Jimmy the Kid (11 page)

Dortmunder backed up the Caprice, then walked to the Cadillac again, opened the chauffeur's door and said, “Move over.”

Kelp made room, and Van Gelden slid over into the middle of the seat. He said, “I hope you birds are bright enough to surrender if some state trooper happens by. I don't want to be a hostage or a victim or anything like that.”

Kelp, given an opportunity to produce another of his lines from the book, said, “Keep it down. I told you, we don't scare the kid.”

But he'd said it without lifting his mask away from his mouth. Van Gelden looked at him and said, “What?”

“Forget it,” Kelp said.

“What?”

Kelp took the mask away from his mouth. “Forget it!”

“You don't have to shout, fella,” Van Gelden said. “I'm right next to you.”

Dortmunder started the Cadillac and backed it away from the truck. Then Murch pulled out the two wooden planks they were going to use instead of a metal ramp. May was the one who had pointed out that if they used a ramp they wouldn't be able to put it back in after the car was inside the truck, since the car's wheels would be in the way. Dortmunder had said, “And that's the book we're supposed to follow,” but Murch had immediately suggested a pair of planks, which could be stored under the Cadillac once it was inside.

But it took a while to place them. Dortmunder sat with both hands on the wheel, and Murch kept running back and forth between the truck and the car, making minor shifts in the two planks, lining them up with the front wheels and trying to keep them nice and parallel. Finally, content, he climbed up into the truck and gestured for Dortmunder to drive forward.

Slowly they went up the ramp. They could feel the planks bending beneath the weight, but Murch had positioned them properly and the tyres were nicely in the middle of each plank. The front tyres; the rear tyres were still on the ground when the bumper scraped against the rear of the truck.

“Now what?” Dortmunder said.

Murch, frowning, went to look at the left front fender of the Cadillac, and then at the right front fender. He shook his head, frowned more deeply, put his hands on his hips, and went back to consider the left front fender again. Then, leaning on that fender, he called to Dortmunder, “It's too wide!”

Dortmunder stuck his head out the side window. “What do you mean it's too wide?”

“It won't fit.”

Murch backed up from the Cadillac, standing inside the truck and studying the two vehicles. He held his hands up, palms facing one another, and peered through them. He shook his head.

Murch's Mom, sitting at the wheel of the school bus and not knowing what the
hell
was going on, considered honking the horn to try to attract somebody's attention. But probably this wasn't a good time to distract them all from whatever they were doing over there. On the other hand, it did seem to be taking them a long time to get that Cadillac into that truck.

Inside the Cadillac, Kelp said, “I never heard of such a thing. Cars always fit inside trucks.”

Van Gelden said, “What?”

“Nothing,” Kelp said.

“I should have known,” Dortmunder said.

Jimmy, in the back seat, found himself considering the situation as though it were a problem to be solved. Like the problems in
Scientific American
, to which he was a subscriber. But that wasn't the right thing to do; he wasn't on their side, he was on the other side. So he tabled the problem, to be considered at some later time.

May, leaning forward, said, “Maybe we could—” and the phone rang.

Everybody jumped. The Cadillac sagged on the boards. May stared at the phone in horror and said, “What do I do?”

Dortmunder twisted around. It was hard, with three men crammed in together in the front seat, but he turned sufficiently to be able to look through the eyeholes in his Mickey Mouse mask at both May and the boy. He said, “The kid has to answer it.”

The phone rang again.

Dortmunder said to the boy, “You play it like everything's okay. You got the idea?”

“I won't cause any trouble,” Jimmy said. He wasn't exactly frightened of these people, but he was well aware that a tense situation could sometimes make a person react more violently than they would normally. He didn't want any of this gang going into a panic.

“You just answer the phone,” Dortmunder said. “You act normal, and you make it as short as you can.”

“All right,” Jimmy said. He reached out to pick up the phone as it rang for the third time.

Dortmunder said, “Hold it away from your ear, so we can all hear what they're saying.”

Jimmy nodded. His mouth and throat were dry. Picking up the phone, he held it so the back part was out and away from his ear. “Hello?”

