Was that a siren in the distance? “Well, now you found me,” Dortmunder
said. “So why don’t we go someplace?”
But Kelp didn’t want to distract himself with driving. He had the engine still
running, but the gear shift was in Park and he had more to say. “Do you know
what it’s like, you spend the whole day just driving up and down and up and
down, and the guy you’re looking for isn’t even in Ranch Cove Estates?”
It was definitely a siren, and it was coming closer. Dortmunder said, “Why
don’t we go there now?”
“Very funny,” Kelp said. “Do you realize I had to put a dollar’s worth of gas
of my own money in this car, and it was almost full when I picked it up?”
“I’ll reimburse you,” Dortmunder said. “If you’ll just use some of it to drive us
away from here.” Far down the street was a tiny winking red light, and it was
coming this way.
“I don’t want your money,” Kelp said. He was somewhat mollified, but still
irritated. “All I want is if you say you’re gonna be in Ranch Cove Estates be in
Ranch Cove Estates,”
There was a police car under the winking red light, and it was coming like hell.
“I’m sorry,” Dortmunder said. “From now on I’ll do better.”
Kelp frowned at him. “What? That’s not like you, to talk like that. Something
wrong?”
The police car was two blocks away and moving fast. Dortmunder put his
head in his hands.
Kelp said, “Hey, what’s the matter?” He said something else after that, but the
noise of the siren was so loud that his voice was blotted out. The siren shrilled to
a peak of noise, and then modulated all at once into minor key and receded.
Dortmunder lifted his head and looked around. The police car was a block
behind them and slowing at last as it neared the house Dortmunder had come
from.
Kelp was frowning at the rear-view mirror. “I wonder who they want,” he
said.
“Me,” Dortmunder said. His voice was a little shaky. “Now do you mind if we
go away from here?”
2
KELP drove along with one eye on the empty street ahead and one eye on
the rear-view mirror showing the empty street behind. He was tense but alert.
He said, “You should’ve told me sooner.”
“I tried,” Dortmunder said. He was being sullen and grumpy in the corner.
“You could’ve got us both in trouble,” Kelp said. The memory of the police
car’s siren was making him nervous, and nervousness made him talkative.
Dortmunder didn’t say anything. Kelp took a quick glance at him and saw him
brooding at the glove compartment, as though wondering if it had an ax in it.
Kelp went back to watching the street and the rear-view mirror and said, “With
that record of yours, you know, you get picked up for anything, you’ll get life.”
“Is that right?” Dortmunder said. He was really being very sour, even worse
than usual.
Kelp drove one-handed for a minute while he got out his pack of Trues,
shook one out, and put it between his lips. He extended the pack sideways,
saying, “Cigarette?”
“True? What the hell kind of brand is that?”
“It’s one of the new ones with the low nicotine and tars.
Try it.”
“I’ll stick to Camels,” Dortmunder said, and out of the corner of his eye Kelp
saw him pull a battered pack of them from his jacket pocket. “True,”
Dortmunder grumbled. “I don’t know what the hell kind of name that is for a
cigarette.”
Kelp was stung. He said, “Well, what kind of name is Camel? True means
something. What the hell does Camel mean?”
“It means cigarettes,” Dortmunder said. “For years and years it means
cigarettes. I see something called True, I figure right away it’s a fake.”
“Just because you’ve been working a con,” Kelp said, “you figure everybody
else is too.”
“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.
Kelp could deal with anything at that point except being agreed with; not
knowing where to go from there, he let the conversation lapse. Also, realizing he
was still holding the cigarette pack in his right hand, he tucked it away again in
his shirt pocket.
Dortmunder said, “I thought you quit anyway.”
Kelp shrugged. “I started again.” He put both hands on the wheel while he
negotiated a right turn onto Merrick Avenue, a major street with a good amount
of traffic.
Dortmunder said, “I thought the cancer commercials on television scared you
off.”
“They did,” Kelp said. There were now cars both in front of him and behind
him, but none of them contained police. “They don’t show them any more,” he
said. “They took the cigarette commercials off, and they took the cancer
commercials off at the same time. So I went back.” Still watching the street, he
reached out to press the lighter button in. Windshield washer fluid suddenly
sprayed all over the glass in front of him, and he couldn’t see a thing.
Dortmunder shouted, “What the hell are you doing?”
“God damn it!” Kelp yelled and stomped on the brake. It was a power
brake, and the car stopped on a dime and gave them change. “These American
cars!” Kelp yelled, and something crashed into them from behind.
Dortmunder, peeling himself off the dashboard, said, “I suppose this is better
than life imprisonment.”
Kelp had found the windshield wipers and now they started sweeping back
and forth over the glass, flinging gobs of fluid left and right. “We’re okay now,”
Kelp said, and somebody knocked on the side window next to his left ear. He
turned his head, and there was a heavyset guy in a topcoat out there, shouting.
“Now what?” Kelp said. He found the button that would slide the power
window down, pushed it, and the power window slid down. Now he could hear
that the heavyset guy was shouting, “Look what you done to my car!”
Kelp looked out front, but there wasn’t anything in front of him at all. Then he
looked in the rear-view mirror and saw a car very close to him in the back.
The heavyset guy was shouting, “Come look! Come see for yourself!”
Kelp opened the car door and got out. A bronze Pinto was nuzzling the
purple Toronado in the rear. Kelp said, “Well, for Christ’s sake.”
“Look what you done to my car!”
Kelp walked down to where the two cars met and studied the damage. Glass
was broken, chrome was bent, and what looked like radiator fluid was making a
green puddle on the blacktop.
“I tell you,” the heavyset guy shouted, “to go ahead, just go ahead and look
what you done to my car!”
Kelp shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “You hit me from the rear. I didn’t
do anything to-”
“You jammed on your brakes! How’m I supposed to-”
“Any insurance company in the world will tell you the driver in the back is the
one who-”
“You jammed on your-We’ll see what the cops say!”
The cops. Kelp gave the heavyset guy a bland, unworried smile and started to
walk around the Pinto, as though to inspect the damage on the other side. There
was a row of stores on the right here, and he’d already spotted an alley between
two of them.
On the way around the Pinto, Kelp glanced in and saw that the storage area in
back was full of open-top cardboard cartons full of paperback books. About
five or six titles, with dozens of copies of each title. One was called Passion
Doll, another Man Hungry, another Strange Affair. The covers featured
undressed girls. There were Call Me Sinner and Off Limits and Apprentice
Virgin. Kelp paused.
The heavyset guy had been following him, ranting and raving, waving his arms
around so that his topcoat flapped-imagine somebody wearing a topcoat on a
day like this-but now he stopped when Kelp did, and his voice lowered, and in
an almost normal tone of voice he said, “So what?”
Kelp stood looking in at the paperback books. “You were talking about the
cops,” he said.
Other traffic was now having to detour around them. A woman in a Cadillac
shouted as she went by, “Why don’t you bums get off the road?”
“I’m talking about traffic cops,” the heavyset guy said.
“Whatever you’re talking about,” Kelp said, “what you’re gonna get is cops.
And they’re likely to care more about the back of your car than the front.”
“The Supreme Court-”
“I didn’t figure we’d get the Supreme Court to come out for a traffic
accident,” Kelp said. “What I figured, we’d probably get just local Suffolk
County cops.”
“I got a lawyer to handle that,” the heavyset guy said, but he didn’t seem as
sure of himself any more.
“Also, you hit me from behind,” Kelp said. “Let’s not leave that out of our