Wally, startled from his dinner in the kitchen by the sudden sound of his scream alarm—haven’t heard the crazed woman with the knife for quite some time, he reflected—hurried into the living room to find the hall door wide open and Doug flat on his face on the floor. Wally crossed to Doug, tapped him on the shoulder, and Doug screamed and fainted.
Light. Voices. Doug, eyes squeezed shut, reoriented himself gradually into space and time, and on this try memory entered like a gamboling lamb, easy and sweet. He remembered everything, and even understood why he was lying on the floor. The only thing he was confused about was why he hadn’t been sliced into tiny ribbons by that crazed woman with the knife.
Don’t argue, Doug; just accept.
He rolled over onto his back, opened his eyes, squinted against the light, and sat up. And Andy’s voice said, “Here he is now. Sleeping Beauty.”
“Slipping Beauty,” said John.
Doug looked over toward the sofa and chair, and the usual four were there, gathered around the cheese and crackers: Wally, John, Andy, and Stan. The maniac woman was nowhere to be seen. “All right,” he said. “Okay. Enough.”
“I’ll go along with that,” John said. “You sane now?”
“I think so,” Doug told him. “And I’ll make a deal with you. I don’t know who that woman was, or what her problem is, or where she is now, but I’ll do whatever you want if you keep her away from me. I never want to see her again. Okay?”
They all looked at one another, as though baffled. Then they all shrugged at one another. Then John said, “It’s a deal.”
“Good,” Doug said, feeling vast relief. “Now I can do it. I’ll pay attention to the model, I’ll think about the salvage job—”
John said, “The what?”
“Salvage job,” Doug said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Bring up something from the bottom of the reservoir. That’s a salvage job.”
Andy, with a happy smile, said, “There, you see? A professional. As soon as you get the right guy, you got a vocabulary and everything.”
“I remember about salvage jobs,” John said, sounding irritated again. “From that book I got. Marine Salvage.”
“Great book,” Doug commented.
“You just mumbled when you said it, that’s all,” John told him. “So, okay, it’s a salvage job. So let’s get to it.”
So they got to it, and this time Doug could absorb the computer model, see how clever it was, and also see what some of the problems were going to be. At one point, he said, “How did you guys figure to find one little box buried somewhere in a field? What were you gonna do, dig up the whole field? Underwater?”
John, a little huffy, said, “We got a fix on the place from Tom. And we had a poker with us, to help find it.”
“Great,” Doug said ironically. Now that they were dealing with his area of expertise, he was losing the last remnants of panic and insecurity, was unconsciously becoming a little arrogant and dismissive. Shaking his head at John, he said to Wally, “How close a fix is this?”
Wally explained about the three streetlights that Tom had used to mark the location of the buried casket, and Doug said, “Can you give me an accurate reading on distance to the box from the back wall of the library?”
“Sure.”
John, a bit nastily, said, “What are you gonna do, pace it off when you get down there?”
“I’ll bring a line with me,” Doug told him, “the same length as the distance from the wall to the box. Okay?”
“Mrp,” John said, and stopped interrupting after that, so finally Doug could close with the problem.
At last, when Wally had shown him everything he had, Doug stepped back from the computer screen and said, “Okay. I got the picture now.”
Andy said, “And it can be done?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Andy said.
“But,” Doug said, “it can’t be done without a boat.”
“Gee, Doug,” Andy said. “That’s a reservoir, you know? No boating.”
Doug frowned at him. “I didn’t think you guys worried about laws that much.”
John said, “What Andy means is, we can’t be seen with a boat.”
Doug shrugged. “So we do it on a cloudy night. All we need is a small rubber boat with a little ten-hp motor.”
John said, “A motor? We shouldn’t be heard with a boat either.”
“You won’t hear it,” Doug promised him. “But the main thing is, we have to go in from above, and that means a boat.”
“Expensive,” John suggested.
Doug waved that away. “A couple thou. For the boat and the motor, I mean. Then there’ll be other stuff. Maybe four or five thou altogether.”
John nodded. “Well,” he said, “time to go tell Tom the good news. We need more money.”
FIFTY-SIX
“Goddammit, Tom,” Dortmunder said, strapping on the safety harness, “why didn’t you ever stash your goddamn money anywhere easy?”
“Easy places other people find,” Tom pointed out. He sat on the ground beside the coil of rope.
“What the hell were you doing in South Dakota anyway?” Dortmunder demanded. This whole thing made him mad.
“Robbing a bank,” Tom said. “You ready?”
“No,” Dortmunder said. “I’m never gonna be ready to step out into thin air from on top of a mountain.” Taking one cautious step out onto Lincoln’s forehead, he looked down, way down, at the tops of pine trees. The whole world was out there. “Somebody’s gonna see me,” he said.
“They’ll think you’re a ranger.”
“I don’t have the hat.”
“So they’ll think you’re a ranger that his hat blew off,” Tom said. “Come on, Al, let’s do it and get it over with. We gotta drive all the way back to Pierre, turn in the car, catch the plane.”
“Pierre,” Dortmunder said in disgust, studying Lincoln’s eyebrows. Would they provide handholds? “Who calls a city Pierre?”
“It’s their city, Al. Come on, will ya?”
So Dortmunder dropped to his haunches and slid forward out of Lincoln’s hair, his feet reaching for those bushy thick eyebrows. Behind him, Tom paid out the rope. “How the hell,” Dortmunder complained, “did you ever stash the stuff here in the first place?”
“I was a lot younger then, Al,” Tom told him. “A lot spryer.”
Dortmunder stopped to look back and say, “Young people aren’t spry. Old people are spry.”
“You’re stalling, Al.”
He was. Oh, well. His waggling feet found the eyebrows, he slid down farther, his legs straddled the bumpy nose.
He was now out of sight of Tom, in safety up there on top, calling down, “You there yet?”
“No!”
“It’s the left nostril.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Dortmunder slid off the nose, dangled briefly in space—the pitons they’d pounded into the ground up there damn well better hold—clutched a naris, and hauled himself in to Lincoln’s upper lip.
Left nostril. Jeez, it was like a cave in there, it was so big. Dortmunder inched up into the thing, standing on Lincoln’s lip, and saw the oilcloth-wrapped package tucked behind an irregularity of rock. Reaching for it, he dislodged a few pebbles, raised some dust. Inside Lincoln’s nostril, Dortmunder sneezed.
“God bless,” called Tom.
“Oh, shut up,” Dortmunder muttered inside the nostril. He grabbed the package and got out of that nose.
FIFTY-SEVEN
One Monday in June, the reservoir gang converged on 46 Oak Street in the peaceful upstate rural community of Dudson Center. Already in residence at the house were May Bellamy, Tom Jimson, and Murch’s Mom. Coming from Islip, Long Island (home of the lobotomy; known in psychiatric circles as Icepick, Long Island), was Doug Berry, his custom-packaged pickup laden with gear for the job ahead: diving equipment, a 10hp outboard motor, uninflated inflatable boat, lots of other stuff. In a borrowed bakery van, driving up from New York City, were Stan Murch and Wally Knurr, with Wally’s computer components strapped down on the bread shelves in back. Also coming from the city, in a silver Cadillac with California MD plates, equipped with cruise control, a/c, cassette player, reading lights and extremely woodlike dashboard trim, traveled Andy Kelp (driver), John Dortmunder (front-seat passenger), and Tiny Bulcher (all over the rear seat). Of these vehicles, only the Cadillac was being followed, by a large roughhewn shambling fellow named Ken Warren, wedged with his tow bar into a small red two-door Toyota Chemistra.