What's The Worst That Could Happen Part 26

47.

When Stan Murch felt the need for temporary wheels, he liked to put on a red jacket and go stand in front of one of the better midtown hotels, preferably one with its own driveway past the entrance. It was usually no more than ten or fifteen minutes before some frazzled out-of-towner, vibrating like a whip antenna after his first experience driving in Manhattan traffic, would step out of his car and hand Stan the keys. One nice thing about this arrangement was that it wasn't technically car theft, since the guy did give Stan the keys. Another nice thing was that such people were usually in very nice, clean, new, comfortable cars. And yet another nice thing was that the former owner of the car would also give Stan a dollar.

Thursday afternoon, the eighteenth of May, while thousands of miles to the west Andy Kelp was dressing John Dortmunder in the dog's breakfast, Stan Murch drove away from the Kartel International Hotel on Broadway in the Fifties, at the wheel of a very nice cherry-red Cadillac Seville, and headed downtown to Ninth Avenue and Thirtyninth Street, near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where he was to meet Tiny Bulcher, the mountain shaped something like a man. There was a brief delay at that location, because Tiny was in the process of explaining to a panhandler why it had been rude to ask Tiny for money. "You didn't earn this money," Tiny was saying. "You see what I mean?"

The way Tiny was holding the panhandler made it impossible for the fellow to answer questions, but that was okay; Tiny's questions were all rhetorical, anyway. "For instance," he was saying, for instance, "the money I got in my jeans this minute, where do you suppose I got it? Huh? I'll tell you where I got it. I stole it from some people uptown. It was hard work, and there was some risk in it, and I earned it. Did you earn it? Did you risk anything? Did you work hard?"

In fact, the panhandler at that moment was at some risk, and was working quite hard merely to breathe, for which Tiny wasn't giving him credit.

And now some taxis honked at Stan, which made Tiny look away from his life lesson. He saw Stan there in the cherry-red Cadillac, patiently waiting, ignoring all those cab horns. "Be right there," Tiny called, and Stan waved a casual hand, meaning: take your time.

Tiny held the panhandler a little closer to give him some parting advice. "Get a job," he said, "or get a gun. But don't beg. It's rude."

Allowing the panhandler to collapse gratefully onto the sidewalk, Tiny stepped over him - displaying politeness - and walked around the cherry red Caddy to insert himself into the pa.s.senger seat. "Quiet car you got."

"It's those cabs that are noisy," Stan told him, and drove away from there and on down to the Holland Tunnel and through it to New Jersey, and then deeper into New Jersey to an avenue of auto dealers and similar enterprises, among which was Big Wheel Motor Home Sales. Stan drove on by Big Wheel an extra block, and then pulled over to stop at the curb. "See you," he said.

"Stan," Tiny said, "I want to thank you. This is a roomy car. I'm not used to roomy in a car. I remember one time I had to make a couple people ride on the roof, I got so cramped in the car."

"How'd they like that?" Stan asked.

"I never asked them," Tiny said. "Anyway, I appreciate you picking out this car, and I don't even mind the color. Just so it's roomy."

"We'll get roomier before we're done," Stan a.s.sured him, and got out of the Caddy to walk back to Big Wheel, where he got into a conversation with a salesman in which the salesman told some little lies and Stan told some great big lies, mostly about being a married construction worker off to different job sites all the time around the country, tired of renting little furnished houses here and there, deciding to get a motor home for himself and Earlene and the kids. So what've we got here? "You're gonna love the Interloper," the salesman said.

So that was another lie. The Interloper was big, which was what Stan had asked for, but it was kind of tinny, and none of the individual rooms in the motor home were very big, and there was only one toilet. Stan and the salesman - who said his name was Jerry, which was probably true - took the Interloper for a spin, but it just didn't satisfy.

Next they tried the Wide Open s.p.a.ces XJ. It was also big enough, and it had a good-size living room and two small bathrooms, so Stan took that one for a spin, too, with Jerry again on the front seat beside him and a cherry-red Cadillac again trailing along in the outside mirror.

But Stan didn't like the way the XJ drove, big and boxy, like it would fall over any second, so back they went to the lot, where Stan rejected the Indian Brave because it wasn't self-contained enough; you had less than an hour of electricity available in the motor home, before you'd have to find a trailer park somewhere and hook up.

Then they got to the Invidia. Unlike most motor homes, which are either chrome or tan, the Invidia was a pale green, like fresh spring gra.s.s. It had three bedrooms, two baths, a good-size living room, built-in furniture that folded away to make more s.p.a.ce, plenty of septic capacity, and all the water storage and electric batteries you could possibly want.

