“Yes, sur.”

“That’s all. Dismissed.”

Dortmunder thudded up the stairs to return the shoes to where he’d found them. Horse, with trainer. Now, in his mind’s eye, he saw Hall, atop a horse, turn to listen to an instruction from the trainer, oblivious of that oncoming tree branch. Very thick tree branch.

45

MAC DIDN’T KNOW WHICH part of the enterprise frightened him the most—all of it, probably. All he knew is, it was the most scared he’d ever been in his life. More scared than the first time he’d had sex with the girl who would soon become his wife; hell, more scared than the first time he’d had sex with anybody. More scared than when they put him in charge of the K-type showerhead assembly line. More scared than the first time he’d gotten off a ski lift at the top of a mountain and looked down.

Well, that time, he’d ridden the ski lift back down the mountain again, and had been firmly apres-ski ever since. But he didn’t have that choice this time. There was only one way off this particular mountain.

And it was worse than the mountain, because the mountain was just one thing. With the mountain, you’ve got this steep bank of white with trees and boulders on it, and the job is to get from the top to the bottom without ricocheting too much. Simple, straightforward. But this horse thing was all details, and every detail was scarier than every other detail.

Take the mustache. It was a thick mustache, like a push broom, and it felt very insecure glued to his upper lip. Also, it tickled his nose. But the worst, the most scary part, was how horribly Os had smirked in amusement while gluing the thing onto him.

You took one look at Os, you knew he was a mean practical joker. But this was too important to him, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t arrange for Mac’s mustache to fall off his face at just the wrong instant for a gag, would he? Would he?

All right, say he wouldn’t. The thing could nevertheless fall off anyway, without underhanded scheming from Os.

So that was one thing to be scared of. Then there was the horse. No, that was scary enough, but before the horse was the horse trailer. It was attached at the rear of a very big pickup truck with four wheels across the back axle, and it wasn’t until Mac really closed with the idea that he was the one who would have to drive it that he saw just how big the damn combination was.

The truck was bad enough, but the trailer was big as a house, built for four horses, two across and then another two across, with a side door on the forward left to feed and look after the front pair. In it at the moment was one horse, at the back, with a big blanket suspended from the roof in front of it to block off the front half, which was where everybody else would hide while Mac drove to Monroe Hall’s compound.

Which was another thing to be scared about. Were they really gonna buy it, those suspicious professional sentries at the entrance to Hall’s compound? Were they really not going to search the trailer from one end to the other and find the four hidden men and all that rope, but just be contented to look at the rear end of one horse? Would they really believe this stupid mustache, and this stupid four-color jockey’s hat, and this stupid green cable-knit sweater with stupid gray leather elbow patches, and these stupid jodhpurs? (Mac had never heard of jodhpurs before, and now that he had, he wished he hadn’t.)

And then the horse. No, forget it, let’s not even think about the horse. Because everybody else is ready, whether Mac is ready or not. They’re all going through the side door into the concealed part of the trailer. Os, entering last, pauses to give one last word of advice: “Try not to have to back up.” But even that he says with a kind of snotty chuckle and a twinkle in his eye.

Sheesh. Where did he go wrong?

•

And yet it worked like a charm. The thirty-mile drive was long enough for Mac to get used to that blunt gray metal box tailgating him, forever up close and personal in the mirror. He never had to back up, thank God, but he did have to learn to brake gently, or the trailer would buck and weave and threaten to take matters into its own hands. And best of all, the mustache didn’t fall off.

He actually got to the compound ten minutes early, and when he said to the brown-uniformed tough guy at the gate, “Jay Gilly, I’m expected,” all the fellow did was make a checkmark on his clipboard and say, “I got to call the house.”

“Sure.”

While the guard was calling the house, a second guard walked around the pickup and horse trailer, more out of curiosity than suspicion. Then the first guard nodded at him through his guardshack window and the bar lifted in front of him, and by golly, after months of trying he just drove onto Monroe Hall’s property and up the long blacktop road to the big white house.

And here he wouldn’t have to back up either, because the road made a little loop past the front door of the house before angling off to a parking area on the right. Mac did the loop so that the left side of the pickup was toward the house, so no one down by the gate would be able to see what was going on up here. Leaving the engine on and the gearshift in park, he got out of the pickup, touched fingertips to the mustache for luck, and walked up to the front door.

Which opened just before he got there, and a sad sack in a black suit looked out at him as though waiting to hear his parole had been denied. “Sur?”

“Jay Gilly,” Mac said, though he wished Flip had given him some other name. He didn’t feel like a Jay Gilly, and was glad he wouldn’t have to pretend to be Jay Gilly for very long.

“One moment, sur,” the gloomy fellow said, and shut the door again. Butler, he must have been, and gloomy because he worked for Monroe Hall.

Mac had acted in high school, mostly because his sister Beth had acted in high school, expecting to be a movie star any minute. (She was now a wife and mother, married to a bus driver.) The drama department at Mac’s high school had all the girl actors they could need, and then some, but it was tough to get boys to come fill in the boy parts in the plays. Beth had dragged Mac along, saying it was because she sensed his massive talent, but he knew her real reason was that she was sucking up to Ms. Mandelstam the drama teacher in hopes of better roles. Mac had parts in Romeo and Juliet and Teahouse of the August Moon and Major Barbara, and felt pretty good about it, though he knew darn well he did not have massive talent, and once high school was over he never thought about acting again.

But here it was, wasn’t it? A new play and a new role: Jay Gilly, horse-riding instructor. He didn’t have any written lines—sides, they were called, he remembered that—but he did have a character to play, and would have to play that character from this front door all the way down to the side door of the trailer. And then briefly again at the gate, on the way out. But his main period on stage was to begin here, right now.

And here it was. The door opened again, and the sad-sack butler stepped back to hold it open and stare into space as out came Monroe Hall himself, recognizable from all those newspaper photos and the few perp walks he’d done when the feds still thought they could pin something on him. He was dressed in what he must think appropriate for climbing on a horse, being tailored blue jeans and expensive leather cowboy boots with pictures of cactus plants on the sides and a red-check flannel shirt. He also had a big smile on his face as he said, “Jay Gilly?”

“Yes, I am,” Mac said, and thought, yes, I am! I can do this. “How do you do, Mr. Hall?” he said, and stuck out his hand.

“Just fine,” Hall said, though he had a rather limp handshake. Waving at the sky with the same hand, he said, “What a beautiful day to go riding, eh?”