I'm a robber, John Dortmunder says, "not a grave robber." Yet he soon finds himself in a Long Island cemetery, in the very dead of night, with dirt up to his knees. His old friend Andy Kelp is to blame--Andy Kelp and the Internet. For it was while ambling on the Net that Kelp met up with master manipulator Fitzroy Guilderpost and his nefarious companions, the flunked teacher Irwin Gabel and the Las Vegas showgirl Little Feather Redcorn. What these three have in mind is the amazing takeover of an upstate New York casino, and what they also envision is that Dortmunder and Kelp will not share in the ill-gotten gains, even though ill-gotten gains are Dortmunder's and Kelp's only source of income. Shovel in hand, Dortmunder wonders whose grave this is. And if he isn't very careful, and very alert, it could be his.
1
John Dortmunder was a man on whom the sun shone only when he needed
darkness. Now, like an excessively starry sky, a thousand thousand
fluorescent lights in great rows under the metal roof of this huge
barnlike store building came flickering and buzzing and slurping on,
throwing a great glare over all the goods below, and over Dortmunder,
too, and yet he knew this vast Speedshop discount store in this
vast blacktop shopping mall in deepest New Jersey, very near Mordor, did
not open at ten minutes past two in the morning. That's why he was here.
Speedshop was a great sprawling mass-production retailer stocked mostly
with things that weren't worth more than a quarter and didn't cost more
than four dollars, but it had a few pricier sections as well. There were
a pharmacy and a liquor department and a video shop and an appliance
showroom. Most important, from Dortmunder's point of view, there was a
camera department, carrying everything from your basic low-price PhD
(Push here, Dummy) to advanced computer-driven machines that chose their
own angles.
In two Speedshop tote bags, canvas, white, emblazoned in red with the
Speedshop slogan:
! SAVE FAST !
at
!! SPEEDSHOP !!
Dortmunder could fit ten thousand dollars' worth of such
high-end cameras, for which he would receive, no questions asked
(because the answers are already known), from a fellow in New York named
Arnie Albright, one thousand dollars in cash. Ten minutes inside the
store, no more, after he'd bypassed the loading dock alarm systems, and
he'd be back in the Honda Platoon he'd borrowed forty minutes ago from
an apartment complex farther up the highway, and well on his way home to
the peace and quiet and safety of New York City.
But, no. As tote bags full of cameras dangled from his bony hands and he
loped down the silent, semidark aisles -- little night-lights here and
there guided him along his way -- he was suddenly bathed in this
ice-water deluge of a harsh white fluorescent glare.
Okay. There must have been something, some motion sensor or extra alarm
he hadn't noticed, that had informed on him, and this big store would be
filling up right this second with many police officers, plus, probably,
private Speedshop security people, all of them armed and all of them
looking, though they didn't know it yet, for John Dortmunder. Didn't
know it yet, but soon would.
What to do? First, drop these bags of cameras behind a kids' sneaker
display rack. Second, panic.
Well, what else? He'd come in from the loading docks at the back, which
they surely knew, so they would come in from the back as well,
but they would also come in from the front. And they would leave guards
at every entrance, while the rest of them fanned out to search
inexorably forward like volunteer Boy Scouts in pursuit of a lost hiker.
Any second now, groups of them would appear at the ends of aisles,
visible far away. And he would be just as visible to them.
Hide? Where? Nowhere. The shelves were packed full and high. If this
were a traditional department store, he could at least try to pretend to
be a mannequin in the men's clothing section, but these discount places
were too cheap to have full entire mannequins. They had mannequins that
consisted of just enough body to drape the displayed clothing on.
Pretending to be a headless and armless mannequin was just a little too
far beyond Dortmunder's histrionic capabilities.
