Bad News

by Donald E. Westlake

“It’s a game,” Viveca told him. “It’s a lot of fun, really.”

  “We play it whenever the electricity goes out,” Virginia explained. “It keeps us entertained.”

  “You don’t have to play if you don’t want to,” Viveca threatened.

  Hughie looked alert, waiting to be given the same option, but not a chance. The more the merrier with Uno, and Hughie was the closest thing they had at this point to a man around the house, so this was not a time when he could be permitted to keep himself to himself. This was a time for Hughie to play Uno.

  They all trooped into the living room, Viveca leading the way with the Coleman lantern, Virginia and Vanessa and Victoria following, Hughie grumpily bringing up the rear, and while Viveca hung the lantern from the hook at the bottom of the chandelier that they always used in these circumstances, the girls took the whatnots off the side table and brought it out to center it under the light. Hughie, catching on, helped bring over the chairs, while Viveca got the Uno deck from the drawer in the end table beside the sofa. Then they all sat down, explained the rules of the game to Hughie three times, and began.

  The first hour, the game was, in fact, a lot of fun for all concerned. Hughie showed an unexpected competitive streak, and his grumpiness turned out to be a kind of bearish good nature. Not for the first time, Viveca was actually getting to know a member of the security staff while playing Uno during a blackout.

  The second hour dragged a little, though nobody would yet admit it. Outside the large windows, the storm whipped around in darkness, lashing the mountainside. It was pitch-black out there, so nothing could be seen, but the storm could be heard as the wind swooped past the house and occasionally sleet rattled against the windows. Inside, they were warm and dry. When one of them had to go to the bathroom, they had water. To occupy themselves, they had Uno. And later on, for Hughie, there would be the guest room.

  The third hour, the girls began to yawn, and Hughie had started to show a certain absence of mind that might suggest he’d now plumbed the depths of the complexities of Uno and was ready to go on to some other challenge, but nobody wanted to go to bed, and there was nothing else to do, really, but sit in a circle under this one light. If they were going to sit here anyway, they might as well play Uno.

  At midnight, Viveca said, “That’s it, now. Time to go to bed.”

  “Just one more round,” Vanessa said, as one of them always did.

  “Hughie will be the last dealer,” Virginia announced.

  “That’s good,” Victoria said.

  Once again, they’d outnumbered her. “Just the one round,” Viveca said, as though it were her idea.

  “Good,” Hughie said.

  They were midway through that last round when Victoria exclaimed, “Look at all those lights!”

  Everyone turned toward the windows, and now all at once there was something to see out there. It was some kind of vehicle, absolutely festooned with bright lights in red and white and yellow, and it was climbing slowly but inexorably up the mountain, toward the house.

  “How can it do that?” Viveca wondered. “Nobody could drive up that road tonight.”

  “It’s a snowplow,” Hughie informed them, from his years of experience as a New York City policeman. Rising from the table with a certain evident pleasure to have done with Uno even before his final deal, he went over to one of the windows—not the yellow-paned one—and said, “It’s a snowplow coming up to the house.”

  “But they don’t do that,” Viveca said, standing and walking over to also stare out the window at the approaching lights. “That looks like some kind of big highway department thing. Jerry from the gas station plows us out, tomorrow, when the storm’s over.”

  “Well, here he is,” Hughie said. “I better go see what it’s all about.”

  “We’ll all go,” Vanessa said, dropping her cards on the table and getting to her feet.

  “Definitely not,” Viveca told her. “You girls are not going out into that storm.”

  “Oh, Mom, yes,” Virginia said.

  “We’re just going outside the door,” Victoria said.

  “Absolutely not,” Viveca said.

  42

  * * *

  I’d like a cab like this,” Murch’s Mom said.

  “Be tough for the customers to get in,” Murch suggested.

  “I wasn’t thinking about the customers,” Murch’s Mom said.

