“This is it here,” Chester said. “The main entrance—well, the only entrance now—is a couple miles farther on.”
Kelp peered past Chester and Stan at the empty forest. “Where’s the security start? Down by the entrance?”
“No, it’s here,” Chester said. “Not right out by the road, in behind the wall about ten feet. Stan, open the window, would you?”
So Stan, next to the door, rolled the window down and said, “I don’t see anything.”
“You can’t see the wires,” Chester told him, “but you can see the uprights.” He pointed past Stan’s nose at the trees. “See them?”
Stan sighted along Chester’s forearm, closing one eye. “Oh, yeah,” he said.
Kelp squinted, looking past Chester and Stan, glance roaming among the trees; then all at once he realized he was looking at a slender black metal pole, about six feet tall. Off to the left, a little farther, a little farther, there was another one. “I see them,” he said. “Very discreet.”
“They didn’t want it to look like a penitentiary or something,” Chester explained.
Dortmunder, from way back there, said, “I don’t see them.”
Tiny said, “What kinda wire?”
“Electric,” Chester said. “Not enough to kill you, but enough to make you go away. Like a deer fence. But if a wire gets broken, there’s a signal in the guardhouse, tells them exactly where, between which two posts. And there’s lights in the trees, you can’t see them from here, but if the wire gets broken at night, they can switch the lights on, it’s like high noon in there.”
“I don’t see them,” Dortmunder said.
Stan said, “Just one wire?”
“No, three,” Chester said. “At two feet, four feet, and six feet.”
“Hey,” Dortmunder called. “I’m back here, remember me?”
Kelp looked in the mirror and saw him way back there, waving for attention. “Oh, hi, John,” he said. “Almost forgot about you.”
“I noticed that,” Dortmunder said. “What I don’t notice is these posts you’re all talking about.”
“They’re right there,” Tiny said, and waved a paw at the woods.
“I don’t see them,” Dortmunder insisted.
Chester said, “Okay, John, you and I can get out, I’ll show it to you.”
So that’s what they did. Stan had to get out first, to let Chester out; then he leaned against the side of the car, leaving the door open, while the other two stepped over the stone wall and walked in among the trees. The occasional vehicle went by, mostly pickup trucks, but nobody paid any attention to the parked car or the strolling men.
With the door open, Kelp could hear Chester as he said, “Closer in, they’ve got motion sensors, but not way over here. So we can walk right up to it. See it, John? See it there? Stop, you’re gonna walk into it!”
“What? There’s—I can’t—Oh, this! It’s metal!”
“Sure,” Chester said, and pointed away to the right. “Metal poles. See them? Every so often, all the way to the cornfield back there, that’s where Hall’s property stops.”
“I thought it was gonna be wood,” Dortmunder said. “I was looking for wood.”
“They did it in metal.”
“Yeah, sure, I get it.”
Dortmunder now squinted off to the right, holding a hand up to his brow to shade his eyes even though he stood under a whole lot of trees in full leaf. He said, “So then it makes the turn and goes along next to the cornfield, is that it?”
“All around the property,” Chester said. “Miles of it.”
“What happens if I touch the wire?” Dortmunder asked, and he could be seen to lean toward where the fence must be, as though touching it might be a good idea. “Does it tell the guards?”
“Not unless you break it. But it’ll give you a hell of a wallop, John, knock you back a few feet, probably give you a sore arm for a few days.”
Kelp called, “Don’t do it, John.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Dortmunder said, and the two of them came back to the car, where he said, “Now that we’re here, maybe Chester or Stan would like to switch with me, I can ride up—”
“No, John,” Kelp said. “We need Chester to describe it to us.”
Stan said, “And I gotta keep my eye on the routes.”
Dortmunder sighed. “Fine,” he said, and stumped away to get into the third tier again.
When they were all aboard and Kelp had them rolling once more, slowly, beside the forest and the stone wall, Dortmunder called to them, “It’s amazing to me how many grown men and women, if you’re sitting back here, make faces at you. Stick their tongue out. Grown-up men and women, driving, think they’re funny.”
“Pretend you don’t see them,” Kelp advised.
“I do,” Dortmunder said. “But I do see them. Waving their hands, thumbing their nose, yukking it up. It wears you down after a while.”
“If we find a store,” Tiny suggested, “we can buy some carpet tacks, you can toss them out your window back there.”
“That’s a very good idea, Tiny,” Dortmunder said. “Thank you.”
Looking ahead, Kelp said, “What’s happening, now?”
The forest was coming to a ragged end, followed by a very large expanse of weedy barren land, with a few farm buildings very far back. The low stone wall continued, and so did the black metal poles bearing the electric wires, the poles more visible now that they weren’t in among trees.
Chester said, “They used to lease this part to commercial tomato growers every year. These people would come in, a little earlier in the spring than this, plant a million plants, put chemical shit everywhere, go away, come back at the end of August for one harvest, middle of September for another, leave the rest of the tomatoes right where they are, you had this whole carpet of red here until frost. Very pretty.”
Kelp said, “But they don’t do that any more.”
“Well, they can’t, with the security,” Chester said. “Also, I understand it, the company didn’t want to do business with Hall any more.”
Kelp said, “People that fill up the food and the ground with chemicals, even those people won’t deal with Monroe Hall?”
“He’s not well liked,” Chester said.
“If they left the rest of the crop like that,” Stan said, “there’s probably volunteers growing in there now.”
“Never volunteer,” Tiny commented.
Soon the weedy field came to an end, with more farm buildings, some of them looking abandoned, and then a blacktop road that ran through a greater variety of landscape—parts with trees, cleared parts, buildings of different kinds, some looking like small residences, some like storage.
Kelp said, “What’ve we got here now?”
“Some of the cars are in those buildings there,” Chester said, pointing. “The ones without windows.”
“What about the ones that look like houses?”
“They’re houses,” Chester said. “Where the staff lives. See that nice green one? That’s where I lived, me and my family.”
“It’s like a little village in there,” Kelp said.
“Not as much occupied as it used to be,” Chester said. “He lost a lotta staff.”
“Running out of money?”
“No, he’ll never run out of money. It’s just more people he screwed, like me. And other people left ‘cause they just didn’t like him any more. It’s tough for him to hire people now. I hear he’s trying to recruit in South Africa.”