Drowned Hopes Part 41

As they drove away from the dam toward Dudson Center, Bob sat way over on his side of the backseat, his smile kind of raggedy around the edges, his eyes shooting out very teeny tiny sparks. His fingertips trembled. He didn't like looking at the naked man on the floor, but there he was, all the time, in the corner of Bob's eye.

Gazing straight ahead as the scrub forest ran backward past the windows on both sides, Bob could see the firm back of Kenny's head and a small segment of Chuck's profile. Chuck was giggling and smirking and at times pressing his palm to his mouth. Kenny's back radiated the lonely obligations of command.

Bob was very happy, of course, very placid, very content. All these little feathery feelings in his stomach and behind his eyes and in his throat and behind his knees didn't matter at all. It would be easier, of course, if the naked man weren't there on the floor next to him, but it wasn't important. It didn't change anything.

After a long period of silence in the car, Bob leaned forward a little and said, confidentially, to the back of Kenny's authoritative head, "I never had an imaginary playmate before."

This set Chuck off again, curling forward, collapsing against his door, various snorts and grunts squeezing out through the hands he held clamped over his mouth. Kenny, pretending Chuck didn't exist (the same way Bob pretended the naked man didn't exist), looked mildly in the rearview mirror and said, "Is that right, Bob?"

"Yes," Bob said. He felt as though there was more he wanted to say, but the words wouldn't come.

Kenny smiled in a big-brotherly fas.h.i.+on: "I bet it's fun," he said. "To have an imaginary playmate."

Bob smiled back at the face in the rearview mirror. Slowly he nodded. "Not really," he said. (The naked man's fist, in the corner of Bob's eye, was shaking again. The naked man's face, in the corner of Bob's eye, was enraged.) Kenny hadn't actually heard Bob's answer. He'd gone back to concentrating on his driving.

Bob wanted to turn his head away so he could look out his side window and not see anything in the car at all, but it was hard to do. His upper body was made of one solid block of wood; it was hard to make one part of it turn separately from the rest. Slowly, very slowly, strain lines standing out on the sides of his neck, Bob turned his face away. He looked out the window. The first houses of Dudson Center went by. Very interesting. Very nice.

In the middle of town, Kenny had to stop for a red light. Bob gazed fixedly at the windows of a hardware store. The other rear door slammed. Kenny said, sharply, "What was that?"

Bob swiveled his head on his painful neck. Chuck said, "Bob's imaginary playmate just got out."

"G.o.ddammit, Chuck!"

"That's right," Bob said. "He went away."

Chuck twisted around to grin at Bob. "He probably went on ahead to your house," he said. "Waiting there for you now, with Tiffany."

"Uh-huh," said Bob.

Through clenched teeth, Kenny said, "Chuck, your job is on the line."

Chuck gave Kenny an excessively innocent look. "Bob's happy," he said. But he faced front after that and didn't say any more.

Five minutes later, they reached Bob's house. "Here we are, Bob," Kenny said.

Bob didn't move. The lower half of his face smiled, but the upper half around the eyes had worry lines in it.

Kenny twisted around, frowning at him. "You're home, Bob," he said. "Come on, guy. I gotta get going."

"I'd like to go back to the hospital now, please," Bob said. And that was the last thing he said for three weeks.

The small-town habit of leaving doors unlocked had even begun to affect the residents of 46 Oak Street, and that was just as well. Reaching there at last, cold, wet, naked, in the downpour, and finding n.o.body even home to hear his complaints, Dortmunder might just have bitten his way through the front door if it had been locked.

He was feeling like biting his way through something, G.o.d knows. What a night! That reservoir was out to kill him, there was no question about that anymore. Every time he went near that evil body of water, it reached out damp fingers and dragged him down. If he so much as thought about that reservoir, waters began to close over his head. No more. He was through now. Three times and out.

This last time had been the closest shave yet. The G.o.dd.a.m.n rubber boat suddenly shrinking and deflating and sinking beneath him, and him sitting there not knowing what to do, the G.o.dd.a.m.n little 10hp motor clutched in his arms, resting on his lap. It wasn't till the boat had reduced itself to a two-dimensional gray rubber rag, dumping him into the reservoir, and he'd found himself heading straight for the bottom, that he finally got his wits about him enough to let go of the motor and let it proceed into eternity without him.

