Drowned Hopes

A while later, the microbiology movie came to an end and Guffey managed to get to his feet on the second try and go over to switch around the cha

The lack of discussion didn’t seem to harm the impact of the picture.

“Sam. Try Sam.”

“Hey, Sam! Sam Guffey! Come over here, Sam!”

“Nope. Makes me sound like a dog.”

After another little period of time, Dortmunder came out of a half snooze to realize he had to make room for more beer. (The pizza was all gone, but a couple beers were left.) “Guffey,” he said.

Guffey looked away from the prehistoric landscapes. “Nurm?”

“Listen, Guffey,” Dortmunder said. “I gotta go the bathroom.”

“Gee, so do I,” said Guffey.

“Yeah, but I’m, uh, I got this, this thing here. The whatchamacallit.”

“Oh, that thing,” Guffey said, and frowned.

In previous similar circumstances, Guffey had sat across the room and tossed the key to Dortmunder, who’d unlocked the cuffs and tossed the key back before Guffey permitted him to go away to the bathroom. Then it had been Dortmunder’s responsibility, under Guffey’s watchful gaze and steady rifle, to lock himself to the cuffs again on his return.

But this time, Guffey made no move to get up and cross the room to where the rifle leaned against an armchair. “Listen, Guffey,” Dortmunder said. “It’s kind of urgent.”

Guffey frowned at Dortmunder, doubling every wrinkle on his wrinkled face. He said, “You won’t try to run away, will you?”

“Run? I can barely walk.”

“Here, take the goddamn thing,” Guffey said, and yanked the handcuff key from his pocket and slapped it into Dortmunder’s palm.

“Thanks, Guffey,” Dortmunder said, the gravity of the occasion causing him to pay insufficient attention to what Guffey had just done. So he simply unlocked the cuffs, climbed the sofa and the wall to his feet, and lurched a circuitous route to the doorway and the hail and the bathroom.

While he was in there, Guffey’s voice sounded from the other side of the door: “Try Jack.”

“Hey, Jack!” Dortmunder yelled, trying to keep his aim true on a sneakily shifting bowl. “I’m fulla beer, Jack! Hey, Jack Guffey, you fulla beer?”

No answer. Dortmunder finished, flushed, washed, opened the door, and Guffey was standing there, nodding slowly, his eyes at half mast. “No,” he said, “and yes.”

Dortmunder went back to the living room and sat on the floor in front of the sofa but didn’t put the cuffs back on. He gazed at the Neanderthals—what casting! — and then at the rifle leaning against the armchair beside the television set, and thought things over. He could move, if he wanted to, no question about that. He just didn’t want to, that’s all.

After a while, Guffey came back into the room, bouncing off the doorposts. He gazed blearily at Dortmunder. Sounding maybe worried, maybe dangerous, certainly drunk, he said, “You didn’t put the cuffs on.”

“No, I didn’t,” Dortmunder told him. “And I didn’t grab the rifle either. What the hell, Guffey. Any enemy of Tom’s is a friend of mine. Come over here and watch the movie.”

SEVENTY

What Doug was, was terrified. Petrified. He had so many things to be terrified about that it petrified him just to try to list them all. That after they let Myrtle go she’d report him to the authorities, for instance. Or that they wouldn’t let her go, but instead would do something dreadful to her and he’d be a party to it. Or that Tom would do something awful to everybody else at the last minute in order to keep all the money for himself. Or that after all these assaults on the reservoir the authorities would have the place staked out and would arrest everybody the minute they showed up for the fourth and final attempt. That Stan Murch, once more at the wheel of Doug’s pickup (because Doug was too nervous to drive), might take it into his head to do another three-sixty just for the high-spirited fun of it. That Andy Kelp, seated on Doug’s other side in the pickup on this run to Long Island, would realize he was proficient enough now to do the rest of the job himself and didn’t need Doug anymore, and so would unload him profitless from the job, via methods ranging from telling him to get lost to killing him.

But all of these paled into insignificance beside the big one, the main fear, the thing he was at this particular moment the most terrified about, which was: he was going to steal a boat.

A crime. A felony. An active robbery or theft, in which he was the principal figure. Or at least that’s the way it would look to the law. True, his companions in crime were hardened criminals while he was still so soft he was practically ru

Not that he wanted to be, God knows. He didn’t want to have anything to do with this entire operation. And yet, here he was. At just around the same time that—unknown to those in the pickup—Dortmunder and Guffey were sociably and comfortably observing Raquel Welch in that cozy living room in Manhattan, here was Doug in the middle of the seat of his pickup, flanked by these hardened criminals here, and heading toward his first major crime through a pelting rain that even sounded like doom, thundering on the pickup’s tin roof.

Somehow or other, by a wandering and purposeless journey he barely remembered and had never understood, Doug’s very first purchase of off-the-back-of-the-truck merchandise from Mikey Donelli (or Do

Well, not that dry, really; it was raining just as hard here on Long Island as back upstate. “This is good for us,” Andy a

“It’s a well-known fact,” Murch added, racing them along a Long Island Expressway that was virtually empty for almost the only time in that clogged roadway’s existence, “that cops are afraid of water. They never come out in weather like this. That’s why we can make such good time.”

Very good time, unfortunately. The sign for the Sagtikos Parkway loomed out of the wet dark, and Murch took the ramp and swung them around onto the southbound highway without in the least slackening speed, leaving a double wake and a million dancing water specks in the oversoaked air behind them.

From there it was a quick run down to the south shore, Doug’s home area, where they would find their boat. (In one way, it seemed kind of dumb to do his first major criminal act in his own back yard, but on the other hand it would be even dumber to do it where he didn’t know the territory. Also, this way he could get back at a boat dealer who’d shafted him half a dozen years ago, too far back for anybody to think of Doug in co

The Sagtikos took them to Merrick Highway, and then Doug directed them along that shopping artery through its various name permutations in several identical little south shore towns (identical even by day, when it wasn’t raining) until at last he pointed to the left, across the empty road, and said, “There’s the son of a bitch, right there.”

It was a revelation to see how professionals handled themselves in this situation; much, he supposed, as he handled himself when working underwater. The danger simply made you more methodical.

While Murch waited in the pickup, Andy and Doug got out into the pouring rain and Andy collected the short stepladder from the bed of the pickup. Then he and Doug approached the boat dealership, a long two-story building with large showroom and repair shop downstairs and offices up, plus a good-sized yard down at one end containing a number of new and repaired boats and enclosed by a chain-link fence with razor wire on the top.