Drowned Hopes d-7

by Donald E. Westlake

  Guffey looked alert. “Up where?”

  “Not near the water,” Dortmunder said. “Just to the town.”

  “What town?”

  “Now, here’s the deal,” Dortmunder went on. “If you wait until Tom’s got his money, then maybe Tom gets away and you don’t get to meet up with him at all. Which is maybe just as well.”

  Guffey rested a scrawny fist on the kitchen table. “That man ruint my life,” he said. “And I mean that, Dortmunder. I was just a young fella when he got his hooks into me, and he ruint my entire life. My destiny is to catch up with that son of a bitch, or why would you and him come all the way out to Cronley, Oklahoma? What happens after I catch up is between him and me, but I got to have him in my sights one time before I die.”

  “I guess I can understand that,” Dortmunder said. “So this is what I offer. You give me your solemn word you won’t make a move on Tom until this other business is over with, and you can come along with me upstate.”

  “Where to?”

  “But you have to swear you won’t do anything till I say it’s okay.”

  Guffey thought about that. “What if I won’t swear?”

  “Then I go out to the living room and get your rifle,” Dortmunder told him, “and bring it back in here, and wrap it around your neck, and go upstate by myself.”

  Guffey thought about that. “What if I swear, only I’m lying?”

  “I got a lot of friends up there where I’m going, Guffey,” Dortmunder said. “And all you got up there’s one enemy.”

  SEVENTY-THREE

  It hadn’t been easy for Andy Kelp to find a large station wagon with both MD plates and a trailer hitch, but he’d persevered, not settling for second best, and so it was a big solid Chrysler Country Square with woodoid trim that he sat in the front passenger seat of as Stan Murch steered off the county road an hour after alleged sunset that wet evening, towing the big boat (containing Doug, back there familiarizing himself with the controls) onto the same dirt lane they’d used for their very first assault on the reservoir, months ago. “This time we get it!” Kelp said. “I can feel it!”

  Tiny got out of the backseat he was sharing with Tom. Carrying the wire cutters through the pouring rain, he lopped the new padlock at the same old barrier, then lifted the barrier out of the way. “Another déjà vu,” he muttered as he put the barrier back in position after car and boat had passed, then returned to his place in the wagon.

  Last time on this road, in the motor home, Kelp had been the driver, mostly by ear, keeping the lights off and the windows open so he could listen to the bushes as they scraped past. This time, the downpour meant not only that no one in the car had any desire for the windows to be open, but also that Stan felt he could safely drive with the parking lights on. The rain both obscured the lights and lessened the likelihood of observers wandering the nearby vicinity. So the windshield wipers slashed back and forth, flinging water left and right, and through the sporadically clear glass they could dimly see the rutted dirt road and its surrounding trees and shrubbery, all muddily illuminated in a smoky amber glow.

  After a while they reached, and this time saw, the second barrier, at the reservoir property’s perimeter fence, the one Kelp had not quite driven into the first time. Tiny climbed out again and cleared the way again, and when he got back into the car, dumping the wire cutters onto the carpet-covered storage space in back, he said, “I might as well go underwater this time. I couldn’t get any wetter.”

  “Soon be over,” Kelp told him.

  “That’s right,” Tom said mildly.

  “According to the computer,” Wally said, “as soon as they get their hands on the money, Tom is going to try to betray everybody.”

  “I’m afraid that’s true,” May agreed.

  Murch’s Mom sniffed. “You don’t have to be a machine smarter than a human being to dope that out,” she said.

  May said, “The guys out there with Tom know he’s got something in mind. They’ll keep an eye on him.”

  “That’s right,” Murch’s Mom said. “They aren’t cream-puffs, you know. My boy Stanley can take care of himself.”

  “And Tiny,” May said. “And Andy.”

  Wally cleared his throat. “Just in case,” he said.

  Murch’s Mom gave him an irritable look. “Are you talking against my boy Stanley?”

  “What I’m saying is,” Wally assured her, “we ought to think about all the possibilities. That’s what the computer says we should do, and I agree with it.”

