Drowned Hopes Part 42

SIXTY-TWO.

Well, at least there was a little more room at the dinner table, though no one said that out loud in case of hurting May's feelings. But it was nice, just the same, to have that extra inch or two for the elbow when bringing a forkful of turkey loaf mouthward.

On the other hand, when it came to discussing future plans, all at once Dortmunder's absence from the table became less positive and pleasant, though that wasn't obvious right at first, when Doug raised the subject over coffee, saying, "Well, it's easy from here on. We've touched the box. We know where it is."

"We've got a rope on it," Kelp added.

Nodding, Doug said, "And the other end of the rope is tied to our monofilament, which n.o.body's going to see."

"Especially in this weather," Tiny said, and sneezed.

"Another good thing," Tom added. "This last time, you birds didn't leave a lot of evidence around to alert the law."

Wally said, "The computer says there's a million ways to get it now. It's so easy."

Stan said, "Good. So let's do it and get it over with."

His Mom said, "I'll go along with that. I want to get back to where driving's a contact sport."

"So we'll just do it," Doug said, and shrugged at how easy it was.

"Be glad to get it over with," Kelp said.

Then there was a little silence, everybody drinking coffee or looking at the wall or drawing little fingertip circles on the tablecloth, n.o.body quite meeting anybody else's eye. The light in the crowded little dining room seemed to get brighter, the tablecloth whiter, the walls s.h.i.+nier, the silence deeper and deeper, as though they were turning into an acrylic genre painting of themselves.

Finally, it was May who broke the silence, saying, "How?"

Then everybody was alive and animated again, all looking at her, all suddenly eager to answer the question. "It's easy, May," Kelp said. "We just winch it in."

"We tie the rope to the rope," Doug explained.

"Naturally," Tiny added, "we gotta get a new winch."

"Oh, yeah," Kelp said, nodding. "And a rope."

Stan said, "Don't we need some kind of boat?"

"Not one that sinks in the rain," Tiny suggested.

Wally asked, "Well, when do we do it? Do you want to wait for the rain to stop?"

"Yes," Tiny said.

"Well, I don't know," Doug said. "Depends on how long that is. You know, the engineers in the dam put a little boat in the water every once in a while, run around the reservoir, take samples and so on, and if they ran over our line they'd cut it. Even if they didn't foul their propeller, even if they didn't find it, we'd lose the line."

Tiny said, "They won't do one of their jaunts in this weather, count on it."

"That's true," Doug agreed.

May cleared her throat and said, "It seems to me, John would point out right here that the instant the rain stops the people in the dam might go right out in their boat so they can get caught up with their schedule."

"That's also true," Doug agreed.

Wally said, "Miss May, what else would John point out?"

"I don't know," May said. "He isn't here."

Everybody thought about that. Stan said, "What it is, when John's around, you don't mind coming up with ideas, because he'll tell you if they're any good or not."

"Dortmunder," Tiny said, ponderously thoughtful, "is what you call your focal point."

With his patented bloodless lipless cackle, Tom said, "Pity he tossed in his hand just before the payout."

Everybody looked uncomfortable. May said, "I'm here to see to John's interests."

"Oh?" Tom asked mildly. "Does Al still have interests?"

Murch's Mom gave him a beady look. "I don't see what it matters to you," she said. "It doesn't come out of your half. You're just a troublemaker for the fun of it, aren't you?"

"As long as everybody's happy," Tom told her, "I'm happy."

"The question is," May insisted, "when are you going to do it, and how are you going to do it?"

"May," Kelp said, "I've touched that box now, with this hand." He showed it to her, palm out. "From here on, it's so easy."

"Fine," May said. "Tell me about it."

Kelp turned to Doug. "Explain it to her, okay?"

"Well," Doug said. "We go out and tie the rope to the rope, and Tiny winches it in."

Tiny said, "Don't you have to do something to get the box lighter, so it'll lift up over the tree stumps?"

"Oh, right," Doug said. "I forgot that part."

"And when," May said. "And what kind of boat. And what are the details?"

"That's what we need John for!" Kelp exclaimed, punching the table in his irritation.

"We don't have John," May pointed out. "So we'll have to work out the details ourselves. And the first detail is, when do you want to do it?"

"As soon as possible," Stan answered. Turning to Tiny, he explained, "I hate to say this, but I think we're better off in the rain. As long as we get ourselves ready for it."

