What's The Worst That Could Happen (27 page)

Between 9:00 P.M. and midnight, moving steadily southward toward the neighborhood of Big Wheel Motor Homes, doing each of their incursions in a different county to lessen the likelihood that the authorities would connect them all, they broke into a plumbing supply company and removed a pipe cutter, entered a major new building’s construction site to collect the Kentucky license plates from front and rear of an office trailer there, and forced illegal entry into a drugstore to collect a lot of high–potency sleeping pills. The hamburger they bought.

A little later that night, in the comforting darkness of a half–full parking lot behind a movie house half a mile from Big Wheel Motor Homes, waiting for the dobermans to go to sleep, luxuriating in the roominess of the van, and watching the rare police car pass with the occasional traffic, Tiny said, “I went out west once.”

“Oh, yeah?”

Tiny nodded. “Guy from prison owed me some money, from a poker game. Supposed to pay up when he got out. Instead, I heard, he went out west, worked in one of those places, whada they call it, uh, rodeo.”

“Rodeo,” Stan echoed. “With the horses and all?”

“Lots of animals,” Tiny said. “Mostly what they do, they throw ropes on animals. People go out, pay good money, sit in the bleachers, you’d think they’re gonna see something, but no. It’s just some guys in dumb hats throwing ropes on animals, and then these people in the bleachers get up and cheer. It’d be like you’d go out to a football game, and the players come out, but then, instead of all the running and passing and tackling and plays and all that, they just stood around and threw ropes on each other.”

“Doesn’t sound that exciting.”

Tiny shook his head. “Even the animals were bored,” he said. “Except the bulls. They were pissed off. Minding their own business, they have to deal with some simpleton with a rope. Every once in a while, one of those bulls, they get fed up, they put a horn into one of those guys, give him a toss. That’s when
I
stand up and cheer.”

Stan said, “What about your friend?”

“He wasn’t exactly my friend,” Tiny said, and moved his shoulders around in reminiscence. When he moved like that, the joints down deep inside there made crackle sounds, which he seemed to enjoy. “They have all these extra guys there,” he told Stan, “to open the gates and close the gates and chase the animals around, and this guy was one of them. I went over, I said I’d like my money now, you know, polite, I don’t ever have to be anything but polite —”

“That’s true,” Stan said.

“So he said,” Tiny went on, “gambling debts from prison were too old to worry about, and besides, he had all these friends out here with sidearms. So I could see he didn’t intend to honor his debt.”

Stan looked at Tiny’s dimly seen face in the darkness here inside the van, and there didn’t seem to be much expression in it. Stan said, “So what happened?”

Tiny chuckled deep in his chest, a sound like thunder in the Pacific Ocean, one island away. He said, “Well, I threw a rope around
him,
tied the other end to a horse, stuck the horse back by the tail with the bowie knife I took off the guy — Did I mention I had to take a bowie knife off him?”

“No, you didn’t mention that.”

“Well, I did, and stuck the horse with it.” Tiny made that distant–thunder chuckle again. “They’re probably both still running,” he said. “Well, the horse, anyway.” Then he rolled his shoulders some more, made that crackle sound, and said, “Let’s go see how the dogs are doing.”

The dogs were doing fine, dreaming of rabbits. Tiny and the borrowed pipe cutter opened the main gate, and Stan went in with his new key and climbed up into the Invidia, which he liked just as much by night as he had during the day. He steered the big machine around the sleeping dogs, letting them lie, and then paused out on the street while Tiny shut the gate behind him so police patrols would not be alerted prematurely.

Tiny climbed aboard, looked around at the interior of the Invidia, and said, “Not bad, Murch, not bad.”

“We call it home,” Stan said, and drove away from there.

After that, it was just a matter of picking up their passengers. Stan hadn’t wanted to drive this big monster into Manhattan if he didn’t have to, so everybody else was coming out, to be met at prearranged locations. First, he picked up the four who’d come over to Hoboken on the PATH train, saving some muggers there who’d been just about to make a mistake. Then he went on to Union City and gathered in the three who’d taken the bus over from the Port Authority terminal through the Lincoln Tunnel. And finally he drove up to Fort Lee, where he connected with the three who’d driven across the George Washington Bridge in a car they’d found somewhere.

From Fort Lee, it was nothing at all for the big Invidia, green tonight but going to be silver by some time tomorrow, with its new Kentucky license plates firmly in place, to get up onto Interstate 80 and line out for the West, just one more big highballing vehicle among the streams of them, all aglow with running lights in yellow and red and white, rushing through the dark.

“Home away from home,” somebody said.

“Shut up and deal,” said somebody else.

But right now, Sunday morning, in the sky over Kansas and the Invidia, a commercial airliner was sailing by, also headed west. It contained among its passengers Fred and Thelma Lartz, Gus Brock, Wally Whistler, and another lockman, who used to be called Herman X, back when he was an activist. Then, while briefly vice president of an African nation called Talabwo, his name had changed to Herman Makanene Stulu’mbnick, but when the rest of his government was hanged by the new government he came back to the States, and now he was called Herman Jones. He and the other four were on their way to Los Angeles, where Herman would select for them a nice automobile from long–term parking and Fred (that is, Thelma) would drive them tomorrow to Vegas.

