Donald Westlake - Drowned Hopes

Blip-blip-blip . The faint jingling sound, like Tinkerbell clearing her throat, came from the left side of Kelp’s bulky pea coat. Reaching in there, he withdrew a cellular phone, extended its antenna, and whispered into its mouthpiece, “Hello?”

A suspicious and bewildered but familiar voice said, “Who’s that?”

“John?” Kelp whispered. “Is that you?”

“What’s goin on?” demanded Dortmunder’s voice, getting belligerent. “Who is that there?”

“It’s me, John,” Kelp whispered. “It’s Andy.”

“What? Who is that?”

“It’s Andy ,” Kelp whispered hoarsely, lips against the mouthpiece. “Andy Kelp .”

“Andy? Is that you?”

“Yes, John, yes.”

“Well, what are you whispering about? You got laryngitis?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Then stop whispering.”

“The fact of the matter is, John,” Kelp whispered, hunkering low over the phone, “I’m robbing a store at the moment.”

“You’re what ?”

“Ssssshhhhhhh, John,” Kelp whispered. “Sssshhhhhh.”

In a more normal voice, Dortmunder said, “Wait a minute, I get it. I called you at home, but you aren’t home. You’ve done one of your phone gizmo things.”

“That’s right,” Kelp agreed. “I put the phone-ahead gizmo on my phone at home to transfer my calls to my cellular phone so I wouldn’t miss any calls—like this one from you, right now—while I was out, and I brought the cellular phone along with me.”

“To rob a store.”

“That’s right. And that’s what I’m doing right this minute, John, and to tell you the truth I’d like to get on with it.”

“Okay,” Dortmunder said. “If you’re busy—”

“I’m not busy forever , John,” Kelp said, forgetting to whisper. “You got something? You gonna meet with the guys at the OJ?” He was remembering to whisper again now.

“No,” Dortmunder said. “Not yet, anyway. Not until I figure the thing out.”

“There’s problems?” In his eagerness, Kelp’s whisper went up into the treble ranges, becoming very sibilant. “You want me to drop over there when I’m done, we can talk about it?”

“Well,” Dortmunder said, and then he sighed, and then he said, “Yeah. Come on over. If you feel like it.”

“Sure I feel like it,” Kelp whispered, in falsetto. “You know me, John.”

“Yeah, I do,” Dortmunder said. “But come on over anyway.” And he hung up.

“Right, John,” Kelp whispered into the dead phone. Then, retracting his antenna, putting the phone away in its special pocket inside his pea coat, he looked around again at the various counters and shelves and product displays here inside Serious Business, that being the name of the store. Most of the exhibit lighting was in pastel neon, giving the place a fairytale quality of pink and light blue and pale green, washing faint color onto the gray industrial carpet and off-white shelves. In the fifteen minutes since effecting entry in here via the men’s room of the coffee shop next door, a window to the basement of this building and a brief squirm through an air-conditioning duct (pushing his pea coat ahead of himself), Kelp had pretty well browsed completely among all the treasures available here. Time to call it a night, probably.

John should have a personal computer, Kelp thought, but even as he thought it, he knew just how hard a sell John was likely to be. Tough to get him to accept anything new; like his attitude toward telephones, for instance.

But a personal computer, a good PC of your very own, that was something else. That was a tool , as useful, indeed as necessary, as a Toast-R-Oven. Wandering back over to the software displays, Kelp picked up a copy of Managing Your Money . Surely, even John would be able to see the advantage in a program like that. If he seemed at all interested, they could go out together tomorrow, or maybe even later tonight, and shop for a PC and a printer and a mouse. Maybe come back here, in fact. Kelp, so far, had enjoyed doing business with Serious Business.

May brought in three more beers and they popped the ring opener on the cans: Pop. Pop. Splop . “Well, hell,” said Dortmunder.

“Oh, John, that’s too bad,” May said. “Should I get a towel?”

“Naw, that’s okay, it didn’t spill much,” Dortmunder told her, and turned to Kelp to say, “Well? Whadaya think?”

“Hmmmm,” Kelp said, and swigged beer. Then he said, “If it isn’t bad manners to ask, John, what was this pal of yours in for?”

“He’s not my pal.”

“Sorry. Ex-cellmate of yours. What was he in for, do you know?”

Dortmunder drank beer, thinking back. “As I remember it,” he said, “it was murder, armed robbery, and arson.”

Kelp looked surprised: “All at once?”

“He wanted a diversion while he pulled the job,” Dortmunder said, “so he torched the firehouse.”

“A direct sort of a fella,” Kelp said, nodding.

May said, “Like with this dam.”

Kelp nodded, thinking, frowning. “You see, John,” he said, “I don’t really follow how you’re involved here. The guy says come help me blow up a dam, you say I don’t want to kill a lot of people in their beds, you say good-bye to each other.”

“He’ll find somebody else,” Dortmunder said.

“But isn’t that up to him?”

“John doesn’t see it like that,” May said, “and I agree with him.”

Dortmunder finished his beer. “I know,” he admitted. “It ought to be that way; I say no and it’s done with. But I just have this feeling, there’s got to be some way to get at that money without killing everybody in upstate New York.”

“And?”

Dortmunder frowned so massively he looked like a plowed field. “This is gonna sound egotistical,” he said.

“Go for it,” Kelp advised.

“Well, it’s just I think, if there’s any way at all to get to that money without emptying the reservoir, I’m the guy who should think of it.”

“The only one who could , you mean,” Kelp said.

Dortmunder didn’t want to go quite that far in his egotism: “The only one who’d put in the effort,” he amended.

Kelp nodded, accepting that. “And what have you come up with so far?”

“Well, nothing,” Dortmunder admitted. “But this is still the first day I’m on this thing, you know.”

“That’s true.” Kelp sloshed beer in his can. “You could tunnel, maybe,” he said.

Dortmunder looked at him. “Through water?”

“No, no,” Kelp said, shaking both the beer can and his head. “I don’t think there’s a way to do that, really. Tunnel through water. I meant you start on shore, near the water. You tunnel straight down until you’re lower than the bottom of the reservoir, and then you turn and tunnel across to this casket, or box, or whatever it is.”

“Dig a tunnel,” Dortmunder echoed, “under a reservoir. Crawl back and forth in this tunnel in the dirt under this reservoir.”

“Well, yeah, there’s that,” Kelp agreed. “I do get kind of a sinus headache just thinking about it.”

“Also,” Dortmunder said, “how do you aim this tunnel? Somewhere out there under that reservoir is a casket. What is it, seven feet long? Three feet wide, a couple feet high. And you gotta go right to it. You can’t go above it, you can’t go below it, you can’t miss it to the left or the right.”

May said, “You particularly can’t go above it.”

“That’s the sinus headache part,” Dortmunder told her, and to Kelp he said, “It’s too small a target, Andy, and too far away.”

“Well, you know,” Kelp said thoughtfully, “this kind of connects in with something I meant to talk to you about anyway.” Casually glancing around the living room, he said, “You don’t have a PC yet, do you?”