The Hot Rock

by Donald E. Westlake

  Chefwick and Greenwood and Kelp were already in their wet-suits, the black rubber gleaming and glistening in the sun. They weren’t wearing the gloves or face masks or headpieces yet, but otherwise they were completely encased in rubber. So much for electrified fences.

  Dortmunder and Greenwood and Kelp all climbed aboard the tender, and Dortmunder called forward to Chefwick, “Go ahead.”

  “Right,” said Chefwick. “Toot toot,” he called, and Tom Thumb began to perk along the track.

  The other wet suit was waiting for Dortmunder in the tender, on the arms case. He put it on and said, “Remember. When we go through keep your hands over your faces.”

  “Right,” said Kelp.

  Tom Thumb traveled faster than seventeen miles an hour, and they reached the Clair de Lune Sanitarium in no time, where Chefwick pulled to a stop just before the turnoff where the old tracks angled away toward the sanitarium grounds. Greenwood jumped down, went over to the switch beside the tracks and turned it to the spur position, and then climbed back aboard.

  (It had taken two nights of oiling and straining and heaving to get the old switch to work again. It’s too expensive for railroads to remove all their old unused equipment, and it doesn’t hurt anything to leave it all lying there, which is why there are so many abandoned stretches of track to be seen around the United States. But there’s nothing wrong with most of it except rust, which had been the only problem here. The switch now turned like a dream.)

  They all put on their headpieces and gloves and face masks, and Chefwick accelerated over the bumpy orange track toward the sanitarium fencing. Tom Thumb, tender and all, was still lighter than the Ford from which his engine had come, and he accelerated like a go-cart, hitting sixty before he hit the fence.

  Snap! Sparks, sputters, smoke. Live wires whipping back and forth. Tom Thumb’s wheels shrieking and squealing along the twisty old rails, then shrieking even louder when Chefwick applied the brakes. They’d breached the fence like a sprinter breasting the tape, and now they screamed and scraped to a stop surrounded by chrysanthemums and gardenias.

  In his office on the opposite side of the building, Chief Administrator Doctor Panchard L. Whiskum sat at his desk rereading the piece he’d just written for the American Journal of Applied Pan-Psychotherapy, entitled “Instances of Induced Hallucination among Staff Members of Mental Hospitals,” when a white-jacketed male nurse ran in shouting, “Doctor! There’s a locomotive in the garden!”

  Doctor Whiskum looked at the male nurse. He looked at his manuscript. He looked at the male nurse. He looked at his manuscript. He looked at the male nurse. He said, “Sit down, Foster. Let’s talk about it.”

  In the garden, Dortmunder and Greenwood and Kelp had emerged from the tender in wet-suits and skin divers’ masks, carrying tommy guns. All over the lawn, white-garbed patients and blue-garbed guards and white-garbed attendants were running back and forth, up and down, around in circles, shouting at each other, grabbing each other, bumping into each other. Bedlam was in bedlam.

  Dortmunder pointed his tommy gun in the air and let go with a burst, and the silence after that was like the silence in a cafeteria just after somebody has dropped a thousand metal trays on a tile floor. Silent. Very silent.

  The lawn was full of eyes, all of them round. Dortmunder looked among them and finally found Prosker’s. He pointed the tommy gun at Prosker and called, “Prosker! Get over here!”

  Prosker tried to make believe he was somebody else, named Doe or Roe. He kept on standing there, pretending Dortmunder wasn’t looking at him.

  Dortmunder called, “Do I shoot your ankles off and have somebody carry you? Get over here.”

  A lady doctor in the foreground, wearing black horn-rims and white lab coat, suddenly cried, “You people ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Do you realize what you’re doing to the reality concepts we’re trying to instill in these people? How do you expect them to differentiate between illusion and reality when you do something like this?”

  “Be quiet,” Dortmunder told her and called to Prosker, “I’m losing my patience.”

  But Prosker continued to stand there, feigning innocence, until all at once a guard near him took a quick step and shoved him, shouting, “Will you get over there? Who knows if his aim is any good? You want to kill innocent people?”

