What's the Worst That Could Happen?

by Donald E. Westlake

  Or the one where they knocked out the power lines, having first drawn trails in fluorescent paint to the places they wanted to reach; like the middle of the stream.

  Or the bomb scare.

  Or the one where they stole the tiger from the zoo—Wally Whistler would be better than Ralph Winslow at that part, actually—and released it into the casino.

  Or the one . . .

  Well. The point was, the details would have to wait, that’s all, until Dortmunder got to Vegas, which would be tonight, on the late flight out of Newark, if he could ever get finished packing here.

  But, no. The phone had to keep ringing. Briefly, that first time, he considered not answering it, but it could be May from the supermarket; since she wasn’t coming along on this trip, she might have some last-minute thing she wanted to say. Or it could be any of the other four guys in the caper, with a problem; people sometimes have problems. So every time the phone rang he answered it, and every time it was the same thing, and what it was was, everybody wanted in.

  The first was Gus Brock: “John, I thought we were pals again.”

  “I got no problems with you, Gus,” Dortmunder admitted.

  “So how come I’m included out?”

  “Oh, you mean, uh . . .”

  “I mean the little visit to Vegas,” Gus said. “Andy Kelp just happened to mention it.”

  “Mention should be Andy Kelp’s middle name,” Dortmunder said.

  “My lady and his lady and him and me,” Gus said, “knocked back a little omelette for lunch, and the subject come up, and my question is, where am I in this thing?”

  “Gus,” Dortmunder said, “it isn’t that we aren’t pals, you know that, but for what I need—”

  “You’re talking an awful lot of security,” Gus said, “a place like that.”

  “I know I am,” Dortmunder agreed, “but I’ve always said, if you can’t do a task with five guys, you—”

  “I want aboard, John,” Gus said. “And this time, it isn’t for the percentage, you know what I mean?”

  “No,” Dortmunder said.

  “I want to be there,” Gus told him, “when you get the ring. Okay? I wanna help. Just solidarity, like.”

  “Well, say, Gus,” Dortmunder said, extremely uncomfortable, “that’s, uh, that’s pretty, uh . . .”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Gus said. “I’ll ride along with Andy.”

  “Okay, Gus,” Dortmunder said. He felt unexpectedly pleased and cheerful and buoyed up, and at the same time he was thinking he could always alter the plan a little, do different details when it came time to do the details, and Gus would probably be a useful addition to the crew anyway, and the five man rule wasn’t written in stone, so what the heck. “See you there,” he said, and hung up, and went back to his packing, and barely had a drawer open when the phone rang.

  This time, it was Fred Lartz, the one-time driver whose wife, Thelma, these days did the actual driving. “John,” he said, “I was talking to Ralph Winslow this morning, I hear you’re gonna get that ring back.”

  “I hope I am.”

  “The way Ralph describes it,” Fred said, “you’re gonna need more than one driver. I mean, you got Stan, am I right?”

  “More than one driver? Why would I—”

  “You’re gonna have vehicles comin into town,” Fred said, “and goin out of town. Think about it, John.”

  “You mean, you want in.”

  “Thelma and me,” Fred said, “we haven’t had a vacation out west in a long time. Nice driving out there. We’d like to do our bit with you, John. Thelma and me. We talked it over, and that’s what we think.”

  So Dortmunder agreed that Fred and Thelma should take part, and this time he wasn’t even back in the bedroom when the phone rang, and it was another longtime associate, with the same story, and no way to tell the guy no.

  It went on like that, phone call after phone call. And then there came a phone call from A.K.A., who said, “John, I hear you’re gonna make a trip.”

  “And you want to come along.”

  “John, I really would if I could,” A.K.A. said. “But you know me, I always got these little stews on the fire, stews on the fire, you gotta stick around those little stews if you got them goin, you know.”

  “I remember,” Dortmunder said. “Fred Mullins of Carrport told me about that.”

  “And wasn’t that a shame, John?” A.K.A. asked. “I remember that whole thing like it was yesterday.”

  “So do I,” Dortmunder said. “Some of the names are fading, though.”