Off for another test drive, and Stan got happier and happier. The Invidia held the road well enough in city traffic that he felt he could probably let it out pretty good on the highway, if need be, big though it was.

They drove here and there, back and forth, and then Stan said, "What's that noise?"

"Noise?"

Jerry looked startled. "What noise?"

"Something in the back, when we were stopped at that light. Lemme pull over here."

Stan stopped at the curb as a cherry red Cadillac drove slowly by, parking just ahead. Jerry got out of the curbside door, while Stan dropped the ignition key out the open driver-side window. Then Stan got out, and he and Jerry went around to the back, where Stan tugged on the license plate - being a dealer plate, it actually was loose, but didn't really rattle - and tugged on the plastic housing for the spare wheel, and on the ladder going up to the roof, and finally said, "Well, I don't know what it could have been."

"Some other car, maybe," Jerry suggested. "Stopped there at that light."

"You could be right. Sorry about that."

They went back around to get into the Invidia again, and Stan found the ignition key on the driver's seat. When he palmed it, it was warm and waxy. He put it in the ignition, started the engine, and said, "Well, I don't hear it any more."

"Good," Jerry said.

Stan drove back to the lot, and a.s.sured Jerry he didn't have to see any more motor homes, he was pretty confident the Invidia was the one for him and his family, "though I'll have to clear it with Earlene, you know how it is. I'll bring her around on Monday."

They shook hands before Stan left "See you Monday," Jerry said.

48.

Well, it seemed to work. Dortmunder went here and there around Las Vegas, wearing this horrible clothing Andy Kelp had foisted on him, and n.o.body gave him a second glance. Cops drove by on the street and didn't even slow down. Hotel security people frowned right past him at boisterous kids. Citizens walked on by without snickering or pointing him out to one another as something that must have escaped from Toontown, and the reason for that, he could now see, was that most of them were dressed just as foolishly as he was. More.

In fact, the only comment he received, pro or con, was on Friday morning, when he came out of his room at the Randy Unicorn and the mummified woman was standing there, outside her office, squinting in the sunlight as though she'd just vaguely remembered that sunlight was bad for her, and when she saw Dortmunder in his new togs she looked him up and down, said, "Uh huh," and went back into her office.

The acid test came when Dortmunder and Kelp went over to the Gaiety. They walked around the Battle-Lake, and studied the cottages where Max Fairbanks would be staying come Monday, and while they were doing all that the exact same rent-a-cops never gave Dortmunder a tumble, didn't even recognize him from two days ago. It was amazing, this protective coloration stuff, simply amazing. Dortmunder said, "What if I wear this c.r.a.p in New York?"

"Don't," Kelp advised.

They called Anne Marie's room from the lobby, but she wasn't in, so they wandered some more, looking at the casino, which was shaped mostly like a Rorschach inkblot. From the front entrance, if you came into the hotel and angled to the right you'd find the doors out to the pool and the Battle-Lake and the rest of the outdoor wonders, and if you went straight ahead you soon reached the broad check-in desk, with half a dozen clerks on duty, but if you angled to the left you entered a kind of cave, low-ceilinged and indeterminate and endless, with all the light you needed at any one specific spot and yet nevertheless an impression of overall darkness.

The first part of the cave was a ranked army of slot machines, brigade after brigade, all at attention, many being fed by acolytes in clothing like Dortmunder's, but with cups full of coins in their left hands. They were like sinners being punished in an early circle of h.e.l.l, and Dortmunder pa.s.sed by with gaze averted.

Beyond the slots, the same room spread left and right, with the c.r.a.p tables to the left, extending for some surprising distance, and the blackjack tables to the right. Following the c.r.a.p tables leftward would funnel you back to the lounge, a dark room with low tables and chairs where drained holidaymakers dozed in front of a girl singer belting your favorites in front of a quartet of Prozaced musicians. If you went the other way, past the blackjack tables, you came to the more exotic dry-cleaning methods: roulette, keno, and, in a roped-off area staffed with men in tuxes and women in ball gowns, baccarat. The keno section was actually the back of the lounge, so you could continue on through and wind up at the c.r.a.p tables again.

This was all one continuous room, without a single window. The ceiling was uniformly low, the lighting uniformly specific and soothing, the air uniformly cool and crisp, the noise level controlled so thoroughly that the shouters at the c.r.a.p tables could hear and be excited by one another but would hardly be noticed by the intense memorizers at the blackjack tables.

