Drowned Hopes Part 23

"They didn't touch it, Al. Trust me on this. Now, one of these doorways should lead to the- Here it is."

Their flashlight beams shone on rusted metal steps leading down into pitch-black total darkness. Looking down there, Dortmunder said, "No matter where I go with you, Tom, sooner or later it's the descent into the depths."

"This is a very solid structure, Al," Tom a.s.sured him. "There's no way it's gonna collapse on us."

Dortmunder hadn't even been thinking of that, but now he was. "Thanks, Tom," he said.

"Sure," Tom said, and started down the stairs, carrying his wrench and hammer in one hand, flashlight in the other, Dortmunder reluctantly following, Tom saying over his shoulder, "Anyway, the wine bottles. I rolled the dough into wads and stuffed them into the bottles, and it took three bottles. Then I brought them down here under my skirt one night."

"Under your skirt. You were still being the sister."

"I went on being the sister, Al," Tom said, "until Nogales, New Mexico. Let's see now, which way?"

They'd reached the bottom of the steps and stood in a smallish open area with doorways leading off in all directions. Anonymous mounds of stuff; crumbly-looking brick walls; pockmarked concrete floor. As Tom turned in a slow circle, pointing the light here and there, trying to reorient himself after all these years, he said, "Did you ever think, Al, in a hotel room, when you flush the toilet, where all that water goes? All those toilets, all those sinks, hundreds of them all in one building, hundreds of people p.i.s.sing and c.r.a.pping and brus.h.i.+ng their teeth and flus.h.i.+ng foreign objects down the commode even when they've been told not to do that, you ever wonder where all that water and stuff goes next?"

"Never," Dortmunder said.

"We go this way," Tom decided, and set off down a wide low-ceilinged filthy hallway, Dortmunder following. "Well, the water comes down here," Tom said, continuing the conversation as they walked. "The pipes get bigger, and there's traps to keep certain stuff from clogging the whole arrangement, and then there's one big last pipe that goes out under the street to the city sewers. And just in front of that last pipe is the last trap and sump. There's access to it so a plumber can get in there if anything really horrible happens, but mostly it's left alone."

"I'd leave it alone," Dortmunder said.

"Believe it or not, Al," Tom told him, "people looking for fourteen thousand dollars will also leave it alone. Guaranteed."

"That's where you put the three wine bottles?"

"I can still smell it," Tom said, shaking his head at the memory.

They went through another doorless doorway into a larger area. Dortmunder's flashlight picked up the scattered skeletons of a couple of small animals on the floor. The air down here smelled dry but rancid, like having your nose rubbed in rotted wood. "I think I can smell it, too," he said.

Tom did his chuckle sound. "Been a long time since anybody's flushed a toilet in this town, Al," he said. "It shouldn't be bad by now. Just up ahead there."

Just up ahead was another brick wall. On the floor in front of it Tom's flashlight picked out a metal plate about three feet by two, held in place with bolts at the corners. Kneeling at one of these corners, bending down to blow dust and trash away from the bolt, Tom said, "Gonna get loud in here for a while."

And it did. Tom hooked the wrench onto the head of the bolt, then began to whale away at the metal handle of the wrench with his hammer. w.a.n.g! w.a.n.g! w.a.n.g! And in the pauses angang, angang, angang, as the sound echoed and rang and reverberated all around the enclosed s.p.a.ce.

After about five minutes of this craziness, Tom stood up and mopped his brow and said, "Spell me awhile, Al," so Dortmunder got to make the horrible noise himself, and it was on his watch that the bolt finally reluctantly started to turn, adding its SKRAWK-SKRAWK to all the w.a.n.gangangings.

The bolt never did get easy. The wrench had to be hit for every fraction of every turn. But at last the thick, rusty, long bolt came all the way out and fell over, clattering with the wrench still attached onto the metal plate, making another charming sound.

Tom said, "Terrific, Al. Only three to go. I'll take a turn now."

All in all, Dortmunder later figured, they were down in there nearly an hour before the last bolt grudgingly released its grip on the floor and fell over, and then the d.a.m.n plate itself didn't want to move, until Tom and Dortmunder had both hit it a hundred million times around its edges. And then at last, slow, heavy, rusty, difficult, it lifted up and out of the way.

