Drowned Hopes (5 page)

Blip–blip–blip.
The faint jingling sound, like Tinkerbell clearing her throat, came from the left side of Kelp’s bulky pea coat. Reaching in there, he withdrew a cellular phone, extended its antenna, and whispered into its mouthpiece, “Hello?”

A suspicious and bewildered but familiar voice said, “Who’s that?”

“John?” Kelp whispered. “Is that you?”

“What’s goin on?” demanded Dortmunder’s voice, getting belligerent. “Who is that there?”

“It’s me, John,” Kelp whispered. “It’s Andy.”

“What? Who is that?”

“It’s
Andy,
” Kelp whispered hoarsely, lips against the mouthpiece. “Andy
Kelp.
”

“Andy? Is that you?”

“Yes, John, yes.”

“Well, what are you whispering about? You got laryngitis?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Then stop whispering.”

“The fact of the matter is, John,” Kelp whispered, hunkering low over the phone, “I’m robbing a store at the moment.”

“You’re
what?
”

“Ssssshhhhhhh, John,” Kelp whispered. “Sssshhhhhh.”

In a more normal voice, Dortmunder said, “Wait a minute, I get it. I called you at home, but you aren’t home. You’ve done one of your phone gizmo things.”

“That’s right,” Kelp agreed. “I put the phone–ahead gizmo on my phone at home to transfer my calls to my cellular phone so I wouldn’t miss any calls — like this one from you, right now — while I was out, and I brought the cellular phone along with me.”

“To rob a store.”

“That’s right. And that’s what I’m doing right this minute, John, and to tell you the truth I’d like to get on with it.”

“Okay,” Dortmunder said. “If you’re busy —”

“I’m not busy
forever,
John,” Kelp said, forgetting to whisper. “You got something? You gonna meet with the guys at the OJ?” He was remembering to whisper again now.

“No,” Dortmunder said. “Not yet, anyway. Not until I figure the thing out.”

“There’s problems?” In his eagerness, Kelp’s whisper went up into the treble ranges, becoming very sibilant. “You want me to drop over there when I’m done, we can talk about it?”

“Well,” Dortmunder said, and then he sighed, and then he said, “Yeah. Come on over. If you feel like it.”

“Sure I feel like it,” Kelp whispered, in falsetto. “You know me, John.”

“Yeah, I do,” Dortmunder said. “But come on over anyway.” And he hung up.

“Right, John,” Kelp whispered into the dead phone. Then, retracting his antenna, putting the phone away in its special pocket inside his pea coat, he looked around again at the various counters and shelves and product displays here inside Serious Business, that being the name of the store. Most of the exhibit lighting was in pastel neon, giving the place a fairytale quality of pink and light blue and pale green, washing faint color onto the gray industrial carpet and off–white shelves. In the fifteen minutes since effecting entry in here via the men’s room of the coffee shop next door, a window to the basement of this building and a brief squirm through an air–conditioning duct (pushing his pea coat ahead of himself), Kelp had pretty well browsed completely among all the treasures available here. Time to call it a night, probably.

John should have a personal computer, Kelp thought, but even as he thought it, he knew just how hard a sell John was likely to be. Tough to get him to accept anything new; like his attitude toward telephones, for instance.

But a personal computer, a good PC of your very own, that was something else. That was a
tool,
as useful, indeed as necessary, as a Toast–R–Oven. Wandering back over to the software displays, Kelp picked up a copy of
Managing Your Money.
Surely, even John would be able to see the advantage in a program like that. If he seemed at all interested, they could go out together tomorrow, or maybe even later tonight, and shop for a PC and a printer and a mouse. Maybe come back here, in fact. Kelp, so far, had enjoyed doing business with Serious Business.

“Oh, John, that’s too bad,” May said. “Should I get a towel?”

“Naw, that’s okay, it didn’t spill much,” Dortmunder told her, and turned to Kelp to say, “Well? Whadaya think?”

“Hmmmm,” Kelp said, and swigged beer. Then he said, “If it isn’t bad manners to ask, John, what was this pal of yours in for?”

“He’s not my pal.”

“Sorry. Ex–cellmate of yours. What was he in for, do you know?”

Dortmunder drank beer, thinking back. “As I remember it,” he said, “it was murder, armed robbery, and arson.”

Kelp looked surprised: “All at once?”

“He wanted a diversion while he pulled the job,” Dortmunder said, “so he torched the firehouse.”

“A direct sort of a fella,” Kelp said, nodding.

May said, “Like with this dam.”

Kelp nodded, thinking, frowning. “You see, John,” he said, “I don’t really follow how you’re involved here. The guy says come help me blow up a dam, you say I don’t want to kill a lot of people in their beds, you say good–bye to each other.”

