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 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.