“The what?”
“The key. For the trunk.”
“Oh.” The keys were all together on a key ring. Dortmunder switched off the engine and gave the keys to Kelp, who went and unlocked the trunk, then gave the keys to Dortmunder, then went back and got his sign. He stood there holding it, looking around but not doing anything, until Dortmunder leaned his head out and yelled, “What are you doing?”
“I forgot which one to block.”
Dortmunder pointed. “That one. The one on the kid’s route.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.”
Kelp went over and set up the sign. It was a three-by. four piece of thin metal that had once advertised 7-Up, and the shape of the bottle could still be seen vaguely through the yellow paint. Kelp had also thought to bring a triangular arrangement of sticks to lean the sign against, a detail not mentioned in Child Heist. He put the sign in place, then trotted back over to the Caprice and said, “How’s that?”
Dortmunder looked at it. It said ROAD CLOSED-DETORE. He said, “Jesus H. Goddam Christ.”
“What’s the matter?” Kelp looked all around the intersection, worried. “Did I put it in the wrong place?”
“Do you have that goddam book on you?”
“Sure,” Kelp said.
“Take it out,” Dortmunder said, “and find the page where they set up the sign.” Turning to May, he said, “I’m following a book he read, and he doesn’t even know how to read.”
Kelp said, “I got it.”
“Look at it. Now look at the sign.”
Kelp looked at the book. He looked at the sign. He said, “Son of a gun. Detour. I thought sure you-”
“You can’t even read!”
May said, “It’s okay, John, it really is. They’ll just think some local highway department people didn’t know how to spell.”
Dortmunder considered that. “You think so?”
Kelp hopped into the back seat. “Sure,” he said. “It makes it more realistic, like. Who’d expect a kidnap gang to put up a sign that’s spelled wrong?”
“I would,” Dortmunder said. “In fact, I’m surprised I didn’t think to check.”
“Listen, I don’t want to push you,” Kelp said, “but we ought to get down there to that dirt road.”
“I wonder what next,” Dortmunder said. He started the engine, drove a quarter mile back toward the city, then backed off into the dead-end dirt road Murch had been astonished to find last week.
“Now there’s nothing to do but wait,” Kelp said.
“I’ll lay five to two,” Dortmunder said, “some farmer comes along in a pickup truck, drives in, wants to know what we’re doing here, and pulls out a shotgun.”
“You’re on,” Kelp said.
Four miles away, the silver-gray Cadillac limousine took the curving ramp down from Interstate 80 to the county road and turned south. The chauffeur, Maurice K. Van Golden, drove at varying speeds above fifty-five, competing with the occasional other car he met. In the backseat, Jimmy Harrington read the “Letter from Washington” in the current New Yorker and wished he had the self-confidence to tell Maurice to quit racing the other drivers. Maurice behaved himself when Jimmy’s father was in the car, but when it was just Jimmy back there he obviously thought he could get away with being a cowboy. And the annoying part of it was, he could; Jimmy wouldn’t complain to his father, since that would be the act of a baby, but on the other hand he hadn’t yet felt quite secure enough to complain to Maurice directly.
Pretty soon I will, Jimmy thought, and read about the administration’s hopes for a settlement in the Middle East.
Five minutes later, May and Kelp both simultaneously said, “Here they come.”
“I see them,” Dortmunder said, and put the Caprice in gear as the Cadillac rocketed by them. The Caprice moved out from the dirt road and accelerated in the Cadillac’s wake.
“That’s five dollars you owe me,” Kelp said.
Dortmunder didn’t answer.
Van Gelden, at the wheel of the Cadillac, suddenly slammed on the brakes and swerved all over the road when he saw the sign blocking the road ahead. Jimmy, flung off the seat, came sputtering up, crying, “Maurice! What in the name of God is going on?”
“Goddam denture!” Van Celden cried. He thought the word was spelled that way.
Jimmy got one quick flashing glimpse of the sign as the Cadillac slewed around, tires squealing, and roared off down the secondary road. “Detour?” He frowned out the back window; there’d been something about that sign, he wasn’t sure what. It had gone by so fast. As a soft drink commercial’s jingle started up in his brain, distracting him, he said to himself, “The detour wasn’t there before.”
