Drowned Hopes d-7

by Donald E. Westlake

  They were less than ten minutes easing their way across the rainswept reservoir, and then Doug, still tugging gently on the line, saw the knot rise dripping and swaying out of the water dead ahead. The monofilament was invisible in these conditions, so the white knot of rope seemed to be levitating itself. He waved to Dortmunder to stop, looped the rope in a quick knot over the davit on the prow, and went back to the wheelhouse.

  (One down here, four around the wheel.)

  Dortmunder said, “Now I hold the position, right?”

  “You bet,” Doug told him. “Tiny, let me show you the winch.”

  Tiny said, “That includes going out in the rain, huh?”

  Doug went to the rear, and Tiny followed. (One down here, two at the wheel, two at the stern.) Opening a floor panel at the stern, Doug shone his headlamp in and pointed out the machinery. “There’s the switch. That’s the spool. It runs off the same shaft as the propeller, so John can make it go slower or faster up there at the wheel.”

  “Gotcha,” Tiny said.

  “Be right back with the rope,” Doug told him. Straightening, he adjusted face mask and mouthpiece and then backflipped out of the boat.

  Tom shifted on the bunk, putting both feet on the gently rocking floor. One down here, two at the wheel, one at the stern, one in the water. That one’s the duck in the barrel.

  Doug swam to the monofilament, untied the marker rope, tied it to his wrist instead, and made his way back to the boat. He came up on the small platform at the rear, but Tiny was looking the other way. “Tiny!” he called. “I got it here!”

  Right, Tom thought. He stood, leaned forward, reached over the sleeping hitchhiker, slid his hand in under the mattress, and it wasn’t there.

  What? Tom moved his hand left, right… Cold on wrist. Click.

  Tom blinked, and the hitchhiker sat up, the Ingram just visible beyond him under his pillow. Wild-eyed, glaring in triumph, raising their right wrists handcuffed together, the maniac cried, “Now, Tim Jepson! Now!”

  “Oh, shit!” Dortmunder cried. “It’s started!”

  Kelp yelled, “What—” But the rest of his words were blotted by a sudden chatter of automatic gunfire.

  Everybody stared at everybody else. Doug looked ready to jump back into the water. In fact, everybody looked ready to jump into the water, even Dortmunder.

  “Al?”

  The wheel forgotten, Dortmunder concentrated on keeping well away from the opening into the cabin. “Yeah, Tom?”

  “It’s a wash, Al,” Tom’s voice called. “You were cuter than I thought.”

  Dortmunder had no idea in what way he’d been so wonderfully cute. He said, “So now what, Tom?”

  “I’m coming up,” Tom called. “I won’t bother none of you, none of you bother me.”

  “Hold it a second, Tom.”

  Dortmunder pushed frantically at Kelp, gesturing to him to get up on the forward deck, above the cabin and ahead of its entrance. Tiny handed the end of the marker rope back to Doug and moved swiftly to the opposite side of the cabin entrance from Dortmunder. Doug, clutching the marker rope in one hand and the rail in the other, crouched down on the platform sticking out behind the boat at the stern.

  “Jesus Christ, Al,” Tom called, “how much time do you need? I told you, I’m no threat.”

  “You kinda sounded like a threat a minute ago,” Dortmunder called back. “Why don’t you toss that Uzi or whatever it is out ahead of yourself?”

  “You’re still a joker, Al,” Tom said. “Here I come.”

  Here he came, moving in an odd crablike fashion like Quasimodo on his way up to his bells. The Ingram, looking like a particularly mean example of plumbing supplies, was grasped in his left hand, held out in front of himself for balance. His right hand was down behind him at his ankle, as though he were dragging something.

  And, in fact, when he came farther up out of the cabin, it could be seen that he was dragging something. Guffey, a dead weight, bleeding onto the steps, his blood then swirling away once Tom had dragged him out into the rain.

  Tom, at a fast scuttling lope, rushed past Dortmunder and Tiny, dragging Guffey behind him. Then he turned around, already drenched, and stared back at Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny, in a triangle facing him. “Where’s Popeye?” He had to shout over the storm.