  “You always agree with that computer,” Murch’s Mom told him. “You got a real mutual admiration society going there, that’s why you keep it around.”

  May said, “Wally, what are you getting at? What possibilities?”

  “Well,” Wally said, “let’s just say Tom does something really underhanded and nasty—”

  “Sounds right,” Murch’s Mom said.

  “And let’s just say,” Wally went on, “that he wins. He’s got the money and he’s, you know, harmed our friends.”

  “Killed them, you mean,” May said.

  “I don’t really like to say that.”

  “But it’s what you mean.”

  Wally looked pained. “Uh-huh.”

  “Hmp,” said Murch’s Mom. But then she shook her head and said, “All right, go ahead, what then?”

  “Well, that’s the question,” Wally told her. “Is Tom just going to take the money and run? Or is he going to say to himself, ‘I don’t want any witnesses left behind?’ ”

  May looked at the storm-battered front windows. “You mean he might come back here.”

  “The computer thinks so.”

  Murch’s Mom said, “And you agree with it.”

  “So do I,” May said. She looked very worried.

  Wally said, “And then there’s Myrtle.”

  Both women were taken aback by this abrupt change of subject. Murch’s Mom said, “Myrtle? That little ninny upstairs? What’s she got to do with anything?”

  “Well, that’s just it,” Wally said. “Nothing.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Murch’s Mom agreed.

  “What I mean is,” Wally told her, “the rest of us got into this because we wanted to, we chose to be here. But Myrtle didn’t. And if her father comes back and—”

  May said, “Who?”

  “Tom’s her father,” Wally said. Nodding at Murch’s Mom, he said, “That lady Edna you play canasta with—”

  “The girl’s mother. I know.”

  “She worked in the library in Putkin’s Corners when Tom buried the casket behind it. She was the one told him they weren’t going to put in the parking lot after all. And her father was the town undertaker; it was from him that Tom got the casket.”

  May said, “Why didn’t Tom say anything when Tiny caught her?”

  “He doesn’t know. And I don’t think he’d care.”

  Nodding thoughtfully, Murch’s Mom said, “Not a sentimental kind of guy, Tom.”

  May said, “Wally? Do you and your computer have an idea what we should do?”

  “Go to Myrtle’s house.”

  They stared at him. May said, “For heaven’s sake, why?”

  “It’s just one block over,” Wally explained. “We can see this house from there. If we turn off all these lights and go over there, then we can keep an eye on this house, and when the lights turn back on I’ll come over and look in the window and make sure everything’s okay.”

  May said, “Doesn’t this mean letting Myrtle and her mother in on the whole thing?”

  “Well, Myrtle’s already in on a lot of it,” Wally pointed out. “And her mother already knows Gladys, and—”

  “I don’t particularly,” Murch’s Mom said through gritted teeth, “like that name.”

  “Oh.” Wally blinked. “Okay, sorry. Anyway, you know Myrtle’s mother, and she knows Tom’s in town. She saw him go by in a car, and that’s what started Myrtle trying to find out things.”
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  May and Murch’s Mom looked at each other. Murch’s Mom said, “Well? What do you think?”

  “I think I wish John was here,” May said.

  “There’s never anybody home in this goddamn place,” Dortmunder said, fifteen minutes later, as he and Guffey pulled to the curb in front of the darkened 46 Oak Street. Sitting behind the wheel of the Peugeot Dormant he’d borrowed three hours ago from a cross street in the theater district back in New York, Dortmunder gazed discontentedly through the rain at the house where half the people he knew were supposed to be in residence, and where not one light was shining. Not one.

  “Something wrong?” Guffey’d been getting increasingly nervy over the course of the trip, which could only be partially explained by the miserable highway conditions and Dortmunder’s less than professional driving skills. He hadn’t offered any first names for Dortmunder to try since way down by exit 2 on the Palisades Parkway. (George: No.) And now he sat hunched beside Dortmunder, chin tucked in as he blinked out at the night and the rain and the old dark house. He looked like one of the three little pigs watching for the wolf; the straw-house pig.

