“And I could maybe set up a couple booby traps,” Irwin said, “so maybe we could get rid of them right away.”
Startled, Little Feather said, “What, are you gonna blow it up? I’ve got all my stuff in here.”
“No, no, no,” Irwin reassured her, “nothing like that. Just little things. If they work, there might be a little blood in here to clean up afterward, that’s all.”
“Just so I don’t have to move out all my stuff,” Little Feather said.
10
In the morning, Dortmunder walked over Nineteenth Street to Third Avenue and waited on the corner there. It was pretty full of pedestrians around that neighborhood, and about three minutes later, down Third Avenue came what appeared to be some sort of sonic wave that moved people to the edges of the sidewalk, opening up a vee behind itself like the wake behind a speedboat. Knowing this was Tiny arriving, Dortmunder turned the other way to look for a nice recent-model car with M.D. license plates.
Andy Kelp always took doctor’s cars when he needed to travel, on the theory that doctors, surrounded as they are by the intimations of mortality, are always in favor of treating themselves well while here below, including the cars they choose to drive. “I trust doctors,” Kelp often said. “When it comes to cars, that is.”
Seeing the approach of no Volvos or Lincolns with M.D. plates, Dortmunder turned back the other way, and yes, here came Tiny. He was dressed for the occasion in a bulky wool olive-drab greatcoat that made him look like an entire platoon going over the top in World War I. But what were those pink nylon straps curving over each shoulder to retreat into each armpit?
Tiny stopped in front of Dortmunder and nodded his head. “Whadaya say, Dortmunder?”
“I say,” Dortmunder told him, “the people we’re going to meet don’t know my last name.”
“Gotcha,” Tiny said. “They won’t hear it from me.”
“Thank you, Tiny. What’s with the straps?”
Tiny turned around, and he was wearing a cute pink nylon backpack big enough for two grapefruit but not one pumpkin, the kind of fashion accessory that on most people just looks dorky but which, on that expanse of olive-drab wool, looked like a really bad pimple. Most men wouldn’t dare to be seen in such a thing because they’d be afraid people would laugh at them, but, of course, Tiny never had that problem.
Having given Dortmunder a complete eyeful, Tiny turned around again to say, “Somebody left it in the lobby at J.C.’s building about a year ago, and nobody ever claimed it—”
“Well, that makes sense.”
“—so after a while, I took it upstairs and threw it in a closet because maybe someday it’d come in handy.”
“Tiny? Why today?”
“I didn’t want the grenade to stretch my pocket,” Tiny said.
“I get it,” Dortmunder said, and Tiny looked past him to say, “Here’s the doctor now.”
When Dortmunder turned, he saw approaching him up Third Avenue one of the larger suburban assault vehicles available, a Grand Cherokee Jeep Laredo, which isn’t quite enough name for such an imposing command car. This one was maraschino cherry red, with huge black waffle-tread tires, and yes, there was the M.D. plate, flanked by a number of bumper stickers recommending we all take great care with the fragile resources of our planet.
“Now that,” Tiny rumbled, “is my kinda car.”
“Yeah, it is,” Dortmunder agreed.
Kelp, at the wheel, was grinning like Christmas morning. He braked to a stop at the curb, and Dortmunder opened the front passenger door while Tiny opened the rear one.
“Watch out for that first step,” Kelp advised them.
Tiny unhooked his itty-bitty backpack and tossed it casually onto the backseat, where it bounced once and fell on the floor. Then he lifted his massive self into all of the backseat while Dortmunder climbed up to the seat next to Kelp.
Kelp looked back and down at the pink pack on the floor. “What’s with that?”
“The grenade,” Dortmunder told him.
Kelp looked at Dortmunder. “Ah,” he said, and faced front, and when the doors were closed, he drove them uptown.
Looking around at the plush interior and the dashboard like an electronic major-league scoreboard, Dortmunder said, “Andy, are you sure a doctor owns this? It’s more like a drug cartel would own it.”
“When I saw it outside New York Hospital,” Kelp told him, “I knew I had to steal it. Even if I wasn’t going anywhere. Lemme tell you, this is a doctor, he doesn’t just want comfort, he doesn’t just want convenience, he wants to be immortal.”
“I bet he’s feeling naked right now,” Dortmunder commented.
“Six to one he won’t even leave the hospital,” Kelp said, and turned toward the Midtown Tunnel.
It was a beautiful clear cold November day, and when they got out to the southern shore of Long Island, with the gray and quicksilver ocean sloping away from them down toward the distant horizon, the sky was a huge empty space, a bright but faded pale blue. There were a few distant cars on Ocean Parkway, but nothing in the day was quite as visible as the red Cherokee zipping along the pale concrete road past the ashy tans of sand and dead beach grass.
The long stretch of Jones Beach was empty, frigid waves lapping ashore, looking for something to take home. From time to time, they passed the entrances to parking areas, mostly blocked by sawhorses, the parking lots themselves screened from the road by hedges and stunted pine trees.
They’d been quiet inside the car for some time, but now Tiny leaned forward and said, “Dortmunder, you can give me a hand.”
“Sure, Tiny.”
Tiny had opened his pink pack and removed from it a standard U.S. Army hand grenade, known as a pineapple because it looks a little like a pineapple, its cast-iron body serrated to turn the body into many small pieces of shrapnel when the TNT inside goes off. Curved down one side of the grenade was its safety lever, held in place by a safety pin at the top, the pin attached to the pull ring. Pull the pin out by the ring, but keep holding the lever close against the grenade, and everything’s fine. Release the lever, and you have ten seconds to remove yourself from the grenade’s proximity.
The other item in the pink pack was a small roll of duct tape. Tiny now handed this tape to Dortmunder and said, “Twice around. But under the lever.”
“Right, I know.”
Tiny held the grenade loosely in his left hand, the lever opposite the side against his palm. Dortmunder wrapped duct tape twice around Tiny’s hand and the grenade, leaving the lever free, then said, “Feel okay?”
“Like a rolla nickels,” Tiny said. He seemed quite happy this way.
And here was Parking Area 6, as the big Parks Department sign announced, and the sawhorses had already been moved aside. The dashboard clock, when you finally found it among all the tachs and meters, read 10:54, but obviously the others were already here.
“Show time,” Tiny said, and they drove through the break in the hedge and out onto the big pale expanse of parking area. And out there in the middle of all that emptiness stood a pastel green and chrome motor home, one of the biggest made, top of the line, a forty-foot Alpine Coach from Western Recreational Vehicles.
“Well, looka that,” Kelp said.
“I guess we drive over there,” Dortmunder said as the bus door at the right front of the motor home opened and three people stepped out into the pale sunlight.
Tiny leaned forward to peer past Dortmunder’s cheek. “That’s them, huh?”
Kelp made the introductions: “The fat one in the three-piece suit is Fitzroy Guilderpost and the thin one in the wrinkled suit is Irwin somebody, or maybe somebody Irwin. We don’t know the babe.”