ten o’clock at the O. J.?”

  “That will be fine,” Chefwick said.

  “See you.”

  Dortmunder hung up and handed the phone back to Kelp, who put it back on its stand and said, “See? No car noises.”

  “Have some cheese and crackers,” Dortmunder said.

  4

  Dortmunder and Kelp walked into the O. J. Bar and Grill at one minute after ten. The same regular customers were draped in their usual positions on the bar, watching the television set, looking not quite as real as the figures in a wax museum. Rollo was wiping glasses with a towel that once was white.

  Dortmunder said, “Hi,” and Rollo nodded. Dortmunder said, “Anybody else here yet?”

  “The beer and salt is back there,” Rollo said. “You expecting the sherry?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll send him along when he comes in. You boys want a bottle and glasses and some ice, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll bring it on in.”

  “Thanks.”

  They walked on into the back room and found Murch there reading his Mustang owner’s manual. Dortmunder said, “You’re early again.”

  “I tried a different route,” Murch said. He put the owner’s manual down on the green felt tabletop. “I went over to Pennsylvania Avenue and up Bushwick and Grand and over the Williamsburg Bridge and straight up Third Avenue. It seemed to work out pretty well.” He picked up his beer and drank three drops.

  “That’s good,” Dortmunder said. He and Kelp sat down, and Rollo came in with the bourbon and glasses. While he was putting them down, Chefwick came in. Rollo said to him, “You’re a sherry, right?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Done.”

  Rollo went out, not bothering to ask Murch if he was ready for another, and Chefwick sat down, saying, “I’m certainly intrigued. I don’t see how the emerald job can come back to life again. It’s lost, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Dortmunder said. “Greenwood hid it.”

  “In the Coliseum?”

  “We don’t know where. But he clouted it somewhere, and that means we can get back on the track.”

  Murch said, “There’s a gimmick in this somewhere, I can smell it.”

  “Not a gimmick exactly,” Dortmunder said. “Just another heist. Two for the price of one.”

  “What do we heist?”

  “Greenwood.”

  Murch said, “Hah?”

  “Greenwood,” Dortmunder repeated, and Rollo came in with Chefwick’s sherry. He went out again and Dortmunder said, “Greenwood’s price is we bust him out. His lawyer tells him there’s no way to beat the rap, so he’s got to beat a retreat instead.”

  Chefwick said, “Does that mean we’re going to break into jail?”

  “In and back out,” Kelp said.

  “We hope,” Dortmunder said.

  Chefwick smiled in a dazed sort of way and sipped at his sherry. “I never thought I’d be breaking into jail,” he said. “It raises interesting questions.”

  Murch said, “You want me to drive, huh?”

  “Right,” said Dortmunder.

  Murch frowned and drank a whole mouthful of beer.

  Dortmunder said, “What’s wrong?”

  “Me sitting in a car, late at night, outside a jail, gunning the engine. I don’t feature it. It don’t raise any interesting questions for me at all.”

  “If we can’t work it out,” Dortmunder said, “we won’t do it.”

  Kelp said to Murch, “None of us wants to go into that jail for more than a minute or two. If it looks like years, don’t worry, we’ll throw it over.”

  Murch said, “I got to be careful, that’s all. I’m the sole support of my mother.”

  Dortmunder said, “Doesn’t she drive a cab?”

  “There’s no living in that,” Murch said. “She just does that to get out of the house, meet people.”

  Chefwick said, “What sort of jail is this?”

  “We’ll all go out there, one time or another, take a look at it,” Dortmunder told him. “In the meantime, this is what I’ve got.” He began to spread out on the table the contents of the three manila envelopes.

  5

  Kelp was shown to a different room this time, but he said, “Hey! Hold on just a minute.”

  The ebony man with the long thin fingers turned back in the doorway, his face expressionless. “Sir?”

  “Where’s the pool table?”

  Still no expression. “Sir?”

