Thieves Dozen Read online

  “And that,” Kelp said, “is a siren.”

  It was true. Far in the distance, the wail of a siren rose and fell, and then rose again, more clearly. “Sounds exactly like the city,” Dortmunder said, with a whiff of nostalgia.

  Kelp said, “Aren’t those lights over there? Over by the road?” Past the bulk of many horses stretching their necks up into apple trees to eat green apples, Dortmunder saw the bobbing beams of flashlights. “Over by the van, you mean,” he said. The siren rose, wonderfully distinct, then fell; and during its valley, voices could be heard, shouting, over by the flashlights. “Terrific,” Dortmunder said.

  “What happened,” Hiram said, “is the owner. The orchard owner.”

  “He probably lives,” Kelp suggested, “in that house we saw across the street from where we parked.”

  “Across the road,” Hiram corrected.

  “Anyway,” Kelp said, “I guess he called the cops.”

  Beyond the bobbing flashlights, which seemed to Dortmunder to be moving closer, red and blue lights appeared, blinking and revolving. “State troopers,” Dortmunder said.

  “Well, we’ll never get to the van,” Hiram said. Turning around, looking past Dire Straits’ shoulder, he said, “We can’t go back that way anymore, either.”

  Dortmunder turned to look and saw many more lights on now in the main ranch building and the outbuildings. The ruckus over here had attracted attention, maybe; or, more likely, the owner of the orchard had phoned the owner of the ranch to say a word or two about horses eating apples.

  In any event, it was a pincer movement, with the orchard people and the state troopers in front and the ranch people in back, all moving inexorably toward the point occupied by Dortmunder and Kelp and Hiram and Dire Straits.

  “There’s only one thing to do,” Hiram said.

  Dortmunder looked at him. “That many?”

  “It’s time to ride out of here.”

  Kelp said, “Hiram, we’ll never get to the van.”

  “Not drive. Ride.” Saying which, Hiram suddenly swung up onto Dire Straits’ bare back. The horse looked startled, and maybe insulted. “Grab mounts,” Hiram said, gripping the rein.

  “Hiram,” Dortmunder said, “I don’t ride horses.”

  “Time to learn, Bo,” Hiram said unsympathetically. Bending low over Dire Straits’ neck, whamming his heels into Dire Straits’ rib cage, Hiram yelled into Dire Straits’ ear, “Go, boy!”

  “I don’t ride,” Dortmunder said, “any horses.”

  With Hiram on his back, Dire Straits walked over to the nearest apple tree and started to eat. “Go, boy!” Hiram yelled, kicking and whacking the oblivious thoroughbred. “Giddyap, damn it!” he yelled, as flashlight beams began to pick him out among the branches and leaves and green apples.

  “I never did have much luck with horses,” Dortmunder said. Out in front of him was a scene of mass, and growing, confusion. As the siren’s wail continued to weave, horses shouldered their way up and down the tight rows of gnarly apple trees, munching and socializing. Human beings uselessly yelled and waved things among them, trying to make them go home. Because green apples go right through horses, the human beings also slipped and slued a lot. Hiram, trying to hide in the tree Dire Straits was snacking off but blinded by all the flashlights now converged on him, fell out of the tree and into the arms of what looked very much like a state trooper, who then fell down. Other people fell down. Horses ate. Lights stabbed this way and that. Back by the breached fence, Dortmunder and Kelp watched without pleasure. “That reminds me of the subway,” Dortmunder said.

  “Here comes that truck,” Kelp said.

  Dortmunder turned, and here came a pair of headlights through the night from the ranch, jouncing up and down. “I do understand pickup trucks,” Dortmunder said and strode toward the lights.

  Kelp, saying, “John? You got something?” came trailing along. Dortmunder and the pickup approached each other. As the vehicle neared, Dortmunder waved his arms over his head, demanding that the thing stop, which it did, and a sleepy young guy looked out at him, saying, “Who the hell are you?”

  “Your goddamn horses,” Dortmunder said, his manner outraged but disciplined, “are eating our goddamn apples.”

  The fellow stared at him. “You aren’t Russwinder.”

