The Hot Rock

by Donald E. Westlake

  “But surely — at the Coliseum you could have — somewhere—”

  “He swallowed it,” Dortmunder said.

  The Major looked at Dortmunder, trying to understand what the man had just said. “I beg your pardon?”

  It was Greenwood who answered. “When I saw they were going to get me,” he said, “I was in a hall. No place to hide anything. Couldn’t even throw it away. I didn’t want them to find it on me, so I swallowed it.”

  “I see,” the Major said, a bit shakily, and then smiled a thin smile and said, “It’s a good thing for you I’m an atheist, Mr. Greenwood.”

  In polite bafflement, Greenwood said, “It is?”

  “The original significance of the Balabomo Emerald in my tribe was religious,” the Major said. “Go on with your story. When did you next see the emerald?”

  “Not till the next day,” Greenwood said. “I’ll sort of skip over that part, if you don’t mind.”

  “I wish you would.”

  “Right. When I had the emerald again, I was in a cell. I guess they were afraid the rest of the guys might try to spring me right away, ‘cause they hid me out in a precinct on the Upper West Side for the first two days. I was in one of the detention cells on the top floor.”

  “And that’s where you hid it?” the Major said faintly.

  “There wasn’t anything else I could do, Major. I didn’t dare keep it on my person, not in jail.”

  “Couldn’t you have just kept on swallowing it?”

  Greenwood gave a greenish smile. “Not after the first time I got it back,” he said.

  “Mm-mm,” the Major admitted reluctantly. He looked at Dortmunder.

  “Well? What now?”

  Dortmunder said, “We’re divided. Two for, two against, and one uncertain.”

  “You mean, whether or not to go after the emerald again?”

  “Right.”

  “But—” The Major spread his hands. “Why wouldn’t you go after it? If you’ve successfully broken into a prison, surely an ordinary precinct house—”

  “That’s just it,” Dortmunder said. “My feeling is we’re pushing our luck. We’ve given you two capers for the price of one as it is. We can’t just keep busting into places forever. Sooner or later the odds have to catch up with us.”

  The Major said, “Odds? Luck? But it isn’t odds and luck that have helped you, Mr. Dortmunder, it’s skill and planning and experience. You still have just as much skill and are capable of just as much planning as in last night’s affair, and now you have even more experience.”

  “I just have a feeling,” Dortmunder said. “This is turning into one of those dreams where you keep running down the same corridor and you never get anywhere.”

  “But surely if Mr. Greenwood hid the emerald, and knows where he hid it, and—” The Major looked at Greenwood. “It is hidden well, is it not?”

  “It’s hidden well,” Greenwood assured him. “It’ll still be there.”

  The Major spread his hands. “Then I don’t see the problem. Mr. Dortmunder, I take it you are one of the two opposed.”

  “That’s right,” Dortmunder said. “Chefwick is with me. Greenwood wants to go after it, and Kelp is on his side. Murch doesn’t know.”

  “I’ll go along with the majority,” Murch said. “I got no opinion.”

  Chefwick said, “My opposition is similarly based to Dortmunder’s. I believe one can reach the point where one is throwing good expertise after bad, and I fear we have reached that point.”

  Greenwood said to Chefwick, “It’s a cinch. I tell you, it’s a precinct house. You know what that means, the joint is full of guys typing. The last thing they’ll expect is somebody breaking in. It’ll be easier than the jug you just got me out of.”

  “Besides,” Kelp said, also talking to Chefwick, “we’ve worked at the damn thing this long, I hate to give it up.”

  “I understand that,” Chefwick said, “and in some ways I sympathize with it. But at the same time I do feel the mathematical pressure of the odds against us. We have performed two operations now, and none of us is dead, none of us is in jail, none of us is even wounded. Only Greenwood has had his cover blown, and being a single man with no dependents, it won’t be at all hard for him to rebuild. I believe we should consider ourselves very lucky to have done as well as we have, and I believe we should retire and consider some other job somewhere else.”