  Kelp made motions like a man operating a cue. “The pool table,” he said. “Pocket billiards. The green table with the holes in it.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s in a different room.”

  “Right,” said Kelp. “That’s the room I want. Lead me to it.”

  The ebony man didn’t seem to know how to take that. He still had no expression on his face, but he just stood there in the doorway, not doing anything.

  Kelp walked over to him and made shooing motions. “Let’s go,” he said. “I feel like dropping a few.”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “I’m sure,” Kelp told him. “Don’t you worry about it, I’m positive. Just you lead me there.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the ebony man doubtfully. He led the way to the room with the pool table in it, shut the door after Kelp, and went away.

  The one ball being blind after the break, Kelp decided to play straight pool this time. He dropped twelve balls with only four misses and was taking aim at the one at last when the Major came in.

  Kelp put the cue down on the table. “Hi, Major. Got another list for you.”

  “It’s about time,” said the Major. He frowned at the pool table, and he seemed irritated by something.

  Kelp said, “What do you mean, about time? Less than three weeks.”

  “It took less than two weeks last time,” the Major said.

  Kelp said, “Major, they don’t guard coliseums the way they guard jails.”

  “All I know is,” said the Major, “I have so far paid out three thousand three hundred dollars in salaries, not counting the cost of materials and supplies, and so far I have nothing to show for it.”

  “That much?” Kelp shook his head. “It sure mounts up, doesn’t it? Well, here’s the list.”

  “Thank you.”

  The Major sourly studied the list while Kelp went back to the table and sank the one ball, leaving the nine and the thirteen. He missed a try for the nine but wound up with perfect position on the thirteen. He dropped the thirteen with enough back spin on the cue ball to practically put it inside his shirt, and the Major said, “A truck?”

  “We’re going to need one,” Kelp said. He sighted on the nine. “And it can’t be hot, or I’d go out and get one myself.”

  “But a truck,” said the Major. “That’s an expensive item.”

  “Yes, sir. But if things work out, you’ll be able to sell it back when we’re done with it.”

  “This will take a while,” the Major said. He scanned the list. “The other things should be no problem. You’re going to scale a wall, eh?”

  “That’s what they’ve got there,” Kelp said. He hit the cue ball, which hit the nine, and everything dropped. Kelp shook his head and put up the cue.

  The Major was still frowning at the list. “This truck doesn’t have to be fast?”

  “We don’t want to outrun anybody in it, no.”

  “So it doesn’t have to be new. A used truck.”

  “With a clean registration we can show,” Kelp said.

  “What if I rent one?”

  “If you can rent a truck that it won’t get back to you if things go wrong, you go right ahead. Just remember what we’re using it for.”

  “I’ll remember,” the Major said. He glanced at the pool table. “If you’
re finished with your game…”

  “Unless you’d like to try it with me.”

  “I’m sorry,” the Major said with a dead smile, “I don’t play.”

  6

  From his cell window Alan Greenwood could see the blacktopped exercise yard and the whitewashed outer wall of Utopia Park Prison. Beyond that wall hunkered the small Long Island community of Utopia Park, a squat flat Monopoly board of housing, shopping centers, schools, churches, Italian restaurants, Chinese restaurants, and orthopedic shoe stores, bisected by the inevitable rails of the Long Island Railroad. Inside the wall sat and stood and scratched those adjudged to be dangerous to that Monopoly board, including the gray-garbed group of shuffling men out there in the exercise yard at the moment and Alan Greenwood, who was watching them and thinking how much they looked like people waiting for a subway. Next to the cell window someone had scratched into the cement wall the question “What did the White Rabbit know?” Greenwood was yet to figure that one out.