  “What I feel,” A.K.A. said, “is I owe you a little something for things that didn’t work out, here and there, now and again, once and a while.”

  “It’s good of you to feel that way,” Dortmunder assured him.

  “So do you remember,” A.K.A. asked, “a guy named Lester Vogel? Used to be in the luggage business, making luggage, you know.”

  “I don’t think I do,” Dortmunder said.

  “Went to jail for a while, some time back.”

  “For making luggage?”

  “Well, you know,” A.K.A. said, “Lester liked to put his initials on his luggage, expression of pride and all that, and turns out, with the initials on, and the designs and so on, his stuff looked an awful lot like some other stuff that had the edge on him in terms of getting there first. There was this talk of counterfeit and all this, and these other people had the inside track with the law, you know, so Lester went inside, carrying his goods in a pillowcase, nobody’s initials on it.”

  “Same thing,” Dortmunder said, “happened to a guy I know, making watches. He called them Rolez.”

  “These things happen,” A.K.A. said, “and you’d expect a little understanding from the competition, mistakes can come along to anybody, but there you are.”

  “Uh huh,” Dortmunder said. “Where am I?”

  “Lester’s out,” A.K.A. told him. “Got out a year or so ago.”

  “I’m glad,” Dortmunder said.

  “Moved out west for his health,” A.K.A. said. “Moved to a place in Nevada called Henderson, near Vegas.”

  We might be getting to it now, Dortmunder thought, and said, “Oh, yeah?”

  “Has a little factory there.”

  “Back in the luggage business?”

  “No no, he’s in the household cleaner business now,” A.K.A. said. “Little stuff to make the house look shiny and nice.”

  “Spic and Span,” Dortmunder suggested.

  “Well, I think his is Spin and Span,” A.K.A. said. “Same color box, though. But his big seller is Clorex.”

  “Ah,” said Dortmunder.

  “Sells pretty well there in the southwest,” A.K.A. said, “across the border into Mexico, down along the Caribbee. One way and another, you know, he undercuts the competition pretty good.”

  “I bet he does.”

  “I could give him a call,” A.K.A. suggested, “tell him you might drop by.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The thing is,” A.K.A. said, “Lester’s got employees, he’s got buildings, he’s got trucks, it could be he could be of use to you, you know what I mean? A lot more than if I came along, even if I could. I mean, what do I know about out west?”

  A sudden boulder in the stream, right there. And another. And another. This is a new idea, it uses all those volunteers keep calling on the phone. Dortmunder, remembering an interesting fact about Las Vegas, said, “This business, your friend, this is chemicals, am I right?”

  “Cleaning products,” A.K.A. said. “We’re not talking drugs here, John, controlled substances, nothing like that.”

  “No, I understand,” Dortmunder said. “And maybe I will get in touch with your friend. You wanna give me a number?”

  A.K.A. did, and said, “I’ll call him now, say you’re on the way.”

  “A guy like this,” Dortmunder said, “the business he’s in, he’s probably got industrial gas, wouldn’t he?”

  “You could
ask him,” A.K.A. said, “but I should think probably, yeah. All that Tex-Mex stuff they eat down there, I should think they all got industrial gas.”

  41

  I t was an unexpected complication for Andy Kelp when it turned out Anne Marie wanted to come along. “Don’t tell me you know Las Vegas, too,” he said.

  “Never been there in my life,” she assured him. “Politics was all the gambling we ever did in my family.”

  This conversation was taking place in a cab headed uptown, late Wednesday afternoon. They’d had lunch with Gus and Gus’s friend Tillie, and then they’d taken in a movie down in the Village, and now they were on their way back uptown to what until recently had been Kelp’s apartment but which was now rapidly becoming “their” apartment, and here it turned out Anne Marie wanted to come along on the caper in Vegas. This was enough to cause Kelp to undergo a major reappraisal of the relationship right here in the taxi, with bright-eyed Anne Marie studying his profile the whole time.