  “Well, I suppose something’s wrong,” Dortmunder answered. “Something’s usually wrong. So what we’re gonna do, you stick close to me, and we’re gonna go in there and not turn on any lights.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And we’ll see what we see.”

  Guffey frowned. “With the lights off?”

  “Yes,” Dortmunder said. “We’ll see what we see with the lights off. Out.”

  They got out of the car into the downpour and ran to the comparative safety of the porch. Guffey shied at the sight of the glider swinging back and forth with nobody on it. Approaching the door, Dortmunder muttered, “Last time they left the place a hundred percent unlocked. Quiet, now.”

  Guffey, who hadn’t been saying anything, remained quiet.

  Dortmunder gently opened the screen door, gently turned the knob of the inner door, gently pushed, and the door yawned open. Dortmunder slid silently in, followed by Guffey, and they quietly closed both doors.

  “Stick close to me,” Dortmunder mouthed into Guffey’s ear, and Guffey nodded, a movement barely visible in the faint glow that was all that could reach here through the rain from the nearest streetlight.

  They moved through the house, found nothing, found nobody, and found no explanation. “I should have known this,” Dortmunder said aloud, back in the living room, Guffey still so close to his right elbow it was like wearing a sleeve guard.

  “You should have?” Guffey asked. “Should have known what?”

  “That I’d have to give that reservoir one more whack at me,” Dortmunder said.

  Soft ground. Heavy boat. Stan finally got the station wagon and boat turned around in the restricted area of the clearing at the end of the access road, but when he tried to ease down the muddy slope into the water everything immediately bogged down. The two rear wheels of the hauler virtually disappeared into the mud, and the rear wheels of the station wagon spun messily in place.

  “Well, hell,” Stan said. “Everybody out.”

  “Hell it is,” Tiny agreed, and everybody but Stan climbed out into the rain and the dark and the mud and the mess and a kind of nasty little needle-tipped wind.

  The station wagon was lighter now, but the boat was still heavy and all the wheels were still stuck. Kelp and Tiny pushed against the front of the wagon while Tom stood off to the side and observed. The wagon’s big engine wailed and whined in competition with the wailing and whining of the storm, but nothing happened except that the pushers got extremely muddy.

  Finally, Stan put the wagon in neutral, opened his window, and called Kelp and Tiny over. They slogged around to talk to him, looking like the defensive line in the final quarter of a particularly hard-fought football game, and Stan said, “We aren’t getting anywhere.”

  Tiny said, “You noticed that, too, huh?”

  “What we gotta do,” Stan said, “is get up on dry land and start again.”

  “There isn’t any dry land,” Kelp told him.

  “Drier,” Stan explained. “A little more solid, I mean. If I get up there all the way to where the road comes in, up at the top of the clearing, then I can get up some speed, run it backward fast as I can, get some momentum on shoving that goddamn boat into the water.”

  “Without jackknifing,” Kelp pointed out.

  “I gotta give it the try,” Stan said.

  “Very tricky on this messy surface,” Kelp suggested.

  Tiny said, “I hate having ideas like this, because I know who they make work for, which is me, but I think maybe we oughta drag it up to the end of the clearing like you say, and then turn this blessed car around and put the trailer hitch on the front bumper instead of the back, so you can drive frontward in low-low.”

  “Now that is an idea,” Stan told him.

  “I was afraid it was,” Tiny agreed. “And now I got another one. Doug can get down off that boat and help push.”

  Kelp grinned at the idea. “Doug’ll love that,” he said.

  “We all will,” said Tiny.

  They went around to the prow of the boat and yelled at Doug for a while, and after he gave up pretending he didn’t understand what they wanted, he very reluctantly came down off his high boat and helped.

  At first the station wagon didn’t want to move forward either, but then its rear wheels came struggling up out of the holes they’d dug, and the hauler’s wheels grudgingly began to lumber along through the mire, and movement took place. At the top of the clearing, Stan brought the wagon and the boat to a stop. The V tongue on the hauler was removed from the trailer hitch, and then Tiny lay down in the mud and Kelp stood by to hand him tools while Tiny, his work illuminated by the station wagon’s back-up lights, with some difficulty removed the muddy hitch from the muddy bumper. Then Stan turned the wagon around and Tiny bent over the front bumper with the trailer hitch in his hands and studied the situation. “It doesn’t want to fit,” he decided.

