What's the Worst That Could Happen?

by Donald E. Westlake

  “You would be,” Dortmunder said.

  7

  T he town of Carrport boasted the fourth-highest-paid municipal police force in New York State. The boys and girls in blue enjoyed that status, and their jobs, and saw no reason to agitate for an increase to Number Three. Crime in Carrport was low, drug use discreet and limited for the most part to the more affluent residents in the privacy of each other’s homes, and the risk of injury or death on the job was much lower than in, oh, say, certain precincts of New York City. It was true that local rents were high, even on a well-paid cop’s salary, and local supermarkets charged gourmet prices for normal crap, but so what? COLAS were written into the police contract; they wouldn’t suffer. All in all, “Service With A Smile” might have been a better slogan for the Carrport Municipal Police Department than the “To Protect, To Serve, To Uphold And To Honor” thought up by some long-forgotten alderman and squeezed onto every CMPD car door, just under the shield.

  The CMPD’s equipment was also up to snuff, modern and well maintained, though of course not what the police forces of Los Angeles or Miami would consider the state of the art. When money had to be spent, the town fathers preferred to spend it on the personnel rather than on cute toys that would never be needed. (Besides, if the demand for a cute police toy ever did arise, they could always call on the Suffolk County cops, who were also well paid, but who in addition were equipped grandly enough to enable them to invade Syria, if the overtime could be worked out.)

  The call that evening to Suffolk County 911 was logged in by the emergency service staff in HQ at Riverhead, at eleven minutes past nine, then rerouted to the CMPD, where the duty sergeant took down the information, understanding at once everything implied by that address, Twenty-Seven Vista Drive, numbers that even in a police report would always be spelled out. He immediately called one of the two cars on patrol duty this evening, manned (and womanned) by Officers Kebble and Overkraut. Kebble was driving this shift, so Overkraut took the squeal: “Overkraut.”

  “Prowler captured at Twenty-Seven Vista Drive. Householder is armed and has the suspect in custody. Householder is a Mr. Fairbanks.”

  The name was known to Kebble and Overkraut, of course, but neither commented. In the old days, there would have been some badinage on the radio at this point, while Kebble sped them toward Vista Drive, but not any more. These days, recordings are made, and kept, of every damn thing. Creativity has been throttled in its crib. “On our way,” Overkraut told the sergeant and the tape and God knows who else, adding no remark about the richness or famousness of the householder called Fairbanks, and no disparagement voiced about householders packing heat. “Over and out,” Overkraut said, put the mike away, and made his comments unsupervised to Officer Kebble, who commented back.

  There was no need for either the rooflights or the siren, not in Carrport on a quiet spring Thursday evening at quarter past nine. And not if the householder were already holding a gun on the intruder. So Officer Kebble drove swiftly but unobtrusively across town and stopped in the driveway at Twenty-Seven Vista, where the house was lit up like a NASA launch. The officers donned their hats and stepped out of their vehicle. Officer Kebble paused to adjust her equipment belt around her waist—it always rode up when she was in the car—and then they proceeded to the front door, which opened just as they reached it, and an astonishingly beautiful young woman with tousled hair, wearing a white terry-cloth robe, greeted them, saying in a husky whisper, “Oh, good, here you are. Max is in the parlor with him.”

  Why, Officer Overkraut asked himself, as they thanked the young woman and moved into the house in the direction she’d indicated, just why can’t Officer Kebble look more like that ?

  The parlor. Beige furniture. Gray-green wall-to-wall carpet. Large stone fireplace, with no ashes and irritatingly shiny brass andirons. Prints of paintings of Mediterranean village streets. Lamps with large round pale shades. And Max Fairbanks standing in the middle of the room in another white terry-cloth robe, plus a small dark S&W .38 clamped in his right fist, pointed unswervingly at the burglar, a slope-shouldered defeated-looking fellow in dark clothing and thinning hair, who had an air of such dejection and collapse there seemed no need to point anything at him more threatening than a banana.