  Over the years, Andy Kelp had had a number of relationships with persons of the opposite sex, some of them solemnized by the authorities in various rites and rituals, others not. He didn’t divide these relationships by the degree of their solemnity, however, but by their length, and in his experience there tended to be two kinds of interpersonal intergender relationships: (1) short and sweet, and (2) long and bitter.

  Kelp knew this wasn’t everybody’s experience. John and May, for instance, and others he could think of. But for himself, up until now, it had always been true that every new pairing started off on a happy high, which gradually ebbed, like the tide. Short relationships, therefore, tended to leave a residue of nostalgia, a semihappy glow in which the rough spots were gauzed over and the highlights highlighted, while longer relationships tended to come to a close with bitterness and recrimination, bruised egos and unresolvable disputes, so that only the wens and warts remained outstanding in the memory.

  So the question he had to ask himself, Kelp thought, riding there in the taxi beside the expectant Anne Marie, was how did he want to remember her. Did he want to remember her warmly and sweetly, or coldly and bitterly? If she was important enough to him so that he would want the memory of her to be golden—and she was, she definitely was—then wasn’t it about time to let memory begin its useful work, by saying good-bye, Anne Marie, good-bye?

  On the other hand, he had to admit, he was somehow finding it difficult to think about life after saying good-bye to Anne Marie. He enjoyed her, and he knew she enjoyed him. And in one significant way, she was different from every other woman he’d ever met, and a very pleasant significant difference it was. In essence, she just didn’t seem to give a damn about the future.

  And that, so far as Kelp was concerned, was unique. Every other woman he’d ever met, when she wasn’t being worried about her appearance, was being worried about what was going to happen next. They were all of them fixated on the future, they all wanted assurance and reassurance and something in writing and a plan. For Kelp, who lived his life with the philosophy that every day was another opportunity to triumph over the unexpected—or at least not get steamrollered by the unexpected—this urgency to nail down tomorrow was completely inexplicable. His reaction was: Say, you know, it isn’t even that easy to nail down today.

  (Of course, that this very philosophy might be the cause of the nervousness in his woman friends that made them fret more than they otherwise might about events to come, had not as yet occurred to him. However, since all his days were brand new, since he wasn’t stuck to a predetermined pattern, it was a thought that could still occur; nothing is precluded.)

  Still, the point was, Anne Marie was different. She took the unexpected in stride and didn’t seem to worry much about anything, and particularly not about whatever might be coming down the pike. This made her very easy for a guy like Andy Kelp to hang out with, and maybe it’s also what made it easy for her to hang around with him. Here today, and who knows about tomorrow, right? Right.

  The cab was approaching their apartment. Anne Marie waited, a little half-smile on her lips, a bright look in her eye. She isn’t worried about what’s gonna happen next, Kelp realized, so why should I? I don’t want to break up with her today, I know that much.

  “If you came along,” he said, knowing that even to start a sentence with the word if was an acknowledgment that she was going to get her way, “if you did, what would you do with yourself?”

  She beamed. “I’ll think of something,” she said. “We’ll think of something together.”

  42

  W ylie Branch always stood with one hip cocked and arms akimbo and head back, eyes slightly lidded, as though about to go for a quick draw; except that the holster on his right hip contained a walkie-talkie instead of a six-gun. He held that stance now, neat enough in his tan chief of security uniform, and looked out the picture window of cottage number one at the Battle-Lake, where tourists stood around with their mouths open, imitating the fish in the water, and watched one another throw perfectly good coins into the lake’s shallow depths. “Well,” he said, “Earl Radburn may have his brains in his hindquarters, but he’s right about that effin lake.”

  Behind him, Brandon Camberbridge had been roving restlessly around the cottage, fussy and picky, not only a nellie but a nervous nellie, his reflection flickering across the glass in front of Wylie like the ghost of Franklin Pangborn, but now he came forward to present his fretful profile to Wylie as he also looked out at the lake. “Oh, Wylie,” he said. “We can’t disturb the lake.”

  “It’s a dang security nightmare,” Wylie told him.

  “But it’s so beautiful,” Brandon said. “It’s a perfect part of paradise.”

