“You just answer the phone,” Dortmunder said. “You act normal, and you make it as short as you can.”
“All right,” Jimmy said. He reached out to pick up the phone as it rang for the third time.
Dortmunder said, “Hold it away from your ear, so we can all hear what they’re saying.”
Jimmy nodded. His mouth and throat were dry. Picking up the phone, he held it so the back part was out and away from his ear. “Hello?”
“Hel-lo, there, is this James Harrington?” The cheerful male voice came tinnily from the phone.
“Yes, it is.”
“Well, this is Bob Dodge of radio WRTZ, the voice of Sussex County, calling you from Hotline For Facts. Your postcard has been selected at random, and you have the opportunity to win prizes totaling over five hundred dollars! And now, here’s Lou Sweet to tell you what prizes are in this week’s Hotline Jackpot!”
Another voice began to ripple from the phone, describing prizes, in each case giving the name of the merchant who had contributed the prize. A camera from a drugstore. Dog food from a supermarket. A dictionary and a table radio from a department store. Dinner for two at a local restaurant.
“I don’t believe this,” Dortmunder said, and May shushed him again.
Bob Dodge came back on the phone. “Are you familiar with the rules of our game?” he asked, but before Jimmy could answer he gave them anyway, talking at top speed. There seemed to be something about levels, options of subject matter, various other sophistications, but the main idea was that they would ask him questions and he would try to answer them. “Are you ready, James?”
“Yes, sir,” Jimmy said. He sometimes listened to this program in the car on the way home from Dr. Schraubenzieher, and it always seemed as though he knew the right answers whenever the contestants got them wrong. About six months ago he’d sent in a postcard, giving both his home phone and the mobile telephone unit in the car, but he’d never expected them to call him. Particularly not the mobile telephone number.
And he sure wished it hadn’t happened now. It was embarrassing to be here on the phone like this, answering some quiz show’s silly questions, with a lot of strangers looking on.
“And here’s your first question,” Bob Dodge said. “Name four of the states of Australia.”
Australia. Concentrating, Jimmy said, “New South Wales. Queensland. Victoria. And Northern Territory.”
“Very good! Next, give the atomic number of samarium.”
“Sixty-two.”
“What is hemialgia?”
“Pain on one side of the head.”
“I’ve got pain on both sides of my head,” Dortmunder muttered.
“Sshh!” Kelp said.
“Who wrote Adrienne Toner?”
“Anne Sedgwick.”
“What year was the battle of Lancaster Abbey?”
Jimmy hesitated. The others in the car all tensed, looking at him, waiting. Finally, with the question apparent in his voice, he said, “Fourteen ninety-three?”
“Yes!”
Everybody in the car sighed with relief; three Mickey Mouse masks ballooned.
Jimmy answered four more questions, on astronomy, economics, French history and physics, and then the next question was, “In astrology, what are the signs before and after Gemini?”
Astrology; that was one of Jimmy’s weak areas. He had no belief in it, and so had never studied it. He said, “The signs before and after?”
“Before and after Gemini, yes.”
“Before Gemini … is Taurus.”
“Yes! And after?”
“After Gemini.”
Kelp whispered, “Cancer.”
Dortmunder glared at him. He whispered, “If you’re wrong-”
“Time is almost up, James.”
Jimmy took a deep breath. He didn’t like accepting help on a test, but what else could he do? He hadn’t asked for it, and it might not even be right. He said, “Cancer?”
“Absolutely right!”
Again, general relief. Even with the mask over his face, Kelp could be seen smiling.
“You, James Harrington,” Bob Dodge was saying, “have won our Hotline Jackpot!”
“Thank you,” Jimmy said, and when he saw Dortmunder gesturing violently at him he added, “I have to hang up now,” and hung up.
“Well,” May said. “Jimmy, that was really impressive.”
“Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Now that the kid got his dog food and his dinner for two, let’s get back to-”
And the planks gave way; both of them at once. The Cadillac slapped down onto the road like a palm slapping down on a table. Everybody was tossed up, ricocheted off the roof, and jolted into their seats again. In the process, Dortmunder’s gun went sailing out the open window next to him, and Kelp’s gun bounced off the roof, the steering wheel and the dashboard before landing in Van Gelden’s lap.
