knew what spot to head for. The others followed him as he walked straight up
the main road, gravel crunching under their feet, and then made a right turn at a
pile of chrome window frames and headed straight for a mountain of wheels.
Victor suddenly said, “You know what this is like?” When nobody
responded, he answered his own question, saying, “It’s like those stories where
people suddenly shrink and get very small. And here we are on the toymaker’s
bench.”
Undercarriages. Stacked up higher than their heads, and spreading out
sloppily to left and right, were dozens of undercarriages salvaged from defunct
mobile homes. Over to the right was another pile of separate wheels, without
their tires-to follow Victor’s toymaker analogy, the stack of round metal
wheels looked like markers in some board game similar to checkers-but it was
the complete undercarriages that Dortmunder had in mind. These too were
minus tires but were otherwise complete-the two wheels, the axle, the metal
framework to attach the whole thing to the bottom of a trailer.
Dortmunder was wearing his leather jacket now, and from the pocket he took
a metal tape measure. Murch had given him minimum and maximum dimensions,
both in width and height, and Dortmunder started with the easiest undercarriages, the ones off to the side of the main heap.
Most, it turned out, were too small, generally in the way of being too narrow,
though Dortmunder did find one good set among those just lying on the ground.
Kelp and Herman rolled that one away from the rest, so they could keep track
of it, and then all four of them started dismantling the hill of undercarriages,
Dortmunder measuring each one as they got it down. The damn things were very
heavy, being totally metal, and for the same reason made a lot of noise.
Finally another set came within the usable range of measurements, and that
too was set aside. Then they rebuilt the hill-aside from being heavy and loud,
the undercarriages were also all dirty and grimy, so that by now all four men
were heavily grease-smeared-and when they were done Dortmunder stepped
back, panting, and surveyed their work. It looked just about the same as before,
the removal of two sets of wheels not changing the appearance of the pile in any
significant way.
All that remained now was to roll the undercarriages down to the gate and
out. They pushed them along, Dortmunder and Kelp on one and Victor and
Herman on the other, and they clattered and banged and made one hell of a lot
of noise. It disturbed the dogs, who groaned and moved around in their sleep
but didn’t quite wake up.
Murch was standing by the open rear of the truck when they came out. He
had the flashlight in his hand again, but tucked it away in his jacket pocket when
he saw them. “I heard you coming,” he said.
They were still rolling the wheels over from the gate to the truck. “What?”
shouted Dortmunder, over the racket.
“Forget it,” Murch said.
“What?”
“Forget it!”
Dortmunder nodded.
They loaded the wheels into the back of the truck, and then Dortmunder said
to Murch, “I’ll ride up front with you.”
“So will I,” Herman said very fast.
“We all will,” Kelp said, and Victor said, “Darn right.” Murch looked at them
all. “You can’t fit five people up there,” he said.
“We’re going to,” Dortmunder said.
“It’s a floor shift.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kelp said.
Herman said, “We’ll manage.”
“It’s against the law,” Murch said. “Two people in the front seat of a floor-shift vehicle, no more. That’s the law. What if a cop stops us?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dortmunder said. He and the others turned and
headed for the cab, leaving Murch to shut the rear doors. Murch did and came
around to the left side of the cab to find the other four all jammed into the passenger seat like college students in a phone booth. He shook his head, made no
comment, and stepped up behind the wheel.
The only real problem was when he tried to shift into fourth; there seemed to
be six or seven knees in that spot. “I have to shift into fourth now,” he said,
speaking with the even patience of somebody who has decided he isn’t going to
run amok after all, and a lot of grunting and grumbling took place from the mass
beside him as it retracted all its knees, leaving him just enough room to move the
shift lever into high.
Fortunately, there weren’t many traffic lights on the route he’d worked out, so
he didn’t have to change gears very often. But the jumble beside him gave a
four-throated groan every time they went over a bad bump.
“I am trying to figure out,” Murch said conversationally at one point, frowning
out the windshield as he spoke, “how this up here can be better than that back
there.” But he wasn’t surprised when no one answered him, and he didn’t repeat
the remark.
The bankrupt computer-parts factory that Dortmunder and Kelp had found
was at last up ahead on the left. Murch drove in there and around to the loading
platform at the back, and they all got out again. Herman got his bag of tools
from the interior of the truck, unlocked the loading platform door, and by the
light of Murch’s flashlight they cleared enough space in the rubble for the two
sets of wheels. Then Herman locked the place up again.
When it was time to go, they found Murch walking around the interior of the
truck, shining his flashlight in the corners. “We’re ready,” Kelp told him.
Murch frowned at them, all four standing on the loading platform looking in at
him. “What’s that funny smell?” he said.
“Whiskey,” Kelp said.
“Canadian whiskey,” Herman said.
Murch gave them a long look. “I see,” he said very coldly. He switched off
the flashlight, came out onto the platform and shut the rear doors. Then they all
got into the cab again, Murch on the left and everybody else on the right, and
headed back for where they’d left their cars. Kelp would bring the truck back to
where he’d picked it up.
They drove for ten minutes of grunting silence, and then Murch said, “You
didn’t offer me any.”
“What?” said the hodgepodge beside him.
“Never mind,” Murch said, aiming at a pothole. “It doesn’t matter.”
15
AT TWENTY after four on Sunday morning, the world still dark with
Saturday night, a police patrol car drove slowly past the temporary headquarters
of the local branch of the Capitalists’ & Immigrants’ Trust. The two uniformed
patrolmen in the car barely glanced at the trailer containing the bank. Lights were
always kept on in there at night and could be seen through the slats of the
venetian blinds over all the windows, but the patrolmen knew there was no
money inside the trailer, not a dime. They also knew that any burglar who
thought there was money in there would be sure to trip the alarm when he tried
to get in, no matter what method he chose; the alarm would sound down at the
station house, and the dispatcher would inform them on their car radio. Since the
dispatcher had not so informed them, they knew as they drove by that the C&I
Trust trailer was empty, and therefore hardly looked at it at all.
Their confidence was well placed. The entire trailer was wired against
burglary. If an amateur were to jimmy open a door or smash the glass in a
window, that would naturally sound the alarm, but even a more experienced man
would be in trouble if he tried breaking and entering around here. For instance,
the entire floor of the trailer was wired; should a man cut a hole in the bottom to
come in that way, he too would trip the alarm. Same with the roof and all four
walls. A sparrow couldn’t have gotten into that mobile home without alerting the
people down at the station house.
The patrolmen, as they drove by, paid more attention to the old bank building
across the way. There had already been some thievery of building materials from
over there, as well as vandalism, though why anybody would want to cause
damage to a building that was being torn down anyway was a puzzlement. Still,
theirs was not to reason why, so they shone their spotlight over the fa�ade of the
old bank building as they passed, saw nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary,
and drove on.
Murch let them get a block away and then stepped down from the cab of the
truck parked just around the corner on the side street, next to the end of the
trailer. Tonight’s truck, marked “Hoity Toity Garment Delivery,” had been much
more thoroughly inspected by Kelp before making delivery, and Murch had by