The faint metallic click as the interloper cocked his rifle caused Dortmunder to frown in his sleep and make disgusting smacking sounds with his mouth, and to dream briefly of being deep underwater and having his air tank suddenly fall off his back and separate from the mouthpiece hose with a faint metallic click just before his mouth and stomach and brain filled with water; but then that dream floated away and he dreamed instead about playing poker with some long-ago cellmates in the good old days, and being dealt a royal flush—in spades—which caused him to settle back down in contentment, deeper and deeper into sleep, so that it was almost two hours later when he finally opened his eyes and rubbed his nose and did that sound with his mouth and sat up and stretched and looked at the rifle aimed at his eye.
“GL!” Dortmunder cried, swallowing his tongue.
Rifle. Gnarled old hands holding the rifle. Wrinkly old eye staring down the rifle’s sights. The last resident of Cronley, Oklahoma, seated in a chair in Dortmunder’s bedroom.
“Now, Mr. Department of Recovery,” said the hermit, “you can just tell me where Tim Jepson is. And this time, ain’t nobody behind me with no bottle.”
SIXTY-FOUR
No bottle…
When dawn’s sharp stiletto poked its orange tip into Guffey’s eye through the windowless opening in the Hotel Cronley’s bar’s front wall, he awakened to a splitting headache and a conundrum. Either the infrastructure man’s partner had hit him on the head with three bottles, which seemed excessive, or something funny was going on.
Three bottles. All broken and smashed on the bar floor, all with their corks still jammed tight in their cracked-off necks. And all absolutely stinking. They were dry inside, so it wasn’t merely that the wine had gone bad after all these years; and in any event, the stench seemed to come more from the crusted gunk on the bottles’ outside.
Plumbing. The second invader had gone to the basement to look at the plumbing. So did Guffey, reeling a bit from the aftereffects of the blow on the head, and when he found the dismantled trap he knew. By God, it was Tim Jepson after all! Come back for his fourteen thousand dollars, just as Mitch Lynch had said he would. Fourteen thousand dollars hidden all these years in those wine bottles in this dreadful muck river; wasn’t that just like Jepson?
In my hands, Guffey thought inaccurately, and I let him get away. But perhaps all hope was not yet lost. There was still one slender thread in Guffey’s hand: the license plate of that little white automobile. Could he follow that thread? He could but try.
Before noon on that same day, Cronley became at last what it had for so long appeared to be: deserted. Guffey, freshly shaved, garbed in the best of the professors’ stolen clothing, dismantled rifle and more clothing stowed in the knapsack on his back, marched out of Cronley and across the rock-strewn desert toward his long-deferred destiny.
By early evening, he’d walked and hitchhiked as far as a town with a state police barracks, where he reported the hit-and-run driver, offering a description of the car and its license number, plus the welt on the back of his head for evidence. They took the license number and description and ran them through their computer, and they took the welt on the back of his head and ran him through the hospital, giving him the softest night’s sleep and the best food of his entire life, and almost making him give up the quest right there. All a fella had to do, after all, to live in the lap of luxury like this, was step out in front of a bus seven or eight times a year.
But duty called, particularly when the cops came around the hospital next morning to say they knew who’d hit him but there wasn’t much to be done about it. (He’d been counting on this official indifference.) The car, it seemed, was a rental, picked up at the Oklahoma City airport the same day it hit Guffey and turned back in the next day. The miscreants—“New Yorkers: you might know”—were long gone. There wasn’t the slightest mark on the car, nor were there any witnesses, nor had the hospital found anything at all seriously wrong with Guffey (amazingly enough), so there simply wasn’t enough of a case to warrant an interstate inquiry.
Guffey, humble as ever, accepted everything he was told, and asked only one thing in return: Might he have, please, the name and address of the person who had rented the car?
One of the cops grinned at that request and said, “You wouldn’t think of taking the law in your own hands, would you?”
“I’ve never been out of Oklahoma in my life!” Guffey cried, truthfully. “I just want to write that person and tell him I forgive him. I’m a Christian, you know. Praise the Lord!”
When it looked as though Guffey might intend to start preaching in their direction nonstop, the cops gave him two names—Tom Jimson, who’d rented the car, and John Dortmunder, who’d driven it—plus one address in New York for both of them. (Tom Jimson, huh? Tim Jepson, Tom Jimson, huh? Huh? Huh?)
There was a little glitch when the hospital said they wanted to keep Guffey a few days longer for observation, but when they discovered he didn’t have any insurance they realized they’d already observed him long enough, and he was let go. And then, for the first time in his life, thumb extended, Guffey left Oklahoma.
The trip northeast was fairly long and adventurous, punctuated by a number of crimes of the most cowardly and despicable sort: church poor-boxes rifled, cripples mugged for their grocery sacks, things like that. And here at last was New York. And here was the address. And here was John Dortmunder.
Tim Jepson wasn’t here right at this minute, unfortunately—killing him in his sleep would be the safest way to go about it, after all—but that was all right. John Dortmunder was here and John Dortmunder could tell Guffey how to find Tim Jepson.
And he would, too. Oh, yes.
SIXTY-FIVE
“Well, no,” Dortmunder said, trying to sound like a reasonable person in control of himself and his environment, rather than a terrified bunny rabbit who’s just been awakened by a madman with a rifle. “No, I don’t know where Tom—Tim is.”
“Lives here,” the madman corrected him. “Said so when you rented the car.”
Dortmunder stared, astonished at the madman’s information, and the madman cackled, rather like Tom himself, except that his mouth opened plenty wide enough to see the shriveled and darkened toothless gums. “Didn’t know I knew that, did you?” he demanded, the rifle as steady as a courthouse cannon in his wrinkled old hands.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Oh, I know all sorts of stuff, Mr. Department of Recovery. Tim Jepson calls himself Tom Jimson now. He paid for that rental car. You drove.”
“Well, gee, you’re pretty good,” Dortmunder told him, thinking like mad.
“You know what I’m really good at?” the madman asked him.
“No, what’s that?”
“Shooting.” The maniac grinned, cheek nestled against the cold rifle. “I been shooting for the pot for years now,” he explained.
“Don’t you ever hit it?” Dortmunder asked him.
Which made the old guy mad, for some reason. “Shooting for the pot!” he repeated, with great emphasis. “That means shooting food! Coyotes and rabbits and gophers and snakes and rats! That you put in the pot! And eat!”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Dortmunder told him, very sincerely. “I’m a city person, I don’t know these things.”
“Well, I do,” the touchy countryman said, “and let me tell you, Mr. City Person, I’m goddamn good at shooting for the pot.”
“I bet you are,” Dortmunder told him, filling his voice to the gunwales with admiration.
“You get a little squirrel out there,” the madman told him, “it don’t stand still and let you aim, like how you do. It keeps moving, jumping around. And yet, every blessed time I pull this trigger, I hit that squirrel just exactly where I want. I never spoil the meat.”