  “Diving,” Dortmunder yelled back. “Over to the monofilament.”

  Tom waved the Ingram in the air like a terrorist announcing a victory, but in his case he was only showing it off, because he said, “A trade, Al. This for the key.”

  That was when Dortmunder saw that it was, in fact, his own handcuffs that Guffey had brought along, without Dortmunder’s knowledge, and had used to attach himself to Tom. But Guffey had the key. Wishing Doug would use the advantage he had that Tom didn’t know there was anyone behind him—but knowing damn well Doug would never do one blessed thing—Dortmunder said, “What if it’s no trade, Tom?”

  Raging, Tom grimaced, his teeth shiny in the rain. “I’ll kill the bunch of you!” he snarled, “and use the bread knife down there to cut this idiot’s hand off!”

  “You won’t get your seven hundred thousand,” Dortmunder pointed out.

  “That’s right, Al,” Tom said. “And neither will you. But I’ll be the only one worried about it. Goddammit! Get this idiot off me! Half the money’s yours, Al, it’s yours, I don’t care, just get this—”

  And Guffey, not dead yet after all, suddenly came surging up off the deck, left hand reaching for Tom’s scrawny neck, closing around it. The Ingram in Tom’s hand spattered once more, spraying bullets as he pounded its butt against Guffey’s head, and Dortmunder and Tiny both dove down into the cabin as Kelp jumped headfirst into the reservoir.

  Doug, terrified, reared up on the little platform as Tom and Guffey, struggling in each other’s grasp, toppled over the rail and crashed into him. All three flailed and toppled and splashed into the water, Tom losing the Ingram, Doug losing the rope.

  Guffey, weak, swallowing water, slumped down below the surface, unable to keep afloat. Tom, tangled with him, hoarsely screamed out, “Al! The key! For Christ’s sake, the key!”

  “The rope!” Doug shrieked, and dived, jamming his mouthpiece in, face mask on. Kicking hard, he reached up, and when his fumbling hands found the headlamp’s switch and turned it on, he could see nothing around him but dirty water. Ahead, it must be; lower; out there ahead. He dived.

  Dortmunder and Tiny came stumbling up out of the cabin. “Where—” Tiny said. “Where is everybody?”

  “Help!”

  They rushed to the side rail, and there was Kelp floundering in the water. Tiny bent down, grabbed one of Kelp’s wrists, and yanked him aboard. Then, while Kelp sat on the wet deck wheezing and coughing and gasping, Dortmunder and Tiny looked out at the speckled black surface of the reservoir.

  Nobody.

  Can’t lose the rope, can’t lose the rope, can’t lose the rope. Doug quartered like a hungry fish, slicing through the murky water, straining to see that rope, floating somewhere, nearby, drifting, attached to seven hundred thousand dollars, the only link to seven hundred thousand dollars.

  And I was just there with it, he thought.

  Movement in the water. Doug turned and saw a leg descending, then another, then a cluster of limbs.

  The two bodies floated down past him, entwined, Tom’s face almost unrecognizable with those staring eyes and wide open mouth.

  Shuddering, Doug turned away. More money for the rest of us. More money for the rest of us. The rope, the rope, the rope.

  “Dortmunder,” Tiny said, “this is a mess.”

  “I never expected anything else,” Dortmunder told him.

  The two stood over the wheel, rain beating down all around them as Dortmunder held the position, waiting for Doug to reappear. He was, they’d realized, off looking for the rope to the money, which he’d managed to lose in the general excitement. Kelp was lying down in the cabin, recuperating from his unexpected
plunge. And Tom and Guffey were gone, no question about that.

  Dortmunder had explained to Tiny who Guffey was, and Tiny commented, “I guess it was only a matter of time, with Tom, till one of his pasts caught up with him.”

  “He was safer in jail,” Dortmunder agreed. “But what bothers me, Guffey never did find his first name.”

  “Tom must of known it,” Tiny said. “Maybe he told him on the way down.”

  Kelp came up from the cabin then, looking a lot greener than usual. “Listen,” he said. “Is it okay for the floor down here to be full of water?”

  Find the railroad tracks. Then you find the town. Then you find the railroad station. Then you find the casket and the rope.