  “Sooner or later,” Wylie said, “it’s gonna have to get shut down for a while anyhows, drained, cleaned out, spiffed up. So why not do it now? Anybody asks, it’s just regular maintenance.”

  “Thursday,” Brandon said, counting days on his fingers, starting with today, progressing from there, “Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. The big cheese isn’t going to get here for four more days, Wylie. You want that beautiful lake turned into a dry quagmire for a week?”

  “Quagmires aren’t dry,” Wylie said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You mean you want everything pretty,” Wylie accused him. “You mean you don’t care if the head cheese, or whatever you call him—”

  “Big cheese, Wylie, please.”

  “You don’t care if the big boss comes here and gets robbed or wounded or worse, just so’s your little kingdom stays pretty.”

  “That’s unfair, Wylie,” Brandon said, and he looked briefly as though he might cry. “You know I’m doing everything in my power to see to it the big cheese is protected, but I do not see how draining our beautiful lake is going to do one single thing to help in that way at all.”

  Wylie sighed, and shifted position, to stand with the other hip cocked. Earl Radburn, head of security for the entire TUI and a tightass pain in the butt if there ever lived one, had been and come and gone and went, leaving Wylie in charge of security for Max Fairbanks’s upcoming visit. He’d also left beefed-up security behind him, in the form of a bunch of beefed-up security guards, extra ones from other parts of the TUI empire, now temporarily under Wylie’s orders, so that Wylie knew for sure and certain, if anything did happen to go wrong during the Fairbanks stay, it would be his own head that would roll as a result and not Earl Radburn’s, and certainly not this goddam faggot next to him.

  Wylie didn’t particularly want his head to roll. He liked it here. He liked his job, he liked the authority he held over other employees, he liked the first-rate salary he hauled in, he liked banging the boss’s wife—that Nell, whenever she wasn’t away on one of her eternal shopping and shagging trips all over these United States of America, was a real tigress in Wylie’s rack, not getting much by way of satisfaction from the pansy she’d married in a moment of inattention—and he didn’t want to have to give it all u
p just so this self-same pansy could go on gazing at his goddam fake lake.

  But it wasn’t an argument Wylie was going to win, he could see that now, so the hell with it, they’d just have to line the goddam lake with beefy security men the whole time Fairbanks was here, whether Brandon Camberbridge liked it or not, and hope for the best. In the meantime, there was no point pressing the issue any more, so Wylie shut his trap and squinted out at the tourists, imagining them all as armed desperadoes in disguise. Hmmmmm; some of those were awfully damn good disguises.

  Wait a second. Wylie squinted more narrowly, this time for real. That fella there . . .

  He did his quick draw after all, bringing up the walkie-talkie, thumbing Send, saying, “One to Base. One to Base.”

  Brandon, jumpy as a schoolgirl at a Hell’s Angels picnic, said, “Wylie? What’s wrong?”

  “Base. What’s up, Wylie?”

  “Thayer,” Wylie said, recognizing the voice through the walkie-talkie’s distortion, “we got a doubtful on the east walk, just south of the lake, before the cottages.”

  Wide-eyed, Brandon whispered, “Wylie? Is it him? Which one is it?”

  More importantly, the walkie-talkie said, in Thayer’s voice, “I got two guys right near there. What are they lookin for?”

  “Midforties,” Wylie said, observing that lurker out there. “Six foot, one-eighty, Caucasian, light blue shirt, wrinkled gray pants. Hands in pockets. Hangdog look.”

  “Got it.”

  “Ten-four,” Wylie said, and holstered the walkie-talkie with one smooth motion of his arm.

  Brandon, meanwhile, who’d picked out the object of Wylie’s attention from the description, was now staring at the lurker, who continued to lurk. “Wylie? That fellow? You don’t think he’s the one we’re looking for, do you?”

  “Not for a second,” Wylie assured him. “No. What I think that fella is is a dip.”

  “Oh, come on, Wylie,” Brandon said. “You see criminals everywhere. That out there is just your normal depressed family man, that’s all.”