Authors: Donald Westlake
“Yeah.”
“Another English muffin?”
“Yeah.”
“Marmalade again?”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay? Yeah!”
“Fine, fine, fine. Listen, try Frank.”
“Frank? You think so? Okay: Hey, Frank! I
always
want marmalade on my English muffin, Frank! Hey, Frank Guffey, you got that?”
Guffey, watching the English muffins in the toaster oven little by little turn brown, like Larry Talbot becoming the wolfman, pondered and pondered and then shook his head. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t be a Frank.”
“I didn’t think so, either,” Dortmunder admitted.
“I might of been better off if I
was
a Frank,” Guffey decided, taking out the English muffins and going to work on them with the marmalade. “More self–assertive. Not so much of a patsy.”
“Hey, Patsy!” Dortmunder called. “Give me more marmalade, Patsy! Hey, Patsy Guffey, bring that English muffin over here.”
“Could be my sister,” Guffey said, bringing the plates over to the kitchen table, where Dortmunder sat hunched over his planted elbows, contemplating his hangover. Guffey went back to the counter for the coffee cups, brought them over, and placed them on the Formica with two loud
ticks
that made Dortmunder flinch.
They sat in silence together while the kitchen clock moved from three–twenty
P.M.
to three–forty
P.M.
without anybody noticing or caring. Then, Dortmunder, lifting his head and his eyes while draining the last of his now lukewarm coffee, noticed the clock and found himself thinking about what was or was not going on upstate. Putting down his cup (
tick,
flinch), he said, “I think I’m gonna phone them.”
Guffey looked semialert. “Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?”
“
You
make more coffee,” Dortmunder told him. “I go to the living room and make my phone call.”
“Hey, come on, Dortmunder,” Guffey said. (He wouldn’t use Dortmunder’s first name, he’d announced, until he found his own.) “That isn’t fair.”
“I’m not trying to be fair,” Dortmunder said, getting with some difficulty to his feet. “I’m trying to protect my interests.”
“Well,
I
got interests, too,” Guffey exclaimed.
“Not that
I
am trying to protect,” Dortmunder told him. “I don’t want you listening when I make my call.” Then, seeing Guffey try to be surreptitious about looking around the kitchen, he smirked a little, as much as his hangover would permit, and said, “No, there aren’t any extensions, though a particular friend of mine keeps trying to load them on me. I always said no, I didn’t want the goddamn things, and now I’m gonna be very happy to tell him I know
why.
”
Sitting at the table, Guffey shook his head and said, “Somehow or other, I lost the advantage around here. I mean, I
had
it. I had the rifle in my hands, I had the drop on you, I had you scared shitless, I had —”
“Well.”
“Never mind ‘well,’ ” Guffey told him. “I had you scared shitless, admit it.”
“You had me worried for a while,” Dortmunder allowed. “But we’re both reasonable men, so we worked things out. Or we’re
working
things out. Like right now, I’m gonna make my phone call and you’re gonna make more coffee.”
“It isn’t that I’m reasonable,” Guffey was saying, as Dortmunder left the room, “it’s that it always happens that way. I
always
lose the advantage. It’s a hell of a thing to live with.”
In the living room, Dortmunder called the number up in Dudson Center, hoping May would answer, and astonishingly enough it was May who answered. Recognizing her voice, he said, “May, it’s me.”
“John! Where are you?”
“Home, like I said I’d be.”
“Safe at home,” she said, sounding wistful.
Looking at the rifle, which still leaned against the wall beside the television set, Dortmunder said, “Well, kinda safe. Safer now, anyway. What’s happening up there?”
“John,” May said, all at once sounding excited, even admiring, “Stan and Andy and Doug came back with a
boat!
It’s
huge!
You wouldn’t believe how big it is!”
“Oh, yeah?”
“John, it sleeps two!”
“Sleeps two!” Dortmunder, visualizing the
QEII,
said, “What are they gonna do with it? Is it gonna go in the reservoir?”
“John,” May said, “it’s going to look like a toy boat in a bathtub. But Doug says it’s better, it’s quieter than an outboard motor and they can put the winch right on the boat and winch the box straight up out of the water and take it to shore on the boat.”
“Well, that part sounds okay,” Dortmunder admitted.
“On the other hand,” May said, lowering her voice, “we’ve had a little trouble around here.”
“Tom?”
“Not yet. He
will
be trouble, but not yet.”
“What, then?”
“There’s a girl,” May said. “Tiny found her peeking in the kitchen window. Turns out, she’s the girl Doug’s been seeing up here, and she was spying, and she knows a
lot
about us. And her mother’s the one Murch’s Mom’s been playing canasta with. John, did you know Murch’s Mom’s name was Gladys?”
“Go on.”
“No, it really is. Anyway, that’s what she told this girl’s mother that she plays canasta with.”
Dortmunder said, “Wait a minute. Tiny found the daughter spying?”