Then it was his own clothing that dragged him down. The shoes were pulled off first, one sock inadvertently going as well, then the jacket, then the trousers, then the s.h.i.+rt, taking the T-s.h.i.+rt with it.

By the time all that underwater undressing was done, he had no idea where he was, except in trouble; the boat, the line of monofilament, everything was gone. His head was above water, barely and only sometimes. Turning in ever more frantic circles, he'd finally seen the dim lights way over by the dam and had known that was his only hope. If he didn't have some target to aim for, he'd just swim around in circles out here in the dark and the wet and the rain and the deep and the horrible until his strength gave out.

So he swam, and floated, and swam, and floundered, and flailed, and at last staggered ash.o.r.e down at the end of the dam near the little stone official structure and its attendant parking lot. An unlocked car there-n.o.body locks anything out in the sticks-provided some small shelter from the storm, and Dortmunder even napped in there occasionally, cold and wet and scared and furious as he was.

He'd been asleep, in fact, when the weird kid with the poleaxed smile came in and sat beside him and gave him a completely drugged-out look and just said, "h.e.l.lo." He isn't going to turn me in, Dortmunder had thought. He isn't going to holler or get excited or do anything normal. He barely even knows I'm here.

And so he'd stuck tight, ignoring his first impulse to jump from the car and make a hopeless run for it, and the result was they'd given him a ride all the way back to Dudson Center. The last four blocks after he left the car, walking along almost completely naked, in daylight, with people on their way to work all around him, had not been easy. But anything was easier than being in the--. (He wasn't going to say the R word anymore, wasn't even going to think it.) But now here he was, home at last, and where was everybody? I don't even get a sympathetic welcome, Dortmunder thought, feeling very sorry for himself as he padded with his one bare foot and one socked foot to the kitchen, opened a can of tomato soup, added milk (no water!), heated it, drank the whole thing serving after serving out of a coffee cup, and packed crackers in around it in his stomach for body. Then, beginning at last to feel warm and dry, and knowing how tired he was, he went back through the empty house and slumped upstairs one heavy foot at a time and got into bed without even bothering to take his sock off.

The return, hours later, of the other eight residents of the house, cold, wet, discouraged, shocked, unhappy, and bickering, didn't wake him, but May's scream when she opened the bedroom door and saw him there did. Briefly. "Later, May, okay?" Dortmunder said, and rolled over, and went back to sleep.

FOURTH DOWN.

SIXTY-ONE.

Then they all blamed him. They all sat around in the living room on Oak Street after Dortmunder finally woke up and came downstairs, and they blamed him. Wouldn't you know?

"You had us very worried, John," May said, gently but seriously.

"I had myself a little worried, too," Dortmunder answered.

His foghorn voice more fogbound than usual, Tiny said, "I think I got a little head cold out there, walkin around in the rain while you were asleep in your bed here."

Murch's Mom sneezed and looked at Dortmunder significantly, but didn't say anything.

"Pretty dangerous," her son commented, "driving that borrowed truck around in the daytime, hour after hour. And then for nothing."

"You know, John," Doug said, "it's kind of hard to figure out how you missed that monofilament, that line stretching right across the lake, when it was right there and everything."

"That's right," Kelp said. "I saw it, no trouble."

Dortmunder lowered an eyebrow at him. "In the light from your headlamp?"

"Well, yeah."

Wally said, "John, while you were asleep up there, I asked the computer, and it couldn't predict you going to the dam either. That's the one direction n.o.body thought of."

"That's where the lights were," Dortmunder told him. "Mention that to your computer next time you run into each other."

Tom cackled and said, "Looks like everybody's sorry you made it, Al."

Then they all changed their tune, and everybody rea.s.sured him how happy they all were to see him under any circ.u.mstances, even home safe in his bed when they'd expected him to be either dead in the reservoir or half-dead beside it. And that was the end of that conversation.

It was late afternoon now, Dortmunder having slept most of the day, and outside the windows the rain still poured down. The weather forecast, full of stalled lows and weak highs, promised this stage of storms would, at the very least, even the score for the weeks of sunny days and star-strewn nights preceding it, and maybe even throw a little extra rottenness in for good measure.

After everybody got over the desire to be crotchety with Dortmunder for having saved himself from a watery grave, the next topic on the agenda was Tom's money, plucked at last from its own watery grave but not yet from the water. "From here on," Doug told the a.s.sembled group, "it's a snap. All we do is go back out to the res-"

"No," Dortmunder said, and got to his feet.

