Donald Westlake: Drowned Hopes

“Be tough to get to,” Dortmunder commented.

“Just a little muddy, is all,” Tom said.

Dortmunder looked around. “Where’s the dam?”

Tom gave him a disbelieving look. “The dam? Where’s the dam? This is the dam. You’re standing on the dam.”

“I am?” Dortmunder looked left and right, and saw how the road came out of the woods behind them and then swung off in a long gentle curve, with the reservoir outside the curve on the right and the valley inside the curve on the left, all the way around to another hillside full of trees way over there, where it disappeared again in among the greenery. “This is the dam,” Dortmunder said, full of wonder. “And they put the road right on top of it.”

“Sure. What’d you think?”

“I didn’t expect it to be so big,” Dortmunder admitted. Being careful to look both ways, even though there had still been no traffic out here, Dortmunder crossed the road and looked down and saw how the dam also curved gently outward from top to bottom, its creamy gray concrete like a curtain that has billowed out slightly from a breeze blowing underneath. Beyond and below the concrete wall of the dam, a neat stream meandered away farther on down the valley, past a few farms, a village, another village, and at the far end of the valley what looked like a pretty big town, much bigger even than North Dudson. “So that,” Dortmunder said, pointing back toward the reservoir, “must have looked like this before they put the dam in.”

“If I’d known,” Tom said, “I would of buried the goddamn box in Dudson Center down there.”

Dortmunder looked again at the facade of the dam, and now he noticed the windows in it, in two long rows near the top. They were regular plate-glass windows like those in office buildings. He said, “Those are windows.”

“You’re right again,” Tom said.

“But— How come? Does a dam have an inside?”

“Sure it does,” Tom said. “They got their offices down in there, and all the controls for letting the water in and out and doing the purity tests and pumping it into the pipes to go down to the city. That’s all inside there.”

“I guess I just never thought about dams,” Dortmunder said. “Where I live and all, and in my line of work, things like dams don’t come up that often.”

“I had to learn about dams,” Tom said, “once the bastards flooded my money.”

“Yeah, well, then you got a personal stake,” Dortmunder agreed.

“And I studied this dam in particular,” Tom told him. Again pointing through fence, this time at an angle down toward the creamy gray curtain of the dam, he said, “And the best place to put the dynamite is there , and over there .”

Dortmunder stared at him. “Dynamite?”

“Sure dynamite,” Tom told him. “Whadaya think I got, nuclear devices? Dynamite is the tool at hand.”

“But— Why do you want to use dynamite?”

“To move the water out of the way,” Tom said, very slowly, as though explaining things to an idiot.

“Wait a minute,” Dortmunder said. “Wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute. Your idea here is, you’re gonna blow up the dam to drain all the water out, and then walk in and dig up the box of money?”

“What I figure,” Tom said, “the cops and all are gonna be pretty busy downstream, so we’ll have time to get in and out before anybody takes much of an interest.” Turning away to look across the road (and the dam) at the peaceful water in the sunshine, he said, “We’ll need some kind of all-terrain vehicle, though, I think. It’ll be pretty goddamn muddy down in there.”

Dortmunder said, “Tom, back up a bit, just back up here. You want to take all that water there , and move it over here .”

“Yes,” Tom said.

“You want to blow up this dam here, with the people inside it.”

“Well, you know,” Tom said, “if we give them the word ahead of time, they might get upset. They might want to get in our way, stop us, make problems for us or something.”

“How many people work down in there?” Dortmunder asked, pointing at the windows in the dam.

“At night? We’d have to make our move at night, of course,” Tom explained. “I figure, at night, seven or eight guys in there, maybe ten at the most.”

Dortmunder looked at the windows. He looked downstream at the farms and the villages and the town at the end of the valley, and he said, “That’s a lot of water in that reservoir, isn’t it?”

“Sure is,” Tom said.

“Everybody asleep down there,” Dortmunder said, musing, imagining it, “and here comes the water. That’s your idea.”

Tom looked through the chain-link fence at the peaceful valley. His gray cold eyes gleamed in his gray cold face. “Asleep in their beds,” he said. “Asleep in somebody’s beds anyway. You know who those people are?”

Dortmunder shook his head, watching that stony profile.

Tom said, “Nobodies. Family men hustlin for an extra dollar, an extra dime, sweatin all over their shirts, gettin nowhere. Women turnin fat. Kids turnin stupid. No difference between day and night because nobody’s goin anywhere anyway. Miserable little small-town people with their miserable little small-town dreams.” The lips moved in what might have been a smile. “A flood,” he said. “Most excitin thing ever happened to them, am I right?”

“No, Tom,” Dortmunder said.

“No?” Tom asked, misunderstanding. “You think there’s a lot of excitement down there? Senior proms, bankruptcy auctions, Fourth of July parades, gang bangs, all that kind of thing? That what you think?”

“I think you can’t blow up the dam, Tom,” Dortmunder said. “I think you can’t drown a whole lot of people—hundreds and hundreds of people—in their beds, or in anybody’s beds, for seven hundred thousand dollars.”

“Three hundred fifty thousand,” Tom corrected. “Half of it is yours, Al. Yours and whoever else you bring in on the caper.”

Dortmunder looked frankly at his old cellmate. “You’d really do that, Tom? You’d kill hundreds and hundreds of people for three hundred fifty thousand dollars?”

“I’d kill them at a dollar apiece,” Tom told him, “if it meant I could get outta this part of the world and get down to Mexico and move into my goddamn golden years of retirement.”

Dortmunder said, “Tom, maybe you were inside too long. You can’t do things like that, you know. You can’t go around killing hundreds and hundreds of people just like snapping your fingers.”

“It isn’t just like snapping my fingers, Al,” Tom said. “That’s the problem. If it was like snapping my fingers, I’d go do it myself and keep the whole seven hundred. If I learned anything on the inside, you know, it’s that I can’t be a loner anymore, not on something like this. Except at the very beginning, with Dilly and Baby and them, I was always a loner, you know, all my life. That’s why I talked so much when we were together in the cell. Remember how I used to talk so much?”

“I don’t have to remember,” Dortmunder told him. “I’m listening to it.” But what he did remember was how odd he used to find it, back in the good old days in the cell, that a man who did so much talking was (a) famous as a loner, and (b) managed to get all those words out without once moving his lips.

“Well, the reason,” Tom went on, “the reason I’m such a blabbermouth is that I’m mostly alone. So when I got an ear nearby, I just naturally bend it. You see, Al,” Tom explained, and gestured at the sweet valley spread out defenseless below them, “those aren’t real people down there. Not like me . Not even like you.”