Mildly, Tom said, “If I’d blown it up to start with, we would’ve all saved ourselves a lot of time and trouble. Well, live and learn.” And he followed Dortmunder away toward the highway.
THIRD DOWN
FORTY-FOUR
May stepped off the curb and hailed a cab. Though its off-duty light was lit, this particular cab immediately cut off a bakery van and a black TransAm from New Jersey to swerve across the lanes and yank to a stop at May’s feet. Since the backseat already contained three people, May opened the front door and slid in beside the driver, who was Murch’s Mom. “Right on time,” she said, slamming the door.
“Naturally,” Mom said, and slashed the cab back into the flow of traffic, causing a great tide of imprecation to rise up into the air behind her.
“We would’ve been late,” Stan said from the backseat, “if I hadn’t told Mom to come down Lex and forget Park.”
“Know-it-all,” muttered Mom darkly.
May shifted around in the seat so she could see Mom and Stan and Andy and Tiny all at once. “I want to thank you all for coming,” she said.
“Sure, May,” Tiny said, his voice like a far-off earthquake. “All you gotta do is ask.”
May smiled at him. “Thank you, Tiny.” To Mom, she said, “And thanks for letting me use your cab.”
“My pleasure,” Mom snarled, blatting her horn at a tourist from Maryland, sightseeing out the window of his Acura Silly.
“The problem is,” May said, “John still won’t even talk about it. Not even talk. So we couldn’t meet at my place. If he knew I was—”
Andy said, “May, believe me, I understand John’s position on this. I was trapped inside that car, too. Now, I’m not one of your broody kind of pessimistic guys, you know me, but I got to tell you, May, I had a minute or two there, down in there, when I was seriously rethinking the various choices of my life. ‘What could I have done instead,’ I was saying to myself. ‘What could I have done different, maybe in third grade, maybe last year, that would have me now at the VCR store putting To Catch a Thief in my armpit instead of where I am?’ A situation like that can give you those kinds of thoughts.”
“I know that,” May said. “I know you and John went through a terrible experience. But it’s been two weeks, Andy, and you’ve gotten over it.”
“Well, not entirely, May,” Andy said. “The fact is, I still have to carry a flashlight when I open my closet door. But at least I’m washing my face again, so there’s been some improvement.”
“John washes his face, all right,” May said, “but he will not talk about the reservoir, or the money, or Tom’s plan to blow up the dam.”
“I think,” Andy said carefully, “I think he’s trying to restrict his involvement with the situation.”
“When Tom moved out,” May told them, “I made him promise to let me know where to get in touch with him, just in case John came up with a new idea. Tom was going away to East St. Louis, Illinois, to pick up another of those money caches of his, and he told me when he’d be back, and he promised he’d call me as soon as he was in New York again, and that’s tomorrow. If I don’t have anything to tell him tomorrow, he’s going to find a couple of people to help him, which won’t take long—”
“Not for that money,” Tiny agreed. “Take him an hour, maybe, unless he’s picky. Then it’ll take two hours.”
“By the end of this week,” May said, “he could have that dam blown up and that entire valley destroyed and everybody in it dead.”
“You know,” Stan said thoughtfully, “I looked over that terrain while we were up there, and I’m not sure Tom could get outta there if he goes the dynamite method. The way the roads are, the way the hills are, he might not have an escape. I mean, he’d get the money, drive down in there in a tractor or an ATV or something, maybe a backhoe, yank the casket up outta the ground, drive back up out of the mud, but when he gets to the road I think he’s screwed. I could study the terrain some more, but that’s my first impression.”
“Tom won’t listen to that,” May said. “He’ll go ahead and do it anyway, and he’ll get caught, and they’ll put him back in prison where they should never have let him out in the first place, but all those people in the valley will be dead. It won’t matter then if Tom says, ‘Gee, Stan, I guess you were right.’ ”
“That’s true,” Stan admitted.
“We need another plan,” May told them. “We need some other way to get to that money that isn’t dynamite and that Tom Jimson will go along with. But John won’t even talk about it, and he absolutely won’t think about it. So what I was hoping from this meeting, I was hoping one of us would come up with something I could tell Tom, something that would at least slow him down, some kind of plan, or even an idea for a plan. Something.”
There was a little uncomfortable silence in the cab, punctuated by Mom’s maledictions against the world of drivers and pedestrians and New York City traffic conditions generally. At last Tiny spread his catcher’s-mitt hands and said, “May, that ain’t my field. I pick up heavy things, I move them, I put them down, that’s what I do. Sometimes I persuade people to change their minds about certain things. I’m a specialist, May, and that’s my specialty.”
Stan said, “I’m a driver. I’m the best in the business—”
“He is,” his Mom said, as she swerved around a wallowing stretch limo driven by a Middle Eastern refugee who’d cleared Customs & Immigration earlier that morning. “I’m his mother, but I’ve got to admit it, my boy Stan is a good driver.”
“The best,” Stan corrected. “But, May, I don’t do plans. Getaways I can do. Vehicles I can drive; there isn’t a thing in the world with wheels and a motor I can’t drive. I could give Tom Jimson very professional advice on how he’ll never get away from that county if he blows the dam, but that’s about it from me.”
May said, “Andy? What about you? You have millions of ideas.”
“I sure do,” Andy agreed. “But one at a time. And not connected with each other. A plan, now, a plan is a bunch of ideas in a row, and, May, I’m sorry, I’ve never been good at that.”
“God damn the State of New York!” Mom cried, sideslipping past a pipe-smoking psychiatrist in a Mercury Macabre. “They give anybody a license to drive a car!”
“They also released Tom Jimson,” May pointed out.
Tiny cleared his throat. “Usually,” he said, “what I’d do at this point is go to the guy that’s the problem and give him a little vacation in the hospital for maybe three months. But the truth is, Tom Jimson—I don’t care if he’s seventy hundred years old—he’s the nastiest guy I ever met. I wouldn’t say this about almost anybody else, but I’m not absolutely one hundred percent sure he’s the one would wind up in the hospital. And then you’d never change his mind. He’d go ahead out of spite.”
May frowned, saying, “Tiny, how can he be that dangerous?”