Watch Your Back! d-13

by Donald E. Westlake

  "Not on your life," Arnie said, and from behind him, putting his wallet away, out crawled Dortmunder, looking nettled and saying, "I paid for the cab. It was the only way to get him here."

  "Though I still got my doubts," Arnie said as the cab hurtled away.

  "Well," Kelp said, "let's go over there and wait in the limo with Tiny."

  Arnie said, "Limo?" but then a white truck, sneaking around the corner just as the light turned red, made the left, then a right toward the garage door, which began to lift. Stan could be seen in the truck cab, putting the remote back down on the seat.

  So instead of everybody getting into the limo, Tiny got out of it, and it drove away. Now that all the traffic had stopped, Tiny crossed the street to join them, and everybody followed the truck into the garage, where Stan thumbed the door shut again.

  Stan was the only one who'd been in this place before, so everybody else had to look it over for a minute. They also had to study the truck. Kelp put the bag of hard hats on the passenger seat, and Tiny said, "Very clean. Better than I figured. What did it used to carry?"

  "People," Stan said, and when they all looked at him, he said, "It's a long story, I'll tell you later, over a beer. The elevator's over there."

  "We'll have to do a little alarm stuff first," Kelp said, "before we ride it anywhere."

  Turned out, the alarm system for the elevator was a simpler problem than switching on the motor to run the elevator, which wanted a key they didn't have, which would fit in a slot to the right of the two buttons lined up vertically on the control panel and marked Top and Bot. Looking at those buttons, Stan said, "Did the manufacturer think the customer was gonna get confused?"

  "Their lawyer made them add that," Kelp explained.

  The problem with the key meant that both Dortmunder and Kelp produced leather toolkit bags and took the metal cover off the control panel, then found the way to bypass the ignition. When they checked it, it worked fine, but Dortmunder and Kelp were the only ones aboard, and the elevator just went up to the top without waiting for anybody else.

  "We'll send it back down," Dortmunder said as they rose.

  "And have the alarms taken care of by the time they get here," Kelp agreed.

  Which they did. The second time the elevator opened at the top level, it was very full, mostly with Tiny, who seemed to be wearing Stan and Arnie as earmuffs.

  (The three long rumbles of the elevator motor had not reached Preston in the master bedroom but had made a faint drone in the guest room, causing Alan to frown and shift position and have a brief, pointless dream about being in a submarine.)

  "We'll just walk it through the first time," Dortmunder said, "and, Arnie, then you can tell us which things to take."

  "I brung red dots," Arnie said. When everybody gave him blank looks, he said, "I got the idea from art galleries. When they have a show, if somebody buys a painting they don't get to take it home until the show is over, so the gallery has these little red dot stickers that they put on, to say, 'this one already sold. " Taking a sheet of such stickers from his pants pocket, he said, "That's what I figured I'd do here. When I see something good, I slap a red dot on it, you guys take it away."

  "I like that," Stan said. "Clear, simple and classy."

  "So let's take a look around," Dortmunder said.

  All the floors of the penthouse were carpeted, in Persian and other antique rugs that were themselves worthy of red dots, though Arnie wouldn't be thinking primarily in terms of furnishings. But the rugs made their progress through the penthouse silent until they entered the big living room with its airplane views of Manhattan and its array of art and antiques.

  Everybody stopped, impressed, staring around at the room and the view, and Arnie said, "Forget the dots. Just take the living room."

  Stan said, "Arnie, the living room is bigger than the truck."

  Dortmunder said, "We like the red-dot thing, Arnie, stick with it."

  "Okay, then," Arnie said, and stepped over to the nearest Picasso and whacked its frame with a red dot. Sold.

  46

  WHEN JUDSON CARRIED THE the Maylohda mail in to J. C. a little after ten that morning, she was seated at attention at her desk, speaking on the phone, using what he thought of as her High Teutonic voice — not quite an accent but definitely not native-born: "Ai do not see," she was saying, "how Ai can be of help to you. Unless we have the manifest from the port at Lacuna in Maylohda, payment is simply impossible. Ai hope you can understand. Than kyew, please do that. Good-bye."