  “Say,” said Kelp, “that’s just the point. We’re still all of us on our uppers, we’ve still got to find a caper somewhere to get us squared away. We know about this emerald, why not go after it?”

  Dortmunder said, “Three jobs for the price of one?”

  The Major said, “You’re right about that, Mr. Dortmunder. You are doing more work than you contracted for, and you should be paid more. Instead of the thirty thousand dollars a man we originally agreed to, we’ll make it—” The Major paused, thinking, then said, “Thirty-two thousand. An extra ten thousand to be split among you.”

  Dortmunder snorted. “Two thousand dollars to break into a police station? I wouldn’t break into a tollbooth for money like that.”

  Kelp looked at the Major with the expression of a man disappointed in an old friend and protégé. “That’s awful little, Major,” he said. “If that’s the kind of offer you’re going to make, you shouldn’t say anything at all.”

  The Major frowned, looking from face to face. “I don’t know what to say,” he admitted.

  “Say ten thousand,” Kelp told him.

  “A man?”

  “That’s right. And the weekly amount up to two hundred.”

  The Major considered. But too quick an agreement might make them suspicious, so he said, “I couldn’t make it that much. My country couldn’t afford it, we’re straining the national budget as it is.”

  “How much, then?” Kelp asked him in a friendly, helpful sort of way.

  The Major drummed fingertips on the desktop. He squinted, he closed one eye, he scratched his head above his left ear. Finally he said, “Five thousand.”

  “And the two hundred a week.”

  The Major nodded. “Yes.”

  Kelp looked at Dortmunder. “Sweet enough?” he asked.

  Dortmunder chewed a knuckle, and it occurred to the Major to wonder if Dortmunder too was padding his part. But then Dortmunder said, “I’ll look it over. If it looks good to me, and if it looks good to Chefwick, all right.”

  “Naturally,” the Major said, “the pay will continue while you look things over.”

  “Naturally,” Dortmunder said.

  They all got to their feet. The Major said to Greenwood, “May I offer you congratulations, by the way, on your freedom.”

  “Thanks,” Greenwood said. “You wouldn’t know where I could find an apartment, do you? Two and a half or three, moderately priced, in a good neighborhood?”

  “I’m sorry,” the Major said.

  “If you hear of anything,” Greenwood said, “let me know.”

  “I will,” said the Major.

  2

  Murch, obviously very drunk and holding a nearly empty pint of Old Mr. Boston apricot brandy in his hand, stepped off the curb, out in front of the police car, waggled his other hand at it, and cried, “Takshi!”

  The police car stopped. It was that or run over him. Murch leaned on the fender and announced loudly, “I wanna go home. Brooklyn. Take me to Brooklyn, cabby, and be fast about it.” It was well after midnight and except for Murch this residential block on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was quiet and peaceful.

  The non-driving policeman got out of the police car. He said, “Comere, you.”

  Murch staggered over. Winking hugely he said, “Never mind the meter, pal. We can work out a private arrangement. The cops’ll never know.”

  “Izzat right?” said the cop.

  “That’s only one of the million things the cops don’t know,” Murch confided.

  “Oh, yeah?” The cop opened the rear door. “
Climb aboard, chum,” he said.

  “Right,” said Murch. He lurched into the police car and fell asleep at once on the rear seat.

  The cops didn’t take Murch to Brooklyn. They took him to the precinct house, where they woke him without gentleness, took him from the back seat of their car, trotted him up the slate steps between the green lights — the globe on the left one was broken — and turned him over to some other cops on the inside. “Let him sleep it off in the tank,” one of them commented.

  There was a brief ritual at the desk, and then the new cops trotted Murch down a long green corridor and shoved him into the tank, which was a big square metal room full of bars and drunks. “This isn’t right,” Murch told himself, and he began to shout. “Yo! Hey! What the hey! Son of a bitch!”

  All the other drunks had been trying to sleep it off like they were supposed to, and Murch doing all that shouting woke them up and irritated them. “Shut up, bo,” one of them said.

  “Oh, yeah?” Murch said and hit him in the mouth, and pretty soon there was a good fight going on in the drunk tank. Most people missed when they swung, but at least they were swinging.