Counting Dortmunder and Kelp and Anne Marie already established in Las Vegas, this meant a crew of twenty, four times Dortmunder’s maximum. The result was, Dortmunder kept changing the plan this way and that way. His problem was, he didn’t have enough for all these people to do, but he knew they all wanted to be part of the action. And, of course, they would all want part of the profit, as well.

As would Lester Vogel. Out there in Henderson, at General Manufacturing, on this Sunday morning, some of Lester Vogel’s employees were at work on an unusual special order, preparing a consignment and loading a truck, to give A.K.A.’s pal John just exactly what he’d asked for. “I don’t know, man,” the workers told each other, shaking their heads. “
I
wouldn’t do this.” But then again, they didn’t know how this special order was going to be used.

Sunday in Las Vegas. The wedding chapels and slot machines were busy. The sun was shining. Everything was calm.

Max blinked, disoriented. “Landing where?”

“Las Vegas, sir. I’ll have breakfast for you out here.” And he bowed himself out, shutting the door.

Las Vegas. It all came back to him now, and Max sat up and smiled. Las Vegas. Here he would have meetings over the next two days in connection with his purchase of a partial stake in two small southwestern TV cable companies; and meetings concerning land of his along the Mexican border in New Mexico; and meetings concerning a few western politicians who could use his counsel, advice, and money. And here,
here,
he would rid himself once and for all of that goddamned burglar!

In coming here from Sydney, with a pause for a meal and a business discussion in San Francisco, Max had crossed twelve time zones, and had briefly moved backward in time from Sunday to Saturday, before returning to Sunday again in mid–Pacific. At this point, his body clock hadn’t the foggiest idea what time it was, but he hardly cared. It was Sunday here in Las Vegas, some daylight hour of Sunday — harsh sun glared outside the small windows of his bedroom — and he had arrived ahead of the original schedule, at Earl Radburn’s suggestion, to be sure the bait would be already firmly fixed inside the snare at the Gaiety before the mouse came to sniff the cheese.

Max washed and dressed, and soon went out to the main cabin, where the deferentially smiling steward ushered him to the table set for one; snowy linen, china with his own symbol on it in the dark red known as garnet, one bright red rose in a cut glass vase, a sparkling tumbler of orange juice, the smell of toast, the pale yellow of a thin square of butter on a small white dish, red strawberry jam agleam in a shallow bowl, a folded white napkin with a slender garnet border. Lovely.

As Max settled himself into the comfortable chair, the steward poured his first cup of coffee and murmured, “Your omelette will be along in just a moment, sir.”

“Thank you.”

A second steward entered, with newspapers: the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
the
London Daily Telegraph.
They were placed on the table near Max’s right hand, and then that steward withdrew.

Outside the window, the flat vista baked; gray runways and tan dead ground and low airport buildings in no color at all. Smiling upon this view because he was safely insulated from it, Max said to the remaining steward, hovering nearby, “What time is it here?”

“Three–twenty, sir. Your car will come at four. I’ll just go get your omelette now, sir.”

Things are looking up, Max thought, as he drank his orange juice. I can feel it. Las Vegas is where all the bad karma gets worked out of the system, and I’m on top of the world again. This is where it happens. Endgame.

He spread jam on toast, the cool knife in his right hand, and on the third finger of that hand the lucky ring glinted and gleamed.

His own limo, when it stopped at the foot of the steps from the TUI plane, held only Earl Radburn and the driver. Earl emerged, to wait at the side of the car, while half a dozen bulky men came up to escort Max down those steps, so that he corrected the previous image: No, not like a president, more like a serial killer on his way to trial.

The president image had been better.

But actually, Max realized, halfway down the steps from the plane, both images were wrong. It was all wrong. He stopped, and two of his guards bumped into him, and then fell all over each other apologizing. Ignoring them, Max crooked a finger at Earl, turned about, shoved through his escort — it was like pushing through a small herd of dairy cows — and went back up and inside the plane, where his breakfast–serving steward leaped up guiltily from the table where he’d been sprawled, finishing Max’s breakfast and reading Max’s newspapers.

Max ignored that, too, though in other circumstances he might not. Turning away from the red–faced stammering steward, now quaking on his feet, Max faced the doorway until Earl entered the plane, saying, “Mr. Fairbanks? You see something wrong out there?”

“I see everything wrong out there, Earl,” Max told him. “We aren’t trying to scare this fellow off, we aren’t trying to make it obviously impossible for him to get anywhere near me, we’re trying to
lure … him … in.
”

Earl stiffened, even more than usual: “Mr. Fairbanks, your security —”

“— is primarily
my
concern. And I will not feel secure until we have our hands on that burglar. And we won’t
get
our hands on that burglar unless he believes he can at least make a
try
for me.”

Earl clearly didn’t like this. An enforcer to his toes, he had wanted to do by–the–book security here, without regard for the specifics of the situation. But he did at least recognize who was boss, so, with clear reluctance, he nodded once and said, “Yes, sir. What do you suggest?”

“Three cars,” Max told him. “Two men each in the front and rear cars. You and I and the driver in the middle car. No one else. No cars out in front, none trailing along behind. No snipers on the roofs. No helicopters. No people on street corners with walkie–talkies. Earl, I want to arrive at the Gaiety in as normal a manner as possible, as though I didn’t have a care in the world.”

“Sir,” Earl said. He nodded once more, permitted one small sigh to escape his thin lips, and exited to undo a whole spiderweb of security.