  A chorus of yeahs followed that remark, and the tableau of people — Living Chessboard is what it mostly looked like — turned itself into a sort of bucket brigade, pushing Prosker on from hand to hand all across the lawn to the locomotive.

  When he got there, Prosker suddenly became voluble. “I’m not a well man!” he cried. “I’ve had illnesses, troubles, my memory’s gone! I wouldn’t be here, why would I be here if I wasn’t a sick man. I tell you, my memory’s gone, I don’t know anything about anything.”

  “Just get up here,” Dortmunder said. “We’ll remind you.”

  Very reluctantly, with much pushing from behind and pulling from in front, Prosker got up into the tender. Kelp and Greenwood held him while Dortmunder told the crowd to stay where it was while they made their escape. “Also,” he said, “send somebody to put that switch back after we’re gone. We don’t want to derail any trains, do we?”

  A hundred heads shook no.

  “Right,” Dortmunder said. He told Chefwick, “Back her up.”

  “A-okay,” Chefwick said, and under his breath he said, “Toot toot.” He didn’t want to say it aloud with a lot of crazy people within earshot, they might get the wrong idea.

  The locomotive backed slowly out of the flower beds. Dortmunder and Kelp and Greenwood surrounded Prosker, grabbing him by the elbows and lifting him a few inches into the air. He hung there, pressed in by wet-suits on all sides, his slippered feet waggling inches above the floor, and said, “What are you doing? Why are you doing this?”

  “So you don’t get electrocuted,” Greenwood told him. “We’re about to back through live wires. Cooperate, Mr. Prosker.”

  “Oh, I’ll cooperate,” Prosker said. “I’ll cooperate.”

  “Yes, you will,” Dortmunder said.

  6

  Murch stood beside the tracks, smoking a Marlboro and thinking about railroad trains. What would it be like to drive a railroad train, a real one, a modern diesel? Of course, you couldn’t change lanes when you wanted, but it nevertheless might be interesting, very interesting.

  In the last fifteen minutes one vehicle had gone by, westbound, an ancient green pickup truck with an ancient gray farmer at the wheel. A lot of metal things in the back had gone klank when the truck had crossed the tracks, and the farmer had given Murch a dirty look, as though he suspected Murch of being responsible for the noise.

  The other noise had come a minute or two later, being a brief stutter of tommy-gun fire, faint and faraway. Murch had listened carefully, but it hadn’t been repeated. Probably just a warning, not an indication of trouble.

  And now, here came something down the tracks. Murch leaned forward, peering, and it was good old Tom Thumb, backing down the rails, its Ford engine whining in reverse.

  Good. Murch flipped away the Marlboro and ran over to the truck. He backed it around into position, and had it all ready when Tom Thumb arrived.

  Chefwick eased the locomotive to a stop a few yards from the rear of the truck. He was already looking a little sad at the prospect of being returned to normal size, but there was no alternative. His Drink-Me was all used up.

  While Greenwood stood guard over Prosker in the tender, Dortmunder and Kelp, no longer in their wet-suits, got out and lowered the ramp into place. Chefwick backed the locomotive carefully up into the truck, and then Dortmunder and Kelp shoved the ramp back inside. Kelp climbed into the truck, and Dortmunder shut the door and went around to get into the cab with Murch.

  Murch said, “Everything okay?”

  “No problems.”

  “Nearest place?”

  “Might as well,” Dortmunder said.

  Murch put the t
ruck in gear and started off, and two miles later he made a sweeping left onto a narrow dirt road, one of the many dirt roads they’d checked out in the last two weeks. This one, they knew, trailed off into the woods without ever getting much of anywhere. There were small indications in the first half mile or so that it was sometimes used as a lovers’ lane, but farther along the ruts grew narrower and grassier and finally petered out entirely in the middle of a dry valley, with no signs of man except a couple of meandering lines of stones that had once been boundary fences and were now mostly crumbled away. Perhaps there had once been a farm here, or even a whole town. The wooded lands of the northeastern states are full of long-ago-abandoned farms and abandoned rural towns, some of them gone now without a trace, some still indicated by an occasional bit of stone wall or a half-buried tombstone to mark where the churchyard used to be.