  She hung up, shifted to a more relaxed at-ease position, and looked over at Judson, who had remained standing beside her desk, waiting to attract her attention. "Something?"

  "I wondered," he said, feeling he had to tiptoe around this topic because he didn't want to push himself forward too aggressively but, on the other hand, didn't want to be left out, either, "if Mr. Tiny said when they were going to do that thing on Sixty-eighth Street."

  J. C. didn't seem bothered by the question. In fact, she seemed, if anything, indifferent. "They're doing it now," she said.

  Surprised, hurt, Judson said, "But— Nobody told me."

  The look she gave him was not warm. "Why should they?"

  "Well— I was helping, Mr. Kelp taught me about that burglar alarm, I thought…" He moved his hands around, no longer sure what he thought.

  "Look, Judson," she said, "you aren't a part of that group."

  "But I thought…"

  "Tiny told me how you volunteered, and how he tried to let you know the volunteer isn't always necessarily right."

  "Oh, he let me know that, all right. But they did let me help."

  "And if they need some more help," she said, "they'll ask you again. Right now they know what they're doing, so they don't need any help. Okay?"

  "Well…"

  It was just a fantasy, then, an assumption, and he'd been wrong. For one moment he'd held their coat, that's all. His position here was "the kid" and nothing else.

  But if he wanted to at least keep that position, he'd better be careful here. So he stood up straighter and wiped the worried look from his face. "Sure," he said, as though it were no big deal. "They know— Mr. Kelp and Mr. Tiny and all of them — they know I'm here if they ever need some help again."

  "They know that," J. C. agreed. "And, when they get their profit on what they're doing today, you'll get a piece, don't worry about it."

  "Oh, I'm not worried," he told her, with a big self-confident grin.

  Her own smile was wry as she studied him. "Well," she said, "maybe worry a little bit."

  He had all day, surrounded by the incoming and outgoing mail, to wonder what she meant by that.

  47

  THE MUFFLED SOUNDS in the penthouse, as load after load of valuables was carried through to the rear of the place and sent down in the elevator, snagged at the sleepers but didn't quite waken them. Yesterday had been so long and tiring, and had ended so late, that as the morning progressed and the sounds neither stopped nor got louder, both Preston and Alan merely adapted their slumber to this addition to their environment, and slept on.

  Meanwhile, in the living room and the formal dining room, the red dots blossomed like a bad case of measles. Dortmunder and Tiny carried the designated goods back to the elevator, loaded it aboard, and sent it down to the garage, where Kelp and Stan unloaded everything, directed the elevator upward again, and stowed the goods in the capacious sixteen-foot-deep interior of the truck.

  Arnie was in heaven. After his first rapturous flurry of red-dot dispensing, he slowed down, took his time, studied the wares on offer, and even rejected some as being, while first quality, not quite at the level he was growing used to here. He also refreshed his vision sometimes by standing at the windows to gaze down on Central Park or at the pork chop of Manhattan narrowing away to the south. All in all, he felt he was enriched by having known Preston Fareweather.

  Around noon, Dortmunder and Tiny, carrying a marble athlete, lost their grip f
or a second, and a marble elbow thudded into the wall beside them. "Watch it," Tiny said, though he was just as much to blame.

  "It's okay," Dortmunder said, and they moved on while, the other side of that wall, Preston frowned in his sleep, and his mouth moved with small moist sounds, tasting itself. Like a bubble in a soda can, he was rising toward consciousness.

  As Dortmunder and Tiny set the marble man on the floor in front of the elevator, its door opened, and Kelp stepped out, saying, "Stan says the truck's about full."

  "We'll make this guy the last of it, then," Dortmunder said. "Help us load him."

  "I'll ride down with him," Tiny said.

  Dortmunder said, "Then send it back up. I'll collect Arnie. We don't want to leave him behind."

  "For once," Kelp said, and the elevator door shut on the trio.

