Nor, unfortunately, was there any way for them to have left. Every door and every window in the place was solidly boarded up, with the single exception of the front door, which had been under constant surveillance since late yesterday afternoon. There were no tunnels in the basement, no secret passages, no hidden rooms. They were not here, and it was not possible for them to have left.
And what made it worse, the radio trucks claimed they were still here. The three trucks were out roaming the world, triangulating and triangulating and triangulating, and every damn time the three lines crossed at the exact same spot on the map. This spot.
The gang wasn’t here. The child wasn’t here. The suitcase wasn’t here. But the gang and the child could not have left, and the radio trucks insisted the suitcase was here.
By dawn’s early light, Agent Bradford stood on the sagging front porch and watched his demoralized men wandering around that field out there, looking for clues. Sergeant Ambrose Rust of the New Jersey State Police came out of the house, after one last head-scratching inspection, and said, “Well, Mr. Bradford, what do we do now?”
“I don’t know about you, Sergeant,” Agent Bradford said, “but I’m going to start looking for somebody to pin this on.”
27
I N T H E deep dark woods they huddled around the television set, for warmth as much as for entertainment. The movie now was Captain Blood, Errol Flynn’s first picture, directed by Michael Curtiz, best known for Casablanca. Jimmy was pointing out to an uncaring audience how the obsessive close-ups of Flynn from a low-angle camera made him separate from and above the surrounding action when Kelp came blundering back through the woods to say, “Well, I finally found something. It wasn’t easy out here, let me tell you.”
It was now shortly after dawn; Captain Blood would soon be giving way to Sunrise Semester. They had spent over an hour heading away from the house, first across open fields, then through woods, then across a county road and a plowed field and more woods until they’d felt secure enough to stop. Another county road was ahead of them; while the rest retired deeper into the woods to hide and watch television, Kelp had gone off to find them transportation, a vehicle to get them to New York.
And now Kelp was back. Slowly Dortmunder rose, clutching his back. He had found and fixed the leak in his air mattress, but the patch had popped during the night, and he’d awakened stiff as a board again. Sitting around on the cold ground late at night hadn’t helped much, so
that by now the movie character he resembled was no – longer Frankenstein’s Monster but the Tin Woodman before he’s been oiled.
“Oh, to be home,” Murch’s Mom said. “Home in my own warm bed.”
Jimmy said, “Can’t we watch the finish? It’s really well done.”
“I’m almost willing,” Dortmunder said. “I’d like to see something well done.”
“Like a steak,” Murch said.
May said, “Don’t talk about food.”
They turned off the TV, over Jimmy’s protests, and all trailed after Kelp through the woods and out to the county road, where they found a Ford Econoline van waiting for them. Colored dark green, it had lettering on the side doors that read BUXTON J. LOWERING, D. V. M.
Dortmunder said, “What’s this?”
“The only vehicle I could find,” Kelp said, “that didn’t have dogs or barbed wire in the way of me getting to it. People are very mistrustful out here, don’t believe any of that stuff about the gullible hicks.”
“D. V. M.,” May read. “That’s some kind of doctor, isn’t it?”
“Even out here,” Murch said, “he steals doctors’ cars.”
“Doctor of Veterinary Medicine,” Jimmy said.
Dortmunder looked at Kelp. “A vet?”
“It’s all I could find,” Kelp insisted. “You go look.”
“No,” Dortmunder said. “It’s okay. Stan, you and your Mom ride up front. The rest of us’ll get in back. And Stan?”
“Mm?”
“Just get us to the city, okay?”
“Sure,” Murch said. “Why not?”
Kelp opened the rear doors of the van, and they started to climb in. Wistfully May said, “And we were going back in a Country Squire. I was really looking forward to that.”
Most of the interior was taken up by a large cage. They had to get into the cage, there being no place else to sit down, and try to get comfortable on the crisscross metal bars of the cage floor. Jimmy sat on his Air France bag, May sat on the suitcase, and Kelp tried sitting on the TV set. When that didn’t work he tried the hibachi, which also didn’t work. Dortmunder, past caring, simply sat down on the floor.
