The Hot Rock

by Donald E. Westlake

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

  Kelp turned to look at him. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing,” said Dortmunder, and the conductor came back into the car and walked down the aisle and stopped beside them. He frowned at the hole in the window. He said, “Who did that?”

  “An old man back at that last station,” Dortmunder said.

  The conductor glared at him. “You did it,” he said.

  Kelp said, “No, he didn’t. An old man did, back at that last station.”

  Greenwood, in the next seat back, said, “That’s right. I saw it happen. An old man did it, back at the last station.”

  The conductor glowered around at everybody. “You expect me to believe that?”

  Nobody answered him.

  He frowned some more at the hole in the window, then turned around to Murch, sitting across the aisle. “Did you see it?”

  “Sure,” Murch said.

  “What happened?”

  “An old man did it,” Murch said. “Back at that last station.”

  The conductor lowered an eyebrow at him. “You with these people?”

  “Never saw them before in my life,” Murch said.

  The conductor gave everybody suspicious looks, then mumbled something nobody could make out and turned away and walked down to the end of the car. He went out the door, and popped back in a second later to call, “Next stop New McKinney,” as though daring somebody to make something of it. He glared, waited, then disappeared again and slammed the door.

  Dortmunder said to Kelp, “I thought you said the next stop was us.”

  “It’s supposed to be,” said Kelp. He looked out the window and said, “Sure it is. There’s the place.”

  Dortmunder looked where Kelp was pointing and saw a large sprawling red brick building off to the right a ways. A tall chain-link fence enclosed the grounds, with metal signs attached to it at intervals. Dortmunder squinted, but couldn’t make out what the signs said. He said to Kelp, “What do the signs say?”

  “Danger,” Kelp told him. “High voltage.”

  Dortmunder looked at him, but Kelp was gazing out the window, refusing to meet his eye. Dortmunder shook his head and looked out at the asylum again, seeing a set of tracks that curved away from the tracks the train was on and angled around to go under the electrified fence and across the asylum grounds. The tracks were orange with rust, and within the grounds they’d been incorporated in the design of a formal flower bed. A couple of dozen people in white pajamas and white bathrobes were strolling around the grass in there, being watched by what looked like armed guards in blue uniforms.

  “So far,” Dortmunder said, “I wouldn’t say it looks easy.”

  “Give it a chance,” Kelp said.

  The train had started to slow, as the asylum moved into the background, and now the door at the far end of the car opened again and the conductor stuck his head in to call, “New McKinney! Newwww McKinney!”

  Kelp and Dortmunder frowned at each other. They looked out the window, and the platform was just edging into sight. The sign on it said, NEW MYCENAE.

  “New McKinney!” yelled the conductor.

  “I think I hate him,” Dortmunder said. He got to his feet, and the other four got up after him. They went down the aisle as the train creaked to a stop, and the conductor glowered at them as they disembarked. He said to Murch, “I thought you said you weren’t with these guys.”

  “With who?” Murch asked him and went on down to the platform.

  The train started up and stumbled slowly away from the station, the conductor leaning out for a long while to look after his five passengers. The three old men on the platform studied them too, one of them spitting tobacco juice to mark the occasion.

  Dortmunder and the others walked through the station and out the other side, where they turned down a mustached fat man who claimed his 1949 Fraser was a cab.

  “We can walk it,” Kelp told Dortmunder. “It isn’t far.”

  It wasn’t. They walked about seven blocks and then they came to the main entrance, with a sign to one side reading, “Clair de Lune Sanitarium.” The electrified fence was set back from the road here, with another chain-link fence about five feet in front of it. Two armed guards sat on folding chairs inside the main gate, chatting together.

  Dortmunder stopped and looked at it all. “Who’ve they got in there?” he said. “Rudolf Hess?”

  “It’s what they call a maximum security bughouse,” Kelp told him. “For rich nuts only. Most of them in there are what they call criminally insane, but their family has enough money to keep them out of some state asylum.”

