“I think you should have the National Guard up there before you could feel really comfortable in your mind,” Tiny told him, “but I agree. You don’t want to go down in there without insurance.”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said. “Will you do it, Tiny?”

“You can buy a lotta sides of beef with a hundred twenty thousand, Tiny,” Kelp chipped in.

Tiny brooded, looking at his cow. The thing looked deader and nakeder than ever. “Every time I tie up with you, Dortmunder,” he said, “something turns weird. The last time, you had me dressed like a nun.”

“We had to get through the cops, Tiny. And that one did work out, didn’t it? We wound up with most of the loot that time, didn’t we? And you wound up with J.C.”

“And think of it this way,” Kelp said, sounding chipper and positive and gung ho, like a high school basketball coach. “It’s an adventure, kinda, and getting outta the city into the healthy country—”

“Healthy,” Tiny echoed.

“—and it’s like a real basic enterprise,” Kelp finished. “Man against the elements!”

Tiny cocked an eyebrow at the back of Kelp’s head. “Tom Jimson’s an element?”

“I was thinking of water,” Kelp explained.

Dortmunder said, “Tiny? I could really use your help on this.”

Tiny shook his head. “Something just tells me,” he said, “if I sign on to this cockamamie thing, I’m gonna wind up looking like Elsie here.”

Dortmunder waited, saying nothing more. It was up to Tiny now, and he shouldn’t be pushed. Even Kelp kept quiet, though he looked in the mirror a lot more than he looked out the windshield.

And finally Tiny sighed. “What the hell,” he said. “If I had any sense, I wouldn’t know you two in the first place.”

TWENTY-NINE

Midnight. The Dodge Motor Home with the MD plates eased off the county road onto the gravel verge and cut its lights. A moon just rising over the Showangunks gave vague amber illumination, turning into copper the metal-pipe barrier across the dirt side road, glowing softly and almost confidentially on the sign beside that road: NO ADMITTANCE — VILBURGTOWN RESERVOIR AUTHORITY.

The living room door of the motor home opened and Tiny Bulcher stepped down, carrying a large gimbaled metal cutter. He crossed to the barrier, snipped the padlocked chain holding it shut, lifted the horizontal bar out of its groove, and pivoted it out of the way. Then he waved the metal cutter at the motor home, which drove slowly through the opening onto the dirt road, rocking dangerously as it came. Once it was by and had come to a stop, its brake lights turning the scene briefly dramatic, Tiny put the barrier pipe back in place and reboarded the motor home.

Inside, Kelp sat at the large bus-type wheel, while Dortmunder and Tom Jimson sat silent, facing each other in the dark living room area. Putting the metal cutter back with a clank on the other tools, Tiny sat in the swivel chair to Kelp’s right, looked out the windshield, and said, “Can you see anything?”

“From time to time,” Kelp told him. “The moon helps a little.”

Dortmunder, hearing this conversation, got up from the convertible sofa and moved forward as the motor home rocked like a boat in a heavy sea, inching along the rutted dirt road. Peering over Tiny’s shoulder at the darkness out front, Dortmunder said, “Andy? You can’t see a goddamn thing out there.”

“I’m doing fine,” Kelp insisted. “If everybody’ll stop distracting me. And you don’t want me to use lights in here.”

“Nothing against you, Andy,” Tiny said, “but why aren’t we using a driver on this job? Where’s Stan Murch?”

“We don’t need a driver,” Dortmunder explained, “because we don’t expect to make any getaways. And the more men on the job, the smaller the split for each of us.”

A cackle sounded from the back. Tiny and Dortmunder exchanged a glance.

Kelp rolled his window down, letting in a lot of cool damp spring air. “There,” he said. “That’s better.”

Tiny frowned at him. “What’s better about it?”

“I can hear when we rub against the bushes,” Kelp explained. “Keeps us on the road.”

Tiny swiveled slowly around to face Dortmunder. “Thirty thousand is what Stan Murch would cost me,” he said. “Right?”

“About that,” Dortmunder agreed.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Tiny said, and swiveled front.

The motor home rocked and swayed through the second-growth forest, Kelp listening to bushes, Tiny and Dortmunder squinting hard as they stared through the windshield, Tom sitting back in the dark by himself, thinking his own thoughts.

Dortmunder said, “What’s that?”

“What’s what?” Kelp asked.

“Just stop,” Tiny told him.

“If you say so,” Kelp agreed nonchalantly, and stopped with the nose of the motor home half an inch from another metal-pipe barrier.

Tiny said, “Okay? Do you see it now?”

Kelp peered out the windshield, gazing too high and too far away. “See what?”

“He can only hear it,” Dortmunder suggested.

Tiny shook his head in disgust and got up out of the swivel chair to look for the metal cutter. Kelp leaned his head out the open window beside him, looked around, and at last saw the barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence sketched into the face of the forest, picking up scattered muted highlights from the moon, extending away into nothingness to left and right. “Well, look at that,” he said.

“We already did,” Dortmunder told him.

Tiny got out and dispatched this barrier the same way as the first, and the motor home steered slowly, majestically, with all the dignity of a great passenger liner, through the opening in the fence and onto Vilburgtown Reservoir property. Then it stopped and Tiny climbed aboard again, saying, “I could see a bit of it out there. Ahead of us.”

“A bit of what?” Kelp asked him.

“The reservoir.”

“Don’t drive into it,” Dortmunder suggested.

“He won’t,” Tiny said. “He’ll hear the splash.”

Ahead, through the trees, as Kelp continued to ease them slowly-forward, tiny winks of gold and saffron showed where moonlight reflected from the restless water of the reservoir. About fifteen feet from the water’s edge they came to a dirt clearing, and Kelp stopped. “There you are,” he said. “Through doubt and scorn, I made my way.”

Tiny said, “You couldn’t of done it without the bushes.”

They all emerged from the motor home and went down to the water’s edge to look out across the quietly rippling surface. It looked deep. It didn’t look man-made at all. In the orangey light of the swollen moon just above the mountain-tops, the Vilburgtown Reservoir looked ancient, bottomless, black, menacing. Things must live down in there; long silent things with large eyes and sharp teeth and long bony white arms. “Hmmm,” Dortmunder said.

“Well, uh,” Kelp said. “We’re here. I guess we should get on with it.”

“No time like the present,” Tom said.

“Right,” Dortmunder said.

Dragging their feet a little, Dortmunder and Kelp led the way back to the motor home and off-loaded all their gear: wet suits, air tanks, underwater flashlights, the whole schmear. As they started to strip off their street clothes in the chilly night air, Tiny frowned away to the left, saying, “Dam’s down there somewhere, isn’t it?”

Tom, pointing, said, “You can make out the curve of it right there. See?”

Tiny said, “Nobody inside there can look down this way?”

“Naw.” Tom waved both bony hands, dismissing that problem. “The windows all face down the valley. Don’t worry, Tiny, we’re all alone here.”

Nearby, Dortmunder and Kelp, changing into their wet suits, heard that remark and looked at each other. But they didn’t say a word.

“Hey, it’s the husband!”

“Welcome back, honeymooner! Hey, you got some bags under your eyes!”

“You gotta take time out to sleep, boy! It’ll still be there when you wake up! Is he thinner?”