  Utopia Park Prison was a county jug, but most of its inmates belonged to the state, the county possessing three newer jugs of its own and no longer needing this one. The overflow of various state prisons was here, plus various charged men from upstate who’d won change of venue for their trials, plus some overflow from the boroughs of New York City, plus some special cases like Greenwood. No one was here for long, no one ever would be here long, so the joint lacked the usual complex society prisoners normally set up within the walls to keep themselves in practice for civilization. No pecking order, in other words.

  Greenwood was spending most of his time at the window because he liked neither his cell nor his cellmate. Both were gray, scabrous, dirty, and old. The cell merely existed, but the cellmate consumed a lot of the hours in picking at things between his toes and then smelling his fingertips. Greenwood preferred to watch the exercise yard and the wall and the sky. He had been here nearly a month now, and his patience was wearing thin.

  The door clanged. Greenwood turned around, saw his cellmate on the top bunk smelling his fingertips, and saw a guard standing in the doorway. The guard looked like the cellmate’s older brother, but at least he had his shoes on. He said “Greenwood. Visitor.”

  “Goody.”

  Greenwood went out, the door clanged again, Greenwood and the guard walked down the metal corridor and down the metal spiral stairs and along the other metal corridor and through two doors, both of which had to be unlocked by people on the outside and both of which were locked again in his wake. This was followed by a plastic corridor painted green and then a room painted light brown in which Eugene Andrew Prosker sat and smiled on the other side of a wall of wire mesh.

  Greenwood sat opposite him. “How goes the world?”

  “It turns,” Prosker assured him. “It turns.”

  “And how’s my appeal coming?” Greenwood didn’t mean an appeal to any court, but his request for deliverance to his former pards.

  “Coming well,” Prosker said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you heard something by morning.”

  Greenwood smiled. “That’s good news,” he said. “And believe me I’m ready for good news.”

  “All your friends ask of you,” Prosker said, “is that you meet them halfway. I know you’ll want to do that, won’t you?”

  “I sure will,” Greenwood said, “and I mean to try.”

  “You should try more than once,” Prosker told him. “Anything that’s worth trying is worth trying three times at the very least.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Greenwood said. “You haven’t given my friends any of the other details, I guess.”

  “No,” Prosker said. “As we decided, it would probably be best to wait till you’re free before going into all that.”

  “I suppose so,” Greenwood said. “Did you get my stuff out of the apartment?”

  “All seen to,” Prosker said. “All safely in storage under your friend’s name.”

  “Good.” Greenwood shook his head. “I hate to give up that apartment,” he said. “I had it just the way I wanted.”

  “You’ll be changing a lot of things once we get you out of here,” Prosker reminded him.

  “That’s right. Sort of starting a new life almost. Turning over a new leaf. Becoming a new man.”

  “Yes,” said Prosker, unenthusiastically. He didn’t like taking unnecessary chances with double entendres. “Well, it’s certainly encouraging to see you talking like this,” he said, getting to his feet, gathering up his attaché case. “I hope we’ll have you out of here in no time.”

  “So do I,” Greenwood said.

  7

  At two twenty-five A.M., the morning after Prosker’s visit to Greenwood, the stretch of Northern State Parkway in the vicinity of the Utopia Park exit was very nearly empty. Only one vehicle was in the area, a large dirty truck with a blue cab and a gray body, the words “Parker’s Rent-a-Truck” in a white-lettered oval on both cab doors. Major Iko had done the renting, through untraceable middlemen, just this afternoon, and Kelp was doing the driving at the moment, heading east out of New York. As he slowed now for the exit, Dortmunder, in the seat beside him, leaned forward to look at his watch in the dashboard light and say, “We’re five minutes early.”

  “I’ll take it slow on the bumpy streets,” Kelp said, “on account of everything in back.”

  “We don’t want to be there too early,” Dortmunder said.

  Kelp steered the cumbersome truck off the parkway and around the curve of the exit ramp. “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  In the prison at this same time Greenwood was also looking at his watch, the green hands in the darkness telling him he still had half an hour to wait. Prosker had told him Dortmunder and the others wouldn’t be making their move until three o’clock. He shouldn’t do anything too early that might tip their mitts.

