“Yeah, okay,” Dortmunder said. “Just forget it, okay? Ouch!”
“Well, hold still,” May told him. “Let me wash the blood off.”
They were back at the farmhouse. There was a fire again in the fireplace; that, and the three kerosene lamps, gave the room its illumination. Dortmunder sat in a folding chair while May patted his cut head with a damp cloth, preparatory to putting on it the bandage Murch would soon be bringing back from the drugstore. At the card table, Kelp and Murch’s Mom were counting the stacks of bills in the suitcase; Kelp was chortling.
Jimmy said, “My father is really very nonphysical. Really.”
“I said forget it.”
“It’s all right, Jimmy,” May said. “Nobody blames your father. It was an accident.”
“By golly,” Kelp said, “it’s all here!”
“It ought to be,” Murch’s Mom said, “after all we went through.”
Murch came in then, revealing a quick view of late afternoon daylight on a rural autumn scene. He closed the door on all that, returning the room to fire lit night, and brought a package to May, saying, “No trouble. They’re getting to know me in town.” He seemed pleased by that.
Kelp said, “Stan, it’s all here, every penny.”
Murch nodded. “Good,” he said, but he didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic. Neither success nor failure surprised him; he had the born driver’s belief in the task being its own reward. Getting there is half the fun. It isn’t whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.
Murch’s Mom said, “You know what I’m getting sick of? I’m getting sick of living in this lousy farmhouse. This place is a landlord’s dream come true: no heat, no hot water, no electricity, no phone, and the john doesn’t work. I can get the same thing in New York, and be close to the cultural’ conveniences.”
“We’ll be leaving tonight,” Kelp said. “We unload the-”
“No, we won’t,” Dortmunder said, and winced while May put the neat white gauze bandage on his forehead.
Kelp was astonished. “We won’t? Why not?”
“We’ll leave tomorrow morning,” Dortmunder said, “and drop the kid in the city.”
“Hold still,” May told him.
“Well, take it easy,” he said.
Kelp said, “Wait a minute. That’s not what we do with the kid. In chapter nineteen it says we-”
“I’d hate to tell you,” Dortmunder said, “what you can do with chapter nineteen. In fact, with the whole book.”
Kelp was astounded and hurt. “How can you argue with it?” he demanded. He gestured toward Jimmy, temporarily out of earshot over by the fireplace, adding a piece of shelf to the fire. “We got the kid, didn’t we?” He gestured toward the money on the card table. “We got the cash, didn’t we?”
Dortmunder gestured at his new bandage. “I got this, didn’t I?”
“That’s not the book’s fault, you can’t blame the-”
“I can blame anybody I damn well want to blame,” Dortmunder said. “That book goes in for too much detail, it makes everything too complicated. You want to know how we’re going to give the kid back? I’ll tell you how we’re going to give the kid back.”
Kelp waved his hand in front of himself, then pointed toward Jimmy, who had come back over from the fireplace. “Not in front of the boy.”
“It don’t matter what he hears,” Dortmunder said. “What I got in mind is neat and simple. No school busses, no phone calls, none of that razzmatazz.”
“I don’t know,” Kelp said. His brow was grooved with worry. “I don’t think we oughta deviate from the plan,” he said. “It’s been working out, it really has.”
“I don’t care,” Dortmunder said. “This part we do my way.”
Behind Dortmunder’s bandaged head, May waggled a hand at Kelp not to argue. Shrugging, Kelp said, “You’re the boss, John, I always said that.”
“All right.” Dortmunder seemed to shrug his shoulders, to sit a little straighter in the chair. “Now,” he said. “We don’t let the kid go around here, because that leaves us the whole long run to the city with every cop in New Jersey looking for us. So we take him to New York, and we give him a subway token, and we let him out of the car in midtown. With a token he can’t make a phone call to turn the law loose on us right away. All he can do is take a subway or a bus. That gives us time to fade out.”
Murch’s Mom said, “Why can’t we do that tonight? Take him to the city, drop him off, I get to sleep in my own bed, cook a meal, flush a toilet.”
