The gunfire went on for a few more seconds, then faltered; then there was a scream; then a sudden new rattle of shots. Dortmunder peeked up past the two-by-three but could see nothing except steps and the stairwell wall.
The silence stretched, covering the entire neighborhood; nobody’s home when the guns start banging. Then there was the clear sound of a metal door slammed open against a plaster wall, and an irritated voice that was recognizably Tom’s said, “Assholes. Now see what you made me do.”
Footsteps clattered down the stairs. Dortmunder got his feet under himself, rose quickly upward, and blinked at Tom as the older man reached the landing, right in front of him, concentrating on the fresh clip he was sliding into the butt of the blue-steel.45 automatic held loosely in his right hand.
Dortmunder stared at the automatic, and Tom looked up, saw him, and stopped, his eyes alight with the adrenaline of battle. They stood facing each other on the landing, Dortmunder squeezing the two-by-three in his hand, Tom lifting one eyebrow, silence all around them.
Then Tom relaxed and moved, tension gone as he tucked the automatic away inside his clothing. Casually, he said, “Whadaya say, Al? Glad you could make it.”
“I come right over,” Dortmunder said. His hands and throat were still clenched.
Tom glanced down at the two-by-three. Conversationally, he said, “What’s that for, Al?”
Dortmunder gestured vaguely with it, indicating the building. “People.”
“Hm.” Tom nodded. “You better hope nobody needs a piece a wood,” he said. “Come on, let’s get outta here.”
Dortmunder couldn’t resist looking up the stairs. “Your new partners?”
“I had to let them go. Come on, Al.” Tom started down the stairs and Dortmunder followed, not looking back anymore.
As they descended, Tom said, “The quality of help these days, Al, it’s a real scandal.”
“I guess it is,” Dortmunder agreed.
“You and your pals,” Tom went on, “seem to have a little trouble closing with the problem, but at least you’re steady and reliable.”
“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.
“You don’t put anything in your nose except your finger.”
“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.
“And nothing at all in your veins.”
“My blood and me,” Dortmunder said as they reached the ground floor and headed toward the smashed defense of the front door, “have an agreement. It does its job, and I don’t pester it.”
“You got it in a nutshell, Al,” Tom said as they stepped out to sunlight that, in this neighborhood, looked like an error. “Don’t second-guess your body, that’s what it comes down to. Those former associates of mine, upstairs, they didn’t understand that. They messed themselves around so much they got it into their heads, since they knew where the reservoir was, they didn’t need me anymore.” Tom’s laugh had an edge to it, like a church bell during the plague. “Lost touch with reality, that’s what they did.”
“I guess so.” Dortmunder looked up toward the top-floor windows of this moldering pile. “Was it their apartment?”
“It is now,” Tom said, and shrugged away all previous associations, turning to Dortmunder on the sidewalk to say, “So you’ve got a new plan, huh?”
“Well, no,” Dortmunder said.
Tom lowered an eyebrow in Dortmunder’s direction. Away from him, it was easy to forget how tall he was, and how bony. “You don’t have a plan?”
“Not yet,” Dortmunder explained. “I wanted to be sure you’d go along with me before I got into any—”
“Al, I’ll tell you the truth,” Tom said. “I’m disappointed.”
“I’m sorry, Tom.”
“You’re right to be. Here I thought your love for a good woman had inspired you to come up with a really first-class notion, and everything was gonna be fine.”
“Everything is, Tom,” Dortmunder assured him. “Now that—”
“I might not have been quite so dismissive of those three fellas upstairs,” Tom went on, “if I’d known you were just blowing smoke.”
“I’m not blowing— Three fellas?” And one old seventy-year-old made of iron bars and antifreeze.
“That’s how many I figured I needed,” Tom said. “Two to carry the dynamite and get blown up with it, one to drive the backhoe and do the work down in Putkin’s Corners.”
“And be left there,” Dortmunder suggested.
Tom’s lips seemed actually to stretch, as though he might be smiling somewhere deep inside. “You know me so well, Al,” he said. But then the ghost smile disappeared, and he said, “And that’s why I’m so surprised you’d come to me empty-handed this way.”
“Not empty-handed,” Dortmunder said. “I’m going to—”
“Yeah, come to think of it,” Tom said, “maybe you should throw that stick away. Those sirens I hear are getting closer.”
Dortmunder had been too distracted by Tom to pay attention to the outer world, but now he did hear that, yes, there were sirens approaching. Fast. From not very far away. “Right,” he said, and tossed the two-by-three into the gutter.
“Let’s take a walk,” Tom said, “since I’m carrying a gun those cops would take a great interest in, and while we walk you can tell me your ideas, and we can discuss where I’m gonna live now.”
They started walking toward Avenue C. Dortmunder said, “Where you’re gonna live?”
Ahead, the first police car came screaming around the corner. “My previous place,” Tom explained, “isn’t gonna be available for a while.”
Dortmunder looked around to watch the police car brake to a stop at Tom’s former address. Cops piled out of it while two more police cars joined the party, one of them coming the wrong way down this one-way street. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”
“This place where May is,” Tom said, “up in Dudson Center. Lotta room there?”
“She says the most she ever had,” Dortmunder said, knowing what was coming but seeing no way out.
“Probably reassure her to have me there where she could see me,” Tom suggested. “Keep an eye on me. Know I’m not blowing the dam when I’m in front of it myself.”
“Probably so,” Dortmunder said.
“Yeah,” Tom said, nodding to himself as they turned the corner away from the scene of excitement. “She’ll probably be glad to see me, in fact, May. Happy to have me around.”
“Probably so,” Dortmunder said.
FIFTY
“I do like you to touch me,” Myrtle told Doug Berry, pushing him away. “And that’s exactly why I shouldn’t let you.”
“That makes no sense at all,” Doug said, continuing to crowd her.
“It makes sense to me,” Myrtle told him, scrinching as far over on the pickup’s seat as possible, keeping her arms folded over her chest as she determinedly gazed out through the windshield at the big outdoor movie screen where Dumbo teetered on a tree branch. “Watch the movie,” she said. “You said you’d never been to a drive-in before, so here we are, so watch the movie.”
“At a drive-in? Myrtle,” Doug said, keeping his hands to himself at last, “you’re driving me crazy.”
Well, if that was true, Myrtle thought, then they were even, because Doug Berry was certainly driving her crazy. Not in the same way, of course; not sexually, or romantically. Though Doug was certainly sexy, and he kept doing his best to be romantic, and if everything else had been okay who knew what might happen?
But everything else was not okay. Everything else wasn’t okay because Doug Berry was a fake, and up to something, and it more than likely had something to do with her father, and she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what it was.
But that he was a fake went without question. When he’d first come to the library, she’d accepted his story about his researches without question, but when he’d suddenly stopped looking at the old microfilm three years before his alleged range of interest was finished, and when he’d suddenly switched to the present day with no explanation, she’d begun to suspect something was wrong. But what?