Drowned Hopes d-7

by Donald E. Westlake

  Tiny said, “She’s been keeping an eye on us, this girl.”

  Myrtle’s father gave Doug a look of icy contempt, saying, “You gave it away, all right. You are as stupid as you look.”

  While Doug was still trying to decide what if any answer to give that, her father turned back to Myrtle and said, “Who else knows about us?”

  (Keep Edna out of this!) “Nobody!”

  Doug said, “That’s gotta be true, Tom. She wouldn’t tell her mother, and there’s nobody else she hangs out with. She’s just a librarian here in town!”

  (How empty he makes my life sound, Myrtle thought. And how little he cares about me, really.)

  Her father nodded slowly, thinking things over, and then he said, “Well, the back yard’s nice and soft after all this rain. We’ll plant her when it gets dark.”

  Everyone else in the room got the import of that remark before Myrtle did, and by the time she’d caught up they were all making objections, every one of which she heartily seconded.

  Gladys spoke first, in tones of outrage: “You can’t do that!”

  Then Doug, in tones of panic: “I can’t be involved in anything like that!”

  And then Tiny, calm but persuasive: “We don’t need to do that, Tom.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Her father—Tom Jimson—shook his head at all three of them. “Where does she go from here, then? Straight to the law.”

  “We keep her,” Tiny said. “We’re making our move tomorrow night, anyway. After that, what do we care what she says or where she goes?”

  “Then her mother goes to the law when she doesn’t come home,” Tom Jimson said. (It was easier to think of him by his name, and not as father at all.)

  Gladys said, “She can phone her mother and say she’s gonna spend the night with Doug.”

  Myrtle gasped, and Doug had the grace to look embarrassed, but Gladys turned and gave her a jaundiced look and said, “It’s better than not spending the night anywhere,” and Myrtle knew she was right.

  But Tom Jimson hadn’t given up his original plan. “Where do we keep her?” he demanded. “Who’s gonna stay up with her all night? Anywhere we put her she’ll go out a window.”

  “Not the attic,” said a voice from the door, and they all turned, and Wally was there (if that was his name).

  How long had he been there? Was he the criminal mastermind Myrtle had been imagining, or merely the inoffensive little round man he seemed? Or something between the two?

  Myrtle stared at him, but Wally didn’t meet her eye. Instead, he came farther into the kitchen, saying to Tom Jimson, “There’s a room up in the attic with a door we can lock. And I kind of stay up all night anyway, so I can check from time to time, make sure she isn’t trying to break out or anything.”

  “She can yell out the window,” Jimson objected.

  Wally shrugged that away with a little smile. He must be the mastermind, he was the only one who didn’t exhibit any fear of Tom Jimson. “In this rain?” he said.

  Gladys said, “Wally’s right. Nobody’s out there, and if they were they couldn’t hear her.” So Wally was his real first name, at least.

  Tiny said, “Look at it this way, Tom. Up to now we haven’t done anything that’s gonna get the law all excited about finding us. But if we start bumping off local citizens, everything changes.”

  “I don’t do things like that,” Doug said with shaky insistence. “I’m a diver. That’s all I came here for.”

  A brisk discussion ensued, everybody arguing against Tom Jimson’s bloodlust, and under it—behind the conversation’s back, as it were—Wally kept staring fixedly at Myrtle, as though trying to convey some private message to her. But what? Was he threatening her? Warning her? Maybe he didn’t want her to tell the others she’d met him before.

  Well, that was all right. She didn’t want to tell anybody anything. Every one of these people scared her, even Gladys.

  The discussion was still raging when three more people crowded into the kitchen, demanding to know what was going on, and the story of Myrtle’s capture and the controversy over her disposal was told all over again. These were two men and a woman, but neither man was the one who’d come raging and angry to pull Doug away from Myrtle’s front porch that time. So how many people were there in this…

  … gang.

  It’s a gang, Myrtle thought. I’ve been kidnapped by a gang. But what in heaven’s name is a gang doing in Dudson Center?