  The two of them were warm and cosy in the cab of Cleveland’s top sand spreader, plowing the twisty, steep road up to Thurstead. Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny were undergoing who knows what agonies behind them in the open bed of the truck, but that was them, and anyway, they’d be making a bunch of money out of this trip.

  The snow was heavy and wet, which, from their point of view, was good. The sand spreader didn’t care how heavy anything was, but a lot of ice on this steep road might have given it pause.

  There was nothing out there so far on this mountain but the snow-piled road, the snow-laden wind, and the snow-burdened trees all around them; beyond the multicolored lights of the truck, there was only darkness. But then, far upslope, Murch’s Mom saw a faint glow, like a dim light left on in an empty attic, seen up the long and creaky stairs. “I guess that’s it,” she said.

  Her son was concentrating on the road; mostly on finding it, under all this snow. “You guess what’s what?” he asked, turning the big wheel this way, then turning it that way, goosing the gas, easing up, goosing the gas.

  “There’s a light up there,” Murch’s Mom said. “What you call your ghostly little light.”

  “Good,” Murch said. “I’m glad they got a light, because that’s what we’re gonna say we saw.”

  The trio in the back of the sand spreader couldn’t see anything at all, and they weren’t even trying. They’d all huddled as close as possible to the cab of the truck, to be in its lee, where the wind was maybe one mile an hour less vicious and the snowflakes maybe seven per minute less frequent. They’d brought hotel blankets to wrap precious items in, but they had started by wrapping themselves inside the blankets, so that they now looked like snow-covered bags of laundry that the driver from the cleaners had forgotten. Every time the truck jolted, which it did all the time, it made them bump into one another and the metal cab wall behind them.

  “Dortmunder,” Tiny growled through his blanket, “when this is all over, we’re gonna have a little discussion about this plan of yours.”

  Fortunately, given the wind and all, Dortmunder didn’t hear that.

  “The light’s moving,” said Murch, who had also spotted it by now.

  “That is spooky,” his Mom said.

  They could almost make out the house now, as they neared it, though mostly they were remembering what they’d seen on the Thurstead Web page. Up there on the second floor of the house, that one spot of light had started to move, shifting past windows, some of which had panes of glass of all different colors, as though the light were semaphoring to some ship long since lost at sea. During a storm like this.

  “They saw us is what it is,” Murch said. “They’re coming down.”

  “Good.”

  Their study of the Thurstead Web page had showed them that a door at the right side of the building, toward the rear, led to a kind of foyer and then the stairs going up to the family’s living quarters. Farther forward in that wall was an entrance to the lower floor; not the main entrance, but a secondary one, to the old original kitchen. Now Murch drove and plowed and steered his way up to the house and along the right side, losing sight of that illumination up above, and stopped with the cab near the family’s entrance and the rear of the vehicle near that other entrance.

  No sooner had Murch shifted the big floor-mounted gear lever into Park than the family’s door over there opened, and out came a guy in a big dark wool hat and a bulky dark pea jacket, pointing a flashlight ahead of himself in the general direction of the truck. Somebody behind him, still in the house, had a lantern of some kind, in whic
h the guy could be more or less seen, and to Murch, he looked like a cop. Ex-cop. Retired cop.

  His Mom said, “They got a cop.”

  “I see that,” Murch said. “Well, here goes nothing,” he said, and opened his door.

  Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny came out from inside their blankets, slowly, cautiously, something like butterflies emerging from their cocoons, but not a lot like that. They shook themselves, and kept the blankets around their shoulders, and duck-walked back to the rear of the truck, where the hinges on the doors had been recently drenched in the lubricant called WD-40.

  Dortmunder cautiously opened the left-hand door, which would open away from the house and would not be seen by anybody standing over by the family entrance. Stiff, aching all over, he let himself down onto the blacktop, which was already covered with snow, even though Murch had just this minute plowed it. Then he waited to hear conversation.

  Murch climbed down out of the cab and waved at the ex-cop.

  “Harya,” he yelled.

