Donald Westlake - Drowned Hopes

Standing on end, a casket has a less restful, more problematic appearance than in its more usual lying-down posture. Standing on end in fifty feet of mucky water, in front of a slime-covered brick wall, its own once-glossy surface dulled and dirtied and covered with goo, a casket looked like a doorway to a different world. Not a better one.

He could imagine that door opening.

Superstition, Doug thought, ignoring the little chills running through his body, inside the warm wetsuit. There are no premonitions, he told himself. The whole thing’s a piece of cake. Taking the light with him, leaving the blackness, he swam powerfully toward the surface.

Tom sat on the narrow bunk in the gently rocking boat, back against a pillow against the wall, and listened. Doug wasn’t back yet. It was nowhere near time to make the move.

Beside him on the bunk, nestled against his bony hip, was the hammer he’d found in a storage drawer beside the sink, for use in case the hitchhiker regained consciousness before Tom was ready. But he doubted now that he’d need it; the hitchhiker’s even breathing and relaxed face suggested he’d moved on from unconsciousness to sleep. He was probably good till morning, if nothing disturbed him.

Tom shifted position on the bunk, fluffing the pillow behind his back. He figured he had half an hour or more to wait. And then the timing would have to be perfect.

The thing was, Dortmunder and his pals would expect Tom to make a move. Everybody always did, that was written into the equation. Tom’s job was to figure out the earliest point at which they’d expect something from him, and the earliest point before that when he could usefully make his move, and then pick his spot between the two.

This time, it seemed to him, they wouldn’t really expect much trouble before they got the loot ashore, but they would probably start being tense and wary once the casket was actually inside the boat. But now that they had a boat with its own winch attached to its own motor, so that Tiny was no longer needed to drag the casket up out of the reservoir, Tom’s actual first potential moment was much earlier than that.

Not when Doug found the marker rope.

Not when he led the boat to it.

Not when he untied the marker rope from the monofilament and handed it to someone in the boat.

When the marker rope was attached to the winch: then .

Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny huddled their heads together over the wheel so they could hear one another above the storm without having to shout loud enough to be heard by Tom down in the cabin. “Once we get that box ashore,” Kelp was saying, “we’ve got to keep a very close eye on Tom because you just know he’s gonna pull something.”

“Before that, if you ask me,” Tiny growled. “Once we get that box in the boat, once he sees it, there’s no way he’s gonna control himself. He’ll make his move. That’s when we gotta be on our guard.”

“You ask me,” Dortmunder said, “the time to be on your guard with Tom is all the time.”

“ Pflufh !” said Doug, appearing at the rail, spitting out his mouthpiece.

They all turned to watch as Doug, who had hoisted himself up out of the water onto the narrow platform jutting out from the stern of the boat, climbed over the rail and stood on the exposed rear deck for a second, face mask still on, dripping in the rain. Then he pulled off the face mask and grinned and came over to speak to Dortmunder, his large wet presence forcing Tiny to back down two steps into the cabin.

“I got it,” Doug said. “So all you do is keep us moving just barely forward, okay?”

Doug had given Dortmunder a quick orientation course in operating this vessel on their way out from shore, not enough to take it on a round-the-world cruise, but maybe enough to keep it moving just barely forward for a few minutes. “Sure,” Dortmunder said.

“I’ll be up on the prow,” Doug told him. “You’ll be able to see me up there through the windshield. If I want you to steer to the right or the left, I’ll wave my arm out like this.”

“Got it,” Dortmunder said.

“Forward, I point that way. Stop, I hold my hand back to you like this.”

“Got that, too.”

“Now, take it real slow and easy,” Doug told him, “because I’m going to be bringing in the line while we move.”

“Very slow, very easy,” Dortmunder promised.

Tom, sitting up on the bunk, heard the conversation through the narrow open doorway where the bottom half of Tiny now stood. He heard Doug’s footsteps move forward on the deck just above his head, and saw Tiny’s legs recede back up to the wheelhouse level. One on the prow, he thought. One on the bunk down here. Three around the wheel.

Doug, seated cross-legged on the prow, waved for Dortmunder to ease them forward, and then began to draw in the line as they moved, coiling it in his lap so it wouldn’t drift under the boat. Getting fouled on one of their lines was, as he saw it, their greatest danger at this point.

They were less than ten minutes easing their way across the rainswept reservoir, and then Doug, still tugging gently on the line, saw the knot rise dripping and swaying out of the water dead ahead. The monofilament was invisible in these conditions, so the white knot of rope seemed to be levitating itself. He waved to Dortmunder to stop, looped the rope in a quick knot over the davit on the prow, and went back to the wheelhouse.

(One down here, four around the wheel.)

Dortmunder said, “Now I hold the position, right?”

“You bet,” Doug told him. “Tiny, let me show you the winch.”

Tiny said, “That includes going out in the rain, huh?”

Doug went to the rear, and Tiny followed. (One down here, two at the wheel, two at the stern.) Opening a floor panel at the stern, Doug shone his headlamp in and pointed out the machinery. “There’s the switch. That’s the spool. It runs off the same shaft as the propeller, so John can make it go slower or faster up there at the wheel.”

“Gotcha,” Tiny said.

“Be right back with the rope,” Doug told him. Straightening, he adjusted face mask and mouthpiece and then backflipped out of the boat.

Tom shifted on the bunk, putting both feet on the gently rocking floor. One down here, two at the wheel, one at the stern, one in the water. That one’s the duck in the barrel.

Doug swam to the monofilament, untied the marker rope, tied it to his wrist instead, and made his way back to the boat. He came up on the small platform at the rear, but Tiny was looking the other way. “Tiny!” he called. “I got it here!”

Right, Tom thought. He stood, leaned forward, reached over the sleeping hitchhiker, slid his hand in under the mattress, and it wasn’t there.

What? Tom moved his hand left, right… Cold on wrist. Click .

Tom blinked, and the hitchhiker sat up, the Ingram just visible beyond him under his pillow. Wild-eyed, glaring in triumph, raising their right wrists handcuffed together, the maniac cried, “ Now , Tim Jepson! Now!”

“Oh, shit !” Dortmunder cried. “It’s started!”

Kelp yelled, “What—” But the rest of his words were blotted by a sudden chatter of automatic gunfire.

Everybody stared at everybody else. Doug looked ready to jump back into the water. In fact, everybody looked ready to jump into the water, even Dortmunder.

“Al?”

The wheel forgotten, Dortmunder concentrated on keeping well away from the opening into the cabin. “Yeah, Tom?”

“It’s a wash, Al,” Tom’s voice called. “You were cuter than I thought.”

Dortmunder had no idea in what way he’d been so wonderfully cute. He said, “So now what, Tom?”