  “I’ve wasted a whole day,” Dortmunder said. “I could of sold half a dozen encyclopedias today. Sunday’s a good day for encyclopedias, you got the husband at home, you tell the husband you’ll throw in a bookcase that comes unassembled and he can put it together himself, and he’ll hand you his wallet.”

  Chefwick said, “You mean it can’t be done?”

  “Armed guards,” Dortmunder said. “Electrified fences. Not to speak of the inmates. You want to mix with them?”

  Greenwood said, “I was hoping you’d see some way. There oughta be a way to get in there.”

  “Sure there’s a way to get in there,” Dortmunder said. “You drop in with a parachute. Now let’s see you get out.”

  Murch said, “Why don’t we walk around the place? Maybe we’ll see something.”

  “Like anti-aircraft guns,” Dortmunder said. “That is not an easy nuthouse to crack.”

  Kelp said, “We got an hour to kill before our train back. We might as well walk around.”

  Dortmunder shrugged. “All right, we’ll walk around.”

  They walked around, and they didn’t see anything encouraging. When they got to the rear of the building, they had to leave blacktopped road and walk across scrubby field. They stepped over the rusty orange tracks, and Chefwick said primly, “I keep my tracks in better condition than this.”

  “Well, they don’t use these any more,” Kelp said.

  Murch said, “Look, one of the loonies is waving at us.”

  They looked, and it was true. One of the figures in white stood by the flower bed and waved at them. He was shielding his eyes from the sun with his other hand, and he was smiling to beat the band.

  They started to wave back to him, and then Greenwood said, “Hey! That’s Prosker!”

  Everybody stood there with his hand up in the air. Chefwick said, “So it is.” He pulled his hand down, and everybody else followed suit. In there by the flower bed Prosker waved and waved, and then began to laugh. He bent over and slapped his knee and went into a fit of laughter. He tried to wave and laugh at the same time and almost fell over.

  Dortmunder said, “Greenwood, let me borrow it again.”

  “No, Dortmunder,” said Kelp. “We need him to give us the emerald.”

  “Except we can’t get at him,” Murch said. “So it doesn’t make any difference.”

  “We’ll see about that,” said Dortmunder, and shook his fist at Prosker, who as a result laughed so hard he sat down on the ground. A guard came over and looked at him, but didn’t do anything.

  Kelp said, “I hate it that we’re beaten by a louse like that.”

  “We aren’t,” Dortmunder said grimly.

  They all looked at him. Kelp said, “You mean—?”

  “He can’t laugh at me,” Dortmunder said. “I’ve had enough, that’s all.”

  “You mean we’re going in after him?”

  “I mean I’ve had enough,” Dortmunder said. He looked at Kelp. “You go tell Iko to put us back on the payroll,” he said and looked back at Prosker, who was now rolling around on the ground, clutching his ribcage and beating his heels into the turf. “If he thinks he can stay in that place,” Dortmunder said, “he’s crazy.”

  4

  When the ebony man showed Kelp in, Major Iko was leaning over the pool table sigh
ting down the cue like a sniper with a musket. Kelp looked at the lie of the table and said, “You go for the twelve like that, your cue ball is going to ricochet off the three and drop the eight.”

  Without moving, the Major lifted his eyes and looked at Kelp. “You’re wrong,” he said. “I have been practicing.

  Kelp shrugged. “Go ahead,” he said.

  The Major sighted some more, then hit the cue ball, which hit the twelve, ricocheted off the three, and dropped the eight. “Banimi ka junt!” the Major said and threw the cue down onto the table. “Well?” he barked at Kelp. “It’s been two weeks since Dortmunder agreed to do the job. Money keeps going out, but no emerald ever comes in.”

  “We’re ready again,” Kelp said and pulled a tattered list from his pocket. “This is the stuff we need.”

  “No helicopters this time, I hope.”

  “No, it’s too far from New York. But we thought about it.”

  “I’m sure you did,” the Major said dryly and took the list.

  Kelp said, “Mind if I sink a couple?”

  “Go ahead,” the Major said and opened the sheet of paper.