  Twenty-five minutes later the rental truck, lights off, rolled to a stop in the parking lot of an A&P three blocks from the prison. Street lights at corners were the only illumination anywhere in this part of Utopia Park, and the cloudy sky made the night even blacker. You could just barely see your hand in front of your face.

  Kelp and Dortmunder got out of the cab and moved cautiously around to open the doors at the rear of the truck. The interior of the truck was pitch black. While Dortmunder helped Chefwick to jump down onto the asphalt, Murch handed a ten-foot ladder out to Kelp. Kelp and Dortmunder stood the ladder up against the side of the truck while Murch handed out to Chefwick a coil of gray rope and his little black bag. They were all dressed in dark clothing and they communicated in whispers.

  Dortmunder took the coil of rope and went first up the ladder, Chefwick following him. Kelp, at the bottom, held the ladder steady until they were both on top of the truck and then pushed the ladder up after them. Dortmunder laid the ladder lengthwise on the truck top and then he and Chefwick lay down on either side of it, like Boccaccio characters flanking a sword. Kelp, once the ladder was up, went around back again and shut the doors, then got back into the cab, started the engine, and drove the truck slowly around the A&P and out to the street. He didn’t turn the headlights on.

  In the prison Greenwood, looking at his watch and seeing it was five minutes to three, decided the time had come. He sat up, throwing the covers off, showing he was already fully dressed except for shoes. He put his shoes on now, got to his feet, looked at the sleeping man in the top bunk for a few seconds — the old man was snoring slightly, mouth open — and then Greenwood hit him in the nose.

  The old man’s eyes popped open, round and white, and for two or three seconds he and Greenwood stared at each other, their faces no more than a foot apart. Then the old man blinked, and his hand sidled up from under the blanket to touch his nose, and he said, in surprise and pain, “Ow.”

  Greenwood, shouting at the top of his voice, bellowed, “Stop picking your feet!”

  The old man sat up, his eyes getting rounder and rounder. His nose was starting to bleed. He said, “W
hat? What?”

  Still at top volume, Greenwood roared, “And stop sniffing your fingers!”

  The old man’s fingers were still against his nose, but now he took them away and looked at them, and there was blood on the tips. “Help,” he said, in a very quiet voice, tentatively, as though to be sure that was the word he was looking for. Then, apparently sure, he let fly with a raucous string of helps, putting his head back, squeezing his eyes shut, yipping like a terrier, “Helphelphelphelphelphelphelphelp—” etc.

  “I can’t take it any more,” Greenwood raged, taking the baritone part. “I’ll break your neck for you!”

  “Helphelphelphelphelphelphelp—”

  Lights went on. Guards were shouting. Greenwood began to swear, to tramp back and forth, to wave his fists in the air. He yanked the blanket off the old man, wadded it up, threw it back at him. He grabbed the old man’s ankle and began to squeeze it as though he thought it was the old man’s neck.

  The big clang came that meant the long iron bar across all the cell doors on this side of the tier had been lifted. Greenwood yanked the old man out of bed by his ankle, being careful not to hurt him, clutched him around the neck with one hand, raised his other fist high, and stood posed like that, bellowing, until the cell door opened and three guards came rushing in.

  Greenwood didn’t make it easy for them. He didn’t punch any of them because he didn’t want them to punch him back with truncheons and make him unconscious, but he did keep poking the old man at them, making it difficult for them to come around through the narrow cell and get their hands on him.

  Then, all at once, he subsided. He released the old man, who promptly sat down on the floor and began to clutch his own neck, and he stood there slump-shouldered, vague-eyed. “I don’t know,” he said fuzzily, shaking his head. “I don’t know.”

  The guards put their hands on his arms. “We know,” one of them said, and the second said quietly to the third, “Flipped out. I wouldn’t of thought it from him.”