  Murch drove the truck in as far as he dared and stopped. “Listen to the silence,” he said.

  It was late afternoon now, and the woods were without sound. It was a softer, more muffled silence than the one at the sanitarium following Dortmunder’s tommy-gun burst, but just as complete.

  Dortmunder got out of the cab, and when he slammed the door it echoed like war noises through the trees. Murch had gotten out on the other side, and they walked separately along the trailer, meeting again at the far end. All around them stood the tree trunks, and underfoot orange and red dead leaves. Leaves still covered the branches too and fluttered constantly downward, making steady small movements down through the air that kept Dortmunder making quick sharp glances to left and right.

  Dortmunder opened the rear door and he and Murch climbed inside, then shut the door again after themselves. The interior of the trailer was lit by three frosted-glass lights spaced along the top, and the place was very, very full of locomotive, with no room at all to move on the right side and just barely enough to sidle along on the left. Dortmunder and Murch went along to the front of the tender and stepped aboard.

  Prosker was sitting on the arms case, his innocent-amnesiac expression beginning to fray at the edges. Kelp and Greenwood and Chefwick were standing around looking at him. There were no guns in sight.

  Dortmunder went over to him and said, “Prosker, it’s as simple as can be. If we’re out the emerald, you’re out of life. Cough it up.”

  Prosker looked up at Dortmunder, as innocent as a puppy who’s missed the paper, and said, “I don’t know what anybody’s talking about. I’m a sick man.”

  Greenwood, in disgust, said, “Let’s tie him to the tracks and run the train over him a few times. Maybe he’ll talk then.”

  “I really doubt it,” Chefwick said.

  Dortmunder said, “Murch, Kelp, take him back and show him where we are.”

  “Right.” Murch and Kelp took Prosker ungently by the elbows, hustled him off the tender, and shoved him down the narrow aisle to the rear of the truck. They pushed open a door and showed him the woods, with the late afternoon sunlight making diagonal rays down through the foliage, and when he’d seen it they shut the door again and brought him back and sat him down once more on the arms case.

  Dortmunder said, “We’re in the woods. Am I right?”

  “Yes,” Prosker said and nodded. “We’re in the woods.”

  “You remember about woods. That’s good. Look up there in the driver’s part of the locomotive. What’s that leaning against the side there?”

  “A shovel,” Prosker said.

  “You remember shovels too,” Dortmunder said. “I’m glad to hear that. Do you remember about graves?”

  Prosker’s innocent look crumpled a little more. “You wouldn’t do that to a sick man,” he said and put one hand feebly to his heart.

  “No,” Dortmunder said. “But I’d do it to a dead man.” He let Prosker think about that for a few seconds and then said, “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. We’re going to stay here tonight, let the cops travel around looking for a locomotive someplace. Tomorrow morning we’re going to leave. If you’ve handed over the emerald by then, we’ll let you go and you can tell the law you escaped and you didn’t know what it was all about. You won’t mention any names, naturally, or we’ll come get you out again. You know now we can get you wherever you hide, don’t you?”

  Prosker looked around at the locomotive and the tender and the hard faces. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Yes, I know that.”

  “Good,” Dortmunder said. “How are you with a shovel?”

  Prosker looked startled. “A shovel?”

  “In case you don’t give us the emerald,” Dortmunder explained. “We’ll be leaving here without you in the morning, and we won’t want anybody finding you, so you’ll have to dig a hole.”

  Prosker licked his lips. “I,” he said. He looked at all the faces again. “I wish I could help you,” he said. “I really do. But I’m a sick man. I had business reverses, personal problems, an unfaithful mistress, trouble with the Bar Association, I had a breakdown. Why do you think I was in the sanitarium?”

  “Hiding from us,” Dortmunder said. “You committed yourself. If you could remember enough to commit yourself to a maximum security insane asylum, you can remember enough to turn over the emerald.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” Prosker said.

  “That’s all right,” Dortmunder told him. “You’ve got all night to think it over.”