“Hands up!” Van Golden yelled, and scrabbled in his lap for the gun. Both Dortmunder and Kelp were obediently lifting their arms, and Van Golden was still bobbling the gun, when May reached over his shoulder, took it away from him, and handed it to Dortmunder.
“All right,” Dortmunder said. “All right, that’s enough fooling around.” To May he said, “Put the mask on the kid and put him in our car.” To Kelp he said, “Put the cuffs on this guy. If it won’t upset you too much, we’re gonna rewrite that book of yours a little bit.”
“Anything you say,” Kelp said. He was puffing the handcuffs out of his hip pocket.
“And you,” Dortmunder told the chauffeur, “you just sit there and keep your mouth shut. ‘Hands up,’ is it?” Giving the chauffeur a look of disgust that the chauffeur couldn’t see through the Mickey Mouse mask, Dortmunder got out of the Cadillac, picked up his gun from the road, and said to Murch, “Forget that goddam truck. We’ll go straight to the hideout from here. All that other crap was more complicated than it had to be anyway?’
“Right,” Murch said. “I’ll get my Mom,” he said, and jumped down out of the truck.
May had put the Mickey Mouse mask with the taped eyeholes over Jimmy’s head. She’d considered using the dialogue from the book about pretending it was night and all that, but somehow it didn’t seem to fit the case, so all she’d said was, “I’m going to blindfold you now.”
“Of course,” Jimmy said.
Murch rid himself of his mask and went over to the school bus, where his Mom was impatiently tapping her fingernails on the steering wheel. She pushed the lever on her left, the door accordioned open, and she said, “So? You want to tell me something?”
“We’re all taking off in our car, Mom. Run the bus out of the way and come on over.”
“I been sitting here,” she said. “Wondering what’s going on.”
“It would take a while to tell, Mom.”
“I saw the Caddy bounce,” she said.
“That was part of it.”
“I wish I had springs like that in the cab,” she said. “Climb aboard.” She shifted into first, and Murch stepped up into the bus as she eased it forward and off onto the shoulder of the road.
May had now led the boy from the Cadillac to the back seat of the Caprice, Kelp had handcuffed Van Golden to the steering wheel, and Dortmunder had filled his pockets with guns and was standing beside the Cadillac looking mulish. When Murch and his Mom came over from the school bus Dortmunder said, “Stan, you drive.”
“Right.”
Murch’s Mom got in the back seat with May and Jimmy. “Well, hello, Jimmy,” she said. “I see you’re playing Mickey Mouse.”
May shook her head. “It’s not quite like that,” she said. Inside his mask, Jimmy said, “I really am a bit old for this kind of psychological reassurance.”
“Hmp,” Murch’s Mom said. “A smart aleck.”
In the front seat, Kelp sat in the middle, with Murch on his left and Dortmunder on his right. As Murch started the engine, Kelp said to Dortmunder, “Can I have my gun back?”
“No,” Dortmunder said. He looked around at the setting they were leaving, giving everything the same impartial look of disgust: truck, school bus, planks, Cadillac, chauffeur. “Hands up,” he muttered, and the Caprice drove off in a flurry of falling leaves.
14
D 0 .R T MU N D E R S A I D, “What’s taking so long? We been driving for forty-five minutes.”
“I’ve been taking some extra turns and cutbacks,” Murch said, “to confuse the boy’s sense of direction. That’s what they did in the book.”
“In the meantime,” Dortmunder said, “the cops are out looking by now.”
“We should have picked up the detour signs,” Kelp said. “We shouldn’t have left them behind like that.”
“We don’t need them any more,” Dortmunder told him. “And I don’t want to waste any more time.” To Murch he said, “So let’s go straight to the farmhouse. No more extra turns?’
“Well,” Murch said.
Dortmunder looked at him. “What do you mean, well?”
“Well, the fact is,” Murch said. He was blinking a lot as he drove, and looking troubled, even embarrassed. “The fact is,” he said, “I think I took too many extra turns and cutbacks already.”