  “Come on in here,” the ex-cop yelled back, more order than invitation, and led Murch through the doorway into the warm foyer, where the other people stood. As he crossed the threshold, Murch took a quick look to his left, where he saw the dark figure of Dortmunder hobble stiffly, like Frankenstein’s monster, toward that other door, whose lock he would now pick.

  There was a mother in the foyer, carrying a Coleman lantern, and there were three girl children. There was supposed to be a father, too, which couldn’t possibly be the ex-cop, who was obviously the guy from the security company. Maybe the father was stuck in town or something. “Evening,” Murch said to everybody.

  The mother looked bewildered, maybe even anxious. She said, “I don’t understand. You highway people never plow this road.”

  “And I go along with us,” Murch assured her. “But I got this lady in the truck,” he explained, “and I saw your light.”

  The truck cab’s windows were opaque at the moment, but everybody stared in that direction anyway as the ex-cop said, “You got a lady in the cab?”

  “Her car went off the road,” Murch explained, “and I come across her, and she’s gonna die in there, you know? So I took her along, but I still got another hour out here before my shift is over, and that truck is no place for this lady. I wondered, you know, you look like you got things okay here, could I leave her with you for an hour?”

  The ex-cop said, “You want to leave her with us?”

  “Yeah, just for an hour, then I’ll come back up and get her and drive her to Port Jervis. But I can’t do that now, I got my route I gotta do. And everything else is dark, it’s cold, there’s nothing around here but you people.”

  The mother said, “Of course she can stay here. That was wonderful of you, to rescue her.”

  “Well, she wasn’t gonna make it,” Murch said. “Wait, I’ll get her.”

  Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny made their way through the downstairs to the living room, where windows showed them the many lights of the sand spreader. Here they sat down in nice antique chairs and caught their breath a little. There was nothing to do now until the sand spreader went away.

  The downstairs heat was on, but not very high, since nobody lived down here. The family kept the temperature in this part of the house at fifty, warm enough so the pipes wouldn’t burst. Normally, Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny might have found that a little chilly. After their ride up the mountain in the back of the open truck, this dark living room was toasty. Toasty.

  “I really wanna thank you,” Murch’s Mom told the people who gathered her into the house, all clustered together at the foot of these stairs. “And I really wanna thank you, too, young man,” she told her son, who was standing at the closed door, his hand on the knob.

  “All in a day’s work, ma’am,” Murch assured her. “Well, I gotta get back on the job.” He waved to everybody and went out to drive the truck back down the mountain, park it just off the road down there, and nap for an hour. Then the alarm on his wristwatch would wake him, for the return trip.

  Dortmunder awoke, to see the lights of the sand spreader recede down the mountain. He nodded at it, closed his eyes, then jolted upright. Asleep!

  Man, that had been close. He’d no sooner sat down here on this comfortable chair in this comfortable living room in the dark than he’d fallen asleep. What if he’d slept the whole time until Murch came back, and even went on sleeping then? Huh? What if that had happened?

  Well, Kelp or Tiny would have woken him. Everything would have been okay.

  Tiny snored. It was a low sound, but powerful, a sound you might hear from deep inside the cave where the virgins are sacrificed.

  The truck was gone now and the room was very dark. Dortmunder stood and peered around at his companions, as best he could in all this darkness, and they were both asleep, Kelp just a little more quietly.

  Dortmunder went to Kelp first, shook his shoulder, and whispered, “Andy! Wake up!”

  “Oh, sure,” Kelp said.

  Tiny snored.

  “No,” Dortmunder said, “I mean really awake.”

  “You got it,” Kelp said.

  “I mean awake with your eyes open and maybe even standing up,” Dortmunder said.

  Tiny snored.

  “Absolutely,” Kelp said.

  So Dortmunder gave up and went to Tiny and said, “Tiny, we gotta wake up now and steal a lot of stuff.”

  Tiny opened his eyes. He looked around and said, “It’s nighttime.”

  “In Thurstead,” Dortmunder reminded him. “We’re here to burgle the place.”

