Stan said, “I’m a driver. I’m the best in the business—”
“He is,” his Mom said, as she swerved around a wallowing stretch limo driven by a Middle Eastern refugee who’d cleared Customs & Immigration earlier that morning. “I’m his mother, but I’ve got to admit it, my boy Stan is a good driver.”
“The best,” Stan corrected. “But, May, I don’t do plans. Getaways I can do. Vehicles I can drive; there isn’t a thing in the world with wheels and a motor I can’t drive. I could give Tom Jimson very professional advice on how he’ll never get away from that county if he blows the dam, but that’s about it from me.”
May said, “Andy? What about you? You have millions of ideas.”
“I sure do,” Andy agreed. “But one at a time. And not connected with each other. A plan, now, a plan is a bunch of ideas in a row, and, May, I’m sorry, I’ve never been good at that.”
“God damn the State of New York!” Mom cried, sideslipping past a pipe-smoking psychiatrist in a Mercury Macabre. “They give anybody a license to drive a car!”
“They also released Tom Jimson,” May pointed out.
Tiny cleared his throat. “Usually,” he said, “what I’d do at this point is go to the guy that’s the problem and give him a little vacation in the hospital for maybe three months. But the truth is, Tom Jimson—I don’t care if he’s seventy hundred years old—he’s the nastiest guy I ever met. I wouldn’t say this about almost anybody else, but I’m not absolutely one hundred percent sure he’s the one would wind up in the hospital. And then you’d never change his mind. He’d go ahead out of spite.”
May frowned, saying, “Tiny, how can he be that dangerous?”
“He doesn’t care,” Tiny said. “That’s what it comes down to. He knows everything there is to know about doing the other guy and not getting done yourself. He’s the only guy I knew, when we were in stir, that could sleep with a twenty-dollar bill stickin out of his hand. See, me,” he went on earnestly, “if I gotta do a little pressure somewhere, I do what I do and that’s it. I mean, unless you really annoy me, I don’t break bones I don’t haveta break. But Tom, he likes to go too far. It’s tough for a normal human being to gear up to that kind of viciousness right away.”
May sighed. “What are we going to do?”
“Well,” Stan said, “I think maybe we shouldn’t watch the TV news much the next few weeks.”
They were all abruptly flung forward when Mom had to slam both feet onto the brake to keep from creaming two bicycle messengers snaking through the traffic with big flat square packages strapped to their backs. One of them looked around over his shoulder through his goggles and surgical mask and rode one-handed long enough to give Mom the finger. Mom stuck her head out the window to give him the verbal finger back, and then turned to glare at May and say, “You want a vacation?”
May blinked at her. “A vacation? No, I want—”
“It’s the same thing,” Mom snapped. “You want to take care of this problem with the dam. I want a vacation. If you’ve got a brain in your head, May, you want a vacation, too.”
Spreading her hands, wondering if traffic conditions had finally driven Murch’s Mom over the brink, May said, “I don’t know what you mean. What’s the connection?”
“I’ll tell you the connection,” Mom snarled. “I’ve got the idea. I know how to stop Tom Jimson.”
FORTY-FIVE
When Dortmunder opened the apartment door and stepped inside to call, “May! I’m home!” and a voice from the living room called back, “In here, John,” that would have been perfectly all right except for two problems: 1) It wasn’t May’s voice. 2) It wasn’t even a woman.
Warily, Dortmunder moved forward to the living room doorway, where he looked in at Stan Murch, seated on the sofa, holding a beer can, his expression troubled. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Dortmunder said.
“I understand that,” Stan told him, “but things have changed.”
“I haven’t changed.”
“Maybe you ought to get yourself a beer,” Stan suggested.
Dortmunder studied him. Stan the driver’s personality usually matched his carrot-colored hair; optimistic, straightforward, a little aggressive. At this moment, though, he was subdued, troubled, almost gloomy; a new Stan, but not an improved one. “I’ll get myself a beer,” Dortmunder decided, and did so, and came back from the kitchen to sit in his normal chair, take a drink from his beer can, wipe his chin, and say, “Okay. You might as well tell me.”
“May moved out,” Stan said.
This was the last thing Dortmunder had expected. He’d been braced for more pressure about that goddamn reservoir, for Stan having been set up to talk to Dortmunder about it by May, but—
May? Moved out? Impossible. “Impossible,” Dortmunder said.
“Well, she did,” Stan insisted without satisfaction. “The cab left about twenty minutes ago. Take a look in the closet, if you want. Look in the dresser.”
“But—” Dortmunder couldn’t bend his mind around this idea. “She left me? May left me?”
“Nah,” Stan said. “She says you can come live with her all you want. Her and Mom both.”
No matter how closely Dortmunder listened, none of this made the slightest, tiniest, least bit of sense. “Your Mom?” he demanded. “What’s your Mom got to do with it?”
“They’re living together,” Stan said. “That was the cab May went in; Mom’s last fare.” Sounding bitter, he said, “It was even Mom’s idea. She got a leave of absence from the cab company on account of traffic burnout, and May said she was due a sabbatical from the supermarket, so they did it. They say we can both go live with them any time we want.”
Dortmunder was on his feet, slopping beer. “Where?” He was ready to go, wherever it was. Go there now, get an explanation he could understand, bring May home again. “Where, Stan?”
“Dudson Center,” Stan told him. With a long sigh, he shook his head and said, “In front of the dam. That’s where they’re living now.”
FORTY-SIX
It’s amazing how many reservoirs there are in upstate New York, all piping their water south. New York City doesn’t look particularly clean, so they must be drinking all that water down there. Or mixing it with something. Or maybe they just leave the faucets on.
Anyway, in addition to the number of reservoirs, there was also the complication of Doug Berry’s regular job and life. It had been tough to get enough time free and clear so he could take several days off from the normal routine, close the dive shop, get into his customized pickup every morning, and barrel north to check out the reservoirs of the Berkshires and the Catskills and the Shawangunks and the Adirondacks and the Helderbergs. So it wasn’t until now, almost two weeks after refilling John and Andy’s air tanks, that Doug at last arrived at North Dudson to check out the Vilburgtown Reservoir.
Was he already too late? Had John and Andy and their unknown friend already reclaimed the drowned and buried loot? They’d had a long time since he’d refilled their tanks. But even so, even if they were ahead of him, if he could just find the right reservoir, find the right trail, he firmly believed he could somehow or other manage to deal himself into whatever was going on. But first he had to figure out which of New York’s myriad reservoirs the loot was or had been under.
This is how his thinking went on that: if you steal a lot of money (something he’d fantasized himself doing more than once in his life), you will either hide it or carry it, but not both; therefore the robbery would probably have taken place somewhere in the general vicinity of the reservoir, but must have happened before the reservoir existed.
So, in each case, he first found out how old the reservoir was, and if it was older than fifty years he immediately crossed it off, because how long ago could the original robbery have been? Then, he would look in the local paper for some big robbery to have occurred in that area not too many years before the reservoir was born. Major robberies are not that common in the kinds of rural areas that succumb to reservoirs, which meant that so far he had only two faint possibilities, both of them extremely unlikely, though he’d go back to both if nothing better showed up.