Drowned Hopes Read Free Page A

people who couldn’t decide whether or not they wanted to make a left turn. Dortmunder didn’t like being behind the wheel, anyway, and these indecisive locals weren’t improving his disposition much. In his universe, the driver drives — usually Stan Murch, sometimes Andy Kelp — while the specialists ride in back, oiling their pliers and wrapping black tape around their screwdrivers. Putting a specialist behind the wheel and making him drive through little towns hundreds of miles from the real city — well, tens of miles anyway, around a hundred of miles — meant that what you wound up with was a vehicle operated by someone who was both overqualified and nervous.
    But the alternative, this time, was even worse. If Tom Jimson had ever known how to drive a car, and had ever cared enough about humanity to try to drive it in a nonlethal fashion, both the skill and the caring had disappeared completely in the course of his latest twenty–three–year visit inside. So Tom had rented the car — a rental, not even something borrowed from the street, another nervous–making element — and now Dortmunder was doing the driving, regardless.

    At least the weather was good, April sun agleam on the white aluminum siding sheathed around all the quaint old houses that made North Dudson so scenic a place that a city boy could get a migraine just by looking at it. Particularly when he hadn’t had enough sleep. So Dortmunder concentrated on the few familiar reminders of civilization along the way — traffic lights, McDonald’s arches, Marlboro Man billboards — and just kept driving forward, knowing that sooner or later North Dudson would have to come to an end. Beside him, Tom looked around, smiled ironically without moving his lips, and said, “Well, this place is still the same piece of shit, anyway.”

    “What do I do when I get out of town?”

    “You keep driving,” Tom said.

    A taco joint with a neon sign in its window advertising a German beer made in Texas was the last building in North Dudson, and then the fields and forests and farms took over. The road began to wobble and to climb, and here and there horses looked up from their grazing in rock–littered fields to give them the fish eye as they passed by.

    About four miles out of town, Tom broke a fairly long silence by conversationally saying, “That was the road.”

    Dortmunder slammed on the brakes, sluing to a stop on the highway and giving the old fart in the pickup truck tailgating him yet another infarction. “Where?” Dortmunder demanded, staring around, seeing no intersection, his question blotted out by the squawk of the pickup’s horn howling in outraged complaint as the truck swung on by and tore away down the road. “Where?” Dortmunder repeated.

    “Back there,” Tom said, and gave him a look. “You can’t take it now, ” he said. “Putkin’s Corners is gone, remember? That’s the whole problem here.”

    “You mean the old road,” Dortmunder said. “Not any road I’m supposed to take now.”

    “You can’t take it now,” Tom said. “It’s all overgrown. See it?”

    Dortmunder still couldn’t see any road, so Tom must have been right about it being overgrown. “When you said, ‘That was the road,’ ” Dortmunder told him, “I thought you meant I was supposed to turn or something.”

    “When you’re supposed to turn or something,” Tom said, “I’ll tell you so.”

    “I thought you did tell me so,” Dortmunder explained.

    “Well, I didn’t.”

    “Well, it just sounded that way,” Dortmunder said, as a station wagon went by, yapping its horn at them for being stopped in the middle of the road. “When you said, ‘That was the road,’ it sounded like you meant that was the road.”

    “It was the road. Twenty–three years ago it was the road.” Tom sounded snappish. “ Now what it is is a lot of trees and bushes and hills.”

    “It was just confusing, what you said, is all,” Dortmunder