Bad News

“Yeah, it is,” Dortmunder agreed.

Kelp, at the wheel, was gri

“Watch out for that first step,” Kelp advised them.

Tiny unhooked his itty-bitty backpack and tossed it casually onto the backseat, where it bounced once and fell on the floor. Then he lifted his massive self into all of the backseat while Dortmunder climbed up to the seat next to Kelp.

Kelp looked back and down at the pink pack on the floor. “What’s with that?”

“The grenade,” Dortmunder told him.

Kelp looked at Dortmunder. “Ah,” he said, and faced front, and when the doors were closed, he drove them uptown.

Looking around at the plush interior and the dashboard like an electronic major-league scoreboard, Dortmunder said, “Andy, are you sure a doctor owns this? It’s more like a drug cartel would own it.”

“When I saw it outside New York Hospital,” Kelp told him, “I knew I had to steal it. Even if I wasn’t going anywhere. Lemme tell you, this is a doctor, he doesn’t just want comfort, he doesn’t just want convenience, he wants to be immortal.”

“I bet he’s feeling naked right now,” Dortmunder commented.

“Six to one he won’t even leave the hospital,” Kelp said, and turned toward the Midtown Tu

It was a beautiful clear cold November day, and when they got out to the southern shore of Long Island, with the gray and quicksilver ocean sloping away from them down toward the distant horizon, the sky was a huge empty space, a bright but faded pale blue. There were a few distant cars on Ocean Parkway, but nothing in the day was quite as visible as the red Cherokee zipping along the pale concrete road past the ashy tans of sand and dead beach grass.

The long stretch of Jones Beach was empty, frigid waves lapping ashore, looking for something to take home. From time to time, they passed the entrances to parking areas, mostly blocked by sawhorses, the parking lots themselves screened from the road by hedges and stunted pine trees.

They’d been quiet inside the car for some time, but now Tiny leaned forward and said, “Dortmunder, you can give me a hand.”

“Sure, Tiny.”

Tiny had opened his pink pack and removed from it a standard U.S. Army hand grenade, known as a pineapple because it looks a little like a pineapple, its cast-iron body serrated to turn the body into many small pieces of shrapnel when the TNT inside goes off. Curved down one side of the grenade was its safety lever, held in place by a safety pin at the top, the pin attached to the pull ring. Pull the pin out by the ring, but keep holding the lever close against the grenade, and everything’s fine. Release the lever, and you have ten seconds to remove yourself from the grenade’s proximity.

The other item in the pink pack was a small roll of duct tape. Tiny now handed this tape to Dortmunder and said, “Twice around. But under the lever.”

“Right, I know.”

Tiny held the grenade loosely in his left hand, the lever opposite the side against his palm. Dortmunder wrapped duct tape twice around Tiny’s hand and the grenade, leaving the lever free, then said, “Feel okay?”

“Like a rolla nickels,” Tiny said. He seemed quite happy this way.

And here was Parking Area 6, as the big Parks Department sign a

“Show time,” Tiny said, and they drove through the break in the hedge and out onto the big pale expanse of parking area. And out there in the middle of all that emptiness stood a pastel green and chrome motor home, one of the biggest made, top of the line, a forty-foot Alpine Coach from Western Recreational Vehicles.

“Well, looka that,” Kelp said.

“I guess we drive over there,” Dortmunder said as the bus door at the right front of the motor home opened and three people stepped out into the pale sunlight.

Tiny leaned forward to peer past Dortmunder’s cheek. “That’s them, huh?”

Kelp made the introductions: “The fat one in the three-piece suit is Fitzroy Guilderpost and the thin one in the wrinkled suit is Irwin somebody, or maybe somebody Irwin. We don’t know the babe.”

The babe was tall and very well proportioned, with lustrous black hair in two long braids halfway down her back, almost to her waist. She wore a long white-fringed buckskin jacket and a short white-fringed buckskin skirt and the kind of tall red leather boots that are allegedly meant for walking.

“Too bad I already know Josie,” Tiny commented. He was the only one in the world who called J. C. Taylor Josie.

“I don’t know,” Kelp said. “She looks to me like you could strike matches on her.”

And, as their red Jeep rolled closer to the trio at the motor home, it was true. The babe was a babe, all right, but she looked more like an action figure made out of stainless steel than an actual person. She stood with one hand on one hip and one leg cocked, as though ready to show her karate moves at the slightest provocation.

Kelp drove up close and stopped, with his side of the car facing the three people, so that was the side Tiny got out. Dortmunder had to walk around the big red hood of the Jeep, and by then Kelp was already introducing everybody: “Tiny, this is Fitzroy Guilderpost, and that’s Irwin, and I don’t know the lady.”

“I guess you don’t,” Irwin said.

Guilderpost said, “Forgive me, this is Tiny?”

“It’s kind of a nickname,” Tiny explained.

“I see,” Guilderpost said. “Well, may I introduce Little Feather. Little Feather, that says he’s Tiny, that’s Andy Kelp, also sometimes Andy Kelly, and that’s John. John, I’m sorry, I don’t know your last name.”

“I’m not,” Dortmunder said. “Go ahead, Tiny.”

“Right.”

Tiny stepped forward and showed all assembled the hand grenade taped to his left hand, then closed the hand to keep the lever pressed to the grenade’s side as he pulled the pin. Moving closer to Guilderpost, whose eyes had grown considerably wider, he extended the pin, saying, “Hold this for me, will you?”

Guilderpost gaped at the hand grenade. All three of them gaped at the hand grenade. Not taking the pin, Guilderpost said, “What are you doing?”

“Well, I’m goin inside there,” Tiny said, “look around, see the situation.”

“But why—Why that thing?”

“Well, if I was to faint or anything in there,” Tiny said, “I wouldn’t be holding this safety lever anymore, would I?”

Irwin said, “Is that—Is that an actual—Is that live?”

“At the moment,” Tiny said.

Guilderpost, flabbergasted, said, “But why would you do such a thing?”

Dortmunder answered, saying, “Fitzroy, we’ve got like a few reasons not to trust you a hundred percent. So Tiny sees to it, if something happens to somebody, something happens to everybody.”

Tiny turned to the babe. “Little Feather,” he said, “you hold this pin for me, okay? Don’t lose it now.”

Little Feather was the first of the three to recover. Gri

“That’s just how I am,” Tiny told her, and said to the rest, “I’ll be out in a minute.”

Tiny started for the motor home, but Irwin suddenly jumped in front of him, saying, “No, well, wait, why don’t you let me go in first? You know, it might be unfamiliar to you and all.”

“We’ll go in together, then,” Tiny said, and turned to Dortmunder to say, “See? Plan B every time.”

“I see,” Dortmunder said.

Tiny and Irwin went into the motor home and Little Feather gave Guilderpost an angry grin as she said, “Temporary partners. We’ll take care of them. Fitzroy, you’re never going to outsmart these people.”