  Kelp picked up the cue, dropped the three, and the Major screamed, “A locomotive?”

  Kelp nodded and put the cue down again. Turning to face the Major, he said, “Dortmunder thought there might be some question about that.”

  “Question!” The Major looked as though he’d been poleaxed.

  “We don’t actually need a big diesel locomotive,” Kelp said. “What we need is something that runs on standard gauge tracks under its own power. But it’s got to be bigger than a handcar.”

  “Bigger than a handcar,” the Major said. He backed up till his legs hit a chair, on which he sat. The list hung forgotten in his hand.

  “Chefwick is our railroad expert,” Kelp said. “So if you want to talk things over with him, he’ll let you know exactly what we need.”

  “Of course,” the Major said.

  “He could come over tomorrow afternoon,” Kelp suggested.

  “Of course,” the Major said.

  “If you could have your own people ready by then. For him to talk to.”

  “Of course,” the Major said.

  Kelp frowned at him. “You okay, Major?”

  “Of course,” the Major said.

  Kelp went over and waved his hand in front of the Major’s eyes. They didn’t change, they kept staring at some point in the middle of the room. Kelp said, “Maybe I oughta give you a call later on. When you’re feeling better.”

  “Of course,” the Major said.

  “It really isn’t that big a locomotive we want,” Kelp said. “Just a kind of a medium-size locomotive.”

  “Of course,” the Major said.

  “Well.” Kelp looked around a little helplessly. “I’ll call you later on,” he said. “About when Chefwick should come over.”

  “Of course,” the Major said.

  Kelp backed to the doorway and hesitated there for a second, feeling the need to say something to buck the Major’s spirits up a little. “Your pool is getting a lot better, Major,” he said at last.

  “Of course,” the Major said.

  5

  Major Iko stood beside the truck, forehead furrowed with worry. “I’ve got to give this locomotive back,” he said. “Don’t lose it, don’t hurt it. I have to give it back, it’s only borrowed.”

  “You’ll get it back,” Dortmunder assured him. He checked his watch and said, “We’ve got to get going.”

  “Be careful with the locomotive,” the Major pleaded. “That’s all I ask.”

  Chefwick said, “You have my personal word of honor, Major, that no harm will come to this locomotive. I think you know my feeling about locomotives.”

  The Major nodded, somewhat reassured, but still worried. A muscle in his cheek was jumping.

  ‘Time to go,” Dortmunder said. “See you later, Major.”

  Murch would drive, of course, and Dortmunder sat in the cab beside him, while the other three got in back with the locomotive. The Major stood watching them, and Murch waved to him and drove the truck down the dirt road from the deserted farmhouse and out to the highway, where he turned north, away from New York and toward New Mycenae.

  It was a very anonymous truck, with an ordinary red cab and a trailer completely swathed in olive drab tarpaulins, and no one they passed gave them a second look. But underneath the tarps lurked a very gaudy truck indeed, its sides combining brightly painted pictures of railroading scenes with foot-high red letters running the length of the trailer and reading, FUN ISLAND AMUSEMENT PARK — TOM THUMB. And underneath, in slightly smaller black lettering, The Famous Locomotive.

  What strings the Major had pulled, what stories he’d told, what bribes he’d paid, what pressures he’d applied in order to get this locomotive, Dortmunder neither knew nor cared. He’d gotten it, that was all, within two weeks of the order having been placed, and now Dortmunder was going to go wipe that laugh from Attorney Prosker’s face. Oh, yes, he would.

  This was the second Sunday in October, sunny but cool, with little traffic on the secondary roads they were traveling, and they made good time to New Mycenae. Murch drove them through town and out the road toward the Clair de Lune Sanitarium. They rode on by, and Dortmunder glanced at it as they went past. Peaceful. Same two guards chatting at the main gate. Everything the same.

  They traveled another three miles down the same road, and then Murch turned right. Half a mile later he pulled off to the side of the road and stopped, pulling on the handbrake but leaving the engine running. This was a woodsy, hilly area, without houses or other buildings. A hundred yards ahead stood a set of white crossbars, warning of a railroad crossing.

