Drowned Hopes d-7

by Donald E. Westlake

  Second padlock untampered with. Nobody at the clearing down by the reservoir at the end of the road. Naturally not.

  Bob switched off his headlights, got out of his car, and stood leaning his skinny butt against a front fender, arms folded, gazing out over the water. Nobody could say for sure how long it would take him to do this pointless inspection every night, since nobody had ever had to go through this nonsense before him, so there was no reason why he shouldn’t take a little time out for himself along the way.

  Darker tonight, without the moon, but lots of high tiny white pinpoints of stars in clusters and lines and patterns all across the black sky, looking as though they really ought to mean something. If only the thousands of white dots were numbered, you could connect them, and then you’d know it all. The secret of the universe. But nobody even knows which dot is number one.

  Maybe the sun? Our own star? Maybe we can’t see the pattern because we’re in the pattern. Have to talk to Manfred about that.

  Ever since he’d started the counseling, Bob had learned there were depths and complexities within himself that his schooling and his family—and certainly his retarded boyhood friends—had never evoked. Ways of seeing things. Ways of relating himself to the world and the universe and time itself.

  What did it all matter, really, in the vastness of space, the fullness of time? Maybe Tiffany wasn’t exactly the ideal person to spend the rest of one’s life with, but what the heck, maybe he wasn’t anybody’s lifelong ideal either.

  Look up at all those pinpricks of light up there, all those stars, billions and billions, so many with planets around them, so many of the planets beating some form of life. Not human beings, of course, and not the kinds of aliens and monsters and ETs you saw in science fiction, either. Maybe life based on methane instead of oxygen; maybe life closer to our plants than our animals, but intelligent; maybe life in the form of radio waves. And all going on for billions of years, from the unimaginable beginning of the universe to its unthinkable end. What were Bob and Tiffany in all that? Not very important, huh?

  So take it easy, that was the answer, don’t get so excited about things. Don’t get so excited about sex—that’s what got you where you are today—or your future or your job or sea serpents or the simple-ass stupid asinine meatheaded dumbness of one’s pals and coworkers. Accept the life you’ve got. One little life in the great heaving ocean of space and time, the hugeness of the universe.

  Think about all those lives up there in space, unguessable lives, millions and millions of miles away. Each life its own, each life unique, unrepeatable, soon ended, a brief shining of the light.

  “And this is mine,” Bob whispered, accepting it, accepting all of it: himself, Tiffany, Manfred, his shit-for-brains buddies, his small destiny in this unimportant spot on this minor planet circling this mediocre sun in this lower-middle-class suburb of the universe. “I accept,” Bob whispered to the universe.

  Bubbles. Little air bubbles breaking the surface of the water, out a ways and off to the right. Hard to see, in this thin starlight barely brushing the black surface of the reservoir. Just a few little bubbles, rippling the water. Bob smiled, calm, accepting it. Some fish down there, moving around.

  Dortmunder moved around as the Hornet came to a stop. Their progress had been very slow from the time they’d been completely submerged, just drifting down along the railroad track, but that hadn’t been at all bad. Actually, the gradualness of their descent helped control the turbidity, so whenever Dortmunder aimed his flashlight back up the track there was very little extra roiling of the water.

  Which didn’t mean the damn stuff was clean. Far from it. Their flashlight beams still glowed dimly on murky brown water full of drifting hairy tendrils and clumps of stuff that Dortmunder could only hope were not what they looked like. But visibility was a lot better than last time; by which is meant, some visibility existed. It was possible for a light beam to cut at least partially through the sludge and drifting guck and pervasive brownness of the water to show the slimy gravel and rusty track over which they were passing, the furry tree stumps on both sides.

  At one point, Kelp had poked Dortmunder’s arm to direct his attention to a low stone wall they were traveling by on their right, with more stone walls going away at right angles into the murk at both ends. A building foundation. That was spooky; people used to live there. Way down here, in the dark.

  The Hornet had still been moving at that time, the old stone foundation gradually receding away behind them. But now it was stopped, with no town at all in sight within the short uncertain range of their lights. As with the last time they’d been down in here, spatial disorientation had taken place, so it was impossible to tell if they were still on a hillside or had reached flat ground. So who knew how much farther it was to Putkin’s Corners?