“Hel-lo, there, is this James Harrington?” The cheerful male voice came tinnily from the phone.

“Yes, it is.”

“Well, this is Bob Dodge of radio WRTZ, the voice of Sussex County, calling you from Hotline For Facts. Your postcard has been selected at random, and you have the opportunity to win prizes totalling over
five hundred dollars
! And now, here's Lou Sweet to tell you what prizes are in this week's Hotline Jackpot!”

Another voice began to ripple from the phone, describing prizes, in each case giving the name of the merchant who had contributed the prize. A camera from a drugstore. Dog food from a supermarket. A dictionary and a table radio from a department store. Dinner for two at a local restaurant.

“I don't believe this,” Dortmunder said, and May shushed him again.

Bob Dodge came back on the phone. “Are you familiar with the rules of our game?” he asked, but before Jimmy could answer he gave them anyway, talking at top speed. There seemed to be something about levels, options of subject matter, various other sophistications, but the main idea was that they would ask him questions and he would try to answer them. “Are you ready, James?”

“Yes, sir,” Jimmy said. He sometimes listened to this program in the car on the way home from Dr. Schraubenzieher, and it always seemed as though he knew the right answers whenever the contestants got them wrong. About six months ago he'd sent in a postcard, giving both his home phone and the mobile telephone unit in the car, but he'd never expected them to call him. Particularly not the mobile telephone number.

And he sure wished it hadn't happened now. It was embarrassing to be here on the phone like this, answering some quiz show's silly questions, with a lot of strangers looking on.

“And here's your first question,” Bob Dodge said. “Name four of the states of Australia.”

Australia. Concentrating. Jimmy said, “New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria. And Northern Territory.”

“Very good! Next, give the atomic number of samarium.”

“Sixty-two.”

“What is hemialgia?”

“Pain on one side of the head.”

“I've got pain on both sides of my head,” Dortmunder muttered.

“Sshh!” Kelp said.

“Who wrote
Adrienne Toner
?”

“Anne Sedgwick.”

“What year was the battle of Lancaster Abbey?”

Jimmy hesitated. The others in the car all tensed, looking at him, waiting. Finally, with the question apparent in his voice, he said, “Fourteen ninety-three?”

“Yes!”

Everybody in the car sighed with relief; three Mickey Mouse masks ballooned.

Jimmy answered four more questions, on astronomy, economics, French history and physics, and then the next question was, “In astrology, what are the signs before and after Gemini?”

Astrology; that was one of Jimmy's weak areas. He had no belief in it, and so had never studied it. He said, “The signs before and after?”

“Before and after Gemini, yes.”

“Before Gemini … is Taurus.”

“Yes! And after?”

“After Gemini.”

Kelp whispered, “Cancer.”

Dortmunder glared at him. He whispered, “If you're wrong—”

“Time is almost up, James.”

Jimmy took a deep breath. He didn't like accepting help on a test, but what else could he do? He hadn't asked for it, and it might not even be right. He said, “Cancer?”

“
Absolutely right
!”

Again, general relief. Even with the mask over his face, Kelp could be seen smiling.

“You, James Harrington,” Bob Dodge was saying, “have won our Hotline Jackpot!”

“Thank you,” Jimmy said, and when he saw Dortmunder gesturing violently at him he added, “I have to hang up now,” and hung up.

“Well,” May said. “Jimmy, that was really impressive.”

“Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Now that the kid got his dog food and his dinner for two, let's get back to—”

And the planks gave way; both of them at once. The Cadillac slapped down onto the road like a palm slapping down on a table. Everybody was tossed up, ricocheted off the roof, and jolted into their seats again. In the process, Dortmunder's gun went sailing out the open window next to him, and Kelp's gun bounced off the roof, the steering wheel and the dashboard before landing in Van Gelden's lap.

“Hands up!” Van Gelden yelled, and scrabbled in his lap for the gun. Both Dortmunder and Kelp were obediently lifting their arms, and Van Gelden was still bobbling the gun, when May reached over his shoulder, took it away from him, and handed it to Dortmunder.