"And the boat doesn't sink," Tiny said.

"Well, a new boat," Doug said. "That's gonna be expensive."

Everybody looked at Tom, who gazed around mildly (for him) and said, "No."

"Tom," Kelp said, "we need a certain amount of-"

"No more dough from me," Tom said. He sounded serious about it. To Doug he said, "Who'm I buying all this equipment from? You. So donate the stuff."

"Well, not the boat," Doug told him.

"Steal the f.u.c.king boat," Tom advised.

Doug floundered a bit at that, but Stan rescued him, saying, "Okay, Doug, never mind, we'll work out the boat."

"Okay," Doug said, but he was getting those little white spots on his cheeks again, like when he'd been in shock.

Stan turned to May. "We'll work it all out, May. We're just not used to doing this, that's all."

May surveyed the table. "I'll make fresh coffee," she decided, and went away to the kitchen. She could hear them bickering in there the whole time she was away.

SIXTY-THREE.

Dortmunder did not sleep like a baby, home in his own bed at last. He slept like a grown-up who'd been through a lot. He slept leadenly, at times noisily, mouth open, limbs sprawled any which way, bedclothes tangled around ankles. He had good dreams (sunlight, money, good-looking cars, and fast women) and bad dreams (water), and periods of sleep so heavy an alligator would have envied him.

It was during a somewhat shallower stretch that Dortmunder was slightly disturbed by the scratchings and plinkings of someone picking the lock on the apartment door, opening it, creeping in (these old floors creak, no matter what you do) and closing the door with that telltale little snick. Dortmunder almost came all the way to the surface of consciousness at that instant, but instead, his brain decided the noises were just Tom returning from one of his late-night filling-the-pockets forays, and so the tiny sounds from the hallway were converted in his dream factory into the shus.h.i.+ngs and plinkings of wavelets, and in that dream Tom was a giant fish with teeth, from whom Dortmunder swam and swam and swam, never quite escaping.

Normally, the interloper would have had trouble finding his way around the dark and almost windowless apartment, but Dortmunder's recent underwater experiences had led him to leave a light burning in the bathroom, by which illumination it was possible for the interloper to make his way all through the place, to rea.s.sure himself that the sleeping Dortmunder was the only current resident, and then to go on and make himself a peanut b.u.t.ter and jelly sandwich in the kitchen. (The clinking of knife inside peanut b.u.t.ter jar became, in Dortmunder's dreams, the oars in the oarlocks of Charon's boat.) The interloper was quiet for a long time after ingesting his sandwich and one of Dortmunder's beers; in fact, he napped a little, at the kitchen table. But then, along around sunup, he moved into the bedroom and threw all Dortmunder's clothing onto the floor from the chair beside the door so he could sit there, just beyond the foot of the bed, and watch Dortmunder sleep.

The faint metallic click as the interloper c.o.c.ked his rifle caused Dortmunder to frown in his sleep and make disgusting smacking sounds with his mouth, and to dream briefly of being deep underwater and having his air tank suddenly fall off his back and separate from the mouthpiece hose with a faint metallic click just before his mouth and stomach and brain filled with water; but then that dream floated away and he dreamed instead about playing poker with some long-ago cellmates in the good old days, and being dealt a royal flush-in spades-which caused him to settle back down in contentment, deeper and deeper into sleep, so that it was almost two hours later when he finally opened his eyes and rubbed his nose and did that sound with his mouth and sat up and stretched and looked at the rifle aimed at his eye.

"GL!" Dortmunder cried, swallowing his tongue.

Rifle. Gnarled old hands holding the rifle. Wrinkly old eye staring down the rifle's sights. The last resident of Cronley, Oklahoma, seated in a chair in Dortmunder's bedroom.

"Now, Mr. Department of Recovery," said the hermit, "you can just tell me where Tim Jepson is. And this time, ain't n.o.body behind me with no bottle."

SIXTY-FOUR.

No bottle...

When dawn's sharp stiletto poked its orange tip into Guffey's eye through the windowless opening in the Hotel Cronley's bar's front wall, he awakened to a splitting headache and a conundrum. Either the infrastructure man's partner had hit him on the head with three bottles, which seemed excessive, or something funny was going on.

Three bottles. All broken and smashed on the bar floor, all with their corks still jammed tight in their cracked-off necks. And all absolutely stinking. They were dry inside, so it wasn't merely that the wine had gone bad after all these years; and in any event, the stench seemed to come more from the crusted gunk on the bottles' outside.

