Donald Westlake - What's The Worst That Could Happen?

So the question he had to ask himself, Kelp thought, riding there in the taxi beside the expectant Anne Marie, was how did he want to remember her. Did he want to remember her warmly and sweetly, or coldly and bitterly? If she was important enough to him so that he would want the memory of her to be golden—and she was, she definitely was—then wasn’t it about time to let memory begin its useful work, by saying good-bye, Anne Marie, good-bye?

On the other hand, he had to admit, he was somehow finding it difficult to think about life after saying good-bye to Anne Marie. He enjoyed her, and he knew she enjoyed him. And in one significant way, she was different from every other woman he’d ever met, and a very pleasant significant difference it was. In essence, she just didn’t seem to give a damn about the future.

And that, so far as Kelp was concerned, was unique. Every other woman he’d ever met, when she wasn’t being worried about her appearance, was being worried about what was going to happen next. They were all of them fixated on the future, they all wanted assurance and reassurance and something in writing and a plan. For Kelp, who lived his life with the philosophy that every day was another opportunity to triumph over the unexpected—or at least not get steamrollered by the unexpected—this urgency to nail down tomorrow was completely inexplicable. His reaction was: Say, you know, it isn’t even that easy to nail down today.

(Of course, that this very philosophy might be the cause of the nervousness in his woman friends that made them fret more than they otherwise might about events to come, had not as yet occurred to him. However, since all his days were brand new, since he wasn’t stuck to a predetermined pattern, it was a thought that could still occur; nothing is precluded.)

Still, the point was, Anne Marie was different. She took the unexpected in stride and didn’t seem to worry much about anything, and particularly not about whatever might be coming down the pike. This made her very easy for a guy like Andy Kelp to hang out with, and maybe it’s also what made it easy for her to hang around with him. Here today, and who knows about tomorrow, right? Right.

The cab was approaching their apartment. Anne Marie waited, a little half-smile on her lips, a bright look in her eye. She isn’t worried about what’s gonna happen next, Kelp realized, so why should I? I don’t want to break up with her today, I know that much.

“If you came along,” he said, knowing that even to start a sentence with the word if was an acknowledgment that she was going to get her way, “if you did, what would you do with yourself?”

She beamed. “I’ll think of something,” she said. “We’ll think of something together.”

Wylie Branch always stood with one hip cocked and arms akimbo and head back, eyes slightly lidded, as though about to go for a quick draw; except that the holster on his right hip contained a walkie-talkie instead of a six-gun. He held that stance now, neat enough in his tan chief of security uniform, and looked out the picture window of cottage number one at the Battle-Lake, where tourists stood around with their mouths open, imitating the fish in the water, and watched one another throw perfectly good coins into the lake’s shallow depths. “Well,” he said, “Earl Radburn may have his brains in his hindquarters, but he’s right about that effin lake.”

Behind him, Brandon Camberbridge had been roving restlessly around the cottage, fussy and picky, not only a nellie but a nervous nellie, his reflection flickering across the glass in front of Wylie like the ghost of Franklin Pangborn, but now he came forward to present his fretful profile to Wylie as he also looked out at the lake. “Oh, Wylie,” he said. “We can’t disturb the lake.”

“It’s a dang security nightmare,” Wylie told him.

“But it’s so beautiful,” Brandon said. “It’s a perfect part of paradise.”

“Sooner or later,” Wylie said, “it’s gonna have to get shut down for a while anyhows, drained, cleaned out, spiffed up. So why not do it now? Anybody asks, it’s just regular maintenance.”

“Thursday,” Brandon said, counting days on his fingers, starting with today, progressing from there, “Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. The big cheese isn’t going to get here for four more days, Wylie. You want that beautiful lake turned into a dry quagmire for a week?”

“Quagmires aren’t dry,” Wylie said.

“You know what I mean.”

“You mean you want everything pretty,” Wylie accused him. “You mean you don’t care if the head cheese, or whatever you call him—”

“Big cheese, Wylie, please.”

“You don’t care if the big boss comes here and gets robbed or wounded or worse, just so’s your little kingdom stays pretty.”

“That’s unfair, Wylie,” Brandon said, and he looked briefly as though he might cry. “You know I’m doing everything in my power to see to it the big cheese is protected, but I do not see how draining our beautiful lake is going to do one single thing to help in that way at all.”

Wylie sighed, and shifted position, to stand with the other hip cocked. Earl Radburn, head of security for the entire TUI and a tightass pain in the butt if there ever lived one, had been and come and gone and went, leaving Wylie in charge of security for Max Fairbanks’s upcoming visit. He’d also left beefed-up security behind him, in the form of a bunch of beefed-up security guards, extra ones from other parts of the TUI empire, now temporarily under Wylie’s orders, so that Wylie knew for sure and certain, if anything did happen to go wrong during the Fairbanks stay, it would be his own head that would roll as a result and not Earl Radburn’s, and certainly not this goddam faggot next to him.

Wylie didn’t particularly want his head to roll. He liked it here. He liked his job, he liked the authority he held over other employees, he liked the first-rate salary he hauled in, he liked banging the boss’s wife—that Nell, whenever she wasn’t away on one of her eternal shopping and shagging trips all over these United States of America, was a real tigress in Wylie’s rack, not getting much by way of satisfaction from the pansy she’d married in a moment of inattention—and he didn’t want to have to give it all up just so this self-same pansy could go on gazing at his goddam fake lake.

But it wasn’t an argument Wylie was going to win, he could see that now, so the hell with it, they’d just have to line the goddam lake with beefy security men the whole time Fairbanks was here, whether Brandon Camberbridge liked it or not, and hope for the best. In the meantime, there was no point pressing the issue any more, so Wylie shut his trap and squinted out at the tourists, imagining them all as armed desperadoes in disguise. Hmmmmm; some of those were awfully damn good disguises.

Wait a second. Wylie squinted more narrowly, this time for real. That fella there . . .

He did his quick draw after all, bringing up the walkie-talkie, thumbing Send, saying, “One to Base. One to Base.”

Brandon, jumpy as a schoolgirl at a Hell’s Angels picnic, said, “Wylie? What’s wrong?”

“Base. What’s up, Wylie?”

“Thayer,” Wylie said, recognizing the voice through the walkie-talkie’s distortion, “we got a doubtful on the east walk, just south of the lake, before the cottages.”

Wide-eyed, Brandon whispered, “Wylie? Is it him? Which one is it?”

More importantly, the walkie-talkie said, in Thayer’s voice, “I got two guys right near there. What are they lookin for?”

“Midforties,” Wylie said, observing that lurker out there. “Six foot, one-eighty, Caucasian, light blue shirt, wrinkled gray pants. Hands in pockets. Hangdog look.”