“All right,” Dortmunder said. “All right, that's enough fooling around.” To May he said, “Put the mask on the kid and put him in our car.” To Kelp he said, “Put the cuffs on this guy. If it won't upset you too much, we're gonna rewrite that book of yours a little bit.”

“Anything you say,” Kelp said. He was pulling the handcuffs out of his hip pocket.

“And you,” Dortmunder told the chauffeur, “you just sit there and keep your mouth shut. ‘Hands up,' is it?” Giving the chauffeur a look of disgust that the chauffeur couldn't see through the Mickey Mouse mask, Dortmunder got out of the Cadillac, picked up his gun from the road, and said to Murch, “Forget that goddamn truck. We'll go straight to the hideout from here. All that other crap was more complicated than it had to be anyway.”

“Right,” Murch said. “I'll get my Mom,” he said, and jumped down out of the truck.

May had put the Mickey Mouse mask with the taped eyeholes over Jimmy's head. She'd considered using the dialogue from the book about pretending it was night and all that, but somehow it didn't seem to fit the case, so all she'd said was, “I'm going to blindfold you now.”

“Of course,” Jimmy said.

Murch rid himself of his mask and went over to the school bus, where his Mom was impatiently tapping her fingernails on the steering wheel. She pushed the lever on her left, the door accordioned open, and she said, “So? You want to tell me something?”

“We're all taking off in our car, Mom. Run the bus out of the way and come on over.”

“I been sitting here,” she said. “Wondering what's going on.”

“It would take a while to tell, Mom.”

“I saw the Caddy bounce,” she said.

“That was part of it.”

“I wish I had springs like that in the cab,” she said. “Climb aboard.” She shifted into first, and Murch stepped up into the bus as she eased it forward and off onto the shoulder of the road.

May had now led the boy from the Cadillac to the back seat of the Caprice, Kelp had handcuffed Van Gelden to the steering wheel, and Dortmunder had filled his pockets with guns and was standing beside the Cadillac looking mulish. When Murch and his Mom came over from the school bus Dortmunder said, “Stan, you drive.”

“Right.”

Murch's Mom got in the back seat with May and Jimmy. “Well, hello, Jimmy,” she said. “I see you're playing Mickey Mouse.”

May shook her head. “It's not quite like that,” she said.

Inside his mask, Jimmy said, “I really am a bit old for this kind of psychological reassurance.”

“Hmp,” Murch's Mom said. “A smart alec.”

In the front seat, Kelp sat in the middle, with Murch on his left and Dortmunder on his right. As Murch started the engine, Kelp said to Dortmunder, “Can I have my gun back?”

“No,” Dortmunder said. He looked around at the setting they were leaving, giving everything the same impartial look of disgust: truck, school bus, planks, Cadillac, chauffeur. “Hands up,” he muttered, and the Caprice drove off in a flurry of falling leaves.

14

D
ORTMUNDER SAID
, “W
HAT'S
taking so long? We been driving for forty-five minutes.”

“I've been taking some extra turns and cutbacks,” Murch said, “to confuse the boy's sense of direction. That's what they did in the book.”

“In the meantime,” Dortmunder said, “the cops are out looking by now.”

“We should have picked up the detour signs,” Kelp said. “We shouldn't have left them behind like that.”

“We don't need them any more,” Dortmunder told him. “And I don't want to waste any more time.” To Murch he said, “So let's go straight to the farmhouse. No more extra turns.”

“Well,” Murch said.

Dortmunder looked at him. “What do you mean, well?”

“Well, the fact is,” Murch said. He was blinking a lot as he drove, and looking troubled, even embarrassed. “The fact is,” he said, “I think I took too, many extra turns and cutbacks already.”

“You're
lost?
”

“Well,” Murch said, “not exactly lost.”

“What do you mean, not
exactly
lost?”

“Well, there was a road I thought was down this way, and it isn't here. I can't seem to find it.”

“If you can't seem to find the road you're looking for,” Dortmunder said, “that means you're lost.
Exactly
lost.”