Donald Westlake - The Hot Rock

The lawn was full of eyes, all of them round. Dortmunder looked among them and finally found Prosker's. He pointed the tommy gun at Prosker and called, "Prosker! Get over here!"

Prosker tried to make believe he was somebody else, named Doe or Roe. He kept on standing there, pretending Dortmunder wasn't looking at him.

Dortmunder called, "Do I shoot your ankles off and have somebody carry you? Get over here."

A lady doctor in the foreground, wearing black horn-rims and white lab coat, suddenly cried, "You people ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Do you realize what you're doing to the reality concepts we're trying to instill in these people? How do you expect them to differentiate between illusion and reality when you do something like this ?"

"Be quiet," Dortmunder told her and called to Prosker, "I'm losing my patience."

But Prosker continued to stand there, feigning innocence, until all at once a guard near him took a quick step and shoved him, shouting, "Will you get over there? Who knows if his aim is any good? You want to kill innocent people?"

A chorus of yeahs followed that remark, and the tableau of people - Living Chessboard is what it mostly looked like - turned itself into a sort of bucket brigade, pushing Prosker on from hand to hand all across the lawn to the locomotive.

When he got there, Prosker suddenly became voluble. "I'm not a well man!" he cried. "I've had illnesses, troubles, my memory's gone! I wouldn't be here, why would I be here if I wasn't a sick man. I tell you, my memory's gone, I don't know anything about anything."

"Just get up here," Dortmunder said. "We'll remind you."

Very reluctantly, with much pushing from behind and pulling from in front, Prosker got up into the tender. Kelp and Greenwood held him while Dortmunder told the crowd to stay where it was while they made their escape. "Also," he said, "send somebody to put that switch back after we're gone. We don't want to derail any trains, do we?"

A hundred heads shook no.

"Right," Dortmunder said. He told Chefwick, "Back her up."

"A-okay," Chefwick said, and under his breath he said, "Toot toot." He didn't want to say it aloud with a lot of crazy people within earshot, they might get the wrong idea.

The locomotive backed slowly out of the flower beds. Dortmunder and Kelp and Greenwood surrounded Prosker, grabbing him by the elbows and lifting him a few inches into the air. He hung there, pressed in by wet-suits on all sides, his slippered feet waggling inches above the floor, and said, "What are you doing? Why are you doing this?"

"So you don't get electrocuted," Greenwood told him. "We're about to back through live wires. Cooperate, Mr. Prosker."

"Oh, I'll cooperate," Prosker said. "I'll cooperate."

"Yes, you will," Dortmunder said.

Murch stood beside the tracks, smoking a Marlboro and thinking about railroad trains. What would it be like to drive a railroad train, a real one, a modern diesel? Of course, you couldn't change lanes when you wanted, but it nevertheless might be interesting, very interesting.

In the last fifteen minutes one vehicle had gone by, westbound, an ancient green pickup truck with an ancient gray farmer at the wheel. A lot of metal things in the back had gone klank when the truck had crossed the tracks, and the farmer had given Murch a dirty look, as though he suspected Murch of being responsible for the noise.

The other noise had come a minute or two later, being a brief stutter of tommy-gun fire, faint and faraway. Murch had listened carefully, but it hadn't been repeated. Probably just a warning, not an indication of trouble.

And now, here came something down the tracks. Murch leaned forward, peering, and it was good old Tom Thumb, backing down the rails, its Ford engine whining in reverse.

Good. Murch flipped away the Marlboro and ran over to the truck. He backed it around into position, and had it all ready when Tom Thumb arrived.

Chefwick eased the locomotive to a stop a few yards from the rear of the truck. He was already looking a little sad at the prospect of being returned to normal size, but there was no alternative. His Drink-Me was all used up.

While Greenwood stood guard over Prosker in the tender, Dortmunder and Kelp, no longer in their wet-suits, got out and lowered the ramp into place. Chefwick backed the locomotive carefully up into the truck, and then Dortmunder and Kelp shoved the ramp back inside. Kelp climbed into the truck, and Dortmunder shut the door and went around to get into the cab with Murch.

Murch said, "Everything okay?"

"No problems."

"Nearest place?"

"Might as well," Dortmunder said.

Murch put the truck in gear and started off, and two miles later he made a sweeping left onto a narrow dirt road, one of the many dirt roads they'd checked out in the last two weeks. This one, they knew, trailed off into the woods without ever getting much of anywhere. There were small indications in the first half mile or so that it was sometimes used as a lovers' lane, but farther along the ruts grew narrower and grassier and finally petered out entirely in the middle of a dry valley, with no signs of man except a couple of meandering lines of stones that had once been boundary fences and were now mostly crumbled away. Perhaps there had once been a farm here, or even a whole town. The wooded lands of the northeastern states are full of long-ago-abandoned farms and abandoned rural towns, some of them gone now without a trace, some still indicated by an occasional bit of stone wall or a half-buried tombstone to mark where the churchyard used to be.

Murch drove the truck in as far as he dared and stopped. "Listen to the silence," he said.

It was late afternoon now, and the woods were without sound. It was a softer, more muffled silence than the one at the sanitarium following Dortmunder's tommy-gun burst, but just as complete.

Dortmunder got out of the cab, and when he slammed the door it echoed like war noises through the trees. Murch had gotten out on the other side, and they walked separately along the trailer, meeting again at the far end. All around them stood the tree trunks, and underfoot orange and red dead leaves. Leaves still covered the branches too and fluttered constantly downward, making steady small movements down through the air that kept Dortmunder making quick sharp glances to left and right.

Dortmunder opened the rear door and he and Murch climbed inside, then shut the door again after themselves. The interior of the trailer was lit by three frosted-glass lights spaced along the top, and the place was very, very full of locomotive, with no room at all to move on the right side and just barely enough to sidle along on the left. Dortmunder and Murch went along to the front of the tender and stepped aboard.

Prosker was sitting on the arms case, his innocent-amnesiac expression beginning to fray at the edges. Kelp and Greenwood and Chefwick were standing around looking at him. There were no guns in sight.

Dortmunder went over to him and said, "Prosker, it's as simple as can be. If we're out the emerald, you're out of life. Cough it up."

Prosker looked up at Dortmunder, as innocent as a puppy who's missed the paper, and said, "I don't know what anybody's talking about. I'm a sick man."

Greenwood, in disgust, said, "Let's tie him to the tracks and run the train over him a few times. Maybe he'll talk then."

"I really doubt it," Chefwick said.

Dortmunder said, "Murch, Kelp, take him back and show him where we are."

"Right." Murch and Kelp took Prosker ungently by the elbows, hustled him off the tender, and shoved him down the narrow aisle to the rear of the truck. They pushed open a door and showed him the woods, with the late afternoon sunlight making diagonal rays down through the foliage, and when he'd seen it they shut the door again and brought him back and sat him down once more on the arms case.