The Road To Ruin

“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 fu

“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.”

“Ru

“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.”

Kelp said, “South Africa?”

“Because they speak English,” Chester said, “but they never heard of Monroe Hall. He needs people that never heard of him. Here comes the entrance.”

First there was a long one-story office building of gray stucco, with Venetian blinds in all the windows, some up, some down, some crooked. Then there was a six-foot-high wall of gray weathered barn siding, and then a blacktop road, one lane on either side of a rustic guardshack that looked like a tugboat coming at you. Serious-looking metal rods were down across both lanes, and three people in rent-a-cop uniforms could be seen inside the big-windowed guardshack. The blacktop road wandered in among more village-type buildings and some not-well-cared-for lawns and plantings. And way in back just a glimpse could be seen of Tara, the house from Gone With the Wind.

Kelp drove on, past another barn-siding wall, as Dortmunder called, “Was that it? The big white house back in there?”

Chester said, “It goes for about another mile along this road, and then there’s a shopping mall, by the intersection with the state highway.”

Stan said, “Was that big white house back there where Hall lives?”

“Yeah, that’s his place.”

“Andy! Andy! Hey, dammit, Andy!”

Kelp looked in the mirror, and there was Dortmunder again, waving like before, or maybe a little more desperately. “Hi, John,” he said. “You wanted something?”

“Find a place and park. Stop. I gotta talk to you people and I can’t do anything back here.”

“Sure, John,” Kelp said. “But maybe we oughta look at this mall first, see if there’s a way in from there.”

“Forget the mall,” Dortmunder said.

Chester said, “It isn’t easier at the mall, Andy, it’s worse. There’s an eight-foot-high chain-link fence all along the property line there.”

“Forget the mall,” Dortmunder said. “The mall doesn’t matter.”

Tiny said, “If we brought a truck in, we could go over the top of the fence.”

“Forget the mall, will you?”

Chester said, “But you’ve still got the electric fence. That goes all the way around the property.”

“Forget the mall!”

“Well, we’ll go on to the mall, anyway,” Kelp decided. “See what things look like along the way. I think John wants to stop for something anyway, when we get there.”

“Yes, stop! That’s right! Stop!”

Kelp said, “Chester, is there anything interesting along this part, before the mall?”

“No, it’s all pretty much the same.”

“I give up.”

So they drove on to the mall, and when they turned in at the entrance Kelp said, “Any kind of store in particular you want, John?”

“A parking space,” Dortmunder said. “Stop the car. Stop it. Make it stop.”

Stan said, “That’s a pretty big fence they got up there. Maybe we should get over closer to it.”

“Stop! Stop! Stop now!”

“That’s what I’m doing,” Kelp said, and drove around a little, and then found a parking space not too far from the home appliance store, in case it turned out anybody needed anything. He switched off the engine, looked in the mirror, and said, “John? Here okay?”

Twisting around, Stan said, “John, it took forever to get out here. We don’t want to waste too much time sitting around some mall. We gotta figure out a way to deal with that electric fence. We gotta figure out how to get in there and get back out again, with a whole lotta cars.”

“Forget that,” Dortmunder said. “Forget the fence.” Finally he had everybody’s attention. They all twisted around to look at him, the ones in front banging each other up pretty well along the way, and then Tiny said, “Dortmunder, we’re outside. The fence is there, all around. We gotta get inside. We gotta get past the fence. We can’t forget it.”

“This is what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Dortmunder said. “There’s no way to defeat the fence. We gotta do it another way.”

Chester said, “John, there is no other way.”

“Well,” Kelp said, “if John says there is, maybe there is. John?”

“Monroe Hall needs staff,” Dortmunder said. “We hire on.”