  7

  “Is this deep enough?” Dortmunder came over and looked at the hole. Prosker was standing in it in his white pajamas, his bathrobe over beside a tree. The hole was knee-deep now, and Prosker was sweating even though the morning air was cool. It was another sunny day, with the crisp clean air of the woods in autumn, but Prosker looked like August and no air conditioner.

  “That’s shallow,” Dortmunder told him. “You want a shallow grave? That’s for mugs and college girls. Don’t you have any self-respect?”

  “You wouldn’t really kill me,” Prosker said, panting. “Not for mere money. A human life is more important than money, you have to have more humanity than—”

  Greenwood came over and said, “Prosker, I’d kill you just out of general irritation. You conned me, Prosker, you conned me. You gave everybody a lot of trouble, and I’m to blame, and in a way I hope you keep pulling the lost memory bit right up till it’s time to leave.”

  Prosker looked pained and glanced along the trail the truck had come on. Dortmunder saw that and said, “Forget it, Prosker. If you’re stalling, waiting for a lot of motorcycle cops to come racing through the trees, just give it up. It isn’t gonna happen. We picked this place because it’s safe.”

  Prosker studied Dortmunder’s face, and his own face had finally lost its pained-innocence expression, replaced by a look of calculation. He thought things over for a while and then flung the shovel down and briskly said, “All right. You people wouldn’t kill me, you aren’t murderers, but I can see you aren’t going to give up. And it looks like I won’t get rescued. Help me up out of here, and we’ll talk.” His whole manner had abruptly changed, his voice deeper and more assured, his body straighter, his gestures quick and firm.

  Dortmunder and Greenwood gave him a hand out of the hole, and Greenwood said, “Don’t be so sure about me, Prosker.”

  Prosker looked at him. “You’re a ladykiller, my boy,” he said. “Not exactly the same thing.”

  “Well, you’re no lady,” Greenwood told him.

  Dortmunder said, “The emerald.”

  Prosker turned to him. “Let me ask you a hypothetical question. Would you let me out of your sight before I handed over the emerald?”

  “That isn’t even funny,” Dortmunder said.

  “That’s what I thought,” Prosker said, and spread his hands, saying, “In that case, I’m sorry, but you’ll never get it.”

  “I am gonna kill him!” Greenwood shouted, and Murch and Chefwick and Kelp strolled over to listen to the conversation.

  “Explain,” Dortmunder said.

  Prosker said,
“The emerald is in my safe deposit box in a bank on Fifth Avenue and Forty-sixth Street in Manhattan. It takes two keys to open the box, mine and the bank’s. The bank regulations require that I go down into the vault accompanied only by an officer of the bank. The two of us have to be alone, and in the vault I have to sign their book, and they compare the signature with the specimen they keep on file. In other words, it has to be me and I have to be alone. If I gave you my word I wouldn’t tell the bank officer to call the police while we were down there you wouldn’t trust me, and I wouldn’t blame you. I wouldn’t believe it myself. You can mount a perpetual watch on the bank if you wish, and kidnap and search me every time I go into it and come out, but that only means the emerald will stay where it is, useless to me and useless to you.”

  “God damn it,” said Dortmunder.

  “I’m sorry,” Prosker said. “I’m truly sorry. If I’d left the stone anywhere else, I’m sure we could have worked out some arrangement where I would be reimbursed for my time and expenses—”

  “I ought to rap you in the mouth!” Greenwood shouted.

  “Be quiet,” Dortmunder told him. To Prosker he said, “Go on.”

  Prosker shrugged. “The problem is insoluble,” he said. “I put the stone where neither of us can get it.”

  Dortmunder said, “Where’s your key?”

  “To the box? In my office in town. Hidden. If you’re thinking of sending someone in my place to forge my signature, let me be a good sport and warn you that two of the bank’s officers know me fairly well. It’s possible your forger wouldn’t meet either of those two, but I don’t think you should count on it.”

  Greenwood said, “Dortmunder, what if this louse was to die? His wife would inherit, right? Then we’d get the stone from her.”

  Prosker said, “No, that wouldn’t work either. In the event of my death, the box would be opened in the presence of my wife, two bank officers, my wife’s attorney and no doubt someone from Probate Court. I’m afraid my wife would never get to take the emerald home with her.”