  Dortmunder looked at his watch. “Due in four minutes,” he said.

  In the last two weeks, he and the others had been all over this territory, till they knew it now as well as they knew their own homes. They knew which roads were well traveled and which were generally empty. They knew where a lot of the dirt side roads went, they knew what the local police cars looked like and where they tended to spend their Sunday afternoons, they knew four or five good places in the neighborhood to hide out with a truck, and they knew the railroad schedule.

  Better than the railroad did, evidently, because the train Dortmunder was waiting for was almost five minutes late. But at last they did hear it hooting in the distance, and then slowly it appeared and began to trundle by, the same passenger train Dortmunder and the others had ridden up here in two weeks ago.

  “There’s your window,” Murch said and pointed at a holed window gliding by.

  “I didn’t think they’d fix it,” Dortmunder said.

  It takes a train quite a while to get itself entirely past a given point, particularly at seventeen miles an hour, but eventually the final car did go by and the road was once again clear. Murch looked at Dortmunder and said, “How long?”

  “Give it a couple minutes.”

  They knew the next scheduled occupant of that track would be a southbound freight at nine-thirty tonight. During the week there were many trains going back and forth, both passenger and freight, but on Sundays most trains stayed home.

  After a minute or two of silence, Dortmunder dropped his Camel butt on the truck floor and stepped on it. “We can go now,” he said.

  “Right.” Murch put the truck in gear and eased forward to the tracks. He jockeyed back and forth till he was crosswise on the road, blocking it, and then Dortmunder got out and went around back to open the rear doors. Greenwood and Kelp at once began to push forward a long complicated boardlike object, a wide metal ramp with a set of railroad tracks on it. The far end clanged on the rails below, and Greenwood came down to help Dortmunder push and shove it till the ramp’s tracks lined up with the railroad company’s tracks. Then Greenwood waved to Kelp on the tailgate, who turned around and waved into the interior, and a few seconds later a locomotive came out.

  And what a locomoti
ve. This was Tom Thumb, the famous locomotive, or at any rate a replica of the famous Tom Thumb, the original of which, built for the Baltimore & Ohio back in 1830, was the first regularly working American-built steam locomotive. It looked just like all the old, old locomotives in Walt Disney movies and so did the replica, which was an exact copy of the original. Well, maybe not exactly exact, since there were one or two small differences, such as that the original Tom Thumb ran on steam from a coal-fired furnace while the replica ran on gasoline in an engine from a 1962 Ford. But it looked legit, that was the important thing, and who was going to carp about the thin putt-putt of smoke that snuck out the tailgate instead of the thick belch-belch of smoke that was supposed to issue from the funnel-mouth smokestack?

  Apparently this replica didn’t spend all its time in the amusement park mentioned on its mother truck, but at least occasionally traveled around to be displayed at fairs and supermarket openings and other gala events. The specially equipped truck was itself an indication of that, as was the fact that the wheels were suited to the standard gauge of today’s tracks.

  The locomotive came complete with its own tender, a boxlike wooden affair like a dinette on wheels. On the original the tender was usually full of coal, but in the replica it was empty except for a green-handled push-broom leaning against one corner.

  Chefwick was at the controls as Tom Thumb came slowly down the ramp and effected the tricky transition from one set of rails to another, and he was in seventh heaven, smiling and beaming around in sheer delight. In his mind he hadn’t been given a full-size locomotive, he himself had been miniaturized. He was running a model train in person. He beamed out at Dortmunder and said, “Toot toot.”

  “Sure thing,” Dortmunder said. “Up a little more.”

  Chefwick eased Tom Thumb forward a few more feet.

  “That’s good right there,” Dortmunder said and went back to help Greenwood and Kelp slide the ramp back up into the truck. They shut the truck doors and hollered to Murch, who hollered back and drove the truck around in a wide loop that left it once more off the road. So far, there’d been no other traffic at all.