  “I work for him, don’t I?” Dortmunder demanded. “And I never seen anybody so mad. We need light back there, he sent us down, get your portable generator. You got a portable generator, don’t you?”

  “Well, sure,” the fellow said. “But I was gonna—”

  “Light,” Dortmunder insisted. Around them, half-awake and half-dressed ranch employees made their way toward the center of chaos, ignoring Dortmunder and Kelp, whose bona fides were established by their being in conversation with the ranch’s pickup truck. “We can’t see what we’re doing back there,” Dortmunder said, “and Mr. Russwinder’s mad.”

  The young fellow clearly saw that this was a time to be accommodating to one’s neighbor and to one’s neighbor’s employee. “OK,” he said. “Climb in.”

  “We’ll ride in back,” Dortmunder told him and clambered up into the bed of the pickup, which was pleasantly aromatic of hay. Kelp followed, eyes bright with hope, and the pickup lurched forward, jounced around in a great circle and headed back toward the ranch.

  The pickup seemed to think it was a horse; over the fields it bucked and bounced, like a frying pan trying to throw Dortmunder and Kelp back into the fire. Clutching the pickup’s metal parts with every finger and every toe, Dortmunder gazed back at the receding scene in the orchard, which looked now like a battle in a movie about the Middle Ages. “Never again,” he said.

  Ka-bump! The pickup slued from field to dirt road, a much more user-friendly surface, and hustled off toward the barns. “Well, this time,” Kelp said, “you can’t blame me.”

  Dortmunder looked at him. “Why not?”

  The cowboy behind the wheel slammed both feet and a brick onto the brake pedal, causing the pickup to skid halfway around, hurl itself broadside at the brown-plank wall of the nearest barn and shudder to a stop with millimeters to spare. Dortmunder peeled himself off the pickup’s bed, staring wildly around, and the maniac driver hopped out, crying, “The generator’s in here!” Off he went at a lope.

  Dortmunder and Kelp shakily assisted each other to the ground, as their benefactor dashed into the barn. “I’d like to wait and run him over,” Dortmunder said, getting into the pickup’s cab and sliding over to the passenger side.

  Kelp followed, settling behind the wheel. The engine was on, so he just shifted into gear and they drove away from there, brisk but not reckless. No need to be reckless.

  At the highway, Dortmunder said, “Left leads past that orchard. Better go right, up the hill.”

  So they went up the hill. As they drove past the high clearing where they’d taken pictures down at the ranch, Kelp slowed and said, “Look at that!”

  It was positively coruscating down there, dazzling, like nighttime on the Fourth of July. Police and fire engine flashing lights in red and blue mingled with the white of headlights, flashlights, spotlights. Men and horses ran hither and yon. Every building in the area was all lit up.

  “Just for a second,” Kelp said, pulling off the road and coming to a stop.

  Dortmunder didn’t argue. It was really a very interesting sight, and they could, after all, claim some part in its creation. They got out and walked to the edge of the drop-off to watch. Faint cries and horse snorts drifted up through the sultry air.

  “We better go,” Dortmunder said at last.

  “Ya. You’re right.”

  They turned back to the pickup, and Kelp said, with surprise, “Well, look at this!” He reached out his hand and took the end of a bridle and turned to smile at Dortmunder, saying, “I guess he likes us!”

  Dortmunder looked at the creature munching calmly at the other end of the bridle. “It is him, isn’t it?”

  “He
followed me home,” Kelp said, grinning broadly. “Can I keep him?”

  “No,” Dortmunder said.

  Surprised, Kelp ducked his head and hissed, so Dire Straits wouldn’t hear him, “Dortmunder, the insurance company! A million dollars!”

  “I am not taking a stolen race horse through the Lincoln Tunnel,” Dortmunder said. “That’s just for openers. And we got no place to keep him.”

  “In the park.”

  “He’d get mugged. He’d get stolen. He’d get found.”

  “We gotta know somebody with a back yard!”

  “And neighbors. Andy, it doesn’t play. Now, come on, say goodbye to your friend; we’re going home.”

  Dortmunder continued on to the pickup, but Kelp stayed where he was, an agonized expression on his face. When Dortmunder looked back, Kelp said, “I can’t, John, I just can’t.” The hand clutching the bridle shook. “I’m holding a million dollars! I can’t let go.”

