Okay, in that case, who would Mikey choose to betray? Some other tough guy like himself, who’d grown up with him and knew all about him and knew where he lived? Or would he choose Doug Berry, a guy he barely knew, who wasn’t connected to anything that Mikey thought important?
These guys didn’t look like cops, But they wouldn’t, would they? Giving the pair a very critical and cautious look, Doug said, “You need some help with a diving problem?”
If he’d expected a no to that question—and he had—he was both disappointed and surprised, because the one called John turned and said, “That’s it, okay. A diving problem.”
“You do?”
“Yeah,” John said. “Andy and me, we got to go underwater, and we never did that before, and it turns out it’s not so simple like we thought.”
Doug just couldn’t get this straight. “You really do want to dive?”
“Walk,” Andy said. “We wanna walk in from the shore to where it’s fifty feet deep.”
Doug looked out the side window at the rain-pocked gray waters of the Great South Bay. “Around here?”
“Somewhere else,” John said.
“Where?”
But John spread his hands and said, “We got to talk first, you know? We got to know we’re all on the same team, then we’ll talk about where.”
Andy said, “You see, Dougie, John and—”
“Doug,” Doug said.
They both frowned at him. Andy said, “I thought Mikey said you were Dougie.”
“That’s what he calls me,” Doug agreed. “Everybody else calls me Doug.”
They looked at each other and came to some sort of decision. Nodding briskly, Andy said, “Got it. Okay, Doug, here’s the story. John and me, we got to go into a body of water, like a lake—”
“Freshwater, you mean,” Doug suggested.
“Yeah,” Andy said. “Down at the bottom of this lake, there’s a box we want. A big box. So we got to get to it, tie a rope on, pull it out.”
John said, “We thought it should be kind of simple. But then we went to a store to buy the stuff, and it turns out there’s this secret society or something, nobody gets to go underwater unless they know the password.”
“We have no fatalities in the sport in the United States,” Doug told him, “and that’s why. Safety first.”
“I believe in safety first,” John said. “I don’t want to go anywhere that it isn’t safety first. So maybe this is okay after all. We can’t pull the job without a pro.”
“Not if it’s underwater,” Doug agreed.
“But,” John said, “we need a very particular special pro. Not just any pro.”
“Not the pro in just any dive shop you see around,” Andy said, expanding on the idea.
Here comes the illegality, Doug thought. Entrapment. Temptation. They’re probably both wired. Be very careful about everything you say. “Mm,” he said.
“So we asked around,” John went on, “among people we know, particular people we know…”
“And I happened to know Mikey,” Andy said. “We’ve been in trade together a couple times. And he said you were exactly the guy we were looking for.”
“So here we are,” John said.
“Mm,” Doug said.
They all looked at one another for a minute. Finally, Andy said, “Don’t you wanna know what we want?”
“I thought you were going to tell me,” Doug said, trying not to sound too eager to commit anything illegal.
Andy and John looked at each other again, and then John nodded and said, “Okay. Here’s what we want. We want the expertise and the equipment so we can go down into this res— this lake and get this box. That’s what we want.”
Doug said, “Mm.”
Again they all stood around gaping at one another, and this time Andy said, “You want to do it?”
Doug had to ask the question somehow, without suggesting he was open to criminal considerations. Tone flat, he said, “What’s illegal about it?”
They looked surprised. “Illegal?” John said. “Unless you’re gonna sell us stuff you got from Mikey, I don’t know what’s illegal about what we want here.”
“You’re the pro, that’s all,” Andy said.
Doug shook his head, bewildered, but still afraid to expose himself to risk. “Then why me?” he asked. “I mean, it’s not that I’m—that I do illegal things or anything. I’m not suggesting here that I’m open to uh, um, criminal enterprises or anything, but why did you need a special pro and all that?”
They stared at him, as bewildered as he was. John said, “Criminal enterprises?”
But then Andy laughed and clapped his hands together and said, “John, he’s afraid we’re wired!”
John looked surprised, then offended. “Wired? You mean like FBI men? Do we look like FBI men?”
“Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” Doug said. “Not that it matters, I’m not proposing any, uh…”
“Criminal enterprise,” John suggested.
Andy said, “Look, Doug, somebody’s gotta start by trusting somebody, so I’m gonna start by trusting you. You got an honest face. See, there’s a fella we know, a long time ago he went to jail, and he just got out now, and it turns out before he went inside he buried some money—”
“Criminal enterprise money,” John interpolated.
“Right,” Andy said. “Your basic ill-gotten gains is what we’re talking about here. And now he’s out and he wants these gains, and it turns out there’s a reservoir there now.”
Doug couldn’t help himself; he laughed. He said, “A reservoir? He buried the money and now it’s underwater?”
“That’s why we’re here,” Andy told him. “And to tell you the truth, Doug, there is gonna be some criminal enterprise in all this. For instance, when we go over the fence around the reservoir, that’s already breaking a law. Trespassing or something. And when we go into the reservoir, actually into the water, there’s another law laying dead on the ground.”
“And,” John said, “when we get the box with the money in it, we won’t give it back to the bank, so there we go again. Who we’ll give it to is the guy that buried it, and he’ll give us some for helping out, and we’ll give you some for helping out.”
“How much?” Doug couldn’t help from asking.
“A thousand dollars,” John said, “over your regular fees and expenses and the cost of the stuff we use.”
“Doug,” Andy said, sounding very sincere and confidential, “in all honesty and truth, Doug, I never in my life even thought about being an FBI man.”
Doug wanted to believe these two—and God knows he could use a thousand dollars—but a lot of Congressmen had once wanted to believe a couple of fellas like this were Arab sheiks. He said, “If we’re gonna start familiarizing ourselves with the equipment and all, you two will have to take your coats and, uh, shirts off, you know. Strip to the waist.”
Andy, grinning, said to John, “He still thinks we’re wired.”
“No, no,” Doug said, “it’s just to, uh, fit everything, that’s all.”
John shook his head, with a faint look of disgust, and took his coat off, and Andy followed suit. With no hesitation at all, they both stripped down, revealing physiques no one in history could have been proud of. But no microphones, no tape recorders, no wires.
Spreading his arms, pirouetting slowly, grinning at Doug, Andy said, “Okay, Doug?”
“Okay,” Doug said, and covered his confusion with a deep layer of professional manner. “Have either of you ever breathed through a mouthpiece before?”