Donald Westlake - Drowned Hopes

“Well, a new boat,” Doug said. “That’s gonna be expensive.”

Everybody looked at Tom, who gazed around mildly (for him) and said, “No.”

“Tom,” Kelp said, “we need a certain amount of—”

“No more dough from me,” Tom said. He sounded serious about it. To Doug he said, “Who’m I buying all this equipment from? You. So donate the stuff.”

“Well, not the boat,” Doug told him.

“Steal the fucking boat,” Tom advised.

Doug floundered a bit at that, but Stan rescued him, saying, “Okay, Doug, never mind, we’ll work out the boat.”

“Okay,” Doug said, but he was getting those little white spots on his cheeks again, like when he’d been in shock.

Stan turned to May. “We’ll work it all out, May. We’re just not used to doing this, that’s all.”

May surveyed the table. “I’ll make fresh coffee,” she decided, and went away to the kitchen. She could hear them bickering in there the whole time she was away.

Dortmunder did not sleep like a baby, home in his own bed at last. He slept like a grown-up who’d been through a lot . He slept leadenly, at times noisily, mouth open, limbs sprawled any which way, bedclothes tangled around ankles. He had good dreams (sunlight, money, good-looking cars, and fast women) and bad dreams (water), and periods of sleep so heavy an alligator would have envied him.

It was during a somewhat shallower stretch that Dortmunder was slightly disturbed by the scratchings and plinkings of someone picking the lock on the apartment door, opening it, creeping in (these old floors creak, no matter what you do) and closing the door with that telltale little snick . Dortmunder almost came all the way to the surface of consciousness at that instant, but instead, his brain decided the noises were just Tom returning from one of his late-night filling-the-pockets forays, and so the tiny sounds from the hallway were converted in his dream factory into the shushings and plinkings of wavelets, and in that dream Tom was a giant fish with teeth, from whom Dortmunder swam and swam and swam, never quite escaping.

Normally, the interloper would have had trouble finding his way around the dark and almost windowless apartment, but Dortmunder’s recent underwater experiences had led him to leave a light burning in the bathroom, by which illumination it was possible for the interloper to make his way all through the place, to reassure himself that the sleeping Dortmunder was the only current resident, and then to go on and make himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the kitchen. (The clinking of knife inside peanut butter jar became, in Dortmunder’s dreams, the oars in the oarlocks of Charon’s boat.)

The interloper was quiet for a long time after ingesting his sandwich and one of Dortmunder’s beers; in fact, he napped a little, at the kitchen table. But then, along around sunup, he moved into the bedroom and threw all Dortmunder’s clothing onto the floor from the chair beside the door so he could sit there, just beyond the foot of the bed, and watch Dortmunder sleep.

The faint metallic click as the interloper cocked his rifle caused Dortmunder to frown in his sleep and make disgusting smacking sounds with his mouth, and to dream briefly of being deep underwater and having his air tank suddenly fall off his back and separate from the mouthpiece hose with a faint metallic click just before his mouth and stomach and brain filled with water; but then that dream floated away and he dreamed instead about playing poker with some long-ago cellmates in the good old days, and being dealt a royal flush—in spades—which caused him to settle back down in contentment, deeper and deeper into sleep, so that it was almost two hours later when he finally opened his eyes and rubbed his nose and did that sound with his mouth and sat up and stretched and looked at the rifle aimed at his eye.

“GL!” Dortmunder cried, swallowing his tongue.

Rifle. Gnarled old hands holding the rifle. Wrinkly old eye staring down the rifle’s sights. The last resident of Cronley, Oklahoma, seated in a chair in Dortmunder’s bedroom.

“Now, Mr. Department of Recovery,” said the hermit, “you can just tell me where Tim Jepson is. And this time, ain’t nobody behind me with no bottle.”

No bottle…

When dawn’s sharp stiletto poked its orange tip into Guffey’s eye through the windowless opening in the Hotel Cronley’s bar’s front wall, he awakened to a splitting headache and a conundrum. Either the infrastructure man’s partner had hit him on the head with three bottles, which seemed excessive, or something funny was going on.

Three bottles. All broken and smashed on the bar floor, all with their corks still jammed tight in their cracked-off necks. And all absolutely stinking . They were dry inside, so it wasn’t merely that the wine had gone bad after all these years; and in any event, the stench seemed to come more from the crusted gunk on the bottles’ outside.

Plumbing. The second invader had gone to the basement to look at the plumbing. So did Guffey, reeling a bit from the aftereffects of the blow on the head, and when he found the dismantled trap he knew . By God, it was Tim Jepson after all! Come back for his fourteen thousand dollars, just as Mitch Lynch had said he would. Fourteen thousand dollars hidden all these years in those wine bottles in this dreadful muck river; wasn’t that just like Jepson?

In my hands, Guffey thought inaccurately, and I let him get away. But perhaps all hope was not yet lost. There was still one slender thread in Guffey’s hand: the license plate of that little white automobile. Could he follow that thread? He could but try.

Before noon on that same day, Cronley became at last what it had for so long appeared to be: deserted. Guffey, freshly shaved, garbed in the best of the professors’ stolen clothing, dismantled rifle and more clothing stowed in the knapsack on his back, marched out of Cronley and across the rock-strewn desert toward his long-deferred destiny.

By early evening, he’d walked and hitchhiked as far as a town with a state police barracks, where he reported the hit-and-run driver, offering a description of the car and its license number, plus the welt on the back of his head for evidence. They took the license number and description and ran them through their computer, and they took the welt on the back of his head and ran him through the hospital, giving him the softest night’s sleep and the best food of his entire life, and almost making him give up the quest right there. All a fella had to do, after all, to live in the lap of luxury like this, was step out in front of a bus seven or eight times a year.

But duty called, particularly when the cops came around the hospital next morning to say they knew who’d hit him but there wasn’t much to be done about it. (He’d been counting on this official indifference.) The car, it seemed, was a rental, picked up at the Oklahoma City airport the same day it hit Guffey and turned back in the next day. The miscreants—“New Yorkers: you might know”—were long gone. There wasn’t the slightest mark on the car, nor were there any witnesses, nor had the hospital found anything at all seriously wrong with Guffey (amazingly enough), so there simply wasn’t enough of a case to warrant an interstate inquiry.

Guffey, humble as ever, accepted everything he was told, and asked only one thing in return: Might he have, please, the name and address of the person who had rented the car?

One of the cops grinned at that request and said, “You wouldn’t think of taking the law in your own hands, would you?”