  Oh, well. Time to go to work. Dortmunder got to his feet, putting one foot on the soggy seat as he turned, holding the flashlight with his left hand as he picked up the pole from the back with his right. Beside him, Kelp, moving more easily without this useless steering wheel in his way, was doing the same thing.

  Kelp elaborately mimed, with his entire body, a counting cadence: One, two, three; ready, set, go. On the first two, they positioned their poles, more or less even with the rear tires, pressing down into the gravel roadbed. On three, they pushed, and the Hornet moved forward, but only as long as they kept pushing.

  One, two, three; forward.

  One, two, three; forward.

  One, two, three; forward.

  One, two, three; up.

  One— Up?

  Dortmunder and Kelp stared at each other in wild surprise, goggle-eyed inside their goggles. Shakily, Dortmunder aimed the flashlight over the Hornet’s side, down at the ground, which was farther away.

  Jesus Christ! Now what?

  Only the front tires still touched the tracks. As the rear of the Hornet swayed gently back and forth, still lifting slowly, tilting them forward, Dortmunder and Kelp turned this way and that, bewildered, losing the poles, bumping into each other. The Hornet, off balance, tilted ever more forward and now leftward as well, the right front tire lifting off the rail as delicately as a mastodon’s foot.

  The Ping-Pong balls! They’d misunderstood the buoying capacity of two large trash bags full of Ping-Pong balls, that’s what had happened. Trapped in the trunk of the Hornet, now that they’d reached the increased pressure of this depth, they were lifting the rear of the car.

  And if Dortmunder and Kelp tried to keep poling them deeper, closer to Putkin’s Corners, despite the Ping-Pong balls? No way. But what could they do instead? Gotta think. Gotta think! Gotta have a minute to think!

  Dortmunder made frantic pushing gestures at Kelp: Sit down! Sit down, you’re rocking the car! Kelp, not sure what Dortmunder wanted of him, moved this way and that, stumbled forward, blundered into Dortmunder, and grabbed the steering wheel beside Dortmunder’s elbow to regain his balance.

  Now all the weight was on the Hornet’s left side, and suddenly the car flipped right over, catching the two of them within itself like a clam rake snagging a couple of clams. Both their flashlights went tumbling away into the murk.

  BCD! That’s all Dortmunder could think when he found himself in the dark again, underwater and lost again, enclosed inside the Hornet. Scrabbling all over himself, he found the right button, managed to lift his left arm up into the area around the steering column, jammed the button down hard, and the BCD filled right up with air, just as it was supposed to, increasing his buoyancy wondrously, pressing him ever more firmly against the Hornet’s upside-down front seat, increasing the Hornet’s buoyancy as well, moving the whole mass slowly and ponderously upward, through the black water.

  So many stars. If you looked very closely, you could see them reflected in the calm black surface of the reservoir, as though this small man-made bowl of water on the planet Earth contained within itself the entire universe.

  Gee! Bob thought, I’m coming up wi
th so many insights! I’ll have to write all of this down on paper when I get back to my desk in-the dam so I’ll be able to talk about it all with Manfred, next time we—

  Something broke the still surface. Out a ways, off to the right, near where the bubbles had been. Something… something hard to make out.

  Bob stood up straighter, taking a step away from his car, squinting toward that unknown object emerging out of the reservoir. Not a sea serpent, he told himself jokingly; he knew all about that sort of thing now, knew the deep wellsprings of self-discontent that had led him to that particular error. This would simply be some sort of fish, that’s all, surfacing briefly; probably the same one that had caused the bubbles a little while ago.

  But, no. Not a fish. Still not a sea serpent, but not a fish either. Starlight glinted mutedly on metal. A machine of some sort. Round constructions on top, a wider metal surface below, angling away, downward into the water. Hard to see details in the dark, but certainly metal, certainly a machine.