Murch turned and called, “All set back there?”
“Just wonderful,” May said.
Murch started them forward. The drive wasn’t as bumpy as it might have been.
“Andy,” Dortmunder said.
“Uh huh?”
“The next time you have an idea,” Dortmunder said, “if you come to me with it, I’ll bite your nose off.”
“Now what?” Kelp was aggrieved again. “Doggone it, this thing’s working out isn’t it? We’re making thirty thousand apiece out of it, aren’t we?”
“I’m just saying,” Dortmunder said.
“I don’t see how you can complain.”
“I’m complaining anyway,” Dortmunder said. “And I’m also warning you.”
“Boy. Some people are just never satisfied.” May said, “What’s that smell?”
“Dog,” Jimmy said.
“Sick dog,” Dortmunder said.
“I suppose that’s my fault, too,” Kelp said. Nobody said anything.
28
“I U S E D to like dogs,” May said. “In fact, I had one once.”
“Lincoln Tunnel coming up,” Murch called to them.
“That’s not all that’s coming up,” May said.
They’d been in this truck for nearly two hours, except for three pauses at rest stops along route 80, when they would all get out and do a lot of breathing. Dortmunder, whose stiffness wasn’t being helped by sitting on a cage floor and leaning his back against a cage wall, would simply stand behind the truck during the rest stops, hanging there like an elm tree struck by the blight, but the others would all walk around, inhaling and limbering up.
“It’ll be over soon,” Kelp said, but not with his usual sparkle. He’d cut out the sparkle about an hour ago, when after one optimistic remark he’d made Dortmunder had given him a flat look and had started thumping his right fist into his left palm. Now, Kelp too seemed beaten by events, even if only temporarily.
Lincoln Tunnel. Murch paid the toll, and they drove through, following a slow-moving, belching tractor-trailer bringing-if the back doors could be believed-pork fat to an anxious city.
Out the other side, Murch scooted the van around the tractor-trailer and headed up Dyer Avenue to Forty-second Street, where a red light stopped him. “Where to?” he called back.
“Out,” Dortmunder said.
Kelp said, “Don’t we have to let the kid off first?”
“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.
May called to Murch, “Stop at Eighth Avenue. He can take the subway there, up to Central Park West.”
“Right.”
Jimmy had been half dozing, sitting on his Air France bag and leaning back against May’s side. Now she jostled his shoulder, saying, “Here we are, Jimmy. New York.”
“Mm?” The boy sat up, blinking. When he stretched, his bones cracked like tree limbs. “Boy, what a trip,” he said.
Murch drove to Eighth Avenue and stopped. May gave the boy a token, and Kelp opened the rear door for him. Carrying his bag, he climbed awkwardly out onto the street. (In some places this might have caused comment, but at Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street in New York City a twelve-year-old boy with an Air France bag climbing out of the back of a veterinarian’s truck at eight-thirty on a Friday morning was the closest thing to normality that had happened there in six years.)
“So long, Jimmy,” May called, and waved to him.
“So long, everybody,” Jimmy said, waving to them all through the open door of the truck. “Don’t feel bad,” he said, and turned away.
Kelp pulled the door shut, and Murch drove them on. “How much farther?” he asked.
“Turn down Seventh,” Dortmunder said, “and park as soon as you can.”
Kelp was frowning. He said, “Don’t feel bad’? What did he mean, ‘Don’t feel bad’?”
May said, “I suppose because we’re all separating now. We kind of got close there, after all, and he did warn us about the police.”
Kelp continued to frown. “It doesn’t feel right,” he said.
Dortmunder looked at him. “What’s up?”
“The kid said, ‘Don’t feel bad.’ Why would he-?”
Kelp blinked. Dortmunder looked at him. The two of them swiveled their heads and looked at the suitcase May was sitting on. May said, “What’s the mat-?” Then she too looked down at the suitcase. “Oh, no,” she said.
“Oh, no,” Kelp said.