  “Evening, Mr. Fairbanks,” Overkraut said, moving toward the burglar, bringing out his handcuffs, being sure not to get in the line of fire.

  “Very prompt response time,” Max Fairbanks said. “Very good.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The burglar humbly extended his wrists to be cuffed. Overkraut had meant to cuff him behind his back, but the gesture was so meek, so pathetic, that he hadn’t the heart to make things worse for the guy, so he went ahead and squeezed the metal rings onto those bony wrists, while the burglar sighed a long and fatalistic sigh.

  While Overkraut frisked the burglar, surprised to find him weaponless, Kebble said, “Any idea how many of them broke in, Mr. Fairbanks?”

  “Only this one, I think,” Fairbanks answered. “Looks like he did something cute to the front-door alarm.”

  Officer Kebble shook her head, while the extremely attractive young woman in terry-cloth robe number one came in and stood by the door to watch. “If only,” Kebble said, “they would turn those talents to good. But they never do.”

  Overkraut said, “You won’t need that pistol any more, sir.”

  “Right.” Fairbanks dropped the S&W into his terry-cloth pocket.

  Kebble said, “Had he taken anything, sir, before you found him?”

  “I don’t think so, he was just—” But then Fairbanks stopped and frowned at the burglar and said, “Just a minute.”

  The burglar lifted his head. “What,” he said.

  “Let me see those hands,” Fairbanks demanded.

  “What? What?”

  “Show Mr. Fairbanks your hands,” Overkraut said.

  “I got nothing in my hands.” The burglar turned his hands over as best he could with cuffs on, to show his open palms.

  “No,” Fairbanks said. “That ring.”

  The burglar stared. “What?”

  “That’s my ring!”

  The burglar covered the ring with his other hand. “No, it isn’t!”

  “That son of a bitch took my ring! I left it on the kitchen sink, and—”

  “It’s my ring!”

  “Quiet, you,” Overkraut said, and meaningfully touched the nightstick on his belt.

  “But—”

  “Officers, I want that ring.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t want you to impound it as evidence, or any of that nonsense, I want my ring back, and I want it now.”

  “It’s my ring!”

  Overkraut faced the agitated burglar. “Unless you want real trouble, mac,” he said, “you’ll take that ring off this second, and you won’t give me any lip.”

  “But—”

  “That’s lip.”

  “I—”

  “And that’s lip,” Overkraut said. He slid the nightstick out of its loop on his belt.

  The burglar breathed like a bellows, very nearly producing more lip, but managed to control himself. Bobbing on his heels like somebody who needs badly to go to the bathroom, he at last pulled the ring off the finger of his right hand and dropped it into Overkraut’s left palm. “This isn’t right,” he said.

  Ignoring him, Overkraut turned to drop the ring into Fairbanks’s palm, saying, “Glad you spotted that, sir.”

  “Oh, so am I, Officer.” Holding the ring up, smiling on it, he said, “There you are, you see? The symbol of twee. I based my whole corporation on this.”

  If that was an insider tip, Overkraut didn’t get it. “Well, I’m glad you got it back, anyway, sir,” he said.

  Sounding mulish, the burglar said, “It isn’t right. I’ll go along with some things, but that isn’t right.”

  “Officers,” Fairbanks said, as he slipped the ring onto the third finger of his own right hand (he
had a wedding ring on the left, though the attractive young woman over by the door didn’t, Overkraut noticed), “officers, I have to say, although I’m grateful for your presence, and I’m glad we captured this fellow and got my ring back—”

  “My ring.”

  “—I have to admit, there’s a certain embarrassment involved here, and—I’m not sure how to say this, particularly in front of the, uh, what do you call him? Perpetrator?”

  Kebble said, “Why don’t I put him in the car, and call in to the station that we got him, and, sir, you can talk to my partner.”

  “That’s very good, Officer, thank you so much.”