  For the first time in his diving life, Doug was being stupid underwater. Greed and panic had combined to make him forget everything he knew. He was down here alone, an incredibly dangerous thing to begin with. He was improperly equipped for the kind of search he’d suddenly started to undertake. And, most stupid of all, he was paying no attention to the passage of time.

  He’d had an hour of air when he started.

  “The fucking boat is sinking,” Dortmunder said. “I’m not going to stand here and have conversations.”

  “John, John,” Kelp said, “all I’m saying is, think about it. You hardly know a thing about how to run this boat, and—”

  “Of course I do.”

  “You know how to hold the position. And how to ease it forward a little bit. Doug knows the whole thing. Even if we’re sinking—”

  Bitterly, Tiny said, “Tom and his goddamn machine gun, shot the bottom full of holes.”

  “Even so,” Kelp said, “we’re sinking slowly. We can wait for Doug.”

  “No way,” Dortmunder said.

  “He needs us.”

  “He’s a pro,” Dortmunder insisted. “He’s dressed for what he’s doing. When he comes up and we aren’t here, he can swim to shore. I can’t swim to shore, not again.”

  Then, to cut through all the crap and get out of there, Dortmunder stepped to the wheel and pushed the accelerator level hard forward. The boat surged ahead and cut through both the monofilament and the rope Doug had been coiling so carefully on the prow. That’s the rope that now wrapped itself tightly a dozen times around the propeller and shaft and stopped the Over My Head dead in the water.

  Standing in the heavy rain, Stan listened and listened but heard no more gunshots. What’s happening out there? He rested one hand on the rear window of the station wagon, looked out over its forward-slanted roof and submerged hood and saw nothing. But nothing.

  So Tom made his move before they got ashore, did he? And did it work?

  Whoever came out ahead out there, the winner or winners will want wheels. For themselves, and for the money. Not this station wagon, this heap will never go anywhere on its own again, but Dortmunder’s car, the Peugeot.

  Just in case; okay? Just in case Tom managed to catch everybody by surprise out there, Stan should do something to defend himself. So he turned and walked upslope to the Peugeot, got behind the wheel, and started the engine. Better than half a tank of gas; good. He switched on the headlights, then got out of the car and splashed through the rain over to the right side of the clearing and in among the trees.

  There were no dry places out here, not after two days and nights of steady rain. Wet and cold but unwilling to make a sitting duck of himself, Stan hunkered down against a tree where he could see the Peugeot’s lights, the clearing, even a bit of the station wagon.

  Hell of a position for a driver.

  “Got it!” Tiny cried. “Pull me up outta here.”

  Dortmunder and Kelp heaved on the rope. The other end of it was tied around Tiny under the armpits, and Tiny was lying half on and half off the platform at the rear of the Over My Head. He’d been reaching farther and farther down under the boat, trying to find an end of rope or—for preference—monofilament, and now at last he’d done it, and once Dortmunder and Kelp’s combined efforts got him completely back up on the platform he rose and held up a jumble of monofilament in his left hand like a serving of angel hair pasta.

  “Beautiful stuff,” Kelp prayed.

  Tiny tied the monofilament to the rail, then climbed over onto the deck and removed the rope from around himself.

  “Tiny, I’m sorry,” Dortmunder said.

  Tiny pointed a fat finger at him. “Dortmunder,” he said, “I want this to be a lesson to you. This is what happens to a person that’s rude. You break off a little discussion before it’s finished, before everybody’s done talking, maybe there’s something you oughta know that you don’t know.”

  “I just didn’t like,” Dortmunder explained, “the idea of being on a sinking ship.”

  “How about,” Tiny asked him, “being on a sinking ship that can’t go nowhere?”

  “That’s worse,” Dortmunder admitted.

  Kelp said, “But we’ll go now, won’t we? We got the monofilament, right?”

  “I got the monofilament,” Tiny reminded him.

  “That’s what I meant,” Kelp agreed. “And the other end of it’s tied to the railroad track in by shore, right? Over where we tried the first time. So now all we do is just tow ourselves in.”