In here it was neither day nor night, but always the same. Dortmunder went through it feeling like an astronaut, far out in the solar system, taking a walk through the airless reaches of s.p.a.ce, and he wished he were back on his native planet; even the protective s.p.a.cesuit he was wearing, with its many colors and its white pocket, didn't seem like enough.

Eventually they found themselves outdoors again, where the nice bushy green plantings along the rambling blacktop paths at least were reminiscent of Earth. They roamed a bit more, breathing the airlike air, and then Kelp said, "There she is," and pointed to Anne Marie, swimming in the pool.

They went over and stood by the pool, crowded with kids of all ages, until she saw them; then she waved and swam over and climbed out, trim in a dark blue one-piece suit. "Hi, guys," she said. "This way."

They followed her around to her towel, on a white plastic chaise longue. She dabbed herself, then gave Kelp a moist kiss and Dortmunder a skeptical look, saying, "Who dressed you?"

Dortmunder pointed at Kelp. "He did."

"Get to know who your friends are," she advised.

Kelp said, "It's protective coloration. Before, people kept wanting to make citizen arrests."

"It seems to work," Dortmunder said.

"Good," she said. "I suppose you want to see the view."

"Yes, please."

They rode up in the elevator together, and Anne Marie unlocked her way into the room. Dortmunder immediately went over to look out the window, and there it was. The field of play, laid out for him like a diagram.

"I took some pictures," Anne Marie said, bringing them out. "Up here, and down there, too."

"I love your camera, Anne Marie," Kelp said, and went over to stand beside Dortmunder and look out the window. They contemplated the scene down there together for a minute, and then Kelp said, "So? Whadaya think?"

Dortmunder made shrugging motions with head and eyebrows and hands and shoulders. "We might get away with it," he said.

49.

Friday night in New Jersey. The Stan Murch/Tiny Bulcher crime spree against the Garden State was getting into high gear. Having borrowed a different car - a Chrysler van, to give Tiny his roominess again - they had headed across the George Washington Bridge, to begin their outrages in the northern part of the state.

Between 9:00 P. m. and midnight, moving steadily southward toward the neighborhood of Big Wheel Motor Homes, doing each of their incursions in a different county to lessen the likelihood that the authorities would connect them all, they broke into a plumbing supply company and removed a pipe cutter, entered a major new building's construction site to collect the Kentucky license plates from front and rear of an office trailer there, and forced illegal entry into a drugstore to collect a lot of high-potency sleeping pills. The hamburger they bought.

A little later that night, in the comforting darkness of a half-full parking lot behind a movie house half a mile from Big Wheel Motor Homes, waiting for the dobermans to go to sleep, luxuriating in the roominess of the van, and watching the rare police car pa.s.s with the occasional traffic, Tiny said, "I went out west once."

"Oh, yeah?"

Tiny nodded. "Guy from prison owed me some money, from a poker game. Supposed to pay up when he got out. Instead, I heard, he went out west, worked in one of those places, whada they call it, uh, rodeo."

"Rodeo," Stan echoed. "With the horses and all?"

"Lots of animals," Tiny said. "Mostly what they do, they throw ropes on animals. People go out, pay good money, sit in the bleachers, you'd think they're gonna see something, but no. It's just some guys in dumb hats throwing ropes on animals, and then these people in the bleachers get up and cheer. It'd be like you'd go out to a football game, and the players come out, but then, instead of all the running and pa.s.sing and tackling and plays and all that, they just stood around and threw ropes on each other."

"Doesn't sound that exciting."

Tiny shook his head. "Even the animals were bored," he said. "Except the bulls. They were p.i.s.sed off. Minding their own business, they have to deal with some simpleton with a rope. Every once in a while, one of those bulls, they get fed up, they put a horn into one of those guys, give him a toss. That's when I stand up and cheer."

Stan said, "What about your friend?"

"He wasn't exactly my friend," Tiny said, and moved his shoulders around in reminiscence. When he moved like that, the joints down deep inside there made crackle sounds, which he seemed to enjoy. "They have all these extra guys there," he told Stan, "to open the gates and close the gates and chase the animals around, and this guy was one of them. I went over, I said I'd like my money now, you know, polite, I don't ever have to be anything but polite -" "That's true," Stan said.

"So he said," Tiny went on, "gambling debts from prison were too old to worry about, and besides, he had all these friends out here with sidearms. So I could see he didn't intend to honor his debt."