May looked up at him in mild surprise. "John? Where are you going?"

"New York," Dortmunder told her, and headed for the stairs.

"Wait a minute!"

"We got it beat now!"

"Piece of cake!"

"We know where the box is!"

"We got a rope on it!"

"We're winning, John!"

But Dortmunder didn't listen. He thudded upstairs, one foot after the other, and while he packed people kept coming up to try to change a mind made of concrete.

May was first. She came in and sat on the bed beside the suitcase Dortmunder was packing, and after a minute she said, "I understand how you feel, John."

"Good," Dortmunder said, his hands full of socks.

"But I just don't feel as though I can leave here until this is all over and settled."

"Uh-huh."

"It wouldn't be fair to Murch's Mom."

"Uh-huh."

"And if we walk away now, Tom might still decide he'd rather use that dynamite of his."

"Uh-huh."

"So you can see, John," May said, "why I feel I have to stay."

Dortmunder paused with his hands in a dresser drawer. "I can see that, May," he said. "And if you stop to think about it, you can see why I can't stay. When you're done up here, you'll come home. I'll be there."

She looked at him, thought it over, and got to her feet. "Well," she said, "I can see your mind is made up."

"I'm glad you can see that, May," Dortmunder said.

Tom was next. "Runnin out, eh, Al?"

"Yes," Dortmunder said.

Wally followed a couple minutes later. "Gee, John," he said, "I know you're not the hero, you're only the soldier, but even the soldier doesn't leave in the middle of the game."

"Game called," Dortmunder told him, "on account of wet."

Tiny and Stan and his Mom came together, like the farmhands welcoming Dorothy back from Oz. "Dortmunder," Tiny rumbled, "I figure you're the one got us this far."

"I understand it's a piece of cake from here on," Dortmunder said, folding with great care his other pants.

Stan said, "You don't want to drive to the city on a Wednesday, you know. Matinee day, there's no good routes."

"I'll take the bus," Dortmunder told him.

Murch's Mom looked insulted. "I hate the bus," she announced. "And so should you."

Dortmunder nodded, taking the suggestion under advis.e.m.e.nt, but then said, "Will you drive me to the bus station?"

"Cabdrivers don't get to have opinions about destinations," Murch's Mom snapped, which might have been a form of "yes," and she marched out.

"Well, Dortmunder," Tiny said, "I can't a hundred percent blame you. Put her there."

So Dortmunder shook his hand, and Tiny and Stan left, and Dortmunder's hand was almost recovered enough to go on packing when Doug came in to say, "I hear you're really going."

"I'm really going," Dortmunder agreed.

"Well," Doug said, "tomorrow or the next day, sometime soon, I got to go back to Long Island anyway, see to my business, pick up the stuff we need for the next try. You could ride along."

"I'm leaving today," Dortmunder told him.

"What the heck, wait a day."

"Well, Doug," Dortmunder said, "let's say I wait a day, a couple of days, everybody having these little talks with me. Then let's say I get into that pickup with you and we head for the city, and you just can't resist it, you gotta tell me the plan, the details, the equipment, you gotta talk about the res- the place there, and all that. And somewhere in there, Doug," Dortmunder said, resting his aching hand in a friendly way on Doug's arm, "somewhere in there, I just might be forced to see if I know how to do a three-sixty."

Dortmunder was just locking his suitcase when Andy Kelp came in. Dortmunder looked at him and said, "Don't even start."

"I've heard the word," Kelp told him. "And I know you, John, and I know when not to waste my breath. Come on over here."

"Come on over where?"

"The window," Kelp told him. "It's okay, it's closed."

Wondering what Kelp was up to, Dortmunder went around the bed and over to the window, and when Kelp pointed outside he looked out, past the curtain and the rain-smeared window and the rain-dotted screen and the rain-filled air over the rain-soggy lawn and the rain-flowing sidewalk to the rain-slick curb, where a top-of-the-line Buick Pompous 88 stood there, black, gleaming in the rain.

"Cruise control," Kelp said, with quiet pride. "Everything. You gotta go back in comfort."

Dortmunder was touched. Not enough to reconsider, but touched. "Thank you, Andy," he said.

"The truth is," Kelp said, leaning forward, speaking confidentially, "I think you're right. That reservoir is out to get you."