Donald Westlake - Drowned Hopes

“Sounds great,” Dortmunder said.

“It is,” Tom said. “And, you know, you can’t just go out and buy one of those. The company that makes them, they keep those babies under very tight control.”

Dortmunder frowned. “They do?”

“They do. See, they don’t want you to take it into your head to buy a box and stick old granny in it and shove her in a hole in the back yard. Free-lance burial, you see. The law doesn’t like that.”

“I suppose not,” Dortmunder said.

“So it happened,” Tom went on, “I happened to know this undertaker around that time. We did business together—”

Dortmunder and May exchanged a look.

“—and he slipped me a box out of his inventory. Sunnyside Casket Company’s best, and worth every penny of it. It’s a crime to waste those boxes on dead people.”

“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

“There was a little town up there,” Tom went on, “not far from the Thruway. Called Putkin’s Corners. I went in there one night and went out behind the library to a spot where you couldn’t be seen from any windows where anybody lived, and I dug a hole four feet deep, and I shoved the casket in and covered it up, and I drove away, and nobody in the entire world—except now you two—ever knew I was ever in a town called Putkin’s Corners in my entire life.”

“And that’s what you need help with?” Dortmunder asked. “Getting that casket full of money back out of Putkin’s Corners?”

“That’s where I need help, all right,” Tom agreed.

“It doesn’t sound like it should be that much trouble,” Dortmunder assured him, thinking Tom meant that, now he was seventy years old, he wasn’t up to all the digging and lifting required.

But Tom shook his head, saying, “A little harder than you might think, Al. You see, about four years after I went up, a while before you come in to be my cellmate, the state of New York condemned all that land and houses and four villages up there, including Putkin’s Corners, and made everybody move away. And then the city of New York bought up all that land, and they threw a dam across partway down the valley, and they made themselves another reservoir for all you people down here.”

“Oh,” Dortmunder said.

“So that’s why I need help,” Tom explained. “Because as it stands right now, that stash of mine is under three feet of dirt and fifty feet of water.”

“Ah,” Dortmunder said. “Not easy.”

“Not impossible,” Tom said. “So here’s the deal I’d like to offer. You got a head on your shoulders, Al—”

“Thanks,” Dortmunder said.

“So you come into this with me,” Tom finished. “We get that box of mine out of Putkin’s Corners, you and me and whoever else it takes, and when we get it we split down the middle. Half for me, and half for you, and you share your half how you like with whoever else you bring in. Three hundred fifty thousand. I can live to be an old man on that much, especially down in Mexico. What do you say?”

“Interesting,” Dortmunder said, thinking he’d like to know more about the problems that had afflicted Tom’s partners in the original robbery, leaving him sole possessor of the seven hundred thousand dollars. But thinking also that at seventy Tom was probably not quite as dangerous as he’d been at forty-three or forty-four, when the robbery had taken place. And thinking beyond that to the amount of money itself, and the hassle he’d just gone through tonight for petty cash out of a check-cashing place with a bad-tempered dog. He didn’t know exactly how you went about digging up a casket from fifty feet down in the bottom of a reservoir, but let’s just say he had to bring in two or three other guys, say three other guys; that still left nearly a hundred thousand apiece. And there are no dogs in a reservoir.

Tom was saying, “Now, you probably want to get some sleep—”

“Yeah, I’m due,” Dortmunder admitted.

“So maybe this afternoon, early afternoon, we could drive on up and I could show you the place. It’s about two hours up from the city.”

“This afternoon?” Dortmunder echoed, thinking he’d like to sleep a little longer than that. The check-cashing place’s dog had kind of taken it out of him.

“Well, the sooner the better, you know,” Tom said.

May said, “John? Are you going to do this?”

Dortmunder knew that May had taken an aversion to Tom Jimson—most human beings did—but on the other hand there were all those advantages he’d just been thinking about, so he said, “I’ll take a look at it anyway, May, see how it seems.”

“If you think you should,” May said. The air around her words vibrated with all the other words she wasn’t saying.

“I’ll just take a look,” Dortmunder assured her, and faced Tom again to say, “Where are you staying now?”

“Well,” Tom said, “until I get my stash out of Putkin’s Corners, that sofa you’re sitting on’s about as good a place as any.”

“Ah,” Dortmunder said, while beside him May’s cheekbones turned to concrete. “In that case,” Dortmunder said, “I guess we better drive up and take a look this afternoon.”

After the Thruway exit, the road took them through North Dudson, a very small town full of cars driven with extreme slowness by people who couldn’t decide whether or not they wanted to make a left turn. Dortmunder didn’t like being behind the wheel, anyway, and these indecisive locals weren’t improving his disposition much. In his universe, the driver drives—usually Stan Murch, sometimes Andy Kelp—while the specialists ride in back, oiling their pliers and wrapping black tape around their screwdrivers. Putting a specialist behind the wheel and making him drive through little towns hundreds of miles from the real city—well, tens of miles anyway, around a hundred of miles—meant that what you wound up with was a vehicle operated by someone who was both overqualified and nervous.

But the alternative, this time, was even worse. If Tom Jimson had ever known how to drive a car, and had ever cared enough about humanity to try to drive it in a nonlethal fashion, both the skill and the caring had disappeared completely in the course of his latest twenty-three-year visit inside. So Tom had rented the car—a rental , not even something borrowed from the street, another nervous-making element—and now Dortmunder was doing the driving, regardless.

At least the weather was good, April sun agleam on the white aluminum siding sheathed around all the quaint old houses that made North Dudson so scenic a place that a city boy could get a migraine just by looking at it. Particularly when he hadn’t had enough sleep. So Dortmunder concentrated on the few familiar reminders of civilization along the way—traffic lights, McDonald’s arches, Marlboro Man billboards—and just kept driving forward, knowing that sooner or later North Dudson would have to come to an end. Beside him, Tom looked around, smiled ironically without moving his lips, and said, “Well, this place is still the same piece of shit, anyway.”

“What do I do when I get out of town?”

“You keep driving,” Tom said.

A taco joint with a neon sign in its window advertising a German beer made in Texas was the last building in North Dudson, and then the fields and forests and farms took over. The road began to wobble and to climb, and here and there horses looked up from their grazing in rock-littered fields to give them the fish eye as they passed by.

About four miles out of town, Tom broke a fairly long silence by conversationally saying, “That was the road.”

Dortmunder slammed on the brakes, sluing to a stop on the highway and giving the old fart in the pickup truck tailgating him yet another infarction. “Where?” Dortmunder demanded, staring around, seeing no intersection, his question blotted out by the squawk of the pickup’s horn howling in outraged complaint as the truck swung on by and tore away down the road. “Where?” Dortmunder repeated.