Stan looked at Tiny's dimly seen face in the darkness here inside the van, and there didn't seem to be much expression in it. Stan said, "So what happened?"

Tiny chuckled deep in his chest, a sound like thunder in the Pacific Ocean, one island away. He said, "Well, I threw a rope around him, tied the other end to a horse, stuck the horse back by the tail with the bowie knife I took off the guy - Did I mention I had to take a bowie knife off him?"

"No, you didn't mention that."

"Well, I did, and stuck the horse with it."

Tiny made that distant-thunder chuckle again. "They're probably both still running," he said. "Well, the horse, anyway."

Then he rolled his shoulders some more, made that crackle sound, and said, "Let's go see how the dogs are doing."

The dogs were doing fine, dreaming of rabbits. Tiny and the borrowed pipe cutter opened the main gate, and Stan went in with his new key and climbed up into the Invidia, which he liked just as much by night as he had during the day. He steered the big machine around the sleeping dogs, letting them lie, and then paused out on the street while Tiny shut the gate behind him so police patrols would not be alerted prematurely.

Tiny climbed aboard, looked around at the interior of the Invidia, and said, "Not bad, Murch, not bad."

"We call it home," Stan said, and drove away from there.

They had one last misdeed to perform before finally leaving New Jersey in peace. At an auto repainting shop in yet another county, once they'd gone through the ineffectual locks, they picked up two gallons of high gloss silver automobile body paint, an electric paint sprayer, and two rolls of masking tape.

After that, it was just a matter of picking up their pa.s.sengers. Stan hadn't wanted to drive this big monster into Manhattan if he didn't have to, so everybody else was coming out, to be met at prearranged locations. First, he picked up the four who'd come over to Hoboken on the PATH train, saving some muggers there who'd been just about to make a mistake. Then he went on to Union City and gathered in the three who'd taken the bus over from the Port Authority terminal through the Lincoln Tunnel. And finally he drove up to Fort Lee, where he connected with the three who'd driven across the George Washington Bridge in a car they'd found somewhere.

From Fort Lee, it was nothing at all for the big Invidia, green tonight but going to be silver by some time tomorrow, with its new Kentucky license plates firmly in place, to get up onto Interstate 80 and line out for the West, just one more big highballing vehicle among the streams of them, all aglow with running lights in yellow and red and white, rushing through the dark.

"Home away from home," somebody said.

"Shut up and deal," said somebody else.

50.

Sunday morning, across America. Rolling over the tabletop of Kansas, now on Interstate 70, here came the silver Invidia, containing Stan and Tiny and the ten other guys. Stan was now asleep in the back bedroom while Jim O'Hara drove, with Ralph Winslow clinking ice cubes in his gla.s.s beside Jim in the pa.s.senger seat. Tiny had sat in on the poker game, and was winning. He usually did win, but guys didn't like to refuse to play with him, because they knew it made him testy. So this bunch in the Invidia, alternating drivers and traveling day and night, expected to reach Las Vegas some time before dark tomorrow.

But right now, Sunday morning, in the sky over Kansas and the Invidia, a commercial airliner was sailing by, also headed west. It contained among its pa.s.sengers Fred and Thelma Hartz, Gus Brock, Wally Whistler, and another lockman, who used to be called Herman X, back when he was an activist. Then, while briefly vice president of an African nation called Talabwo, his name had changed to Herman Makanene Stulu'mbnick, but when the rest of his government was hanged by the new government he came back to the States, and now he was called Herman Jones. He and the other four were on their way to Los Angeles, where Herman would select for them a nice automobile from long-term parking and Fred (that is, Thelma) would drive them tomorrow to Vegas.

Counting Dortmunder and Kelp and Anne Marie already established in Las Vegas, this meant a crew of twenty, four times Dortmunder's maximum. The result was, Dortmunder kept changing the plan this way and that way. His problem was, he didn't have enough for all these people to do, but he knew they all wanted to be part of the action. And, of course, they would all want part of the profit, as well.

As would Lester Vogel. Out there in Henderson, at General Manufacturing, on this Sunday morning, some of Lester Vogel's employees were at work on an unusual special order, preparing a consignment and loading a truck, to give A. K. A.'s pal John just exactly what he'd asked for. "I don't know, man," the workers told each other, shaking their heads. "1 wouldn't do this."

But then again, they didn't know how this special order was going to be used.

Sunday in Las Vegas. The wedding chapels and slot machines were busy. The sun was shining. Everything was calm.