  Kebble herded the burglar out of the room, the man throwing many sullen looks over his shoulder on the way, and once they had gone, Fairbanks said to Overkraut, “Officer, I’m now going to explain to you why, although your capture of this felon this evening is creditable and indeed newsworthy, my own presence here, and Miss Kimberly’s, are, for a variety of reasons, best left out of the picture.”

  “Mr. Fairbanks,” Overkraut said, “I’m all ears.” Which was in fact almost accurate.

  8

  D ortmunder was very very very angry.

  To be arrested was one thing, to be convicted, sent to prison, given a record, made to wear ill-fitting denim, forced to live in close proximity to thoroughly undesirable citizens, listen to lectures, take shop, eat slop, all part of the same thing, all within the known and accepted risks of life. But to be made fun of? To be humiliated? To be robbed . . . by a householder ?

  To have May’s ring stolen, that was what hurt. That was what changed the whole situation, right there. Until that point, facing the householder and the householder’s gun—and so much for all those chapters the householder was supposed to be away in—and then facing the local law, Dortmunder had fully expected to go forward from here in a normal fashion, through the program, all hope gone, three times and you’re in, throw away the key, okay, ya got me, I’ll never live on the outside again.

  But when the son of a bitch stole the ring, that’s when it changed. That’s when Dortmunder knew he could no longer play by the rules. He was going to get that ring back. Which meant, he was going to escape.

  The woman cop with the lard ass walked him out to the cop car in the driveway and put him in the backseat, then hit the button that locked both rear doors and raised the thick wire mesh divider between front and back seats, imprisoning him in there. Then she sat up front, behind the wheel, to use her radio.

  All right. He was going to escape, that was a given. Which meant he had to do it before they reached the local police station, where they would not only have sturdy cells to lock him into but would surely take his fingerprints at once, so that even if he escaped after that they’d still know who he was, and it would be much more difficult, henceforward, to live a normal life. So it had to be now, in this car, before they got where they were going.

  A workman thinks first of his tools. What did he have, besides these handcuffs, which all they did was restrict his movements? (His movements would be even more restricted were the cuffs holding his wrists behind his back, but Dortmunder had undergone the process of arrest once or twice before in his life, and he’d learned, particularly with a younger or fairly inexperienced cop, that if one humbly extended one’s wrists and looked hangdog, often one got the more comfortable option of being cuffed in front. It had worked this time, too, so he didn’t have to do the Houdini thing of climbing through his own arms, like squirming backward through a barrel hoop.)

  Tools, tools, tools . . . He had a belt, with a buckle. He had shoes, with shoelaces. His pants had a zipper, and the zipper had a pull tab, the metal piece you grasp when opening or closing the zipper. The pull tab was not attached to the zipper slide but was held to it by a tooth extending inward from the tab into a groove on each side of the slide. Dortmunder, watching the back of the woman cop’s head, reached down to the front of his pants. Grasping the pull tab in one hand and the slide in the other, he twisted them in opposite directions, and the pull tab came off in his fingers. A tool.

  The rear doors of the cop car were shut and locked, but were otherwise ordinary automobile doors, except there were no buttons or cranks to open the windows, just little blank shiny metal caps where the buttons or cranks would normally be. The inside panel beneath each shut window was held in place by a whole lot of Phillips-head screws.

  Dortmunder slid over to the left, behind the woman cop. His right hand moved under his left hand, as he reached down between his hip and the door and inserted a top corner of the pull tab into the X in the head of the nearest screw. He applied pressure, but nothing happened, so he stopped, took a breath, gripped the pull tab more tightly, and gave a sudden jerk. Resistance, resistance; the screw turned.

  Fine; loose is all we need right now. Dortmunder moved on to the next screw, up near his left elbow. Same resistance, same sudden jerk, same abrupt victory. The third screw, though, had to be jerked twice before it quit fighting.

  Dortmunder had loosened five of the screws, with at least that many still to go, when the male cop with the dirty hat came out, got into the passenger seat up front, gave one casual glance back at his slumped and oblivious prisoner, tossed his hat onto the floor (no wonder it was dirty), and said, “Okay, we can take him in.”

