“There’s three of us,” Mac pointed out, “if we wanna turn them in. Why would we?”
Ace frowned, searching for an answer, while Buddy shook his head and said, “Oh, go ahead, Mac, tell them.”
“Sure.” Facing Mark and Os, Mac said, “Hold him for ransom.”
“Ransom?” Mark considered that. “You mean a straight kidnapping?”
“Almost.” Mac nodded at his friends. “We’re all members of ACWFFA, and—”
“I’m sorry, the what?”
“Our union,” Mac explained. “There’s over twenty-seven hundred union members just from ACWFFA lost everything with SomniTech. So the idea is, we grab him, we hold him for ransom, but we don’t want the ransom for us. The ransom goes to the union.”
“Ten mil,” Buddy said.
“What that is,” Mac said, “it’s a little over three grand for each and every union member.”
“Outa his pocket,” Ace said, “and into ours.”
“I know three grand doesn’t seem like a lot to you guys,” Mac said, “but our union members could use it, and it would be like a symbol. Justice got done.”
“Admirable,” Mark said, and meant it. “I admit you surprise me, Mac, I hadn’t expected selflessness. I admit I’m feeling abashed. But I’m afraid there are problems with your idea.”
“Yeah,” Ace said. “We can’t get our hands on him.”
“In addition to that,” Mark said.
Os made one of his rare appearances, saying, “Who’d pay for the son of a bitch? Not ten mil, ten bucks. Who’d pay for him?”
“His wife,” Mac said.
Mark said, “It’s possible you’re right about that, Mac, but if her, surely she’s the only one.”
“One will do,” Mac said.
“Except not,” Mark told him. “If she tried to raise the ransom, what assets would she use? Her husband’s.”
“That’s the idea,” Ace said.
“But,” Mark said, “if Alicia Hall—that’s her name—if she reached out to her husband’s unseized holdings, if she withdrew ten million dollars from anything at all belonging to him, and brought it into the country, the courts would take it away from her long before she could get it to you and the … your union.”
“ACWFFA,” Mac said, helpfully.
“Yes, them,” Mark said. “The money might get to Alicia Hall, if she asked for it, but it would never get through her. Our idea has a much better likelihood of success.”
Mac said, “Then why’d you want to talk to us? If you’ve already got your success.”
“Because,” Mark said, “while we have the likelihood of success, which you do not, so far we do not have the actuality of success. But with three strong, gifted, imaginative, and, if I may say so, noble fellows like yourselves joined to us, success might still be in the offing.”
“An extra ten mil to you,” Os threw in.
“Exactly,” Mark said. “So long as we’re having our way with Monroe’s offshore accounts, there’s no reason we can’t drop an additional bundle into the coffers of, uh, the, your union.”
“ACWFFA,” Mac said.
“Exactly.”
“What we’ve been thinking recently,” Mac said, “is, it might be what we got to do now is go in there into that compound and just bring him out.”
Mark turned a hugely beaming countenance upon Os, who himself was very nearly smiling. “There, you see?” Mark said. “Great minds do think alike.”
9
ANDY KELP TRUSTED DOCTORS. Not so much on the medical side, though some of them were pretty good at that, too, but on the question of automobiles. As far as he was concerned, if you trusted a doctor’s judgment when it came to his personal wheels, you were not likely to go far wrong.
Doctors have a deep understanding, for instance, of the difference between comfort and pain, so they’re unlikely to choose a car with a badly designed driver’s seat or misplaced steering wheel or one of those accelerators where your knee begins to hurt after a hundred miles. Also, doctors have a perhaps too-vivid picture in their minds of the aftereffects of high-speed physical impacts, so they’re mostly going to wrap themselves in products that will (a) avoid accidents where possible, or (b) survive them when necessary. Thus, when Andy Kelp went shopping in the streets and parking lots of greater New York for transportation, he always went for the sign of the MD plate.
Today, however, Kelp had a second criterion to include in his search, which was that he needed not just a car and not just a doctor’s car, but a large car currently owned by a doctor. This wasn’t because the car would be carrying five travelers, but because one of the travelers would be Tiny.
It was, therefore, a distinct pleasure to him when, the morning after the meeting at the O. J., while roving the outer reaches of long-term parking out at Kennedy International Airport, a place where you’re pretty much guaranteed to have a few days’ head start if you choose a vehicle with no dust on it, he saw ahead of him a Buick Roadmaster Estate, seven or eight years old, an antique the day it was built, a nine-passenger station wagon with not only room enough inside for a bowling team but room enough for that team to bowl. And proudly below that broad rear window and door, a … yes! MD plate.
This grand vehicle was a color not seen in nature, nor much of anywhere else except certain products of Detroit. It was a metallic shimmering kind of not-chartreuse, not-gold, not-silver, not-mauve, with just a hint of not-maroon. It was in effect a rendering in enamel of a restaurant’s wine list descriptions. But even better, from Kelp’s point of view, the Roadmaster was dust-free.
It’s amazing how many people don’t want to carry their parking lot ticket with them when they travel, preferring to “hide” it behind the sun visor instead. Even some doctors. Kelp was happy to pay the two-day parking fee, explaining to the ticket-taker’s surprised look, “Emergency at the hospital.”
“Oh, too bad.”
Kelp took his change, took the Van Wyck Expressway toward the city, and while stopped by the monorail construction phoned the troops. “I’m on my way,” he told them, not completely accurately.
Still, they didn’t have that long to wait, at Ninth Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, before Kelp slid the Roadmaster in at the curb next to them. Once he got there, it didn’t take them long to sort themselves out. Chester and Stan, of course, had to ride up front with Kelp, because they’d be the drivers on the day and Chester knew how to find Hall’s place. Tiny, of course, had to sit on the back seat; all of the back seat. And Dortmunder, of course, had to open the rear door and climb over the tailgate and sit on the backward-facing final seat, as though he’d been bad in class.
“Been waiting long?” Kelp asked, after everyone was in and the door closed.
“A while,” rumbled Tiny from behind him.
“They waved down a couple real doctors,” Chester said, between Kelp and Stan. “I think one of them’s gonna send a bill.”
“We’ll fight him to the Supreme Court,” Kelp said, and accelerated to and through the Lincoln Tunnel and across New Jersey without looking at it, and halfway across Pennsylvania.
•
“There it is,” Chester said.
“There what is?” Kelp asked.
“The compound. Hall’s land, it started just back there.”
Tiny said, “Pull off, let’s look at this.”
“Right,” Dortmunder said, from way in the back.
This was a fairly straight county road, rolling along with the low hills to either side, some of it farmed and some of it forested. This stretch was forested on both sides. The right shoulder was wide enough for a car to pull off, but just beyond the shoulder was an old low stone wall that suggested this land too had at one time been farmed, or at least settled. Beyond the wall was second-growth forest, tall but skinny-trunked trees with a lot of bramble and shrubbery underneath.