There was another thud, and Herman cried, “Ouch! Son of a bitch!”
Dortmunder called, “What happened?”
“Hurt my thumb. But I figured out how to get it open.”
Kelp said, “Any whiskey in there?”
Dortmunder said warningly, “Wait a minute.”
“For later,” Kelp said.
A match flared. They could see Herman leaning through a narrow partition in
the front wall, holding the match ahead
of himself so they could make him out only in silhouette.
“Cigarettes,” Herman said. “About half full of cigarettes.”
Kelp said, “True?”
“Swear to God.”
“What brand?”
“L and M.”
“No,” Kelp said. “I’m not mature enough for them.”
“Wait, there’s some others. Uhhh, Salem.”
“No. I feel like a dirty old man when I try to smoke a Salem. Springtime fresh
and all, girls in covered bridges.”
“Virginia Slims.”
“What?”
“Sorry.”
“That’s May’s brand,” Dortmunder said. “I’ll take some of them with me.”
Kelp said, “I thought May got them free at the store.”
“That’s right, she does.”
“Ow,” Herman said, and the match went out. “Burned my finger.”
“You better sit down,” Dortmunder told him. “You’re choppin’ up your hands
pretty good for somebody’s gonna open some locks.”
“Right,” Herman said.
They rode along in silence awhile, and then Herman said, “You know, it really
stinks in here.”
Kelp said, “Everything happens to me. I looked at this truck, it said ‘paper’
on the side, I figured it would be nice and clean and neat.”
“It really smells bad,” Herman said.
“I wish Murch wouldn’t jounce so much,” Victor said. He sounded small and
distant.
Dortmunder said, “How come?”
“I think I’m gonna be sick.”
“Wait,” Dortmunder urged him. “It’s only a little farther.”
“It’s the smell,” Victor said miserably. “And the jouncing.”
“I’m beginning to feel that way, too,” Kelp said. He didn’t sound healthy.
Now that the idea had been suggested, Dortmunder too was starting to feel
queasy. “Herman,” he said, “maybe you ought to rap on the front wall, signal
Murch to stop a minute.”
“I don’t think I can get up,” Herman said. He too was sounding very unhappy.
Dortmunder swallowed. Then he swallowed again. “Just a little longer,” he
said in a strangled voice and kept on swallowing.
Up front, Murch drove along in blissful ignorance. He was the one who’d
found this place, and he’d worked out the fastest and smoothest route to reach
it. Now he saw it, up ahead, the tall green fence around the yard, surmounted by
the sign reading, “Lafferty’s Mobile Homes-New, Used, Rebuilt, Repaired.”
He slowed to a stop in the darkness just beyond the main entrance, got out of
the truck, walked around to the back, opened the doors, and they shot out of
there like they’d been locked in with a lion.
Murch said, “Wha …” but there wasn’t anybody to ask; they’d all run across
the road to the fields on the other side, and though he couldn’t see them, the
sounds they were making reminded him of clambakes. The endings of
clambakes.
Puzzled, he looked into the interior of the truck, but it was too dark to see
anything in there. “What the hell,” he said, making it a statement because there
was nobody around to ask a question of, and walked back up to the cab. In his
usual check of the glove compartment he’d seen a flashlight, which he now got
and carried back to the rear of the truck. When Dortmunder came stumbling
across the road again, Murch was playing the light around the empty inside of
the truck and saying, “I don’t get it.” He looked at Dortmunder. “I give up,” he
said.
“So do I,” said Dortmunder. He looked disgusted. “If I ever tie up with Kelp
again, may I be put away. I swear to God.”
Now the others were coming back. Herman was saying, “Boy, when you go
out to steal a truck, you pick a real winner.”
“Is it my fault? Can I help it? Read the truck for yourself.”
“I don’t want to read the truck,” Herman said. “I never want to see the truck
again.”
“Read it,” Kelp insisted. He went over and banged the side. “It says paper!
That’s what it says!”