  Dortmunder got into the pickup, behind the wheel. He looked out through the open passenger door at Kelp in the dark, on the hilltop, holding a strip of leather with $1,000,000 on the other end. “I’m going to New York now,” Dortmunder told him, not unkindly. “Are you coming, or are you staying?”

  TOO MANY CROOKS

  DID YOU HEAR SOMETHING?” DORTMUNDER WHISPERED. “The wind,” Kelp said.

  Dortmunder twisted around in his seated position and deliberately shone the flashlight in the kneeling Kelp’s eyes. “What wind? We’re in a tunnel.”

  “There’s underground rivers,” Kelp said, squinting, “so maybe there’s underground winds. Are you through the wall there?”

  “Two more whacks,” Dortmunder told him. Relenting, he aimed the flashlight past Kelp back down the empty tunnel, a meandering, messy gullet, most of it less than three feet in diameter, wriggling its way through rocks and rubble and ancient middens, traversing 40 tough feet from the rear of the basement of the out-of-business shoe store to the wall of the bank on the corner. According to the maps Dortmunder had gotten from the water department by claiming to be with the sewer department, and the maps he’d gotten from the sewer department by claiming to be with the water department, just the other side of this wall was the bank’s main vault. Two more whacks and this large, irregular square of concrete that Dortmunder and Kelp had been scoring and scratching at for some time now would at last fall away onto the floor inside, and there would be the vault.

  Dortmunder gave it a whack.

  Dortmunder gave it another whack.

  The block of concrete fell onto the floor of the vault. “Oh, thank God,” somebody said.

  What? Reluctant but unable to stop himself, Dortmunder dropped sledge and flashlight and leaned his head through the hole in the wall and looked around.

  It was the vault, all right. And it was full of people.

  A man in a suit stuck his hand out and grabbed Dortmunder’s and shook it while pulling him through the hole and on into the vault. “Great work, Officer,” he said. “The robbers are outside.”

  Dortmunder had thought he and Kelp were the robbers. “They are?”

  A round-faced woman in pants and a Buster Brown collar said, “Five of them. With machine guns.”

  “Machine guns,” Dortmunder said.

  A delivery kid wearing a mustache and an apron and carrying a flat cardboard carton containing four coffees, two decafs and a tea said, “We all hostages, mon. I gonna get fired.”

  “How many of you are there?” the man in the suit asked, looking past Dortmunder at Kelp’s nervously smiling face.

  “Just the two,” Dortmunder said, and watched helplessly as willing hands dragged Kelp through the hole and set him on his feet in the vault. It was really very full of hostages.

  “I’m Kearney,” the man in the suit said. “I’m the bank manager, and I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you.”

  Which was the first time any bank manager had said that to Dortmunder, who said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” and nodded, and then said, “I’m, uh, Officer Diddums, and this is Officer, uh, Kelly.”

  Kearney, the bank manager, frowned. “Diddums, did you say?” Dortmunder was furious with himself. Why did I call myself Diddums? Well, I didn’t know I was going to need an alias inside a bank vault, did I? Aloud, he said, “Uh-huh. Diddums. It’s Welsh.”

  “Ah,” said Kearney. Then he frowned again and said, “You people aren’t even armed.”

  “Well, no,” Dortmunder said. “We’re the, uh, the hostage-rescue team; we don’t want any shots fired, increase the risk for you, uh, civilians.”

  “Very shrewd,” Kearney agreed.

  Kelp, his eyes kind of glassy and his smile kind of fixed, said, “Well, folks, maybe we should leave here now, single file, just make your way in an orderly fashion through—”

  “They’re coming!” hissed a stylish woman over by the vault door.

  Everybody moved. It was amazing; everybody shifted at once. Some people moved to hide the new hole in the wall, some people moved to get farther away from the vault door and some people moved to get behind Dortmunder, who suddenly found himself the nearest person in the vault to that big, round, heavy metal door, which was easing massively and silently open.