  The woman who’d just arrived, a taller and younger and friendlier-seeming person than Gladys, said at one point, “I wonder if I should phone John, see if he has any ideas for what to do.”

  “My idea is,” Tom Jimson told her, “Al’s out of this story,”

  “The attic,” Tiny said, quiet but emphatic. “Wally’s right.”

  There was general agreement on this, except of course for Tom Jimson, who said, “I’ll tell you one thing, and listen with all your ears. If she gets away, it’s dynamite. Now.”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” everybody said, and then they all gestured to Myrtle, a little impatient and irritated with her. “Come on, come on,” they all said, and the whole crowd escorted her upstairs.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  The warlord and the princess do not recognize each other!

  The princess, stolen by gypsies/crows/Merlin/the childless peasant woman, will have a birthmark in an intimate location.

  Not in Real Life. Or, even if she does, it doesn’t matter, because there isn’t any inheritance.

  A princess has her father’s realm. A warlord has a cache of valuables.

  Oh, the money in the reservoir. I think Tom intends to take that with him. The point is, the princess is in peril!

  Naturally.

  I arranged to have her placed under my protection.

  Naturally.

  And now I wait, and I’m patient, and I see what transpires, isn’t that right?

  Naturally.

  SIXTY-NINE

  When Dortmunder opened one eye, everything was wrong. Opening the second eye didn’t improve the situation. He was still in the same condition, lying on the floor in the living room, facing a television set on which Raquel Welch wore a lab coat and discussed microbiology. Raquel Welch. Microbiology. Microbiology.

  Feet. Feet entered the living room, dressed in scuffed old brown boots and raggedy-cuffed faded blue jeans. Seeing the feet, Dortmunder realized it had been the opening of the apartment door that awakened him, and then he remembered it all: 1) Guffey. 2) Tom/Tim Jimson/Jepson. 3) Handcuffs. 4) Pizza, which Guffey had gone out for.

  “Got it,” Guffey announced from way up there above the feet.

  “Great.” Dortmunder used his left hand to push himself to a seated position, since his right wrist was through a loop of the handcuffs, whose other loop was closed around a segment of the radiator. Dortmunder felt dizzy, woozy, and now he recalled that the reason Guffey had gone out for pizza in the first place was because they both had begun to feel they’d put somewhat too much beer into empty stomachs.

  Companionably, Guffey opened the pizza box on the floor, within easy reach of Dortmunder’s left hand, and then said, “I got us some more beer, too.”

  “Good.”

  Guffey also sat on the floor, democratically, and they both rested their backs against the sofa while they ate pizza and drank beer and watched Raquel Welch run around inside somebody’s bloodstream. She was in a jumpsuit now, more sensibly, but she was still talking about microbiology.

  After a while, Guffey said wistfully, “You know, John, this is about the nicest party I’ve been to in, oh, forty, uh, lemme think, forty-four years.”

  “Well, it’s not a real party, Guffey,” Dortmunder pointed out. “It’s just the two of us.”

  “For me,” Guffey told him, “two’s a crowd.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  They sat in easy silence together awhile longer, and then, during a National Guard commercial—it was really very late at night, damn near morning
already—Guffey said doubtfully, “Maybe it’s Matt.”

  “You think so?”

  “I dunno. Try me on it.”

  Filling his voice with enthusiasm and good cheer—or at least giving it the old dropout try—Dortmunder said, “Hey, Matt, whadaya say? How ya doing, Matt? Hey, look, fellas, it’s Matt Guffey!”

  Guffey listened to all that, listened to the echoes, thought it over, then shook his head. “Don’t think so,” he said.

  “It’ll come to you,” Dortmunder assured him.

  “Yeah, sure it will.”

  That had been a kind of embarrassing moment, much earlier this evening, when Dortmunder, in a psychologically clever ploy to get Guffey to relax his vigil and lower his guard, had said, “Listen, if we’re gonna be stuck together a couple days, let’s at least be friendly. My name’s John.” And it had turned out that Guffey couldn’t remember his first name.

