Drowned Hopes Part 50

"Down there by the railroad tracks," Andy told him, pointing vaguely away along the sh.o.r.eline. "We walked here from there."

"Waded here," Tiny corrected. He was holding his hands in his armpits, pressing his arms against his sides as though the hands were cold or sore or something.

John said, "Can we go now?"

"Go?" Stan looked around. "Aren't we missing a couple people?"

"And seven hundred thousand dollars," Tiny said.

Andy said, "It's a long story."

John said, "Let's tell it tomorrow, okay? Today is finished."

SEVENTY-FOUR.

"The lights are on!" Myrtle cried, in great excitement.

So then Wally crept over to see what was happening, and after that everybody including Myrtle and Edna had to go over to Oak Street, and the whole long story did have to be told tonight, after all. But at least they were all indoors and warm, and the stay-at-homes were willing to wait until the returnees had changed into dry clothes. By then, May had made soup, Myrtle had made toast, and Edna had made a pitcher of what she called "b.l.o.o.d.y Marys that'll iron your socks." Under those conditions, it was possible to recount the night's events without too many qualms or expressions of disgust. Kelp did most of the talking, with amplifications by Tiny and occasional color reportage from Dortmunder.

Tom Jimson's lady friend and daughter bore up very well under the news of his death. "Well, that was overdue," Edna commented. "I thought I was done with that man years ago, and now I am."

"I so wanted to meet my father," Myrtle said with a little shiver, "and then I did. He'll be much better as a memory."

The news about Doug was a little harder to take. "Well, I don't hold much brief for that young man," Edna said, "as Myrtle well knows-"

"Mother!"

"-but I certainly don't wish him ill."

"Doug's a pro," Dortmunder said for about the thousandth time. "He'll be okay. But there was no point our hanging around. He wouldn't of found us anyway."

"That's really true," Kelp said.

"And John did get back by himself last time," May said doubtfully.

"Darn right I did," Dortmunder said. "Without wetsuits and air tanks and all of that."

"We'll hope for the best," Edna said.

"I hope for the best," Myrtle agreed.

"We all do," Wally said, but his eyes were on Myrtle.

SEVENTY-FIVE.

Gray day was returning, seeping back into a sopping world, and still they hadn't gone to bed. Dortmunder was ready, more than ready, but now everybody else wanted to talk about the future. "There isn't any," Dortmunder stated, as definitively as he could. "Not between me and that reservoir."

"The thing is, Dortmunder," Tiny said, "we invested so much in this already."

"Including," Dortmunder pointed out, "two, maybe three people. I'm in no hurry to go with them."

Kelp said, "I've touched that box with these hands. That's what gets me."

"And," Stan said, "we don't have Tom to worry about anymore."

Dortmunder said, "We don't have anything else, either. Doug lost the rope that leads down to the casket, and I lost the monofilament. Also, we don't have a boat. Also, we don't have a professional diver anymore."

"He could still show up," Murch's Mom said.

"Even so." Dortmunder spread his hands. "The only reason I got into this was to keep Tom from blowing up the dam and drowning everybody-"

"So like him," Edna said.

"Well, that danger's past," Dortmunder said. "It's Tom's money. He's down there with it. Let them stay together. I'm going to sleep. And then I'm going to New York. And then I'm gonna think about something else for the rest of my life."

The Batesville Casket Company is quite properly proud of its Cathodic System steel casket. A bar of magnesium is welded to the bottom of the casket with a resistor attached that detects rust as it develops anywhere on the casket surface and sends the magnesium to that spot. Eventually the magnesium will degenerate, but Batesville still guarantees the internal integrity of its Cathodic System caskets in air or ground for a minimum of twenty-five years.

In air or ground. In water, who knows?

SEVENTY-SIX.

Morning. All morning the rain poured down, as before. The night shift left the dam with heads down and chins tucked in, running for their cars and climbing in and driving away with none of the usual horsing around. The day shift, arriving, ran the other way, crowding into the dry safety of the dam with nothing on their lips but curses. The weeks of beautiful weather were forgotten: "Won't this c.r.a.p ever let up?"

In the course of the morning, only three cars pa.s.sed by on the road over the dam, and Doug opened his eyes in time to see the third go by just above him. I'm alive, he thought, lying there on the rocks at the east end of the dam, barely clear of the water and a little below the roadway, and he was amazed.

He was right to be amazed. His last clear memory from the night before was that exhilarating moment when he had seen the railroad tracks! Exhilarating in part because, he now realized, his brain had already begun to suffer oxygen starvation. But exhilarating anyway, after all his desperate searching, when the road he'd been following had suddenly crossed those two rusty black lines leading toward seven hundred thousand dollars.

And death.

He'd actually started to follow the tracks, he remembered that now. Even though in some still-rational corner of his brain he'd realized he was running out of air, that he didn't dare stay down one second longer, he had turned and obstinately kicked himself not upward but downward at a long slant, closer to the tracks.

That's all he could remember. Somewhere in there, he must have blacked out, or partially blacked out, and once his greedy stupid conscious mind had gotten out of the way his professional knowledge and diver's instincts had taken over and, at long last, he had started doing the right thing.

A diver out of air is only out of air at his current depth. Ascending alters pressure, and more air becomes available; not much, but every little bit helps.