“Looking in the kitchen window.”
“Then what?”
“Well, one thing led to another, and now she’s locked in the attic until we’re finished.”
“And then what?”
“Well,
we
say we let her go. I don’t know what Tom says.”
Dortmunder could guess. He said, “What about her mother? Won’t she call the cops when her daughter doesn’t come home? Won’t they
first
look around the neighborhood?”
“We made her call home last night,” May said, “and say she was going away overnight with Doug. I listened on the extension, and —”
“Huh,” Dortmunder said.
“What?”
“Never mind, something I’ll tell you later about extensions. What happened next?”
“Well, John, I was
astonished
at that mother, let me tell you. The daughter — her name’s Myrtle
Street,
would you believe it?”
“Why not?”
“Because she lives on
Myrtle
Street.”
“Oh. No kidding.”
“Anyway, her mother said, ‘Good. About time you got your blood moving.’ Did you ever hear such a thing?”
“Weird,” Dortmunder agreed.
“
Then
she wanted to talk to Doug. The mother did. So Doug got on, expecting to have to say how he was going to respect the daughter and all that, and the mother wanted to talk to him about
condoms.
”
“Ah,” Dortmunder said.
“I don’t know who was more embarrassed, the girl or Doug. Particularly since, you know, nothing like that was going on anyway. Apparently, Doug hasn’t been too successful with this girl. So she wasn’t even spending the night with him, she was spending the night locked in the attic.”
“I don’t know, May,” Dortmunder said. “That doesn’t sound to me like a good situation up there.”
“Well, it’ll be over soon,” May said. “And John, I do understand your feelings about all this, I’m not going to argue with you or try to change your mind or anything, but we sure could use you up here.”
“What
I
think is,” Dortmunder said, “I think everybody should just walk away from it right now.”
“That’s impossible, John, you know that. Besides, they’re going to go do it tonight, and then it’ll be all over with. One way or the other.”
“It’s the other that bothers me,” Dortmunder said. “You keep your back against the wall, May.”
“I will. And I’ll see you tomorrow, John.”
Dortmunder was very thoughtful when he went back to the kitchen, where Guffey offered him a fresh cup of coffee, plus two more names to try: Harry and Jim. Neither did the trick, and then Dortmunder said, “Guffey, I’m gonna have to go up there.”
Guffey looked alert. “Up where?”
“Not near the water,” Dortmunder said. “Just to the town.”
“What town?”
“Now, here’s the deal,” Dortmunder went on. “If you wait until Tom’s got his money, then maybe Tom gets away and you don’t get to meet up with him at all. Which is maybe just as well.”
Guffey rested a scrawny fist on the kitchen table. “That man ruint my life,” he said. “And I mean that, Dortmunder. I was just a young fella when he got his hooks into me, and he ruint my entire life. My
destiny
is to catch up with that son of a bitch, or why would you and him come all the way out to Cronley, Oklahoma? What happens after I catch up is between him and me, but I
got
to have him in my sights one time before I die.”
“I guess I can understand that,” Dortmunder said. “So this is what I offer. You give me your solemn word you won’t make a move on Tom until this other business is over with, and you can come along with me upstate.”
“Where to?”
“But you have to swear you won’t do anything till I say it’s okay.”
Guffey thought about that. “What if I won’t swear?”
“Then I go out to the living room and get your rifle,” Dortmunder told him, “and bring it back in here, and wrap it around your neck, and go upstate by myself.”
Guffey thought about
that.
“What if I swear, only I’m lying?”
“I got a lot of friends up there where I’m going, Guffey,” Dortmunder said. “And all you got up there’s one enemy.”
Tiny got out of the backseat he was sharing with Tom. Carrying the wire cutters through the pouring rain, he lopped the new padlock at the same old barrier, then lifted the barrier out of the way. “
Another
déjà vu,” he muttered as he put the barrier back in position after car and boat had passed, then returned to his place in the wagon.
Last time on this road, in the motor home, Kelp had been the driver, mostly by ear, keeping the lights off and the windows open so he could listen to the bushes as they scraped past. This time, the downpour meant not only that no one in the car had any desire for the windows to be open, but also that Stan felt he could safely drive with the parking lights on. The rain both obscured the lights and lessened the likelihood of observers wandering the nearby vicinity. So the windshield wipers slashed back and forth, flinging water left and right, and through the sporadically clear glass they could dimly see the rutted dirt road and its surrounding trees and shrubbery, all muddily illuminated in a smoky amber glow.
After a while they reached, and this time saw, the second barrier, at the reservoir property’s perimeter fence, the one Kelp had not quite driven into the first time. Tiny climbed out again and cleared the way again, and when he got back into the car, dumping the wire cutters onto the carpet–covered storage space in back, he said, “I might as well
go
underwater this time. I couldn’t get any wetter.”
“Soon be over,” Kelp told him.
“That’s right,” Tom said mildly.