  Well, you couldn’t blame the guy, really. For the last couple of decades, nobody had talked directly to Guffey at all, and during the prison years prior to that people all called one another by their last names to demonstrate how manly they really were despite whatever sexual practices incarceration might have reduced them to, so it had probably been some time in the waning days of the Second World War that anybody had last addressed Guffey by his first name.

  Guffey had been embarrassed, of course, at this lapse in his memory, and Dortmunder had volunteered to help him find the missing name, so now Guffey spent a part of his time—that part not learning about microbiology—thinking about potential names, and whenever he came across one that seemed a possibility Dortmunder would try it out on him. So far, no success.

  A while later, the microbiology movie came to an end and Guffey managed to get to his feet on the second try and go over to switch around the channels till he found Raquel Welch again, this time not discussing anything at all because she was a cavewoman.

  The lack of discussion didn’t seem to harm the impact of the picture.

  “Sam. Try Sam.”

  “Hey, Sam! Sam Guffey! Come over here, Sam!”

  “Nope. Makes me sound like a dog.”

  After another little period of time, Dortmunder came out of a half snooze to realize he had to make room for more beer. (The pizza was all gone, but a couple beers were left.) “Guffey,” he said.

  Guffey looked away from the prehistoric landscapes. “Nurm?”

  “Listen, Guffey,” Dortmunder said. “I gotta go the bathroom.”

  “Gee, so do I,” said Guffey.

  “Yeah, but I’m, uh, I got this, this thing here. The whatchamacallit.”

  “Oh, that thing,” Guffey said, and frowned.

  In previous similar circumstances, Guffey had sat across the room and tossed the key to Dortmunder, who’d unlocked the cuffs and tossed the key back before Guffey permitted him to go away to the bathroom. Then it had been Dortmunder’s responsibility, under Guffey’s watchful gaze and steady rifle, to lock himself to the cuffs again on his return.

  But this time, Guffey made no move to get up and cross the room to where the rifle leaned against an armchair. “Listen, Guffey,” Dortmunder said. “It’s kind of urgent.”

  Guffey frowned at Dortmunder, doubling every wrinkle on his wrinkled face. He said, “You won’t try to run away, will you?”

  “Run? I can barely walk.”

  “Here, take the goddamn thing,” Guffey said, and yanked the handcuff key from his pocket and slapped it into Dortmunder’s palm.

  “Thanks, Guffey,” Dortmunder said, the gravity of the occasion causing him to pay insufficient attention to what Guffey had just done. So he simply unlocked the cuffs, climbed the sofa and the wall to his feet, and lurched a circuitous route to the doorway and the hail and the bathroom.

  While he was in there, Guffey’s voice sounded from the other side of the door: “Try Jack.”

  “Hey, Jack!” Dortmunder yelled, trying to keep his aim true on a sneakily shifting bowl. “I’m fulla beer, Jack! Hey, Jack Guffey, you fulla beer?”

  No answer. Dortmunder finished, flushed, washed, opened the door, and Guffey was standing there, nodding slowly, his eyes at half mast. “No,” he said, “and yes.”

  Dortmunder went back to the living room and sat on the floor in front of the sofa but didn’t put the cuffs back on. He gazed at the Neanderthals—what casting! — and then at the rifle leaning against the armchair beside the television set, and thought things over. He could move, if he wanted to, no question about that. He just didn’t want to, that’s all.

  After a while, Guffey came back into the room, bouncing off the doorposts. He gazed blearily at Dortmunder. Sounding maybe worried, maybe dangerous, certainly drunk, he said, “You didn’t put the cuffs on.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Dortmunder told him. “And I didn’t grab the rifle either. What the hell, Guffey. Any enemy of Tom’s is a friend of mine. Come over here and watch the movie.”