  Dortmunder went back to the living room, and Arnie was over at the window again, gazing dreamily out. Looking at Dortmunder, he said, "I run outa dots."

  "And the truck's run outa space. Time to go."

  "I'll take a quick look around at the other rooms," Arnie said, "see is there any must-haves."

  "Fine."

  Arnie went off, and Dortmunder looked around for pocket-size stuff, of which there was a bunch. A Faberge egg, for example, a couple of gold medallions, a Mont Blanc pen, a nice piece of scrimshaw. Pockets bulging, he left the living room, and in the hall he met Arnie coming out of a side room.

  Arnie grinned at him and said, "We got the cream, but just lemme look."

  "Sure."

  Dortmunder walked on, and Arnie opened the next door.

  The click of the doorknob popped Preston's eyes open. Bleary, somewhere between awake and asleep, he lifted his head and looked at Arnie Albright, frozen in the open doorway.

  Preston blinked, there was a slam, and when his eyelids sluggishly lifted again, there was no Arnie Albright, only a closed door. Preston tried to frame a question, but was too befuddled to speak it, or even very much to think it. A dream? His head dropped back on the pillow.

  A dream about Arnie Albright — too awful to think about. Down Preston went into oblivion once more.

  Arnie raced down the hall, overtaking Dortmunder, whispering in shrill urgency, "He's here! In bed!"

  "What? Who?"

  "Him! We gotta get outa here!"

  Arnie scampered on, and Dortmunder followed him, looking over his shoulder, not seeing anyone behind them. Preston Fareweather was here? In bed? All along?

  Arnie skittered in place at the elevator door. "We gotta get outa here! Outa here!"

  "Arnie, we do have to wait for the elevator."

  But then it came, and they boarded, and Arnie pushed Bot so hard, it bent his thumb back, which he barely noticed. "Outa here," he said. "This is no place for a person like me. Outa here."

  48

  WHAT MIKEY believed in was patience; that's what he told his crew all the time. "Don't fuckin jump into nothin, be patient. First find out what the fuck, and then it's fuckin yours."

  Another thing Mikey believed in was revenge. He probably believed in revenge more than in patience or anything else, if it came to that. If Mikey were ever to build a shrine to something other than himself, it would be to revenge.

  Also, a third thing Mikey believed in, passionately and without question, was profit. Everybody earns; everybody's taken care of. If you don't have profit, what have you got? Nothing. QED.

  In the O.J. Bar Grill business, the three things Mikey believed in were finally about to come together. A sweet deal he'd set up had been queered for him by some stumblebum heister named Dortmunder, not Dortmund as originally reported, plus a few of Dortmunder's unconnected loser pals. So what was needed? What was needed was to get revenge on Dortmunder and his pals, and to make a profit out of that revenge, and for all that to happen, Mikey had to be patient, which he damn well knew how to be.

  This Dortmunder was such a clown, Mikey's people had been tailing him for two days, ever since Mikey's guy had picked up that name, almost the right name, in the O.J., and not once had Dortmunder even suspected there was somebody on his trail.

  Not that he did much, most of the time. Once on Wednesday, and again this morning, he'd gone to the Upper West Side to the same apartment building, and this morning he'd come out of it with some gnarled little jerk, and they'd taken a cab over to Fifth and Sixty-eighth, where they'd met up with three other guys that were definitely part of Dortmunder's crew, part of the bunch that had screwed up Mikey's deal at the O.J. This time, they had a pretty big truck with them, and they and the truck all went into a garage on Sixty-eighth.

  When all this was reported to Mikey, at home in New Jersey, he said, "We'll fuckin meet right there. In the fuckin park. Pass the word. We want the fuckin crew and we want some fuckin cars."

  On his way to Central Park from farthest New Jersey, Mikey saw how it was going to play out, how it had to play out. Dortmunder and his people were heisters, independent heisters — he knew that much — and the story was, the reason they'd involved themselves with his sweet deal at the O.J. and loused it up the way they did in the first place was that they wanted to make a meet in the O.J.'s back room, because that was where they always met when they were planning a job.