Still, at some point Doug must have done an emergency ascent, because he no longer had either his weight belt nor his air tank. In an emergency ascent, the diver simply tries to get to the surface as rapidly as possible, slowly exhaling into the water along the way to prevent injuries caused by his lungs expanding too rapidly with the decreasing pressure. The partly inflated BCD would have helped speed his ascent, and would have kept him afloat and alive once he'd made it all the way up to air. And some remaining flicker of intelligence had made him swim toward the dam's lights (as John had done the last time), and had helped him drag himself up above the water line, where he'd been lying ever since.

The wetsuit had kept him from hypothermia, but he was incredibly weary and achy and hungry and cold and, now that he stopped to think about it, scared. I could have died down there!

I should have died down there. How could I have been so dumb?

Slowly Doug sat up, moaning in pain. Every joint and muscle in his body ached. Despite the wetsuit, he felt cold, chilled to the bone. Warmth, he thought. Warmth, food, bed. Too bad he'd never really connected with Myrtle; bed with a woman right now would be exactly what the doctor ordered.

Moving as stiffly as the Tin Woodman when he needed oil, Doug bent down over his knees and removed the flippers from his feet. Then he crawled up the rocks and boulders to the parking area beside the dam entrance. After a couple of minutes of limbering-up exercises there, bending and twisting and kicking (all the time hoping a car would come by so he could thumb a ride), he started walking along the road. Too bad he didn't have Andy Kelp's skill at commandeering cars.

At least with movement he wasn't so cold. On the other hand, his bare feet didn't like the rough road surface at all. Still, he was alive, and that counted.

He'd walked a bit more than half a mile when he heard the car coming along behind him. Turning, trying his best to smile like a friendly and innocent hitchhiker, he stuck his thumb out and was quite surprised when the car, a Chevy Chamois, actually came to a stop.

His surprise was doubled when he opened the pa.s.senger door to climb in and saw that the driver was a good-looking girl. A very good-looking girl. "Thanks a lot," he told her, shutting the door. "Pretty bad out there."

"Well, you're dressed for it," she commented, giving his wetsuit a crooked grin as she shifted into gear and the car rolled forward.

Oh, it was nice to watch the countryside go by at forty miles an hour instead of four. Doug said, "n.o.body should be out in this stuff."

"You bet," she said. "I wouldn't be out here, believe me, if I wasn't such a good little wifey."

The word wifey sent one signal to Doug, but the ironic tone sent another. Looking at her more closely, he said, "Your husband sent you out in this weather? For what? Get him a sixpack?"

"He didn't send me," she said. "He doesn't send anybody anywhere, believe me. I was just visiting him in the hospital."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"The bug hospital," she said, not sounding sorry at all. "He's wiggy, you know?"

"That's terrible," Doug said. "A good-looking girl like you, stuck with a nutcase?"

She gave him a gratified smile. "You think I'm good-looking?"

"You know you are."

"Would you believe I'm pregnant?"

"No! Really?"

"I don't show, do I?"

"Not a bit," Doug told her truthfully, wondering if he dared pat her belly. Probably not. A ride was more important than anything else at this point.

The gift sighed theatrically. "I should have listened to my mother," she said. "She knew there was something wrong with him from the beginning, but I just never listened."

"Why not?"

Another sigh. "I guess I just like s.e.x too much," the poor girl said.

"Mmm," said Doug, in sympathetic understanding. "Uh, what's your name?"

SEVENTY-SEVEN.

Dortmunder raised his cup. "My last coffee for a year," he said, and drank.

May, with him in the kitchen of the house on Oak Street, said, "Why's that?"

"Because I'm going back to the city," he explained, "and I won't be drinking anything out of a faucet there for a good long time."

"What about taking showers?"

"I haven't doped that out yet."

May said, "John, they do all kinds of things to purify that water before it ever gets to the city. Animals and birds and fish and things die in it all the time."

"Still," Dortmunder said. "Every time I turn the faucet and the water splashes in the sink, you know what it's gonna sound like? 'Al.' "

Murch's Mom came in and said, "Wally's off."

Dortmunder and May went out to the living room, where the front door was open, letting in cold damp air and giving a great view of the rain-drenched world outside. Tiny carried the components of Wally's computer in white plastic trash bags to protect them from the weather, and Wally carried his bulgy green vinyl bag. He was grinning from ear to ear, which made him look more than ever like a novelty item for sale on the Jersey sh.o.r.e. "Miss May, John," he said. "It's been wonderful. I learned so much from you all."

"It was nice to meet you, Wally," May said.

"You and the, uh, computer," Dortmunder said, coughing slightly, "were a real help."

"I hate long good-byes," Tiny said. "Especially when I'm carrying three hundred pounds of s.h.i.t."

So they had a short good-bye, and Wally and his equipment went out to Murch's Mom's cab for the run around the corner to Myrtle Street. Uh, Myrtle Street. On Myrtle Street.

A little later, Kelp and Stan Murch came back with transportation for the trip back to the city; Stan a Datsun S.E.X. 69 for his Mom and himself, Kelp an MD-plated Pontiac Prix Fixe for himself and Dortmunder and May and Tiny. They packed the two cars, running back and forth in the rain, and when they were about to leave, Dortmunder shut the front door and turned to see May frowning in worry at Doug's pickup, still parked on the gravel drive beside the front lawn. Dortmunder said, "What's up?"

"I wish I knew Doug was all right," she said. "And don't say, 'He's a pro.' "

"I wasn't going to," Dortmunder lied. "I was going to say he's a big boy. Come on, May, it's raining."

FIFTH DOWN?.