Bad News

5

Irwin sat on a tombstone, but the stone made his butt cold and there was nowhere to lean his back. So he sat on the ground in front of the stone, leaning against it, but the ground made his pants wet and the stone made his back cold. So he stood and leaned against a tree, but the bark was rough and uncomfortable, and his legs got tired. So he tried sitting on the stone again.

Meanwhile, over there, in the glare of the van’s headlights, the bozos were working up a pretty good sweat. They were stripped to the waist now, both excessively unlovely, both shovels working, dirt flying up and out of the hole and onto the tarp on the grave next door. These two were better than the bozos in Nevada, harder workers, more willing, and much more trusting.

Irwin walked around in the darkness, trying to dry the seat of his pants, and thinking how the word trust and the name Fitzroy Guilderpost just naturally didn’t belong together. Well, he was no bozo, Irwin Gabel was no bozo, and when he outlived his usefulness for Guilderpost, he’d have something to say about it.

His partners had no idea that Irwin had routinely wired himself for every single one of their meetings, including the events in Nevada and including the events yet to come tonight. All those tapes were very safely and securely tucked away, not to be mentioned until that inevitable moment when Fitzroy Guilderpost thought he and Irwin Gabel had come to the parting of the ways.

If only he could team up with Little Feather, but the bitch was so cold and hard, it was like trying to chat up one of these tombstones here. But she was the one he’d need, when the end of the partnership with Guilderpost was reached. It was Little Feather who was going to be the rich one, and if Guilderpost really thought he had her tied up with that contract they’d all signed, he was crazy. Try enforcing that in court.

But if Irwin and Little Feather could combine, life would be a lot easier and a lot safer. Guilderpost would be out and gone and forgotten, and Irwin would be in, and life would be easy forever after. Millions, an eventual payout of millions, and coming in steadily, endlessly, over their lifetimes and beyond. It was worth all the effort they were putting into it.

The problem was, Little Feather’s relationships with men had been too narrowly focused over the years. She just naturally assumed Irwin’s interest in her was sexual, which it emphatically was not. Get into bed with that, you’d probably break something. But until he got her on his side, it was too dangerous to tell her what he really had in mind. She would probably believe she’d be better off siding with Guilderpost, who’d thought up this scheme in the first place, not realizing that Irwin Gabel was the real brains of the operation.

Well, there was still time to sort everything out.

Over there at the grave, Guilderpost was now turning the van around, so they were ready for the switch. Yes, here came the Redcorn coffin up out of the grave, the two bozos tugging and hauling on the ropes attached to the thick canvas strap they’d lashed around the middle of the box. Out it came, with a certain amount of heavy breathing and muttered curses, and now they removed the strap and headed for the open van.

Irwin dared to move cautiously a little closer to the scene, because this was the part that mattered. How they banged around the Redcorn coffin didn’t concern him, but the Elkhorn coffin had to be used gently. It shouldn’t go into the grave with any fresh dents or dings on it. Irwin had explained that very carefully to Guilderpost, and he could only hope Guilderpost was explaining it just as carefully to the bozos.

Well, apparently so. Good. The two pulled the box out of the van, laid it carefully on the ground, strapped it, roped it, then lowered it with care into the grave. Excellent.

The rest took no time at all. The dirt went back into the hole a lot more quickly than it had come out. When the bozos went to their knees to start carefully replacing the sod, like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, Irwin turned away. Nothing would go wrong from this point. At the end, they’d put the Redcorn coffin in the van, to be taken to the disposal site, and then they’d leave.

Irwin walked briskly, still hoping the air movement would dry the seat of his pants, and went out through the hole in the fence and down the long block of Su

6

This new coffin smelled a little nastier than the first one, a little more dank, probably because the bits of dirt clinging to it had more recently been underground. Otherwise, it was a very similar coffin, a little timeworn in the same way; nevertheless, Dortmunder found it less appetizing to sit beside, and he tried to scrunch over as far to the left as possible, away from the aura of the thing.

Up front, as they drove back onto the Long Island Expressway, eastbound, away from the city, Andy said, “So what are we go

“About half an hour from here,” Fitzroy told him, “there’s a bridge over to Fire Island, the western end of Fire Island. It’s almost never used this time of year, because, mostly, Fire Island is seasonal, summer cottages. There’s a pretty quick cha

“I get it,” Kelp said. “We toss it off the bridge, it floats for a while, and it’s heading out to sea, and then it sinks.”

“Exactly.”

And us, Dortmunder thought, we just sink, right there in the cha

The Voyager’s headlights hadn’t appeared in the mirrors until they’d gotten back up on the expressway, but they were there now, keeping a certain distance, trying to remain unremarkable in this sparse traffic. After two in the morning, even the Long Island Expressway wasn’t getting much action.

And the traffic only got sparser as they headed east, so that the Voyager had to hang farther and farther back. They left Queens and crossed Nassau County, all the little bedroom communities asleep, and by the time they got to Sagtikos Parkway, that distant Voyager was the only light at all in the rearview mirrors.

Fitzroy turned south on Sagtikos Parkway, which was empty in both directions as far as the eye could see. They crossed the Southern State Parkway, and then they came to a very long and elaborate bridge, which couldn’t be the one Fitzroy had in mind.

No. This one crossed the Great South Bay, the long strip of seawater between the southern shore of Long Island and its line of sandbar beaches. At the end of this bridge, you could turn right and go eventually to Jones Beach, or you could go straight, over a much smaller and shorter bridge crossing a narrow inlet over to Fire Island, a long strip of sand with seasonal communities, no real roads, and very few vehicles, so that this bridge wasn’t used much even in season.

There had been no headlights in the mirror since they’d reached the first bridge, so the follower must be driving with his lights out. A whole lot of effort these people were putting in, and it seemed to Dortmunder the reason had to be something more than just stiffing a couple guys out of a thousand dollars. They wanted nobody to know Joseph Redcorn was AWOL from his grave, replaced by an alternate. Meaning that when that coffin was dug up again, by somebody else, there would be some publicity in it, something of value co