“He’ll find somebody else,” Dortmunder said.

“But isn’t that up to him?”

“John doesn’t see it like that,” May said, “and I agree with him.”

Dortmunder finished his beer. “I know,” he admitted. “It ought to be that way; I say no and it’s done with. But I just have this feeling, there’s got to be some way to get at that money without killing everybody in upstate New York.”

“And?”

Dortmunder frowned so massively he looked like a plowed field. “This is gonna sound egotistical,” he said.

“Go for it,” Kelp advised.

“Well, it’s just I think, if there’s any way at all to get to that money without emptying the reservoir, I’m the guy who should think of it.”

“The only one who
could,
you mean,” Kelp said.

Dortmunder didn’t want to go quite that far in his egotism: “The only one who’d put in the effort,” he amended.

Kelp nodded, accepting that. “And what have you come up with so far?”

“Well, nothing,” Dortmunder admitted. “But this is still the first day I’m on this thing, you know.”

“That’s true.” Kelp sloshed beer in his can. “You could tunnel, maybe,” he said.

Dortmunder looked at him. “Through water?”

“No, no,” Kelp said, shaking both the beer can and his head. “I don’t think there’s a way to do that, really. Tunnel through water. I meant you start on shore,
near
the water. You tunnel straight down until you’re lower than the bottom of the reservoir, and then you turn and tunnel across to this casket, or box, or whatever it is.”

“Dig a tunnel,” Dortmunder echoed, “under a reservoir. Crawl back and forth in this tunnel in the dirt under this reservoir.”

“Well, yeah, there’s that,” Kelp agreed. “I do get kind of a sinus headache just thinking about it.”

“Also,” Dortmunder said, “how do you aim this tunnel? Somewhere out there under that reservoir is a casket. What is it, seven feet long? Three feet wide, a couple feet high. And you gotta go right
to
it. You can’t go above it, you can’t go below it, you can’t miss it to the left or the right.”

May said, “You
particularly
can’t go above it.”

“That’s the sinus headache part,” Dortmunder told her, and to Kelp he said, “It’s too small a target, Andy, and too far away.”

“Well, you know,” Kelp said thoughtfully, “this kind of connects in with something I meant to talk to you about anyway.” Casually glancing around the living room, he said, “You don’t have a PC yet, do you?”

Dortmunder bristled. He didn’t know what this was going to turn out to be, but already he knew he didn’t like it. “What’s that?” he demanded. “Another one of your phone gizmos?”

“No, no, John,” Kelp assured him. “Nothing to do with phones. It’s a personal computer, and it just may be the solution to our problem here.”

Dortmunder stared at him with loathing. “Personal computer? Andy, what are you up to
now?
”

“Let me explain this, John,” Kelp said. “It’s a very simple thing, really, you’re gonna love it.”

“Uh–huh,” Dortmunder said.

“There must be maps,” Kelp said, “old maps from before the reservoir was put in. We use those to do a program for the computer, see, and it makes a model of the valley. Your pal shows us —”

“He’s not my pal,” Dortmunder said.

“Right,” Kelp agreed. “Your ex–cellmate shows us —”

Dortmunder said, “Why don’t you just call him Tom?”

“Well, I don’t really know the guy,” Kelp said. “Listen, can I describe this thing to you?”

“Go right ahead,” Dortmunder said.

“The maps I’m talking about,” Kelp explained, “I don’t mean your gas station road maps, I mean those ones with the lines, the whatchacallit.”

“Topographical,” May said.

“That’s it,” Kelp said. “Thanks, May.”

Dortmunder stared at her. “How come you know that?”

“Why not?” she asked him.

Kelp said, “I’m
trying
to explain this.”

“Right, right,” Dortmunder said. “Go right ahead.”

“So the computer,” Kelp said, “makes a model of the valley from before the water went in, with the towns and the buildings and everything, and we can turn the model any way we want —”

“
What
model?” Dortmunder demanded. He was getting lost here, and that made him mad. “You wanna make like a model train set? What is this?”

“The model in the
computer,
” Kelp told him. “You see it on your screen.”

“The television, you mean.”

“Very like television, yes,” Kelp agreed. “And it’s this detailed three–dimensional model, and you can turn it around and tilt it different ways —”

“Sounds like fun,” Dortmunder said acidly.

“
And,
” Kelp insisted, “you can blow up part of it bigger, to get the details and all, and then your, uh, this, uh, this fella who buried it, he shows us on the model where he buried the box, and then we input the reservoir and —”

“You what?”

