Doug about jumped into the pool. He did jump, but in a circle, landing to face Billy Pohlax, Officer William Pohlax, the beat cop who wasn’t supposed to be around this area for at least another half hour, but who was in this school, in the doorway to this very room, not twenty feet from the pool, shakily pointing a gun in Doug’s general direction. Billy was so obviously terrified, so out of control, that his gun could surely go off at any second.
Doug cried, “Billy! Billy, it’s me, Doug!”
“Don’t move, don’t move!” Fear, fortunately, was keeping Billy way back in the doorway, where he couldn’t see the people inside the pool.
Doug froze. “I just want to show you my face, Billy. Remember me? Doug Berry?”
“Doug?” Billy’s trembling perceptibly eased.
Doug risked lifting his hands to his head, removing the mask and mouthpiece, showing his white face to Billy’s white face.
And Billy sagged with relief, saying, “Jeez, Doug, I thought you were a man from Mars or something. They had that movie Cat People on the box the other night, d’jever see that?”
“No,” Doug said.
Looking around, Billy said, “Anybody else here?” He took a step forward into the room.
“Uhhh, no,” Doug said, and moved casually but quickly to join Billy at the doorway. “What I’m doing here, Billy,” he explained, “Jack Holsem let me have a key, you remember Jack?” Subtly, he moved in a half circle, turning Billy away from the pool.
“Sure,” Billy said. “Dumbest kid in school. Works here now.”
A three-quarter turn away from the pool was the best Doug could make Billy do. “Still in school,” he said, and tried a casual grin, just to see if he could do it. “Anyway, I don’t have any place to try out new equipment, test it, you know. This time of year, the bay’s too cold.”
“Yeah, I guess it would be,” Billy agreed.
“Listen, Billy,” Doug said, being very confidential, pressing hard on their old friendship, “I’m not supposed to be here, you know. Jack wasn’t supposed to let me have the key. But I’m not stealing anything or anything, not doing—”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Billy said, looking down, watching himself with awkward intensity shove his gun back into its holster.
“I don’t want to get Jack in trouble,” Doug said, and over Billy’s shoulder he saw John and Andy’s heads emerge, way down at the shallow end of the pool. They were walking out! But then they turned and saw him talking to the cop, the quite obvious cop, and without even pausing they reversed direction and plodded stolidly back underwater again.
Oh, very good! Very smart! Doug, turning his relief into good fellowship, said, “Billy? You can forget about this, can’t you? For Jack’s sake?”
“Sure,” Billy said. “You I don’t have to worry about. But what about that stolen car out there?”
“Stolen car,” Doug echoed, while his stomach joined John and Andy at the bottom of the pool.
“Mercedes,” Billy explained. “MD plates. Reported stolen in the city about an hour ago. I came back behind the school”—and he grinned sheepishly—“to tell you the truth, Doug, I was gonna coop a little.”
Doug didn’t know the word. “Coop?”
“Take a little nap,” Billy translated. “Back behind the school here’s the perfect place. Anyway, I recognized your pickup, you know, because of the bumper sticker, and right next to it’s this stolen Merc.” Consciously becoming more formal, more official, Billy said, “You want to tell me about that, Doug?”
“A stolen Mercedes?” Doug’s mind skittered with a million unhelpful thoughts.
“MD plates,” Billy amplified. “What about it?”
“I don’t know,” Doug said, floundering. “What about it?”
“You don’t know anything about this car?”
“Well, no,” Doug said, as innocent as anything. “It wasn’t there when I parked the pickup. I’ve been down here maybe half an hour. They must’ve left it there after I came down.”
“Abandoned it,” Billy decided, nodding in agreement. “Okay, Doug. I better go report it. You ready to get out of here?”
“Aw, gee, Billy,” Doug said. “I’ve still got another, I don’t know, ten, fifteen, maybe twenty minutes to do down here, testing, uh, equipment. Can’t I, uh—”
“Well, the thing is,” Billy said, “our department wrecker’s gonna come here for the Merc. If they see your pickup, you know, the least I’ll have to do is give you a ticket. There’s no parking behind the school after ten P.M. except on game nights.”
“Well, uh…” He couldn’t leave John and Andy in the bottom of the pool for the rest of their lives! “Give me, uh, Billy, give me just five minutes, okay?”
“Well, a couple minutes,” Billy agreed reluctantly. “But I can’t be away from my post, away from the radio—”
“You go back to the radio,” Doug told him. “I’ll just finish up down here. I’ll be right out.”
“Now, don’t take too long,” Billy said.
“No no no, I promise.”
Billy looked out toward the pool, as though he’d walk over there and look in after all. “Spooky down here at night. Just like Cat People. You gotta see that flick, Doug. The original, not the dumb remake.”
“I will, I will. Don’t forget your radio.”
“Right.” Billy pointed a stern finger at Doug, becoming official again as he said, “Five minutes.”
“Thanks, Billy.”
Then, at last, Billy left, and the instant he was gone, Doug ran to the pool and jumped into the water, descending to where John and Andy stood around as though waiting to be picked up by the next submarine. With pointings and other frantic gestures, he showed them yet again how to add air to the BCD to increase their buoyancy, and up all three rose together. As soon as their heads broke the surface, all three started loudly to talk, but Doug’s urgency was greater and he shouted them both down, screaming, “We don’t have time!”
“That was a cop!” Andy yelled.
“Looking for the people who stole the Mercedes!”
Andy and John became very silent. Floating in the pool, they exchanged a glance, and then John said to Doug, “You didn’t happen to mention us down there in the pool.”
“Don’t worry, I said I was alone. But I’ve got to leave now, and take the pickup away before Billy calls the department wrecker to come get the Mercedes.”
John said, “Billy?”
“The cop,” Doug told him. “I went to high school with him. This high school.”
“Those early contacts,” Andy suggested, “are so all-important.”
“Yeah,” Doug said. “Anyway, I gotta leave, but you can’t. So what I’ll do is, I’ll wait till they come for the Mercedes and everybody’s gone, and then I’ll come back and pick you guys up and all this equipment.”
John said, “How long?”
“How do I know?” Doug asked him. “An hour, maybe.”
John said, “And what are we supposed to do down here for an hour?”
Doug looked around the pool, then back at his students. “Well,” he said, “you could practice. Tell the truth, guys, you need it.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Tom Jimson was a criminal! That was the first thought in Myrtle Street’s head every morning when she awoke, and the last thought every night as she drifted—later and later, it seemed—into sleep, and it was somewhere in her mind all day long: at the library, at home, in the car, shopping, everywhere. Tom Jimson, her father, was a major criminal.
She’d known this fact for nearly two weeks now, and it still hadn’t lost its power to astonish and appall and excite. The very next morning after that evening of pointless pursuit of her father in the car that merely circled and circled, when Myrtle had gone to work at the library, she’d started to look for Tom Jimson in every reference work she could think of, and there he was right away in, of all major-league places, the index of the New York Times!
She had been two years old, just on the brink of entering play school, when Tom Jimson had entered Sing Sing for what the newspaper account said would be the last time: “… seven life sentences to run consecutively, with no possibility of parole.”