  A submarine? In the reservoir? Ridiculous. It couldn’t possibly—

  And then, with a sudden leap of the heart, Bob knew. A spaceship! A flying saucer! A spaceship from the stars, from the stars! Visiting Earth secretly, by night, hiding here in the reservoir, taking its measurements or doing whatever it was doing, now rising up out of the water, going back, back to the stars. To the stars!

  Bob ran forward, arms upraised in supplication. “Take me with you!” he screamed, and tripped over a root, and crashed flat onto the ground at the edge of the water, knocking himself cold.

  “Now, if you want to get to South Jersey in the afternoon,” Stan said, “the Verrazano and the Outerbridge Crossing are still your best bet. It’s just it’s a little tricky getting across Staten Island. What you do, when you—”

  “I had to bury a soldier on Staten Island once,” Tiny reminisced, leaning on the winch.

  Tom, hunkered down on his heels beside the tracks like a refugee taking five, said, “Because he was dead, I suppose.”

  “Not when we started,” Tiny said. “See, what we—”

  Stan, looking out at the reservoir, said, “What’s that?”

  They all looked. Tom slowly rose, with a great creaking and cracking of joints, and said, “Tires.”

  “The Hornet,” Tiny said. “Upside-down.”

  “Floating,” said Stan.

  Tiny said, “I don’t think it’s supposed to do that.”

  Stan said, “Where do you figure John and Andy are?”

  “In the reservoir,” Tom said.

  Tiny said, “I think I oughta winch it in.”

  Stan said, “Did you hear somebody shout?”

  They all listened. Absolute silence. The rear wheels and axle and a bit of the trunk and rear fenders of the Hornet bobbed in the gloom.

  Tiny said, “I still think I oughta winch it in.”

  “I’ll help,” Stan volunteered.

  Tiny turned the winch handle rapidly at first, taking up a lot of slack, while the car sat out there like a newly discovered island; then the rope tautened, the winching got harder, and the Hornet wallowed reluctantly shoreward.

  The car was still several yards offshore, but in water only perhaps five feet deep, when a sudden thrashing and spouting took place on its left side, and Dortmunder and Kelp appeared, apparently fighting each other to the death, struggling, clawing, swinging great haymaker lefts and rights. But, no; what they were really trying to do was untangle from each other, separate all the hoses and equipment and feet.

  Kelp at last went flying ass over teakettle, and Dortmunder turned in a great swooping circle, found the shore, and came wading balefully forward, flinging things in his wake: face mask, mouthpiece, tank, BCD. Emerging from the water too wild-eyed for anybody to dare speak to, he unzipped the wetsuit, sat on a rail to remove the boots and peel off the legs of the wetsuit, stood in nothing but his underpants to heave the boots and wetsuit into the reservoir (just missing Kelp, who was still struggling and floundering and falling and scrambling shoreward), and turned to march away, between the tracks.

  “Oo! Oo! Oo!”

  He stopped, growling in his throat, grinding his teeth, and turned about to march back to the reservoir. “Oo! Oo! Oo!” Wading into the cold water, he felt around in it for the boots, found them, carried them back to shore—“Oo! Oo!”—sat down again on the rail, pulled the boots on, stood in nothing but his underpants and boots, and this time did go marching away down the railroad line.

  Mildly, Tom said, “If I’d blown it up to start with, we would’ve all saved ourselves a lot of time and trouble. Well, live and learn.” And he followed Dortmunder away toward the highway.

  THIRD DOWN

  FORTY-FOUR

  May stepped off the curb and hailed a cab. Though its off-duty light was lit, this particular cab immediately cut off a bakery van and a black TransAm from New Jersey to swerve across the lanes and yank to a stop at May’s feet. Since the backseat already contained three people, May opened the front door and slid in beside the driver, who was Murch’s Mom. “Right on time,” she said, slamming the door.

  “Naturally,” Mom said, and slashed the cab back into the flow of traffic, causing a great tide of imprecation to rise up into the air behind her.

  “We would’ve been late,” Stan said from the backseat, “if I hadn’t told Mom to come down Lex and forget Park.”

  “Know-it-all,” muttered Mom darkly.

