Irwin said, “It’s a pay phone, John, at Whispering Pines. There’re four of them there in a row.”
“All right,” Dortmunder said. “So there’s a chance. Then what?”
“The usual routine,” Guilderpost told him. “And she comes here, to let us know how things went.”
“No,” Dortmunder said.
Guilderpost didn’t believe it. “No?”
“In the first place,” Dortmunder told him, “if they let her go, we know how things went. In the second place, taxis have trip sheets, what time the pickup, where’d they go, what time the drop-off. It’ll take the cops half an hour to see Little Feather spends a hell of a lot of time in that supermarket.”
Irwin said, “John, we do have to talk with Little Feather, plan what we do next.”
Tiny grunted and pointed at Dortmunder and said, “You listen to Duh—John.”
“That’s right,” Kelp said. “He’s the planner, he’s the organizer.”
Guilderpost looked offended. “I beg your pardon, but this is my project. You three have coattailed yourselves to it. All right, there’s enough for everyone, no need to be greedy or cause trouble, but it’s still my project.”
Dortmunder said, “That’s not what they mean. We do different things, Fitzroy, you and me. You figure out someplace where you can make people believe something’s true that isn’t true. Make them believe you got an old Dutch land grant screws up their title to their property. Make them believe maybe there is just one more Pottaknobbee alive in the world. That’s not what I do.”
“No, of course not,” Guilderpost said, and Irwin, sounding slightly snotty, said, “I’ve been wondering that, John. What is it you do?”
“I figure out,” Dortmunder told him, “how to go into a place where I’m not supposed to be, and come back out again, without getting caught or having anything stick to me.”
“It’s like D day,” Kelp explained, “only like, you know, smaller.”
“We also go for quieter,” Dortmunder said.
“So up till now,” Kelp said, “you’ve just been putting the scam together, but now you sprung it, now you got the law and the tribes and everybody taking an interest, now you need John.”
“To tell you don’t do phone calls in code,” Dortmunder said. “And don’t just make a meeting without thinking about it, because now you got law sniffing around. All of us in this room, our job now is to not exist.”
Irwin said, “You mean leave Little Feather out there completely on her own?”
“No,” Dortmunder said. “What we do with Little Feather is, we act like she’s the crown jewels of England, and she’s for the first time on display in America, in New York, somewhere, at somewhere—”
“Radio City Music Hall,” Kelp suggested.
“I don’t think so,” Dortmunder said. “Maybe the UN. Maybe Carnegie Hall. Somewhere. And there’s guards. And now what we gotta do is, we gotta get in there—”
“Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Tiny offered.
“Wherever,” Dortmunder said. “We gotta get in there, wherever the hell it is, and we gotta get back out again, without those guards even knowing we were there.”
“Only in this case,” Kelp finished, “without the crown jewels.”
“Well, yeah,” Dortmunder said. “I’m not suggesting we kidnap Little Feather. What I’m saying is, we got to deal with Little Feather without anybody knowing we’re doing it, so let me run this part.”
“I am prepared,” Guilderpost assured him, “to learn at your feet.”
“Good,” Dortmunder said. Irony never did make much headway with him.
18
Little Feather got out of the cab, walked into the supermarket through the automatic in door, made a U-turn, aimed for the automatic out door, and Andy came in the automatic in door. He gave her the smallest head shake the world has ever barely seen, though Little Feather saw it loud and clear, he did not look at her, and he moved on into the store.
And so did she. He got a cart, and so did she. He started up and down the aisles, taking his time, adding very few items to his cart but studying many, reading cereal boxes and vitamin supplement labels and safe handling instructions on shrink-wrapped hamburger. Little Feather followed him for a few minutes, until she realized he didn’t want her to follow him, and then she went off on her own.
Which was when she realized somebody was following her. A chunky little guy of about thirty, very much an Indian from the reservation, dressed in old blue jeans, which had been faded by work and use and not by the designer, and a red plaid shirt of the sort worn by some men upstate and some women in the city, and he was not a very good follower. He kept being in Little Feather’s way as she roved about, but he would practically rather fling himself over the high display racks than meet her eye. He also was forgetting to put things in his cart, except that, when she stopped to put something in hers, he’d immediately grab something to his right, at waist level, without looking at it, and dump it in. Did he really need Depends? Poor fellow, and so young, too.
Okay, Little Feather got the picture. The tribes had put somebody on her, to tail her around and see whom she made contact with, and Fitzroy and the others knew about it, or had guessed it would happen, and were warning her not to try to meet the same old way.
Which made her realize, as she wended her slow and thoughtful way through the supermarket, that the cops might be doing exactly the same thing, with a more competent shadow, someone she might not tip to right away, or ever. So what did this mean?
Was she on her own now? Couldn’t she meet up with Fitzroy and the others at all? That could create a little tension.
Except that Andy was still in the store, wandering around; Little Feather saw him from time to time, down at the end of some aisle. So there was more to come, somehow. But what?
It was fifteen minutes later, when she was in the dairy section once again, this time trying to find the low-fat plain yogurt, as opposed to the no-fat plain yogurt—ya gotta have a little fat—when another cart stopped next to hers, and Andy leaned past the end of her cart to reach for a Honey Walnut Lime Rickey Yogurt With No Sodium!, and when he’d moved on away, there was an additional item in her cart. It was a magazine, and it was called Prevention.
She didn’t read the note tucked inside the magazine until she got back to the Winnebago. It was hand-printed on two small sheets of Four Winds motel stationery, and it said:
Don’t telephone. We think they might be tailing you, to see if you’ve got what they call “confederates.” And they could also be tapping the pay phones there.
At four o’clock, call a cab. There’s a big shopping center called SavMall outside of town. Go there, go to the drugstore there, buy something you want, come back.
If you see your tail, mark him, but don’t let him know you’re onto him.
Everything’s fine with us, no problem.
Well, who cares about you people? Little Feather thought. Four o’clock. Another cab ride.
19
Little Feather’s a real boon for the taxi industry around here,” Kelp said as they watched the cab turn in at Whispering Pines main entrance, over there across the road.
They were all in Guilderpost’s Voyager, which was crowded but marginally more roomy than the Jeep, parked on the blacktop beside the kind of liquor store that grows like magic across the road from every campground in the civilized world. Guilderpost was at the wheel, with Dortmunder beside him, now looking past Guilderpost’s impressive chin at the taxi turning in at the entrance over there. Tiny took up much of the rest of the vehicle, with Kelp and Irwin tucked in among him.
A minute after the cab drove in, a little chunky guy came trotting out of the entrance, had to stop and bounce on both feet and wait impatiently while two big semis roared by, one north, one south, and then scampered across the road to climb into a small old orange Subaru parked around at the front of the liquor store, facing out. Dortmunder had noticed that vehicle on the way in and had idly wondered if the place was in the process of undergoing a holdup, because why else would you park in front of a liquor store facing out? Well, this was why else.