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

“I won’t need one,” Dortmunder assured her.

She nodded. “Uh huh,” she said, and put the money in the pocket of her cardigan.

So that was the second warning, and the third warning was this morning, in the cafe a block from the Randy Unicorn where he ate his breakfast, and where the waitress, at the end of the meal, when she slid the check onto the table, said, “Just get to town?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Just a friendly word of warning,” she said, and leaned close, and murmured, “Just leave.”

And now, he’s less than an hour at the Gaiety Hotel, Battle-Lake and Casino, and he’s got security guards in both hip pockets. What’s going on here?

It was a twenty-minute walk from the Strip back to the Randy Unicorn, through flat tan ground with more empty lots than buildings, and none of the buildings more than three stories tall. And back there behind him loomed those architectural fantasies, soaring up like psychedelic mushrooms, millions of bright lights competing with the sun, a line of those weird structures all alone in the flatness, surrounded by Martian desert, as though they’d sprouted from seeds planted in the dead soil by Pan, though actually they’d been planted by Bugsy Siegel, who’d watered them with his blood.

Walking in the sunlight through this lesser Las Vegas of dusty parking lots and washed-out shopfronts of dry cleaners and liquor stores, Dortmunder reflected that somehow, once he was out of New York City, he was less invisible than he was used to. He was going to have to move very carefully around this town.

When he came plodding down the sunny dry block to the Randy Unicorn, he had to pass the office first, with the rental units beyond it, and as he sloped by, the office door opened and the mummified woman stuck her head out to say, “Over here.”

Dortmunder looked at her, then looked down along the line of motel room doors that faced onto the blacktop parking area between building and street. A silver Buick Regal was parked among the vehicles along there, nose in, probably in front of Dortmunder’s room. It was quite different from the dusty pickup trucks and rump-sprung station wagons in front of some of the other units. Dortmunder couldn’t see the license plate on the Regal, but he could guess. And he could also guess what the mummified woman wanted to say.

Which is what she said: “Some fella picked his way into your room awhile ago. He’s still in there.”

“That’s okay,” Dortmunder said. “He’s a friend of mine.”

“Uh huh,” she said.

“Ah, the open road,” Andy Kelp said, at the wheel of the Regal. (The license plates did say MD, as Dortmunder had expected, and were from New Mexico.)

Interstate 93/95, between Las Vegas and Henderson, was a wide road, all right, but with all the commercial traffic highballing along it Dortmunder wouldn’t exactly call it open. Still, they were making good time, and the Regal’s air-conditioning was smooth as a diaper, so Dortmunder relaxed partly into all this comfort and said, “Lemme tell you what’s been happening here.”

Kelp glanced away from the semis and vans and potato chip trucks long enough to say, “Happening? You just got here.”

“And everybody,” Dortmunder told him, “makes me for a wrong guy. Like that. Like that.” The second time he tried to snap his fingers, he hurt something in a joint. “Right away,” he explained.

Again Kelp gave him the double-o, then looked back at the highway in time not to run into the back of that big slat-sided truck full of live cows. Steering around the beef, which looked reproachfully at them as they went by, Kelp said, “I see what your problem is, John. You don’t have a sense of what we call protective coloration.”

Dortmunder frowned at him, and massaged his finger joint. “What’s that?”

“You’ll find out,” Kelp promised him, which sounded ominous. “When we get back from seeing this fella Vogel. But let’s get this part squared away first.” Shaking his head, weaving through the traffic in all this sunlight, Kelp said, “I hope he’s got what we want.”

“It would help,” Dortmunder agreed.

Dortmunder had phoned Lester Vogel from Vegas to introduce himself and get directions, and they found the place the first try, in a low incomplete tan neighborhood of warehouses and small factories in the scrubby desert, just beyond the Henderson city line. A tall unpainted board fence ran all around a full block here, with big black letters along each side that read GENERAL MANUFACTURING , which didn’t exactly tell you a hell of a lot about what was going on inside there. However, when Dortmunder and Kelp got out of the Regal’s air-conditioning and into Nevada’s air, there was a smell wafting over that fence to suggest there were people somewhere nearby stirring things in vats with one hand while holding their nose with the other.

Kelp had parked, per instructions, next to the truck entrance to General Manufacturing, a big pair of broad wood-slat doors that looked just like the rest of the fence and that were firmly closed. Now they went over to those doors, banged on them for a while, and at last a voice from inside yelled something in Spanish, so Dortmunder yelled back in English: “Dortmunder! Here to see Vogel!”

There was silence then for a long while, during which Dortmunder tried unsuccessfully to see between the wooden slats of the door, and then, just as Kelp was saying, “Maybe we oughta whack it again,” one side of the entrance creaked inward just enough for a bony dark-complexioned black-haired head to lean out, study them both briefly, and say, “Hokay.”

The head disappeared, but the opening stayed open, so Dortmunder and Kelp stepped on inside, to find that the interior of General Manufacturing was a lot of different places, like an entire village of busy artisans in different sheds and shacks and lean-tos and at least one old schoolbus without its wheels. Various smokes of various colors rose from various places. Vehicles of many kinds were parked haphazardly among the small structures. Workers hammered things and screwed things together and painted things and took things apart. A number of trucks, mostly with pale green Mexican license plates, were being loaded or unloaded. In an open-sided lean-to off to the right, people stirred things in vats with one hand while holding their nose with the other.

The bony head that had invited them in belonged to a scrawny body in some leftover pieces of ripped clothing; judging from his size and boniness and the condition of his teeth, he could have been any age from eleven to ninety-six. After he’d pushed shut the door behind them and dropped a massive wooden bar over it to keep it shut, this guy turned toward Dortmunder and Kelp, nodded vigorously, flapped a hand in the direction of the schoolbus, and said, “Orifice.”

“Got it,” Dortmunder said, and he and Kelp made their way through this dusty busy landscape that would surely have reminded them of Vulcan’s workshop if either of them had ever paid the slightest bit of attention in school, and as they got to the orangey yellow bus its door sagged open and out bounded a grinning wiry guy in a black three-piece suit, white shirt, black tie, and black wing-tip shoes. He looked like he was going to the funeral of somebody he was glad was dead.

This guy stopped in front of Dortmunder and Kelp, legs apart, hands on hips, chin thrust forward, eyes bright and cheerful but at the same time somehow aggressive, and he said, “Which one’s Dortmunder?”

“Me,” Dortmunder said.

“Good,” the guy said, and squinted at Kelp: “So what does that make you?”

“His friend,” Kelp said.

The guy absorbed that thought, then frowned deeply at Kelp and said, “You a New Yorker?”