Oh, boy. Forty years hadn't done a thing to lessen that aroma. "Aaaaa!" cried Dortmunder, releasing the plate as it fell over onto its back. While Tom watched him with interest, Dortmunder staggered backward, hands to his nose. It was as though somebody'd just hit him in the face with a used shroud.

"This isn't even it, Al," Tom told him calmly. "The bottles are down inside that trap, fastened with wires. See the trap?"

But Dortmunder didn't want to look down into that place. "I believe you," he managed to gasp through a throat uninterested in breathing, not if this was what air had become. "It's okay, I believe you."

Pointing his flashlight into the hole beneath the metal plate, Tom said, "This is just the access to the pit with the equipment. Hmmm; a lot drier than it used to be."

"Tom," Dortmunder said through his hands, "I'm sorry, but I can't hang around in here anymore." He looked wildly around on the floor for his flashlight, staring over his protective knuckles, trying to breathe without inhaling. And there it was, the flashlight, on the floor, gleaming toward that awful place. Moving to retrieve it, Dortmunder said, "I'll just wait for you upstairs. You don't need me anymore, right?"

"You're gonna miss something, Al," Tom said. "Those wine bottles, full of cash. Over forty years down in there."

"If that's what I'm gonna miss," Dortmunder said, shakily pointing the flashlight toward the doorway on the far side of the room, "then I'm just gonna have to miss it. See you upstairs."

"Can you find your way?"

"Yes."

With a feeling that he understood the phrase "a.s.shole of the world" better than he ever had before, Dortmunder went out of that room and headed for an environment more compatible with man. His sense of direction, sometimes shaky, had him doubtful at one turning or another, but as long as he stayed ahead of that smell he knew he'd be all right. Though it would be nice to have that rope around his waist right now, with Tiny pulling at the other end.

Another corridor, but smelling only of the usual dry brick dust and decayed wood. Dortmunder traversed it, went through the doorway at the far end, and there was the staircase up. And amazing was its transformation: what on the way down had been rust-diseased and battered and filthy was now, in Dortmunder's eyes, marble and gold, strewn with rose petals and glisten'd o'er with dew, leading upward to Paradise. Or at least to normal air.

At the head of the stairs, as he'd remembered, were the offices behind the main desk. These were interior rooms, without windows, and Dortmunder wanted windows, so he set off toward the lobby, rounded a corner into a hall, and his flashlight shone on a scrawny old ragam.u.f.fin of a guy holding a rifle pointed straight at him. "Sssh," said the guy.

Dortmunder nodded. When a person pointing a rifle at you says, "Sssh," you don't speak out loud in response, but you do nod.

"Point that light at the floor!"

Dortmunder pointed the light at the floor.

"Come on around me and walk out to the lobby."

Dortmunder did that, too. What the h.e.l.l, that's where he'd been going, anyway.

The sudden western twilight had come and been and gone, leaving a faint but clear silvery greenish-gray illumination at every exterior rectangle, returning to these former windows and former doors a bit of their one-time dignity.

"s.h.i.+ne the light over to the left."

Dortmunder did so and saw another doorway, leading into what had once been the hotel bar (members only). "You want me to go over there?"

"Sss.h.!.+"

Dortmunder nodded.

Something-probably not the old guy's finger-prodded Dortmunder's back, and the old guy's hoa.r.s.e harsh voice, nearly a whisper, said, "Where's your partner?" He p.r.o.nounced it "pardner."

"Downstairs," Dortmunder answered in the same near whisper. "In the bas.e.m.e.nt. Looking at the, uh, plumbing."

"Plumbing?" That seemed to bewilder the old guy but only for a second because, with another prod in Dortmunder's back, he said, "Go on in over there."

So Dortmunder did that, too, entering one of the most completely stripped rooms in the hotel. Tables, chairs, banquettes, barstools, bar, back bar, mirrors, cabinets, sinks, refrigerators, carpets, light fixtures, light switches, imitation Remington prints, window shades and curtains, cash register, gla.s.ses, ash trays, tap levers, duckboard floor behind the bar, both clocks, and the sawed-off baseball bat; all were gone.

