Donald Westlake - The Hot Rock

Greenwood didn't make it easy for them. He didn't punch any of them because he didn't want them to punch him back with truncheons and make him unconscious, but he did keep poking the old man at them, making it difficult for them to come around through the narrow cell and get their hands on him.

Then, all at once, he subsided. He released the old man, who promptly sat down on the floor and began to clutch his own neck, and he stood there slump-shouldered, vague-eyed. "I don't know," he said fuzzily, shaking his head. "I don't know."

The guards put their hands on his arms. "We know," one of them said, and the second said quietly to the third, "Flipped out. I wouldn't of thought it from him."

Not too many walls away, the rented truck had rolled silently and blackly to a stop against the outer wall of the prison. There were towers at both corners of the wall and there was a great deal of light in other parts of the wall, such as the part around the main entrance and the part near the exercise yard, but here there was silence and darkness only intermittently broken by a searchlight sweeping along the length of the wall from the inside. The reason was, there were no cells nor entrances near this part of the wall at all. On the other side of this wall, according to Greenwood's maps, were buildings housing the prison heating plant, the laundry, the kitchens and dining halls, the chapels, various storage sheds and the like. No part of the wall was left totally unguarded, but the guard in this area was the most perfunctory. Besides, with such a transient prison population as that at Utopia Park Prison, escapes were very rarely attempted.

As soon as the truck came to a stop, Dortmunder got to his feet and leaned the ladder against the wall. It reached almost to the top. He hurried up it while Chefwick held it steady, and at the top he peeked over, watching for the searchlight. It came, it showed him a layout of building roofs that matched Greenwood's map, and he ducked out of sight just before it swept past the spot where his head had been. He went back down the ladder and whispered, "It's all right."

"Good," Chefwick whispered.

Dortmunder joggled the ladder to be sure it would hold still with no one at the bottom to mind it, and then he went back up, Chefwick this time following close behind him. Dortmunder carried the coil of rope over one shoulder, Chefwick toted his black bag. Chefwick moved with an agility surprising in a man of his appearance.

At the top, Dortmunder shook out the coil of rope, holding on to the end tied to the metal hook. The rope was knotted every few feet and dangled to about eight feet from the ground. Dortmunder attached it to the top of the wall with the hook and tugged it to be sure it was solid. It was.

As soon as the searchlight glided by the next time, Dortmunder zipped up the rest of the ladder and straddled the top of the wall just to the right. Chefwick hurried up after him, hampered slightly by the black bag, and straddled the wall just to the left, facing Dortmunder. They reached down, grabbed the ladder by the top rung, pulled it up until it would tilt over the wall, and then slid it down the other side. About nine feet down was a flat tar roof, over the prison laundry. The ladder touched the roof and Dortmunder immediately clambered onto it. He took the black bag from Chefwick and hurried down the ladder. Chefwick scrambled down after him. They put the ladder down next to the low wall that edged the roof and then lay down on top of the ladder, where they would be in that wall's shadow the next time the searchlight came by.

Outside, Kelp had been standing beside the truck, squinting to see Dortmunder and Chefwick and the ladder. He saw them vaguely, huddled on the ladder, one time when the searchlight went by on the other side of the wall, but the next time it went by they were gone. He nodded in satisfaction, got into the cab, and drove away from there, lights still off.

Dortmunder and Chefwick, meantime, used the ladder to get from the laundry roof to the ground. They put the ladder on the ground to one side and hurried for the main prison building looming up in the darkness ahead of them. They had to duck behind a wall once, to let the searchlight go by, but then trotted on, got to the building, found the door where it was supposed to be, and Chefwick took from his pocket the two tools he'd known he would have to use on this door. He went to work while Dortmunder kept watch.

Dortmunder saw the searchlight coming again, running along the face of the building. "Hurry it up," he whispered, and heard a click, and turned to see the door opening.

They ducked inside, shut the door, and the searchlight went by. "Close," Dortmunder whispered.

"I'll take my bag now," Chefwick whispered back. He was completely unruffled.

The room they were in was totally black, but Chefwick knew the contents of his bag so well he didn't need light. He squatted on the floor, opened the bag, put the two tools away in their appropriate pouches, took out two others, closed the bag, stood, and said, "All right."

Several locked doors away, Greenwood was saying, "I'll come quietly. Don't you worry, I'll come quietly."

"We're not worried," one of the guards said.

It had taken them all quite a while to get everything sorted out. After Greenwood had suddenly gotten calm the guards had tried to find out what had happened, what it was all about, but all the old man could do was sputter and point, and all Greenwood would do was stand around looking vague and shaking his head and saying, "I just don't know any more." Then the old man said the magic word "feet" and Greenwood erupted again.

He was very careful about how he erupted. He did nothing physical, all he did was scream and shout and thrash a bit. He kept it up while the guards held on to his arms, but when he saw they were about deciding to apply a local anesthetic to his head he calmed down again and became very reasonable. He explained about the old man's feet, being totally lucid, explaining to them as though he thought once they understood the situation they would thoroughly agree with him.

What they did was humor him, and that was what he wanted. And when one of them said, "Look, fellow, why don't we just find you someplace else to sleep?" Greenwood smiled in honest pleasure. He knew where they would take him now, to one of the cells over in the hospital wing. He could cool off there until morning, and then be handy for the doctor to see.

That's what they thought.

Greenwood said a smiling goodbye to the old man, who was holding a sock to his bleeding nose now, and out he marched amid the guards. He assured them he would go with them quietly and they assured him they weren't worried about that.

The early part of the route was the same as when he'd gone to see Prosker. Down the metal corridor, down the metal spiral stairs, along the other metal corridor and through two doors, both of which had to be unlocked by people on the outside and both of which were locked again in his wake. After that the route changed, going down a long brown corridor and around a corner to a nice lonely spot where two men dressed all in black, with black hoods over their heads and black pistols in their hands, came out of a doorway and said, "Don't nobody make a sound."

The guards looked at Dortmunder and Chefwick, for indeed it was they, and blinked in astonishment. One of them said, "You're crazy."

"Not necessarily," Chefwick said. He stepped to one side of the doorway and said, "In here, gentlemen."

"You won't shoot," the second guard said. "The noise would attract a lot of attention."

"That's why we have silencers," Dortmunder told him. "That's this thing like a hand grenade on the front of the gun. Want to hear it?"

"No," said the guard.

Everybody went into the room and Greenwood shut the door. They used the guards' belts to tie their ankles, their ties to tie their hands, and their shirttails to gag them. The room they were in was small and square and was somebody's office, with a metal desk. There was a phone on the desk but Dortmunder ripped the cord loose.