“Please don’t say that,” Dortmunder told him.
“It’s your plan, John,” Kelp pointed out. “What could go wrong?”
Dortmunder groaned.
Bob shone the flashlight beam on the padlock securing the bar across the dirt road leading to the reservoir. As usual, it had not been tampered with. Of course it hadn’t. The event had happened once, that’s all, and would never happen again. Making Bob come down here every night and doublecheck every padlock on every entry road around the reservoir was just a sneaky punishment for his failure to understand what was actually going on the night it happened.
The night it happened. Not a sea monster, after all, but some weird form of breaking and entering. Who would break and enter a reservoir, and for what possible reason? It didn’t make any sense, but that’s what somebody did, all right; the clipped-through padlocks found next morning, and the tracks of some large heavy vehicle leading right down to the bank of the reservoir, proved that much.
Unfortunately, these mysterious midnight prowlers had chosen to strike at a particular moment when Bob himself was overwrought, what with his just having returned from his honeymoon and starting back to work and all, and so he’d had this excessively emotional response when he’d looked out at the lake and seen what it turned out must have been a person swimming, but which, to his overwrought and excessively emotional eyes had, uh, seemed to be, um…
… a sea serpent.
Bob and the counselor had worked all this out pretty extensively the last month. In fact, Bob was beginning to believe that his terrible experiences of that moonlit night in April were a blessing in disguise, since they’d led him to Manfred, the counselor who was having an absolutely significant effect on Bob’s life.
But what a mess he’d made of things along the way, starting with his inability to find Soldier of Fortune magazine later that night when he’d driven away from the dam and home and Tiffany forever. Without Soldier of Fortune, his plans to become a hard-bitten mercenary soldier on some different and more interesting continent had been stymied, and so he’d bought a couple sixpacks instead and parked all night alone up on Ten Eyck Hill, overlooking the reservoir, waiting for the sea serpent to return.
It had not, of course, and at some point in his vigil Bob had finally passed out from exhaustion and beer (and, as he and Manfred now understood, overwroughtness and excessive emotion), and when he’d returned, bleary and messy, to his normal life the next day, he’d learned that nobody wanted him anymore. Tiffany, furious, had moved back with her parents. Down at the dam, they were talking about dereliction of duty. It wasn’t until Bob had agreed to accept counseling that his boss had decided not to fire him.
Once Tiffany had learned he was so serious about solving his problems that he’d started counseling, she’d come back as well—which had its pluses and minuses, to tell the truth—and over the course of the last month Bob felt that he and Manfred had made great strides together. Bob felt himself really coming together these days, both intellectually and emotionally. Right now, he was feeling very good about himself, very comfortable in his space.
It was going to take a little longer, though, for the crowd at work to settle down and forget the past and accept the new Bob. In the meantime, the other guys mostly didn’t talk to him—which was okay, too, considering the kind of talk they talked when they did talk—and he had this ridiculous extra duty every night, checking all the padlocks and all the roads to be sure those mysterious unknown swimmers had not returned.
But who were they? What made them do it? Cutting through padlocks, destroying official property like that, was serious business. Nobody would do such a thing just so they could go skinny-dipping with their girlfriend. Not when there were so many actual lakes and ponds all around this whole area. And not at all in April; way too cold. Some sort of Polar Bear Club branch of the ancient Druids was the only possibility Bob had come up with so far, which just didn’t sound all that probable, not even to him.
Well, again tonight, this padlock on the barrier next to the state highway was unharmed. Nevertheless, he was required to unlock it, open the bar, get into his car, drive to the property-line fence and the second padlocked barrier, check that lock, open it, and drive on to the reservoir, to the spot where it had happened.
Criminals do not return to the scene of their crime. Manfred said that was just superstition. But on the other hand, Manfred also said he should go along with everybody else for now, with all their myths and rituals, until the general community feeling was that he had atoned for his abandonment of them and their values. So that’s what he’d do.
Once he had the barrier unlocked and open, Bob sighed and got back into his car, shifted into drive, and headed down the dirt road, among the trees, in the dark, toward the water.
The water looked darker tonight, with no moon. Darker, and colder, and even more unfriendly. Changing into his wetsuit, boots, gloves, airtank, weight belt, and BCD, Dortmunder muttered, “Last chance to get outta this.”
“What?” Kelp asked chirpily, nearby.
“Nothing,” Dortmunder said grumpily.
Because, of course, it wasn’t the last chance to change his mind, he’d missed that moment a long time ago. He was here now, with Kelp and Tiny and Tom and Stan Murch and this vivisected Hornet and this winch and all this rope, and there was no choice. Into the drink. “I could use one,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing!”
“All set over here,” Stan said, standing beside the car.
All set. Tiny had broken off a couple of pine tree branches to chock the wheels of the Hornet, though it didn’t give much impression of any lively desire to race down the gradual slope into the water. One end of the long rope from the winch was tied to a frame piece where the bumper used to be attached; not because they had any hope of winching the entire car back up to the surface, but only because that was the simplest and safest way to be sure they had the rope with them. The two big trash bags of Ping-Pong balls were in the trunk, which was closed only with a simple hook arrangement to make it easy to open underwater in the dark. The underwater flashlights waited on the front seat, the shovels and a four-foot-long fireplace poker in back. A second long coil of rope also lay on the backseat, one end extended forward between the front seats and tied firmly to the steering column. The two long poles, to push them along as necessary, were placed behind the front seats, sticking up and back over the rear seat.
The idea was, the Hornet would roll on down the track underwater, downhill almost all the way into Putkin’s Corners. Now and again, if they came to a stop, they’d stand up in the car like gondoliers and pole themselves along. Since only the points of the poles would ever touch bottom, they could minimize turbidity.
Once they reached Putkin’s Corners, they’d have to get out of the car and walk, which would roil up the bottom some, but that couldn’t be helped. They would use the second rope then to keep in contact with each other and with the car as they made their way around the library—directly across the street from the railroad station, that’s a help—and into Tom’s goddamn field. The four-foot-long poker would be poked into the soft bottom in the area where Tom had buried his casket, and when they hit it they’d dig it up and drag it—this would be a tough part, full of hard work and turbidity—back to the Hornet. There, they’d attach the long rope to a casket handle, then open the car’s trunk—carefully! don’t want the trash bags of Ping-Pong balls to escape and float up to the surface—tie the bags of Ping-Pong balls to the casket on both sides to lighten it, then give the prearranged three-tug signal to Tiny and walk back up the track with the casket as Tiny cranked the winch.