“In the first place,” Mac said, “nobody except us in this room knows we’re the ones doing what we’re doing.”

“As it should be,” Os said, and Mark nodded.

“So we gotta live normal lives,” Mac pointed out. “We can’t be here twenty-four hours a day.”

“I see your point,” Os said. “I do think it important we make a show of strength tonight. Could you three phone your families and make excuses, why you won’t be home till midnight?”

“Eleven,” Ace said. “Henrietta will go along with bowling or whatever, but the curfew’s eleven.”

“Me, too,” Buddy said.

Os said, “Then we merely move the schedule forward, talk to Hall at nine, then come back tomorrow. No one needs to stay here overnight, though actually I will. Mark and I will return horse and trailer, then I’ll come back here. In fact, I do have a right to be here, and I can keep watch.”

Buddy said, “The idea was, Mark was gonna write out the demands for me to read, because Hall recognized his voice, right?”

“Exactly,” Os said, and Mark shuddered.

Mac said, “What? Hall knows it’s Mark?”

“No,” Os said. “He knows he knows the voice, that’s all. That’s why he won’t hear Mark any more, and probably shouldn’t hear me, either.”

Buddy said, “My idea is, why don’t we just hand him the piece of paper, and he doesn’t hear anybody’s voice? That’d be scarier, wouldn’t it?”

Mac grinned. “Silent masked men,” he said, “with a note.”

They all liked that. “I’ll get some more beer,” Ace said, getting to his feet. “Then make my call.”

51

THEY SAT AROUND ANOTHER terrific old-country dinner from the kitchens of Tiny, but nobody felt much like eating. “Everything’s completely outa whack,” Tiny commented, frowning at his food.

“It looks to me,” Stan said, “like we’re gonna find out if these IDs we got from whatsisname are gonna stand up.”

Kelp said, “I’ve been trying not to think about that.”

“If only we could get outa here,” Stan said.

Well, forget that. Not only did the law have the entire compound shut down tight, but the media was out there like seven-year locusts, just waiting to photograph and question anything that moved. Up till now, the only upside was that three reporters so far had been hospitalized after getting a little too close to the electric fence; apparently, it did pack a mean wallop.

“And tonight,” Tiny grumbled, “we were gonna be outa here. I’m gonna be alone on the gate, the coast is clear, we’re home free. We drive the cars out, we come back and drive the rest of them out, stash them in the place, go home. Josie’s expecting me in the morning.”

“Well, now she isn’t,” Kelp said. “This kidnapping thing is all over the news.”

“I’m getting very irritated,” Tiny said.

Stan said, “You know, I’m beginning to realize. That electric fence is just as good at keeping people in as it is keeping people out.”

“We all noticed that,” Tiny told him.

Kelp said, “I wonder how John’s doing.”

Tiny snorted. “Dortmunder? Don’t worry about Dortmunder, worry about us. He’s outa here.”

52

I GOTTA GET OUTA HERE, Dortmunder thought. But how? This was a kind of a nice bedroom—guestroom, he figured, with its own small attached bath—but it wasn’t rich with forms of egress, and yet, Dortmunder didn’t want to be in it any more.

He really needed to get out of here. The car heist was supposed to go down tonight; his life as a butler was supposed to be finished by now. But here he was in this room.

I should be able to beat this thing, he told himself. What I do is get in and out of places. So this is a place, and I’ve got to get out of it.

What do we have in here? What are the possibilities? Like most bedrooms, this one had a door that opened inward from the hall, so the hinges were on this side, and that should mean he could pop the pins out of the hinges and yank the door open that way. Worry about what was on the other side of the door when he was on the other side of the door.

The only trouble was, these hinges had been painted so many times over so many years they were absolutely stuck solid. Maybe if he had pliers, wrenches, hammers, probably a hacksaw, he could make some headway with these hinges, but not with bare fingers. Not after bending one fingernail a little too far back.

So what else do we have here? Two windows, both good-sized, and one smaller window in the bathroom, and all three of them sealed up with plywood attached on the outside. Push on that plywood, nothing happens. Punch it with the heel of your hand, then you get to walk around the next five minutes saying, “Ow, ow, ow,” with your right hand stuck in your left armpit.

What else? Anything else? The door is locked, with a kind of ordinary old-fashioned lock, the kind where you can bend down or kneel down and look through the keyhole and see some length of wall and another closed door across the way. Maybe Hall was in there. Anyway, there’s no getting at this lock in this door, just no way.

And yet, somebody was inserting a key, he could hear it, inserting the key, and turning it.

Damn! If he’d known somebody was coming, he could have positioned himself behind the door with a chair poised over his head. Now, it was all happening too quick: key in lock, knob turn, door open.

Oh. Five of them, all in those different kinds of masks. The one with the bandanna around his nose and mouth like a bank robber in the old West must have been the driver on the trip here. Anyway, a chair was not going to deal with all five of these people, no matter how much advance warning he got.

“Listen,” he said, as they tromped in, “I gotta get outa here.”

One of them handed him a piece of paper. What? What’s this? A handwritten note? Don’t these people speak English? Well, of course they do, he’d heard them in the trailer.

Two others were putting things on the low dresser. A sandwich, on a paper plate. Soup in a waxed-paper cup. Ice cream in another waxed-paper cup, with a plastic spoon. They nodded at him, pointed at the food, and turned away.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, wait a minute. I’m not the one you want, what’s the edge in holding on to me like this?”

They weren’t here to talk. They left, closed the door, turned the key in the lock, took the key away with them.

Damn those people! How could they louse things up so—

What time was it, anyway? He couldn’t see out, he didn’t have a watch, he had no way to tell if it was day or night or what it was. But the sandwich and the soup and the ice cream suggested—and his stomach was going along with the idea—that it was dinnertime. How long did they figure to keep him in here?

Maybe the note would give him a clue. Opening it, he read: