“That was the mistake?” Dortmunder asked. “That’s what killed Cronley? No booze?”
“It set the situation up,” Tom answered. “See, what happens is, you put a law on the books, no matter how dumb it is, sooner or later somebody’s gonna come along dumb enough to enforce it. That’s what happened back in the fifties. Oklahoma cops boarded a through passenger train and arrested the bartender in the bar car for serving drinks in a dry state.”
“Wait a minute,” Dortmunder said. “On the train?”
“The through train, comin in this side of the state, goin out that side. Took the barman off, put him in jail overnight, the railroad people come around the next day and got him out.” Tom did that thing of grinning without moving his lips. “Fun night for the barman, huh? Al, you’re gonna take that county road up there.”
Up ahead, a small sign indicated a side road on the left. Since Tom had steered them off the interstate a while back, each road he’d put them on had been smaller and less populated, and now he was directing Dortmunder from an empty two-lane blacktop road onto a narrow two-lane oiled gravel road wandering off across scrub land as though it had been laid out by a thirsty snake.
At least the countryside wasn’t so flat in this middle part of the state; low, bare, brown hills now rose up around them, with taller and craggier (though just as barren) hills out ahead. This new road angled upward slightly, becoming rutted and rocky, as though rain sometimes fell here. Using both hands on the wheel to steer around the bumps and holes, Dortmunder said, “The last we heard, the bartender spent the night in jail.”
“Right,” Tom said. “So what the railroads did, the next couple years, they kept shifting routes around, and when they were done there wasn’t any trains in Oklahoma anymore.”
Surprised, but also pleased at the thought of such extensive revenge, Dortmunder said, “Is that right?”
“That’s right, all right,” Tom told him. “Even today, you take a look at the Amtrak map, the railroad lines go all around Oklahoma, but they never go in. And that’s what killed Cronley. No trains, no reason for the damn place. Now, there’s gonna be a turnoff along here somewhere, Al, but they probably don’t keep it up a hell of a lot, so we gotta watch for it.”
“Left or right?”
“Right.”
Dortmunder slowed the little white washing machine to a walk and hugged the right edge of the narrow roadway, but still they almost missed it. “Damn, Al!” Tom suddenly cried. “That was it! My fault this time, I shoulda seen it.”
Dortmunder braked to a stop and considered Tom. “Your fault this time?”
“That’s what I said,” Tom agreed, looking over his right shoulder at the ground behind them. “Come on, Al, back up, will ya?”
Dortmunder took a deep breath and held it. Then he nodded to himself, released the deep breath, shifted into reverse, and squirted the washing machine backward, gravel spraying hither and yon.
“Take it easy, Al,” Tom said calmly, looking out his window. He stuck his arm out the open window into the air and pointed, saying, “See it? See it there?”
Then Dortmunder did; crumbled blacktop, covered with dirt and weeds. “That’s it?”
“This was the back road in the old days,” Tom said. “This thing we’re on used to be paved, too.”
“Well, why don’t we take the front road?” Dortmunder asked him.
“It’s gone,” Tom said. “They ripped up part of it when they put in one a the interstates, and another part got sold off to some agribusiness. So now this is it.”
“How far from here?”
“Maybe six miles.”
“I don’t know,” Dortmunder said. “Maybe we want a Jeep for this. Or a tank, maybe.”
“We’ll be fine,” Tom assured him. “Just drive, Al.”
So Dortmunder drove, steering his little white appliance out onto a surface it had never been intended to know. Much of the roadway was crumbled away or undercut and gullied by rain, and a lot of the rest had weeds growing up right through the blacktop. The road had originally been a fairly wide two lanes, but the worst damage had worked inward from the outer edges, so now in parts it was barely as wide as the car, and never was it within the range of the civilized or the acceptable.
Which Tom didn’t seem to mind. While the vehicle made about four miles an hour—an hour and a half to Cronley, at this rate—and Dortmunder hunched over the steering wheel, forehead pressed to the windshield as he looked for axle-breaking holes out there, Tom chatted casually on, saying, “This is one of my oldest stashes, you know. Just after the war, it was. GI Joe comin home from everywhere, the streets lined with sharpers with decks a cards in their hands, just waiting. There was a fella in Cronley, stayed at the hotel there, had a girl named Myra. Lotta soldier boys got off the train there, headed back to the farm, or transfer to another train. Those days, you could take the train from Cronley down to Wichita Falls or up to Wichita or over to Amarillo, or all kinds of places. This fella—what was his name? — doesn’t matter. Him and Myra, they worked those soldiers pretty good, the fella play some poker with them up in the hotel room, Myra stand around looking sexy. So I got in good with Myra for a while, had her give me the high sign when there was a lotta money in the room, leave the door unlocked, and me and two other guys walked in and took it.” Tom nodded. Without moving his lips, he said, “Hee-hee.” Then he said, “Those other two guys, they didn’t know about me and Myra. So they run into the elevator and I shut the door on them and yanked the power and carried the cash to the room Myra’d rented for me.”
Dortmunder said, “Yanked the power? You mean you shut off the electricity in the hotel?”
“To confuse things,” Tom explained.
“With your partners in the elevator?”
“Ex-partners,” Tom corrected, and did his chuckle again, and said, “The soldiers got kinda rough on them two until the law got there.”
“Didn’t they search the hotel?” Dortmunder asked.
“Oh, sure,” Tom said. “But Myra fixed me up so I was her sister, and—”
“Sister!”
“Myra was the one with the looks,” Tom said. “But I was the one with the brains, so when the deck-a-cards guy found out Myra’d been in with the hijackers—”
“How’d he find out about that?”
“Well, how do you think, Al?” Tom asked.
“That’s how,” Dortmunder said, steering around the dangers in the road.
“So by then,” Tom said, “I was outta there. But I couldn’t take much of that cash with me, so I left it right there in the hotel, where it was safe.”
“How much?”
“We got sixteen thousand in the heist, so I took along two with me, left fourteen.”
“And now,” Dortmunder said, as the little tires of the machine plunged into the holes and clawed up the other sides, “you think this fourteen grand is gonna still be there, forty years later.”
“Absolutely,” Tom said. “I’m not comin all the way out here, Al, for the fresh air. And not to look up Myra either.”
“How old would she be now?” Dortmunder asked.