  SEVENTY

  What Doug was, was terrified. Petrified. He had so many things to be terrified about that it petrified him just to try to list them all. That after they let Myrtle go she’d report him to the authorities, for instance. Or that they wouldn’t let her go, but instead would do something dreadful to her and he’d be a party to it. Or that Tom would do something awful to everybody else at the last minute in order to keep all the money for himself. Or that after all these assaults on the reservoir the authorities would have the place staked out and would arrest everybody the minute they showed up for the fourth and final attempt. That Stan Murch, once more at the wheel of Doug’s pickup (because Doug was too nervous to drive), might take it into his head to do another three-sixty just for the high-spirited fun of it. That Andy Kelp, seated on Doug’s other side in the pickup on this run to Long Island, would realize he was proficient enough now to do the rest of the job himself and didn’t need Doug anymore, and so would unload him profitless from the job, via methods ranging from telling him to get lost to killing him.

  But all of these paled into insignificance beside the big one, the main fear, the thing he was at this particular moment the most terrified about, which was: he was going to steal a boat.

  A crime. A felony. An active robbery or theft, in which he was the principal figure. Or at least that’s the way it would look to the law. True, his companions in crime were hardened criminals while he was still so soft he was practically runny, but in fact his expertise was necessary to the selection of just the right boat; his equipment from his shop would fill out the required gear; his pickup truck would tow the stolen boat halfway across New York State; and he would be present throughout the entire event.

  Not that he wanted to be, God knows. He didn’t want to have anything to do with this entire operation. And yet, here he was. At just around the same time that—unknown to those in the pickup—Dortmunder and Guffey were sociably and comfortably observing Raquel Welch in that cozy living room in Manhattan, here was Doug in the middle of the seat of his pickup, flanked by these hardened criminals here, and heading toward his first major crime through a pelting rain that even sounded like doom, thundering on the pickup’s tin roof.

  Somehow or other, by a wandering and purposeless journey he barely remembered and had never understood, Doug’s very first purchase of off-the-back-of-the-truck merchandise from Mikey Donelli (or Donnelly) had led, by minuscule gradations and unnoticeable slippages and the tiniest of forward steps, to this: piracy. On dry land.

  Well, not that dry, really; it was raining just as hard here on Long Island as back upstate. “This is good for us,” Andy announced. “Nobody’s gonna be out and about to observe us.”

  “It’s a well-known fact,” Murch added, racing them along a Long Island Expressway that was virtually empty for almost the only time in that clogged roadway’s existence, “that cops are afraid of water. They never come out in weather like this. That’s why we can make such good time.”

  Very good time, unfortunately. The sign for the Sagtikos Parkway loo
med out of the wet dark, and Murch took the ramp and swung them around onto the southbound highway without in the least slackening speed, leaving a double wake and a million dancing water specks in the oversoaked air behind them.

  From there it was a quick run down to the south shore, Doug’s home area, where they would find their boat. (In one way, it seemed kind of dumb to do his first major criminal act in his own back yard, but on the other hand it would be even dumber to do it where he didn’t know the territory. Also, this way he could get back at a boat dealer who’d shafted him half a dozen years ago, too far back for anybody to think of Doug in connection with that dealer now.)

  The Sagtikos took them to Merrick Highway, and then Doug directed them along that shopping artery through its various name permutations in several identical little south shore towns (identical even by day, when it wasn’t raining) until at last he pointed to the left, across the empty road, and said, “There’s the son of a bitch, right there.”

  It was a revelation to see how professionals handled themselves in this situation; much, he supposed, as he handled himself when working underwater. The danger simply made you more methodical.

  While Murch waited in the pickup, Andy and Doug got out into the pouring rain and Andy collected the short stepladder from the bed of the pickup. Then he and Doug approached the boat dealership, a long two-story building with large showroom and repair shop downstairs and offices up, plus a good-sized yard down at one end containing a number of new and repaired boats and enclosed by a chain-link fence with razor wire on the top.

  Stopping in front of the triply bolted double gate in this fence, Andy peered into the darkness of the yard and said, “Where’s this dog, do you suppose?”

  “Maybe he’s afraid of water,” Doug suggested. “He’s a police dog.”

  “Well, he’ll be along,” Andy said, and opened the stepladder and climbed to its top. While Doug watched, he used the rubber-cowled alligator clips on the long length of wire to bypass the alarm system and make it possible to open the gate.