  The cell door opened and some cops came in, saying, “Break it up.” They broke it up, and worked it out that Murch was the cause of the trouble. “I ain’t staying here with these bums,” Murch announced, and the cops said, “Indeed you aren’t, brother.”

  They took Murch out of the drunk tank, being not at all gentle with him, and ran him very rapidly up four flights of stairs to the fifth and top floor of the precinct, where the detention cells were.

  Murch was hoping for the second cell on the right, because if he got the second cell on the right that was the end of the problem. Unfortunately, there was somebody else already in the second cell on the right, and Murch wound up in the fourth cell on the left. They pushed him in at high speed and shut the door behind him. Then they went away.

  There was light, not much, coming from the end of the corridor. Murch sat down on the blanket-covered metal bunk and opened his shirt. Inside, taped to his chest, were some sheets of typewriter paper and a ballpoint pen. He removed these from his chest, wincing, and then made a lot of diagrams and notes while it was still fresh in his mind. Then he taped it all back to his chest again, lay down on the metal bunk, and went to sleep.

  In the morning he was given a good talking to, but because he had no record and he apologized and was very chagrined and embarrassed and decent about it all, he was not held.

  Outside, Murch looked across the street and saw a two-year-old Chrysler with MD plates. He went over and Kelp was behind the wheel, taking photographs of the front of the station house. Chefwick was in the back seat, keeping a head count on people going in and coming out, cars going in and coming out at the driveway beside the building, things like that.

  Murch got into the Chrysler beside Kelp, who said, “Hi.”

  “Hi,” Murch said. “Boy, don’t ever be a drunk. Cops are death on drunks.”

  A little later, when they were done, Kelp and Chefwick drove Murch across town to where his Mustang was parked. “Somebody stole your hubcaps,” Kelp said.

  “I take them off when I come to Manhattan,” Murch said. “Manhattan is full of thieves.” He opened his shirt, removed the papers from his chest again, and gave them to Kelp. Then he got in his car and drove home. He went up to 125th Street and over to the Triborough Bridge and around Grand Central Parkway to Van Wyck Expressway to the Belt Parkway and home that way. It was a hot day, full of sun and humidity, so when he got home he took a shower and then went downstairs to his bedroom and lay on the bed in his underwear and read what Cahill had to say about the Chevy Camaro.

  3

  This time the ebony man with the long thin fingers took Kelp to the room with the pool table right away, without detours or side trips. He bowed his head slightly at Kelp and left, closing the door behind him.

  It was a hot night outside, the last week in July, humidity building up toward 1,000 percent. Kelp was in thin slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt and the central air conditioning in here was making him chilly. He wiped leftover perspiration from his forehead, lifted his arms to air his underarms, walked over to the pool table, and racked up the balls.

  He didn’t feel like much of anything tonight, so he just practiced breaks. He’d rack the balls, line the cue ball up in this spot or in that spot, hit it here or there with or without some kind of english, aim for one spot or another spot on the lead ball, and see what would happen. Then he’d rack them again, set the cue ball up somewhere else, and do it all over again.

  When the Major came in he said, “You haven’t progressed so far tonight.”

  “Just fooling around this time,” Kelp told him. He put the cue down and took a damp and crumpled sheet of paper from his hip pocket. He unfolded it and handed it over to Iko, who took it with some apparent reluctance to have his fingers touch it. Kelp turned back to the table, where he’d just made a break that had dropped two balls, and began to sink the rest of them, quickly but methodically.

  He’d put three away when Iko squeaked, “A helicopter?”

  Kelp put the cue down and turned back to say, “We weren’t sure you could get your hands on one of those, but if you can’t we don’t have any caper. So Dortmunder said I should just bring you the list like always and let you decide for yourself.”

  Iko was looking a little strange. “A helicopter,” he said. “How do you expect me to get you a helicopter?”

  Kelp shrugged. “I dunno. But the way we figured, you’ve got a whole country behind you.”