  May shifted around in the seat so she could see Mom and Stan and Andy and Tiny all at once. “I want to thank you all for coming,” she said.

  “Sure, May,” Tiny said, his voice like a far-off earthquake. “All you gotta do is ask.”

  May smiled at him. “Thank you, Tiny.” To Mom, she said, “And thanks for letting me use your cab.”

  “My pleasure,” Mom snarled, blatting her horn at a tourist from Maryland, sightseeing out the window of his Acura Silly.

  “The problem is,” May said, “John still won’t even talk about it. Not even talk. So we couldn’t meet at my place. If he knew I was—”

  Andy said, “May, believe me, I understand John’s position on this. I was trapped inside that car, too. Now, I’m not one of your broody kind of pessimistic guys, you know me, but I got to tell you, May, I had a minute or two there, down in there, when I was seriously rethinking the various choices of my life. ‘What could I have done instead,’ I was saying to myself. ‘What could I have done different, maybe in third grade, maybe last year, that would have me now at the VCR store putting To Catch a Thief in my armpit instead of where I am?’ A situation like that can give you those kinds of thoughts.”

  “I know that,” May said. “I know you and John went through a terrible experience. But it’s been two weeks, Andy, and you’ve gotten over it.”

  “Well, not entirely, May,” Andy said. “The fact is, I still have to carry a flashlight when I open my closet door. But at least I’m washing my face again, so there’s been some improvement.”

  “John washes his face, all right,” May said, “but he will not talk about the reservoir, or the money, or Tom’s plan to blow up the dam.”

  “I think,” Andy said carefully, “I think he’s trying to restrict his involvement with the situation.”

  “When Tom moved out,” May told them, “I made him promise to let me know where to get in touch with him, just in case John came up with a new idea. Tom was going away to East St. Louis, Illinois, to pick up another of those money caches of his, and he told me when he’d be back, and he promised he’d call me as soon as he was in New York again, and that’s tomorrow. If I don’t have anything to tell him tomorrow, he’s going to find a couple of people to help him, which won’t take long—”

  “Not for that money,” Tiny agreed. “Take him an hour, maybe, unless he’s picky. Then it’ll take two hours.”

  “By the end of this week,” May said, “he could have that dam blown up and that entire valley destroyed and everybody in it dead.”


  “You know,” Stan said thoughtfully, “I looked over that terrain while we were up there, and I’m not sure Tom could get outta there if he goes the dynamite method. The way the roads are, the way the hills are, he might not have an escape. I mean, he’d get the money, drive down in there in a tractor or an ATV or something, maybe a backhoe, yank the casket up outta the ground, drive back up out of the mud, but when he gets to the road I think he’s screwed. I could study the terrain some more, but that’s my first impression.”

  “Tom won’t listen to that,” May said. “He’ll go ahead and do it anyway, and he’ll get caught, and they’ll put him back in prison where they should never have let him out in the first place, but all those people in the valley will be dead. It won’t matter then if Tom says, ‘Gee, Stan, I guess you were right.’ ”

  “That’s true,” Stan admitted.

  “We need another plan,” May told them. “We need some other way to get to that money that isn’t dynamite and that Tom Jimson will go along with. But John won’t even talk about it, and he absolutely won’t think about it. So what I was hoping from this meeting, I was hoping one of us would come up with something I could tell Tom, something that would at least slow him down, some kind of plan, or even an idea for a plan. Something.”

  There was a little uncomfortable silence in the cab, punctuated by Mom’s maledictions against the world of drivers and pedestrians and New York City traffic conditions generally. At last Tiny spread his catcher’s-mitt hands and said, “May, that ain’t my field. I pick up heavy things, I move them, I put them down, that’s what I do. Sometimes I persuade people to change their minds about certain things. I’m a specialist, May, and that’s my specialty.”

  Stan said, “I’m a driver. I’m the best in the business—”

  “He is,” his Mom said, as she swerved around a wallowing stretch limo driven by a Middle Eastern refugee who’d cleared Customs & Immigration earlier that morning. “I’m his mother, but I’ve got to admit it, my boy Stan is a good driver.”