“You’re gonna wake everybody in the neighborhood,” Herman said.
“It says paper,” Kelp whispered.
Murch said to Dortmunder quietly, “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me
about this.”
“Ask me tomorrow,” Dortmunder said.
Victor came back last, rubbing his face and mouth with a handkerchief.
“Wow,” he said. “Wow. That was worse than tear gas.” He wasn’t smiling at
all.
Murch shone the flashlight around the inside of the truck one last time, and
then shook his head and said, “I don’t care. I don’t even want to know.” Still,
on the way back up to the cab, he did pause to read the side of the truck, and
Kelp had been absolutely right; it said “paper.” Murch, looking put-upon, got
into the cab again and shut the door behind him. “Don’t tell me,” he muttered.
Meanwhile the other four, also looking put-upon, were getting their gear from
inside the truck; they’d traveled light the first time out of it. Herman had a black
bag similar to the kind doctors used to carry, back when they made house calls.
Dortmunder got his leather jacket and Kelp got his shopping bag.
They all went from the truck over to the fence, where Kelp, looking pained,
reached into the shopping bag and pulled out half a dozen cheap steaks, one at a
time, and threw them over the fence. The others all faced the other way, and
Kelp’s nose wrinkled at the smell of food, but he didn’t complain. Very quickly
after he started throwing the steaks over, they heard the Doberman pinschers
arrive on the other side and start snarling among themselves as they gobbled the
meat. Murch had counted four of them in his daytime visit here; the other two
steaks were just in case he’d missed a couple.
Now Herman carried his black bag over to the broad wooden gate in the
fence, hunkered down over the several different locks, opened the bag and went
to work. For quite a while, the only sound in the darkness was the tiny clink of
Herman’s tools.
The idea was, this operation must not exist. The people who worked at
Lafferty’s Mobile Homes were not to realize tomorrow morning that they’d
been burgled tonight. This meant that Dortmunder and the others couldn’t just
bust through the locks but had to open them in such a way that they would still
be usable afterward.
While Herman worked, Dortmunder and Kelp and Victor sat on the ground
nearby, their backs against the green wooden fence. Gradually their breathing
grew more regular and they got some flesh tone back in their faces. None of
them spoke, though once or twice Kelp looked on the verge of a declamation.
However, he didn’t deliver it.
This part of Long Island, quite a distance out from the city, was semi-rural
between the patches of housing developments. The private estates were on the
north side; down here, junkyards, car dealers, small assembly plants and Little
League baseball diamonds were interspersed amid weedy fields and off-brand
gas stations. There were housing developments within a mile of here in three
different directions, but no residences in this particular area at all.
“All right,” Herman said quietly.
Dortmunder looked along the fence. The gate was hanging slightly open, and
Herman was putting his tools away in his black bag. “Okay,” Dortmunder said,
and he and the others got to their feet. They all went inside and pushed the gate
closed behind them.
Murch had made the right count on the dogs; all four of them were sound
asleep, and two of them were snoring. They would wake up in an hour or so
with a splitting headache, but the Lafferty’s people wouldn’t be likely to notice
anything tomorrow morning, since dogs like this never do have much by way of
a sweet disposition.
The interior of Lafferty’s looked like an abandoned city on the moon. If it
hadn’t been for the big boxes of the mobile homes spaced here and there, it
would have been an ordinary junkyard, with its piles of used parts, some
mounds of chrome reflecting the dim light and other mounds of grimy dark
machinery parts like a wrecked spaceship a thousand years after the crash. But
the mobile homes looked almost like houses, with their high walls and their
narrow windows and doors, and the way they were canted and leaning here and
there around the lot made it look as though this city had been abandoned after
an earthquake.
There were floodlights mounted on fairly high poles around and about, but
they were so broadly scattered that most of the interior was in a kind of fitful
semi-darkness. However, there was enough light to see the paths through the
rubble, and Dortmunder had been here with Murch yesterday afternoon, so he