  “That’s true,” Iko said, “but the country behind me is Talabwo, it is not the United States.”

  Kelp said, “Talabwo doesn’t have any helicopters?”

  “Of course Talabwo has helicopters,” Iko said irritably. It looked as though his national pride was stung. “We have seven helicopters. But they are in Talabwo, naturally, and Talabwo is in Africa. The American authorities might ask questions if we tried to import an American helicopter from Talabwo.”

  “Yeah,” Kelp said. “Let me think,” he said.

  “There’s nothing else on this list to cause any trouble,” Iko said. “Are you sure you have to have a helicopter?”

  “The detention cells,” Kelp said, “are on the top floor, which is the fifth floor. You go in the street entrance, you’ve got five floors of armed cops to go through before you ever reach the cells, and then you’ve got the same five floors of cops to go through all over again before you get back to the street. And you know what’s out on the street?”

  Iko shook his head.

  “Cops,” Kelp told him. “Usually three or four prowl cars, plus cops walking around, going in, coming out, maybe just standing around on the sidewalk, talking to each other.”

  “I see,” said Iko.

  “So our only chance,” Kelp told him, “is to come down from the top. Get on the roof, and go from there down into the building. Then the detention cells are right there, handy, and we don’t even see most of the cops. And after we get the emerald we don’t have to fight our way through anybody, all we have to do is go back up to the roof and take off.”

  “I see,” said Iko.

  Kelp picked up his cue, dropped the seven, walked around the table.

  Iko said, “But a helicopter is very loud. They’ll hear you coming.”

  “No, they won’t,” Kelp said. He leaned over the table, dropped the four, straightened, said, “There’s airplanes going over that neighborhood all day long. Big jets landing at LaGuardia, they go over that neighborhood a lot lower than you’d think. You know, they start their approach, some of them, like out at Allentown.”

  “You’ll use their noise to help you?”

  “We’ve kept a record on them,” Kelp said. “We know who the regulars are, and we’ll drift in while one of them is going by.” He sank the twelve.

  Iko said, “What if someone sees you, from some other building? There are taller bu
ildings around there, aren’t there?”

  “They see a helicopter land on a police station roof,” Kelp said. “So what?” He dropped the six.

  “All right,” Iko said. “I can see where it could work.”

  “And nothing else can work for a minute,” Kelp told him and dropped the fifteen.

  “Perhaps,” Iko said. He frowned in a troubled way. “You could be right. But the problem is, where am I going to get you a helicopter?”

  “I don’t know,” Kelp said, sinking the two. “Where’d you get your helicopters before this?”

  “Well, we bought them, naturally, from—” Iko stopped, and his eyes widened. A white cloud formed above his head, and in the cloud a lightbulb appeared. The lightbulb flashed on. “I can do it!” he cried.

  Kelp dropped the eleven and, on ricochet, the eight. That left the three and the fourteen still around. “Good,” he said and put the cue down. “How you going to manage it?”

  “We’ll simply order a helicopter,” Iko said, “through normal channels. I can arrange that. When it arrives in Newark for transshipment by boat to Talabwo, it will spend a few days in our warehouse space. I can arrange for you to be able to borrow it, but not during normal working hours.”

  “We wouldn’t want it during normal working hours,” Kelp told him. “About seven-thirty in the evening is when we figure to get there.”

  “That will be fine, then,” the Major said. He was obviously delighted with himself. “I will have it gassed up and ready,” he said.

  “Fine.”

  “The only thing is,” the Major said, his delight fading just a trifle, “it could take a while for the order to go through. Three weeks, possibly longer.”

  “That’s okay,” Kelp said. “The emerald will keep. Just so we get our salary every week.”

  “I’ll get it as quickly as I can,” Iko said.

  Kelp motioned at the table. “Mind?”

  “Go ahead,” Iko said. He watched Kelp sink the last two and then said, “Perhaps I ought to take lessons in that. It does look relaxing.”

  “You don’t need lessons,” Kelp told him. “Just grab a cue and start shooting. It’ll come to you. Want me to show you how?”