  It stopped halfway, and three men came in. They wore black ski masks and black leather jackets and black work pants and black shoes. They carried Uzi submachine guns at high port. Their eyes looked cold and hard, and their hands fidgeted on the metal of the guns, and their feet danced nervously, even when they were standing still. They looked as though anything at all might make them overreact.

  “Shut up!” one of them yelled, though nobody’d been talking. He glared around at his guests and said, “Gotta have somebody to stand out front, see can the cops be trusted.” His eye, as Dortmunder had known it would, lit on Dortmunder. “You,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

  “What’s your name?”

  Everybody in the vault had already heard him say it, so what choice did he have? “Diddums,” Dortmunder said.

  The robber glared at Dortmunder through his ski mask. “Diddums?”

  “It’s Welsh,” Dortmunder explained.

  “Ah,” the robber said, and nodded. He gestured with the Uzi. “Outside, Diddums.”

  Dortmunder stepped forward, glancing back over his shoulder at all the people looking at him, knowing every goddamn one of them was glad he wasn’t him—even Kelp, back there pretending to be four feet tall—and then Dortmunder stepped through the vault door, surrounded by all those nervous maniacs with machine guns, and went with them down a corridor flanked by desks and through a doorway to the main part of the bank, which was a mess.

  The time at the moment, as the clock high on the wide wall confirmed, was 5:15 in the afternoon. Everybody who worked at the bank should have gone home by now; that was the theory Dortmunder had been operating from. What must have happened was, just before closing time at three o’clock (Dortmunder and Kelp being already then in the tunnel, working hard, knowing nothing of events on the surface of the planet), these gaudy showboats had come into the bank waving their machine guns around.

  And not just waving them, either. Lines of ragged punctures had been drawn across the walls and the Lucite upper panel of the tellers’ counter, like connect-the-dot puzzles. Wastebaskets and a potted Ficus had been overturned, but fortunately, there were no bodies lying around; none Dortmunder could see, anyway. The big plate-glass front windows had been shot out, and two more of the black-clad robbers were crouched down, one behind the OUR LOW LOAN RATES poster and the other behind the OUR HIGH IRA RATES poster, staring out at the street, from which came the sound of somebody talking loudly but indistinctly through a bullhorn.

  So what must have happened, they’d come in just before three, waving their guns, figuring a quick in and out, and some brown-nose employee looking for advancement triggered the alarm, and now they had a stalemate hostage situation on their hands; and, of course, everybody in the world by n
ow has seen Dog Day Afternoon and therefore knows that if the police get the drop on a robber in circumstances such as these circumstances right here, they’ll immediately shoot him dead, so now hostage negotiation is trickier than ever. This isn’t what I had in mind when I came to the bank, Dortmunder thought.

  The boss robber prodded him along with the barrel of his

  Uzi, saying, “What’s your first name, Diddums?”

  Please don’t say Dan, Dortmunder begged himself. Please, please, somehow, anyhow, manage not to say Dan. His mouth opened, “John,” he heard himself say, his brain having turned desperately in this emergency to that last resort, the truth, and he got weak-kneed with relief.

  “OK, John, don’t faint on me,” the robber said. “This is very simple what you got to do here. The cops say they want to talk, just talk, nobody gets hurt. Fine. So you’re gonna step out in front of the bank and see do the cops shoot you.”

  “Ah,” Dortmunder said.

  “No time like the present, huh, John?” the robber said, and poked him with the Uzi again.

  “That kind of hurts,” Dortmunder said.

  “I apologize,” the robber said, hard-eyed. “Out.”

  One of the other robbers, eyes red with strain inside the black ski mask, leaned close to Dortmunder and yelled, “You wanna shot in the foot first? You wanna crawl out there?”

  “I’m going,” Dortmunder told him. “See? Here I go.”

  The first robber, the comparatively calm one, said, “You go as far as the sidewalk, that’s all. You take one step off the curb, we blow your head off.”

  “Got it,” Dortmunder assured him, and crunched across broken glass to the sagging-open door and looked out. Across the street was parked a line of buses, police cars, police trucks, all in blue and white with red gumdrops on top, and behind them moved a seething mass of armed cops. “Uh,” Dortmunder said. Turning back to the comparatively calm robber, he said, “You wouldn’t happen to have a white flag or anything like that, would you?”