“Input the reservoir,” Kelp repeated, unhelpfully, but then he added, “Our first model in the program is the valley from when the towns were there. So we can pinpoint the box.
Then
we tell the PC about the reservoir, and put in the dam, and fill the water in, and probably tell it how much water weighs and all that, so it can tell us what might be different down there at the bottom now.” A shadow of doubt crossed Kelp’s eager face. “There’s a lot of data we’re gonna have to get,” he said, “if we’re gonna do this right. Guy–go, you know.”

“No,” Dortmunder told him. “Guy–go I don’t know.”

“You never heard that expression?” Kelp was astonished.

“May probably did.”

“No, I don’t think so,” May said.

“Guy–go,” Kelp repeated, then spelled it. “G, I, G, O. It means ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out.’ ”

“That’s nice,” Dortmunder said.

“It means,” Kelp amplified, “the computer’s only as smart as what you tell it. If you give it wrong information, it’ll give you wrong information back.”

“I’m beginning to see,” Dortmunder said. “This is a machine that doesn’t know anything until I tell it something, and if I tell it wrong it believes me.”

“That’s about it, yes,” Kelp agreed.

“So this machine of yours,” Dortmunder said, “needs me a lot more than I need it.”

“Now, there you go, being negative again,” Kelp complained.

May said, “John, let Andy finish about this. Maybe it
will
help.”

“I’m just sitting here,” Dortmunder said, and tried to drink from an empty beer can. “I’m sitting here listening, not making any trouble.”

“I’ll get more beer,” May decided.

As she got to her feet, Kelp said, “I’ll wait for you to come back.”

“Thank you, Andy.”

While May was out of the room, Kelp said, “Actually, if we could work this out, that’s a lot of money.”

“It is,” Dortmunder agreed.

“I’m not saying necessarily a tunnel,” Kelp said, “but whatever, probably wouldn’t take a lot of guys. Your old — This, uh, guy, he’s seventy years old, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“How strong is he?”

“Very.”

“Well, that’s fine,” Kelp said. “So he can carry his weight. Then you and me. And a driver, probably.”

“Absolutely,” Dortmunder said. “I drove up there once already. That’s enough. We’ll call Stan Murch, if it looks like we’ve got something.”

“And maybe Tiny Bulcher, for the lifting and the moving around,” Kelp suggested as May came back with three more beers. “Thanks, May.”

May said to Dortmunder, “I already opened yours, John.”

“Thanks.”

“You know,” Kelp said, popping open his beer can with casual skill, “your old — This guy, uh …”

“Tom,” Dortmunder said. “His name is Tom.”

“Well, I’ll try it,” Kelp said. “Tom. This Tom sounds a lot like Tiny. In fact, I’m looking forward to meeting him.”

Dortmunder muttered, “Better you than me.”

“
Anyhoo,
” Kelp said, “we were talking about the PC.”

Dortmunder looked at him. “ ‘Anyhoo’?”

“The PC,” Kelp insisted. “Come on, John.”

“Okay, okay.”

“It’s true,” Kelp said, “we have to get a lot of information to put into the computer, but that’s nothing different. You always want the best information you can get anyway, in any job. That’s the way you work.”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

“And when we put it all in the computer,” Kelp told him, “then we say to it, ‘Plot us out the best route for the tunnel.’ And then we follow that route, and it takes us right to the box.”

“Sounds easy,” May said.

“Whenever things sound easy,” Dortmunder said, “it turns out there’s one part you didn’t hear.”

“Could be,” Kelp said, unruffled. “Could be, we’ll give the model to the computer and ask it about the tunnel, and it’ll say the tunnel doesn’t work, too much water around, too much mud, too far to go, whatever.”

“Be sure to put all that last part in,” Dortmunder told him, “when you’re putting in the rest of the garbage.”

“We’re not
going
to put garbage in,” Kelp corrected him. “We’re going to input quality data, John, believe me. In fact,” he said, suddenly even more peppy and enthusiastic, “I know just the guy to work with on this program.”

“Somebody else?” Dortmunder asked him. “One of us?”

Kelp shook his head. “Wally’s a computer freak,” he explained. “I won’t tell him what we’re trying for, I’ll just give it to him like as a computer problem.”

“Do I know this Wally?”

“No, John,” Kelp said, “you don’t travel in the same circles. Wally’s kind of offbeat. He can only communicate by keyboard.”

“And what if he communicates by keyboard with the law?”

“No, I’m telling you that’s all right,” Kelp insisted. “Wally’s a very unworldly guy. And he’ll save us
weeks
on this thing.”

“Weeks?” Dortmunder said, startled. “How long is this gonna take?”

“Just a few days,” Kelp promised. “With Wally aboard, just a very few days.”