47

DORTMUNDER WAS FURIOUS. He was so mad he forgot to be surprised. A bunch of clowns in funny faces boil out of a horse carrier and lay rough hands on Dortmunder (and also on whatsisname, Hall) and throw him into the horse carrier, which smells exactly like a horse carrier, and he doesn’t even take a second out to marvel, to say, Wow, looka that! Guys jumping out of a horse carrier, with weird stuff on their heads!

No. From instant one, he knew what was going on, and it made him so mad he could bite through a phone book. What he was thinking, and what he wanted to shout, was, “Geddada here! This is my heist! You’re busting into the middle of a serious operation here! Stand in line, take a check, wait your turn! I’m not the butler, I’m the car thief! Take a hike, will ya?”

Fortunately, he didn’t shout any of that, because it might have queered the deal if he did, if the deal wasn’t queered already. But even if he’d so forgotten himself as to voice his perfectly justified grievances, these people probably wouldn’t have heard him, because they were all shouting already:

“Tie him up! Tie him up!”

“He is tied up!”

“The other one!”

“Oh, for God’s—”

Rough hands grasped Dortmunder, followed by rough rope. It wasn’t pitch black in here, but it was dim, and crowded, and filled with confusion. Also, the vehicle now bolted forward, which didn’t help.

“Put a blindfold on him!”

“We didn’t bring another one!”

“Who knew we were gonna get a butler?”

“I’m not—”

“Cover his mouth, we’re coming to the guardshack! No, I’ve got this one, the other one!”

Rough hands spread over most of Dortmunder’s head. He felt the trailer go over the speed bump at the guardshack, and then it swung leftward, throwing everybody around, and the oofs, and ows this led to were music to Dortmunder’s ears. Also, it meant all those hands left his head in order to try to break various falls in various directions.

“We gotta blindfold this guy!”

“Bu—uhh—uhh, put that paper bag over his head.”

“He’ll see me when I take it off!”

“Turn him around. Turn him around!”

Several people in this crowded dark space with the horse blanket wafting gently and odoriferously at the back, like the curtain before a very bad play will start, grabbed Dortmunder’s arms and neck and rib cage and turned him to face away from the curtain. Now he couldn’t see anybody clearly, not that he wanted to, but only the blank front wall, beyond which the truck would be rolling along through Pennsylvania.

A paper bag came down over his head. All the hands let him go. He started to turn.

“Put the eyeholes at the back!”

“Oh! Right!”

Hands grabbed him again, turned him again, the paper bag was turned—now they’re gonna give me a paper cut on the neck, he thought, but they didn’t—and then he was released again, just in time to go flying when the trailer took another sharp turn.

Apparently everybody went flying; more satisfying oofs and ows. Dortmunder hit more people than wall, which was also good. Then one of the calmer voices said, “We have to sit down. Everybody sit down. Help those two sit down.”

More hands, encouraging him downward. Thump, he sat on a floor he doubted he’d want to sit on if he could see it. Somebody shoved him and poked him, and there he was with a wall behind him. He braced his back against it.

They were all settling down now, calming down. The voice that had suggested they get off their feet now said, “We’ve got about two hours’ drive ahead of us, so you two try to get comfortable, but don’t think you’re going to pull anything, because you’re not.”

“I know that voice.” That was Monroe Hall talking.

Absolute silence. Dortmunder listened, and then heard whispering, and then another voice said, “No, you don’t.”

“Not you,” Hall said. “The other one.”

“There is no other one,” the new voice said. “There’s only me.”

Clowns, Dortmunder thought. I knew they were clowns to begin with. And here they are messing up something I had put together and planned and worked for and even learned how to be a butler so I could pull it off, and these bozos come along.

I’m gonna get them for this, Dortmunder promised himself. He didn’t care what happened to Hall, they’d planned on dealing with the insurance company anyway and still would, but these guys couldn’t just waltz into a perfectly planned and smoothly functioning heist and expect to get away with it. I’m gonna get them, he vowed. Just as soon as we get somewhere and I’m not all tied up and no paper bag over my head and it’s not five against one, whenever that happens, and it’s gonna happen, I’m gonna get them. Just wait.

48

TINY WASN’T SUPPOSED TO be on duty till midnight, but now everything was out of whack. Chuck Yancey phoned him at two twenty-five and said, “We got an emergency here. Put on your uniform and come on down.”

“I need transport.”

Sigh. “Mort’ll be there in five minutes.”

So five minutes later, when Mort Pessle arrived at Chester’s old house, Tiny was in the brown uniform, in which he looked mostly like a bungalow. He got into the backseat, and along the way Mort told him the situation: “They got Mr. Hall.”

“Who got Mr. Hall?”

“Don’t know yet. They were in a horse trailer.”

Tiny wasn’t loving this conversation. “Who was in a horse trailer?”

“Whoever took Mr. Hall,” Mort said. “That’s how they got him off the compound.”

“In a horse trailer.”

“Chuck’s really mad,” Mort said, meaning Chuck Yancey, the boss of security.

And that was true enough. When Tiny walked into the office, Mort having gone back to duty on the gate, Heck Fiedler stood to one side, looking scared and trying to look invisible, while Chuck Yancey paced back and forth like a very irritated tiger. Glaring at Tiny, he said, “This happened on my watch.”

Tiny nodded. “Mort says they used a horse trailer.”

“Goddamn horse trailer.” Yancey punched the air and kept on pacing. “Nobody looked inside it.”

Sounding as scared as he looked, Heck said, “There was a horse in it. You could see the horse.”

“You could see the horse’s ass,” Chuck snarled at him. “You could see that, could you? Recognize that, did you? Old home week, huh? Like looking in a mirror, was it?”

To maybe take a little heat off Heck, who probably shouldn’t have spoken up, Tiny said, “What’s a horse trailer doing in here?”

Chuck turned his glare on Tiny, who didn’t mind. “Hall asked for it,” he announced. “Called down yesterday, says a horse is coming, in a trailer, with a guy named—” Glare at Heck again. “What was that name?”

“Jay Gilly,” Heck said, and blinked a lot.

“That’ll turn out to be a fake,” Chuck snarled, and said to Tiny, “Hall says it’s coming, let it through. It came, it was let through. It went back out again. Fifteen minutes later, Mrs. Hall calls down, ‘Where’s my husband?’ Nobody knows. Guess who didn’t look in the horse trailer, going in or out.”

“We never search anything going out,” Heck said, not yet having learned the wisdom of silence.

He got the full Yancey glare this time. “Some of us,” Chuck said, spacing his words, “don’t bother to search things going in either.”

Tiny said, “What do you think they’d of found?”

“Men,” Chuck said. “There had to be people hidden in the trailer, to grab Hall when he came out to look at the horse, and hold him down while they drove past Heck here. Did you wave, Heck?”

Heck might actually have answered that question, but Tiny said, “Well, if they took him away, that means at least they didn’t wanna kill him.”