Dortmunder said, “Where’s the kid go at night? You’re gonna leave a kid in midtown at night? Some sex maniac comes along and kills him and we get blamed. Tomorrow he can go to his father’s office, or he can go up to that place on Central Park West, he can go wherever he wants.”
“Sure,” Jimmy said. “That sounds fine to me.”
Dortmunder pointed at him. “I don’t need any help from you,” he said.
May said, “John, the boy was just agreeing with you.”
“Well, I don’t need it.” Dortmunder knew he was being grumpily unfair, and that just made him grumpier. “Where was I?” he said. “Right. We drive him in tomorrow, let him off, get rid of the car, and we all go home. Finished. Done with.”
Kelp shook his head. “It just doesn’t have the scope of Richard Stark,” he said.
“I’ve had all the scope I need,” Dortmunder said. “I’ve been scoped enough.”
“Wonderful,” Murch’s Mom said. “Another night in the Antarctica Hilton.”
Murch said to Dortmunder, “What if we just let him off near his house? Tonight, I mean.”
“No,” Dortmunder said. “He immediately gets the law on us. We have sixty miles to get to New York, and they know that’s where we’re headed, and we never make it.”
“We can give ourselves an edge,” Murch said. “I happened to notice that for the last half mile on the county road to the kid’s place there isn’t any phone booth at all. No gas stations, no stores, no bars, nothing, just a couple farms, a couple private estates. And you know the way those places are set up for protection from strangers. The kid wouldn’t dare just walk in some driveway after dark. He’d get eaten up by a dog first thing, and he knows it.”
“That’s true,” Jimmy said. “On Halloween, when I used to go trick or treating, Maurice had to drive me.”
“You keep out of this,” Dortmunder told him. To Murch he said, “That still only gives us maybe fifteen minutes head start. In Jersey I can’t disappear. In New York I can fade away like that.” And he snapped his fingers.
Murch’s Mom said to her son, “It’s okay, Stan. He’s really right, and I can put up with this place one more night. I’m almost getting used to it.”
May said, “What about the boy’s father?” Dortmunder said, “What about him?” “He’ll be expecting Jimmy back. I think we should call him, so he won’t worry all night.”
“You’re right,” Dortmunder said. “Stan, you and your mom and Andy take the kid to a phone. Let him talk to his father, but make sure he doesn’t say too much.”
“Oh, good,” Jimmy said. “I’ll go get my jacket.” They watched the boy trot upstairs. May said, “You know, I’m going to miss that kid.”
“Me, too,” Murch’s Mom said.
“He’s an okay kid,” Kelp said.
Dortmunder said, “I don’t intend to make any big issue of this, but I just want to say one thing. This is not what I had in mind when I decided to go in for a life of crime.”
24
E V E R Y T I M E the phone rang it was for the head FBI man. Harrington kept picking up the receiver and saying hello and some very male voice would invariably say, “Let me talk to Bradford.” Bradford was the head FBI man’s name.
When the phone rang again at six-fifteen, Harrington said, “Why don’t you answer it? It won’t be for me.”
“Right” The head FBI man was very brisk. He spoke into the phone, nodded (which the other party surely couldn’t see, even if he was a detective), and smiled in grim satisfaction when he cradled the receiver. “Got them,” he said.
Harrington sat up. “You captured them?”
“No, we won’t move in till tonight, not till we’re sure they’re all asleep. We don’t want to endanger the boy.”
“But you know where they are?”
“Yes.” The head FBI man was very pleased with himself and displayed that by flexing his muscles and by making a kind of closed-lip smile in which his mouth became a straight horizontal line with parentheses around it. “They’re professional, all right, our kidnappers,” he said, “but sooner or later they had to make one mistake, and now they’ve made it. I was hoping they wouldn’t think to get rid of that suitcase.” His mouth corners drooped slightly, thoughtfully. “I’m surprised at that oversight,” he said, and he sounded almost disappointed that he hadn’t been outwitted. “And I’m glad the mechanism didn’t get broken when you threw the suitcase over the bridge,” he added. “It must have landed on something relatively soft to break its fall.”