Plumbing. The second invader had gone to the bas.e.m.e.nt to look at the plumbing. So did Guffey, reeling a bit from the aftereffects of the blow on the head, and when he found the dismantled trap he knew. By G.o.d, it was Tim Jepson after all! Come back for his fourteen thousand dollars, just as Mitch Lynch had said he would. Fourteen thousand dollars hidden all these years in those wine bottles in this dreadful muck river; wasn't that just like Jepson?

In my hands, Guffey thought inaccurately, and I let him get away. But perhaps all hope was not yet lost. There was still one slender thread in Guffey's hand: the license plate of that little white automobile. Could he follow that thread? He could but try.

Before noon on that same day, Cronley became at last what it had for so long appeared to be: deserted. Guffey, freshly shaved, garbed in the best of the professors' stolen clothing, dismantled rifle and more clothing stowed in the knapsack on his back, marched out of Cronley and across the rock-strewn desert toward his long-deferred destiny.

By early evening, he'd walked and hitchhiked as far as a town with a state police barracks, where he reported the hit-and-run driver, offering a description of the car and its license number, plus the welt on the back of his head for evidence. They took the license number and description and ran them through their computer, and they took the welt on the back of his head and ran him through the hospital, giving him the softest night's sleep and the best food of his entire life, and almost making him give up the quest right there. All a fella had to do, after all, to live in the lap of luxury like this, was step out in front of a bus seven or eight times a year.

But duty called, particularly when the cops came around the hospital next morning to say they knew who'd hit him but there wasn't much to be done about it. (He'd been counting on this official indifference.) The car, it seemed, was a rental, picked up at the Oklahoma City airport the same day it hit Guffey and turned back in the next day. The miscreants-"New Yorkers: you might know"-were long gone. There wasn't the slightest mark on the car, nor were there any witnesses, nor had the hospital found anything at all seriously wrong with Guffey (amazingly enough), so there simply wasn't enough of a case to warrant an interstate inquiry.

Guffey, humble as ever, accepted everything he was told, and asked only one thing in return: Might he have, please, the name and address of the person who had rented the car?

One of the cops grinned at that request and said, "You wouldn't think of taking the law in your own hands, would you?"

"I've never been out of Oklahoma in my life!" Guffey cried, truthfully. "I just want to write that person and tell him I forgive him. I'm a Christian, you know. Praise the Lord!"

When it looked as though Guffey might intend to start preaching in their direction nonstop, the cops gave him two names-Tom Jimson, who'd rented the car, and John Dortmunder, who'd driven it-plus one address in New York for both of them. (Tom Jimson, huh? Tim Jepson, Tom Jimson, huh? Huh? Huh?) There was a little glitch when the hospital said they wanted to keep Guffey a few days longer for observation, but when they discovered he didn't have any insurance they realized they'd already observed him long enough, and he was let go. And then, for the first time in his life, thumb extended, Guffey left Oklahoma.

The trip northeast was fairly long and adventurous, punctuated by a number of crimes of the most cowardly and despicable sort: church poor-boxes rifled, cripples mugged for their grocery sacks, things like that. And here at last was New York. And here was the address. And here was John Dortmunder.

Tim Jepson wasn't here right at this minute, unfortunately-killing him in his sleep would be the safest way to go about it, after all-but that was all right. John Dortmunder was here and John Dortmunder could tell Guffey how to find Tim Jepson.

And he would, too. Oh, yes.

SIXTY-FIVE.

"Well, no," Dortmunder said, trying to sound like a reasonable person in control of himself and his environment, rather than a terrified bunny rabbit who's just been awakened by a madman with a rifle. "No, I don't know where Tom-Tim is."

"Lives here," the madman corrected him. "Said so when you rented the car."

Dortmunder stared, astonished at the madman's information, and the madman cackled, rather like Tom himself, except that his mouth opened plenty wide enough to see the shriveled and darkened toothless gums. "Didn't know I knew that, did you?" he demanded, the rifle as steady as a courthouse cannon in his wrinkled old hands.

"No, I didn't."

"Oh, I know all sorts of stuff, Mr. Department of Recovery. Tim Jepson calls himself Tom Jimson now. He paid for that rental car. You drove."

"Well, gee, you're pretty good," Dortmunder told him, thinking like mad.