This secondary road was narrower, bumpier, and curvier than the county road. Van Gelden, taking out his rage at the fact of the denture by flinging the car forward as rapidly as possible, was tossing Jimmy around the back seat like a sneaker in a dryer. Jimmy, holding on for dear life, found at last the maturity to shout out, “Damn it, Maurice, slow down!”
Van Celden didn’t touch the brake, but he did lift his foot from the accelerator. “I’m just trying to get you home,” he snarled, glaring in the rearview mirror at the boy, and as he did so he came around a curve in the road and saw vehicles stopped ahead. A school bus, facing this way, its red lights flashing, meaning it was unloading passengers and traffic wasn’t permitted to pass it in either direction. And a truck, a big tractor-trailer rig, facing the same direction as the Cadillac and obediently standing still. The two vehicles between them blocked the road completely.
“Goddammit,” Van Gelden said, and tromped on the brake again. He had to brake hard to stop in time, but it was less violent than if his foot had still been pressed on the accelerator when he’d rounded the bend. Jimmy, since he’d been clutching the armrest and a strap anyway, managed to stay on the seat as the Cadillac nosed down to a shuddering stop directly behind the tractor-trailer.
“One thing after another,” Van Golden said.
“Maurice,” Jimmy said, “you drive too fast.”
“It’s not my fault there’s all this stuff in the way.” Van Golden gestured angrily toward the truck and the bus.
“You drive too fast all the time,” Jimmy insisted. “Except when my father is in the car. From now on, I want you to drive me the way you drive my father.”
Van Golden, becoming sullen, jammed his uniform cap farther down on his forehead, folded his arms, and said nothing.
Jimmy said, “Did you hear me, Maurice?”
“I hear you.”
“I hear you!”
“Thank you, Maurice,” Jimmy said, and sat back to savor his triumph. After a moment he picked up the New Yorker again.
Back at the intersection, Dortmunder stopped the Caprice and Kelp jumped out to move the sign. He picked it up, moved it to another side, and started back, when Dortmunder leaned out the window and shouted, “Not there! Where we follow the Cadillac!”
“Huh?” Kelp looked around, pointing at various places, reorienting himself. Then, with a sudden sunny smile of recognition, he waved to Dortmunder and shouted, “Gotcha!” He ran back to the sign, picked it up, and put it back where it had been.
“Not there!” Dortmunder yelled. He was leaning his whole upper torso out of the car, pounding the door panel with his arm and the flat of his hand. Waving that hand violently around, he yelled, “Over there!”
“Right!” Kelp yelled. “Right! Right! I got it now!” And he picked up the sign and started trotting toward the last possible wrong choice.
Dortmunder came boiling out of the Caprice. “I’m going to wrap that sign around your head!”
“Now what?” Kelp stood there, bewildered, while Dortmunder came over and wrenched the sign and sticks away from him and put them where they belonged. Kelp watched, and when Dortmunder was finished the two men met again at the car, where Kelp said, “I would have got it, I really would have.”
“Get in the car,” Dortmunder said. He got behind the wheel and slammed the door.
Kelp got in the back seat again. May shook her head at him, not pleased, and he lifted his shoulders helplessly. Dortmunder punched the accelerator, and the Caprice bounced forward.
Van Gelden, his sullenness boiling over all at once into rage, pushed the button that rolled his window down, stuck his head out, and yelled toward the school bus, “Get with it, will ya! We don’t have all day!”
Jimmy looked up from his magazine. “What’s the matter, Maurice?”
“Bus just sitting there,” Van Golden said. “Tying up traffic.” Looking in the rearview mirror, he said, “And here comes somebody else.”
Jimmy looked back, and saw the blue car approaching around the curve. The road here was hemmed in by trees and shrubbery on both sides. Scrub pine gave some swaths of green, but the rest of the trees had lost about half their foliage, making black trunks and branches form jagged lines against the orange and gold of autumn leaves. Dead leaves swirled around the tires of the blue car as it came silently toward them, slowed, and stopped. The figures through the windshield were indistinct, but in some sort of motion back there.