Ridding himself of mouthpiece and goggles, Kelp waded ashore as Tiny came down to meet him, saying, “What’s the story?”
“It’s no good,” Kelp told him. He moved toward the motor home, meaning to rid himself of all this gear. “Can’t see anything. And there’s tree stumps all over the place. You just can’t move down there.”
Tom joined them on their move toward the motor home, looking concerned, saying, “You can’t get to my money?”
“I don’t see how,” Kelp told him. “John and me, we—” He stopped and stared around the clearing. “Where is John?”
Tiny said, “Where’s John? He was with you!”
“Gee,” Kelp said, “I figured he’d get back before me. He had the rope, he had…”
Kelp’s voice faded away to silence. He turned and looked at the silent dark water. Deep as hell out there; he knew that now. Tiny and Tom also looked out over the reservoir, listening, watching, waiting…
“Jeez,” said Tiny.
The winch and its tripod fell over.
They spun around, startled by the noise, to see the winch and tripod sliding toward the water, zipping down the bank in a long shallow ground-hugging dive, determined to go for a moonlight swim.
“He’s pullin the rope!” Tiny cried.
“Stop it!” Kelp yelled, and Tiny ran forward and jumped, to slam both big feet down on the snaking white rope, pinning it to the ground just in front of the suicidal winch, while Kelp flung away his goggles and flashlight and ran to the water’s edge, where he gazed at the taut rope angling straight into the water.
Tiny picked up the slack part of the rope, the part between his imprisoning feet and the winch, and wrapped it around one wrist. “Should I pull it in?”
“Sure!” Kelp told him, excited and relieved. “That’s gotta be John at the other end!”
So Tiny began, hand over hand, to haul in the rope. “Heavy,” he commented, but kept pulling.
Tom approached the taut line of rope and looked along its length to where it disappeared in the dark water. He said, “Do you suppose he got it?”
“Jeepers,” Kelp said. “Do you think so? He just kept going! We lost each other, but he just kept at it, moved right on down in there, and found the box, and now he’s—” But then doubt crossed Kelp’s brow and he shook his head. “I was down there,” he said. “No way.”
“Whatever it is,” Tiny said, “it’s heavy.”
They stood there on the bank, water lapping just beyond their feet, Kelp and Tom tensely waiting while Tiny drew in rope, hand over hand, straining, putting his back into it. Then, all at once, Tiny fell over backward, landing with a major thump, his big legs flipping up into the air to catch a lot of suddenly loose-flying rope, and an instant later Dortmunder, who had let go the rope when he’d finally seen the surface of the water above him, came charging up onto dry land, flinging his remaining equipment left and right.
(If Bob had really wanted to see a sea serpent, he should have stuck around for this one. Unfortunately, though, the apotheosis of having sighted the first sea serpent had led him to realize that in fact he hated his bride, loathed his friends and coworkers, and despised his job, so Bob had left work and driven to the nearest town with an all-night newsstand to buy a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Happiness, he now knew, would be found as a mercenary soldier on some different continent.)
Having been dragged headfirst through tree stumps and roots and mud for what had seemed like miles, Dortmunder was not at the moment at his most presentable. He’d lost both his boots by this stage, plus the weight belt, plus the collapsible shovel, and several times had come damn close to losing his grip on both the rope and his mind. The wet suit had half unzipped itself and was full of mud. So were the goggles.
This creature, looking in fact less like a sea serpent and more like one of the clay people of Mayan mythology and Flash Gordon serials, stomped up out of the reservoir and slogged straight to Tom, who actually looked kind of startled at this abrupt approach, saying, “Al? You okay?”
“I got one word to say to you, Tom,” Dortmunder announced, pointing a muddy finger at Tom. “And that word is dynamite!”
Tom blinked. “Al?”
“Blow it up!” Dortmunder ranted wildly, waving in the general direction of the reservoir. “Do it any way you want! I’m through!”
Tiny, sitting up from his supine position, said, “Dortmunder? You’re giving up?”
Dortmunder swiveled around to glare at him. In a clear and praiseworthy effort to keep himself more or less calm and under control, he pointed again at the reservoir with his mud-dripping finger and said, “I am not going in there again, Tiny. That’s it.”
Kelp approached his old friend, worry creasing his features. He said, “John? This isn’t you. You don’t admit defeat.”
“Defeat,” Dortmunder told him, and squished away to the motor home.
SECOND DOWN
THIRTY
May put on her mitts, opened the oven door, and took out the big white-with-tiny-blue-flowers Corning bowl containing her famous tuna casserole. It was perfect; already she knew it. The smell alone was enough to tell you. Little bubbles of the grand aroma within kept breaking through the crusty golden-brown surface—a surface composed of grated cheese and riced potatoes sprinkled liberally over elbow macaroni— and just filled the kitchen with promises of culinary pleasure to come. May hoped John could smell it from the living room.
It was only, in fact, the promise of her tuna casserole that had persuaded John to permit this meeting in the first place. “I don’t want to talk about it!” he’d kept raging at the beginning. “I don’t want anything more to do with it! I don’t want him living in this house anymore! And I don’t want to ever be underwater, or talk about being underwater, or even think about being underwater, for the rest of my life!”
This was a pretty negative attitude to overcome, but May’s famous tuna casserole had worked wonders before, and so she’d promised she would make it and serve it at a nice social dinner that would also happen to be a discussion of the feasibility of trying for Tom’s buried/drowned cache again. That’s all it would be, just a discussion, just to talk about the possibility, just to see if it really and truly was no more than a hollow hope that Tom Jimson could ever get hold of his seven-hundred-thousand-dollar stash without blowing up the Vilburgtown Reservoir dam, or if somebody, just maybe, if somebody might come up with something.
“They better not,” John had said, but at long last he’d agreed to this dinner. And now all May could do was present the tuna casserole and hope for the best. From here on, it was up to everybody else.
When they had six for dinner, like tonight, they moved the coffee table out of the living room into the bedroom, and the kitchen table out of the kitchen into the living room, and the four kitchen chairs into the living room, and the other armless wooden-seated chair from the bedroom into the living room, and John would sit on a telephone book on his regular living room chair, which would still have him lower than everybody else but at least high enough to see his food and enter into the conversation. The kitchen table was really quite a good size with both its leaves open, and if you put a really thick pad under the tablecloth, you wouldn’t hardly hear at all the hollow clack of Formica every time you put down your glass or your knife.