Dortmunder's flashlight picked out the peeling rotting plywood floor, the brick walls, and in the middle of the floor a black box, three feet tall and about one foot square. Pointing the light beam directly at it, Dortmunder saw it was a speaker cabinet from some old sound system, not looted because somebody at one time had kicked it in the mouth, ripping the black-and-silver front cloth and puncturing the speaker's diaphragm. Maybe somebody who'd heard "Rock Around the Clock" once too often.

"Sit down," said the raspy rusty voice.

"On that?"

For answer, he got another poke from the non-finger. So he went over to the speaker and turned around and sat on it, being careful to point the flashlight beam downward and not directly toward his captor. "Here I am," he said.

"s.h.i.+ne the light on your face."

He did, which made him squint. Resting the b.u.t.t of the flashlight on his knee, he pointed the business end at his nose and said, "This kinda makes it tough."

"Point it to the side a little," the voice said out of the darkness, sounding petulant all at once. "This ain't the third degree."

"It isn't?" Dortmunder pointed the light beam over his right shoulder, which was better.

"I just gotta see your face," the old guy explained, "so I can see if you're telling the truth."

"I always tell the truth," Dortmunder lied, and gave the old guy a good clear view of his face while doing so to see how things could be expected to go.

Pretty well. "You better be sure you do," the old guy said, having just failed the test. "What do you know about..." Portentous pause, that. "... Tim Jepson?"

Ah-hah. With the lightning speed of a main-frame computer, in nano-fractions of a nanosecond, Dortmunder got the picture. "Tim Jepson" = "Tom Jimson." Old guy with rifle = ex-partner left in elevator. Long-term revenge from a loony. A loony with a rifle. A loony with a rifle and a legitimate grievance against the guy he'd already referred to as "your pardner." Face held unflinchingly into the light, "Never heard of him," Dortmunder said.

"He didn't send you two here for... anything?"

"Not us," Dortmunder said, knowing it was the fourteen thousand dollars the old guy was hinting around about, knowing-old computer brain still clicking along at top speed-this old guy would have searched high and low for that money, but not low enough. Tom had been right about that; fourteen grand wasn't enough to get most people to go down into that trap in the large intestine of the Cronley Hotel.

Just how long was it going to take Tom to finish down there? And when he came up, what would happen then? This old guy hadn't recognized Tom yet, but wouldn't he sooner or later?

"If Jepson didn't send you," the querulous voice said out of the darkness, "what are you doing here?"

Oh, good question. "Inspection," Dortmunder said, floundering a bit, the old computer brain beginning to hiccup. What was he doing here? "We were told there wasn't anybody living in, uh, Cronley," he said, filling time, being innocent, waiting for the computer to come through.

"Who told you?"

"Well, the state," Dortmunder said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. "The State, uh, Department of Recovery."

"Department of Recovery?"

"You never heard of the D.O.R.?" Dortmunder shook his head, astonished at such unworldliness. "You gotta know about the housing shortage, right?"

"You mean..." The old guy's voice quavered. "Here?"

He's buying it! Dortmunder kept his face innocently blank and earnest as he said, "Well, that's what we're here to check out. To see if the, uh, you know, the, uh, infra, infra, infra..."

What was that word? Knowing he was losing his audience, knowing his right hand and therefore the flashlight beam was beginning to tremble, knowing his look of simple honesty was falling apart only because he couldn't remember one single word, realizing that hotshot computer inside his head was down, Dortmunder gaped in the light, struggled-infra, infra, infrasomething-and gave it up. "Well," he said pleasantly, "bye now," and switched off the flashlight as he dove for the floor.

"Infrastructure!" he shouted, the G.o.dd.a.m.n word blazing across his brain too late, his voice drowned out by the roar of the rifle.

THIRTY-EIGHT.

"Infrastructure!" shouted the interloper in the dark.

So Guffey'd missed him, dang it. Aiming at where he thought the voice had come from-hard to tell in this enclosed s.p.a.ce, though, with the brang of his first shot still echoing in his ears-Guffey fired again.

"Infrastructure! Infrastructure!"