  “Or rob,” Tiny suggested, and heaved himself to his feet. “When is it, do you happen to know, Dortmunder? When is it you burgle, and when is it you rob?”

  “When I get the chance,” Dortmunder said.

  Tiny looked around. “I can’t see in here,” he complained. “Hold on.”

  A second later, light appeared. They had all brought flashlights along, which they’d adapted for the night’s work by covering most of the lens with black electric tape, so that only a narrow band of light could emerge. Tiny had switched his on, and now he waved it around at all the treasures in the room. He said, “Where’s Kelp?”

  “Right there, asleep,” Dortmunder said.

  Tiny tapped Kelp on the side of the head. “Up,” he said.

  Kelp got up.

  “I love Uno,” Murch’s Mom said. She’d told these people her name was Margaret Crabtree, so the mother, Viveca, called her Margaret, and the three children, very polite and well brought up, called her Mrs. Crabtree. Hughie, the ex-cop, hadn’t figured out yet what to call her.

  “Margaret,” Viveca said, “it’s so late for the girls.”

  “But it’s a special night, isn’t it?” Murch’s Mom said. “With the storm and everything.” She wanted everybody talking and involved in one place together, not off alone and silent in their individual rooms, listening to unusual noises from downstairs.

  “Oh, Mom, please,” or variations on “Oh, Mom, please,” said the three girls, and Viveca said, “Well, just for a little while.”

  “Yeah,” Hughie the ex-cop said. “Just for a little while.”

  Everywhere you go these days, if there’s a group that’s sponsoring where it is you are, the group gives you a tote bag. The tote bag has something written on it that is supposed to make you remember the group and the occasion every time later on that you use the tote bag, but when will you ever use all those tote bags? The only real use for your fourteenth tote bag is to hold the other thirteen tote bags, which is what most people do and why most people say they don’t have enough closet space. However, if you happen to be a burglar by profession—or maybe a robber—tote bags are very handy.

  The public rooms of Thurstead were full of many valuable items, both large and small, but, given the circumstances, the three robbers now shining their muted flashlight beams this way and that way in those rooms were interested only in items that were both valua
ble and small; thus the two tote bags that each of them carried.

  The paintings on the walls in here might be worth two or three fortunes in money, but they would never survive a trip down the mountain through this storm in the back of an open truck, so unfortunately they had to be left where they were. But gold would survive, in a tote bag. Jewels would survive, jade would survive, marble would survive, scrimshaw would survive.

  Tiny’s left-hand tote bag said National Scrabble Championship 1994 and his right-hand tote bag said, many, many times all over it, Holland America Line. Kelp, somehow a more literary type, carried in his left hand a tote bag that said LARC—Library Association of Rockland County and in his right hand one bearing a stylized giant W and the name Warner Books. And Dortmunder’s two tote bags read Temporis Vitae Libri and Saratoga.

  They didn’t rush to fill these bags. They had an hour, and each of them wanted to be carrying only really very valuable items when the job was done. They used their experience from previous dealings with resalable merchandise, they occasionally consulted together over an item such as a dagger with a ruby-encrusted hilt, and slowly they made their way through the treasures of Thurstead, leaving many of them, but not all, behind.

  Murch’s Mom said, “Could I, uh, could I be excused?”

  “Of course,” Viveca said.

  Rising, Murch’s Mom said quietly to Viveca, “Where’s the, uh, you know, facilities?”

  “Oh, use my bathroom,” Viveca told her. “It’s just to the left, and then the first door on the right, and through the bedroom.”

  “Here, take my flashlight,” Hughie said.

  “Thanks,” Murch’s Mom said, and went away, followed directions, and in the bedroom went straight to the hairbrush on the vanity table. From her pocket, she removed a small Ziploc bag, and into it went all the stray hair from the brush. Then back into the pocket went the Ziploc bag and, after a quick visit to the bathroom, back to the Uno game went Murch’s Mom.