  “What did he want to talk to you about back there?”

  The male cop laughed. “Wait’ll you hear,” he said, and Dortmunder loosened the sixth screw.

  The female cop drove, Dortmunder worked on the screws, and the male cop told the story about Max Fairbanks and the bankruptcy court. Fairbanks—so that son of a bitch who’d copped Dortmunder’s ring was the guy himself, the head cheese—had given the cop a capsule version of his legal situation, and it came out exactly the way Gus had described it to Dortmunder, except with the added wrinkle that Max Fairbanks was in violation of the court order in re that house there, and didn’t want anybody to know about it.

  Isn’t that a nice one? Max Fairbanks is breaking the law, he’s going against an order from a judge, and he asks this meatheaded cop with the dirty hat to aid and abet him in his crime, and the cop does it! Is life unfair, or what?

  It’s unfair. The cop had agreed that, since Max Fairbanks wasn’t supposed to be there, and since in addition he certainly wasn’t supposed to be there with that particular young woman, it was the two cops who had noticed a light on in the house they knew was supposed to be empty, and had entered, and captured the burglar themselves.

  “That’s better for you, too,” the male cop said, turning his head to look back at Dortmunder through the wire mesh. “If there’s nobody in the house, it’s simple burglary, but if there’s somebody home when you break in it’s robbery, and you’ll do heavier time for that. So you luck out, you see?”

  “Thank you,” Dortmunder said, and popped the last screw.

  Carrport is an early town, and on weeknights not much of a happening town, not since the Gatsbys and the flappers faded away. The streets are lined with many more leafy trees than streetlights, so there was rarely enough light to make its way inside the police car as it drove steadily from the residential area surrounding the cove and headed uptown and uphill toward the main business district, where the police station stood. The darkness was fine for Dortmunder as he removed all those screws, pocketing them so they wouldn’t make noise rolling around on the floor, and as he silently popped the panel out at last and leaned it against the rear of the front seat, behind the female cop, carefully smearing fingerprints away with his palms. But then the darkness got to be a little too much of a good thing, because Dortmunder needed to see the machinery inside the door before he could go on to phase two.

  And here’s the business district, such as it is; real-estate agents and video stores. Most places call this section downtown, but in Carrport it’s uphill to here from the cove, the businesses placed up and away from the more valuable real estate down around the water, so the locals call it uptown, and when
they need anything they go somewhere else.

  Still, there were more streetlights here, and fewer leafy trees, so now Dortmunder could see the layout inside the door. This bar goes across here, this elbow goes this way, and if you pull this pin out here—

  Thunk. The window dropped like a guillotine into the doorwell.

  “What was that?” cried the male cop, and the female cop slammed on the brakes, which was good, because Dortmunder, headfirst, pulling and then pushing himself with his handcuffed hands, was going out the window, kicking himself away from the car as he fell, ducking his head down and hunching his shoulders up, landing on his curved upper back, then rolling out flat, faceup, then spinning to the right several times because of his remaining momentum from the car. And then, bruised, battered, manacled but free, he staggered to his feet while the cops were still trying to get their vehicle stopped over there, and ran for the nearest darkness he could find.

  9

  M ax’s eyes glittered under the porch lights as he watched the sparkly police car move away down the brightly illuminated asphalt and on past the gateposts to the outer darkness, bearing off that hapless burglar with the hangdog look. And without his ring. Find a job you’re better suited to, my friend, that’s my advice.

  Was there a better feeling than this? Not only to have won, but to have rubbed your enemy’s nose in his defeat. The ring twinkled on Max’s finger, still warm from the burglar’s hand.

  This was why he was a winner, a winner against all the odds, and always would be. Luck followed the bold. And look what it had brought him this time.

  When he’d first decided to take the ring, Max hadn’t as yet looked closely at it, hadn’t realized it actually did belong to him, in an odd and delightful way. The taking had been merely an amusing fillip to an already enjoyable evening; to cap it all by robbing the robber. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?