  “If it doesn’t break,” Tiny pointed out. “It’s awful skinny stuff.”

  “It’s supposed to be very strong,” Dortmunder suggested. He was feeling unusually humble. “For bringing in big fish like tunas and marlins and things,” he said.

  “Well, let’s see.” Tiny reached over the side, lifted the monofilament, wrapped it once around his fist, and tugged gently. Then he stopped. “Not bare-handed,” he said. “This stuff’ll take my fingers off.”

  “I’ll get you a rag or something, Tiny,” Dortmunder offered, and went away to the cabin, where the water was almost knee deep now, despite the laborings of the boat’s automatic pump. Ignoring that, or trying to, Dortmunder searched around and found two oven mitts hanging from hooks beside the stove. He waded back up on deck and offered the mitts. “Try these.”

  With some difficulty, Tiny jammed his hands partway into the mitts, then picked up the monofilament and pulled with a slow and even pressure. “Much better, Dortmunder,” he said.

  “Thank you, Tiny.”

  A sound of sloshing was heard from the cabin. Sounding surprised, Kelp said, “I think we’re moving.”

  “So far,” Tiny said. Hand over hand, he reeled in the monofilament.

  Kelp looked over the side. “You’d think Doug would of come up by now,” he said.

  Tree stumps, tree stumps, tree stumps. Doug flew back and forth like an underwater bat over the drowned hillsides, his meager light playing in sepia tones across the devastation. There had to be some sort of landmark around here somewhere, but all Doug could see, every which way he turned, was these rotting tree stumps.

  His turns, in fact, were slower now, less coordinated, as the strain of constant underwater exertion began to take its toll. These are signs he would normally have heeded, but at this moment there was no room in his brain for anything but this:

  I saw the casket full of money, I saw it tonight, I swam down to it, just a little while ago. I held the rope in my hand. I have to be able to get it all back. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise. I have to get it all back.

  No tree stumps. Doug in his weariness almost flew on over the spot, but then his laggard brain caught up with his eyes and be reversed, awkwardly, like a manatee, and shone his light on the spot again, and it was true. A clear swath cut through the forest of decayed stumps.

  A road; it must have been a road. So it has to lead somewhere, and once there I can orient myself.

  This way, or that way? I think it should be that way. Doug set off along the faint line of road, kicking doggedly.

  Stan didn’t hear anybody coming, and then all at once people were moving around in the Peugeot’s headlights. People. The boat hadn’t come back, he knew that much for sure. So who were these people?
>
  Maybe the law did have the reservoir staked out, after all. Cautious, doubtful, apprehensive, Stan straightened stiffly from his hunkered-down position and stalked the people moving around out there in the clearing. Who were they? What were they up to?

  It was Tiny’s shape he recognized first, and right after that the sound of John’s complaining voice: “Now, where the hell is Stan?”

  “Here,” Stan said, stepping forward into their midst and causing all three to jump like little kids in a haunted house. “What’s going on?” Stan asked them. “Where’s the boat?”

  “Down there by the railroad tracks,” Andy told him, pointing vaguely away along the shoreline. “We walked here from there.”

  “Waded here,” Tiny corrected. He was holding his hands in his armpits, pressing his arms against his sides as though the hands were cold or sore or something.

  John said, “Can we go now?”

  “Go?” Stan looked around. “Aren’t we missing a couple people?”

  “And seven hundred thousand dollars,” Tiny said.

  Andy said, “It’s a long story.”

  John said, “Let’s tell it tomorrow, okay? Today is finished.”

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  “The lights are on!” Myrtle cried, in great excitement.

  So then Wally crept over to see what was happening, and after that everybody including Myrtle and Edna had to go over to Oak Street, and the whole long story did have to be told tonight, after all. But at least they were all indoors and warm, and the stay-at-homes were willing to wait until the returnees had changed into dry clothes. By then, May had made soup, Myrtle had made toast, and Edna had made a pitcher of what she called “Bloody Marys that’ll iron your socks.” Under those conditions, it was possible to recount the night’s events without too many qualms or expressions of disgust. Kelp did most of the talking, with amplifications by Tiny and occasional color reportage from Dortmunder.