  “Make it fit,” Kelp advised.

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured.”

  Doug, sounding scared, his voice cutting through the ongoing roar of the storm, said, “Stan, turn off your lights!”

  Stan didn’t ask questions. The heel of his hand slapped the headlight control on the dashboard. Their clearing became abruptly black, pitch black, and they all turned their heads to watch the bright lights approaching down the access road through the rain and the night and the sopping trees.

  “Still no light,” Myrtle said, coming back down to the living room from her own bedroom, where she had the best view past the intervening buildings to the house on Oak Street.

  “Oh, I think they’ll take another hour, maybe even more,” Wally told her.

  “Plenty of time,” Edna said, “to tell me what’s going on. Myrtle, you begin.”

  “I think I see a car,” Dortmunder said, peering through the windshield and out at the storm-tossed night. “They’re probably all out on the reservoir in that big boat May told me about.”

  He braked the car to a stop at the beginning of the clearing. It was hard to see anything at all through the sheets of rain, even with the headlights on; the zillion raindrops just bounced the light right back at you.

  Guffey said, “What’s three thousand, seven hundred fifty dollars compounded at eight percent interest for forty-three years?”

  “I give up,” Dortmunder said. “What is it?”

  “Well, I don’t know.” Guffey sounded surprised. “That’s why I was asking you.”

  “Oh,” Dortmunder said. “I thought it was one of those puzzle things.”

  “It’s what Tim Jepson owes me,” Guffey said grimly. “So I figure a lot of that money you say is down there in that reservoir comes to me.”

  “You can discuss that with Tom,” Dortmunder advised him. “And remember, half of it belongs to the rest of us.”

  “Sure, sure. Sure.”

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nbsp; Dortmunder switched off the headlights. “Can’t see a goddamn thing,” he said.

  “Sure you can’t,” Guffey said. “You turned the lights off.”

  “I’m looking for their lights,” Dortmunder told him. “We better get out of the car.”

  The interior light went on when they opened the doors, illuminating the inside of the car but nothing else, and only making the surrounding blackness all the blacker once the doors were shut.

  Dortmunder and Guffey, two bulky huddled figures in the night, met at the front of their car, and Dortmunder pointed past Guffey’s nose, putting his hand up close so Guffey could see it. “The reservoir’s that way, and I thought I saw a car over there. That’s where we’ll look.”

  “Uh,” Guffey said, and fell down.

  “Uh?” Dortmunder turned, bending, to see what had happened to Guffey, and therefore spoiled Tiny’s aim. The sap merely brushed down the side of his head, not quite removing his ear, and bounded painfully off his shoulder. “Ow!” he yelled. “Goddammit, who is that?”

  “Dortmunder?” came Tiny’s voice out of the dark. “Is that you?”

  “Who the hell did you expect?”

  “Well, we didn’t expect nobody, Dortmunder,” Tiny said, sounding aggrieved. “Who’s this with you?”

  Out of the darkness, Tom’s voice said, “So you couldn’t keep away, huh, Al?”

  “Looks like it,” Dortmunder admitted.

  “Who is this guy?” Tiny wanted to know, prodding the fallen Guffey with his toe.

  Aware of Guffey’s helplessness and of Tom’s presence, Dortmunder said, “Um. A hitchhiker.”

  The others had gathered around now, and it was Kelp who said, “John? You brought a hitchhiker to the caper?”

  “Well, I couldn’t leave the poor guy out there in the rain,” Dortmunder said. At the same time, he was inwardly furious with himself, thinking: Why did I say hitchhiker? Well, what else would I say? Aloud, he said, “It’s okay, Andy. Trust me, I know what I’m doing. You guys finished already?”

  That changed the subject, with a vengeance. Everybody vied to tell him how much fun they were having, even Tom. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Dortmunder said. “Let’s see this monster boat.”