What was that, some new word for I surrender? Lowing his rifle, Guffey peered angrily into the darkness. He was getting confused, and he hated that. What was going on? Why had this state inspector-if that's what he was-suddenly switched off his flashlight and started running around the darkness shouting out foreign words?

And if he and his partner weren't state inspectors from the Department of Recovery, then who were they? Would Tim Jepson send other people to get his fourteen thousand dollars, or would he come himself? If Guffey knew Tim Jepson, and he thought he did by now, Tim Jepson wasn't a man who trusted other people a whole lot. Not enough to tell some other people where he'd hidden a stash of money. And certainly not enough to send those other people out here by themselves to get it.

Could one of these two interlopers be Tim Jepson in disguise? The features of the man who had ruined his life were seared permanently into Guffey's brain, undimmed by the more than forty years that had pa.s.sed since he'd last laid eyes on that devil in human shape. Slick black hair parted in the middle and pasted flat to his skull with Vitalis. Piercing dark eyes under thin eyebrows of midnight black. A cruel hard smile showing big white teeth. A kind of loping walk, shoulders loose. A big-framed but skinny body. There was no way Tim Jepson could disguise himself that Guffey wouldn't recognize him.

So these were just looters, weren't they? Not officials from state government, looking to move people back into this old town. And not people connected with Tim Jepson. Simple looters, looking for plumbing fixtures at this late date! Dumb as they looked, in other words.

"Infrastructure!"

"Oh, shut up," Guffey said, trying to think.

Surprisingly, the idiot shut up. He also stopped running back and forth and stood still. Guffey knew that because the fellow had stopped in front of a window, not realizing he was outlined against the starlight outside. And therefore he had no idea Guffey could now drop him with one shot, simple as pie.

But Guffey no longer wanted to shoot him. The way he saw it, he was already in so much trouble just having shot at this idiot that he'd probably have to hide out in the woods for a year before the state cops stopped looking for him. If he actually killed himself a couple plumbing-fixture thieves, the state cops wouldn't give up looking until they found him.

And if they ever did find him, he knew what they'd do next. They'd put him back inside. Back inside there. The thought made Guffey's hands tremble so hard he almost dropped the rifle. "Turn the flashlight back on, will you?" he asked, hating the quaver he couldn't keep out of his voice.

"What, and get shot?"

"You're standing in front of a window," Guffey told him, forgetting his fear in his exasperation. "If I wanted to shoot you, you'd be shot by now."

He saw the shadowy figure spin around to stare at the window, heard the shadowy figure gasp, and then the flashlight came on again, pointing at the window, illuminating the street out front and their little car parked there.

Little car. Hmmmm...

"Wait a minute," Guffey said, and the flashlight swung around to point in his direction. Ignoring the light, Guffey said, "People who come here to steal toilets and sinks, they don't drive little cars like that."

"I told you," the interloper said, "we're from the State Department of Recovery, checking on the infrastructure so we can report-"

"Cow doody," Guffey told him. "People from the government come around here sometimes. They're in big Ford LTDs with air, with a big state seal on the side. Or Chrysler LeBarons. People from the government don't drive d.i.n.ky little j.a.p cars like that."

"We're, uh, outside consultants," the interloper said.

Dealing with other human beings was so aggravating. They constantly made Guffey angry, or scared, or confused, or sad. "G.o.ddammit," Guffey said to this one, "you just stop lying to me right now, or I don't care what happens, I'll shoot you anyway."

"Why would I lie to you?" the interloper demanded, foolishly, and pointed the flashlight up at his own face again. A dumb and completely untrustworthy smile was crookedly attached to it now, like a sign half knocked down by a hurricane.

"That's what I wanna know," Guffey told him, and brought the rifle b.u.t.t up to his shoulder as he pointed the business end at that insulting smile. Aiming dead at that face down the length of the rifle barrel, Guffey said, "You ain't looters, and you ain't from the government. I know you're nothing to do with Tim Jepson, I know I still got longer to wait till he shows up, but he will, and I'm gonna be here, and you and your partner ain't gonna make trouble for me. By G.o.d, I will shoot you, shoot the both of you, and bury you where they'll never find you, and drive that little car of yours into the river, and won't n.o.body ever know a thing about it. So you better tell me the truth."