  Planning a job. Was that perfect? There they were now, in that garage, loading up the truck with something or other valuable from that house — or more likely the small private museum on the next street behind it.

  Mikey would be patient. He would give them all the time they needed, all the time in the world, and whenever they finally did bring that truck back out of that garage, Mikey and his friends would be there to take it away from them. Revenge and profit, in one neat ball.

  The only little potential difficulty was the fact that all this was taking place in New York City. Mikey's crew, and his father Howie's entire outfit, operated within an agreement with the families in New York: that the New York guys didn't interfere with New Jersey, and the New Jersey guys didn't interfere with New York. Pulling off anything at all on this side of the river could be looked at, by anybody who wanted to be a stickler for detail, as a violation of that agreement, which could possibly end in consequences.

  On the other hand, this wasn't any New York City operation Mikey was messing in; this was a bunch of no-connection independents against whom he had a legitimate beef. So this would be like what the army guys call a surgical strike: invade, pull the job, clear out. Everything beautiful.

  (The O.J, bustout, if it had gone down the way it should, would also have been a technical violation of the interstate agreement, but there it was a unique deal, with Mikey the only one who could get hold of the place to squeeze it, and at the end of the operation the appropriate New York family would have been given an explanation, an apology, and a small piece, and there would have been no trouble. This, involving hijack, maybe guns shown, violence on the streets of Manhattan, was a different matter entirely.)

  By eleven Mikey had everything in position. Sixty-eighth Street was one-way east, so he had a car stopped by a hydrant down toward the other end of the block. The next intersection, Madison Avenue, was northbound, so he had a car stopped around the corner on Madison, and a third waiting beyond Madison on Sixty-eighth. He had two soldiers in each car, equipped with cell phones.

  Whichever way the truck went, Mikey's people would be on it, two cars at first and the third catching up. They would tail it and wait for just the right spot to crowd it to a stop, throw those people out of there, take over the truck themselves, and drive it straight to New Jersey.

  Also, unless Dortmunder's crew acted wise, which Mikey didn't expect to happen, in deference to the agreement with New York there would be minimum violence and, if possible, no shooting. Smart, you had to be smart.

  Seated on a bench in the park, though it faced the wrong way, Mikey could twist halfway around and look back past the low stone wall at the park's edge and across Fifth Avenue and straight down Sixty-eighth Street. Like a general with an
overview of the battlefield; nice.

  Mikey sat there, on the bench in Central Park, and was patient.

  49

  THE TALK around the security desk all morning at the Imperiatum at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-eighth Street was of the astounding return, way late last night, of the mythical Preston Fareweather. He'd showed up after four in the morning with some other guy and enough luggage for a 747, all of which the staff, including security(!), had had to wrestle up to the penthouse, using the public elevator in front and not his private elevator in the back. In fact, nobody had used the private elevator at all.

  So now, Big José and Little José, all ears, at last learned the story of that elevator they'd seen at the back of Fareweather's penthouse. It didn't go to some other apartment in the building for hot sex after all, but all the way down to a garage at street level.

  So whadaya thinka that? In addition to everything else he's got, Preston Fareweather's got his own elevator to his own garage, in which he keeps a really cool BMW.

  Well, it was nice to know the truth about the elevator, though it was a shame to lose the fantasies about that hot TV news anchor. On the other hand, this return of the prodigal Preston Fareweather meant some distinct changes in the work lives of the Josés. As Little José pointed out, "You don't get to coop up there in his living room no more, man."

  "I loved that eight-foot sofa," Big José said, because he did have trouble finding comfortable places in the world where he could stretch out his long frame.

  Another change was that, with the owner's return, it would no longer be necessary to do the twice-a-month security sweep of the penthouse. But that was okay. At first, going through that place had been kind of exciting, with its great views and all the art and the furniture, but of course every time they went up there, it was the same views and art and furniture, so after a while, no matter how great it was, it did get a little boring. They could remember the place pretty well by now; they didn't need to go on seeing it every two weeks.