2

Kelp drove along with one eye on the empty street ahead and one eye on the rear-view mirror showing the empty street behind. He was tense but alert. He said, “You should’ve told me sooner.”

“I tried,” Dortmunder said. He was being sullen and grumpy in the corner.

“You could’ve got us both in trouble,” Kelp said. The memory of the police car’s siren was making him nervous, and nervousness made him talkative.

Dortmunder didn’t say anything. Kelp took a quick glance at him and saw him brooding at the glove compartment, as though wondering if it had an ax in it. Kelp went back to watching the street and the rear-view mirror and said, “With that record of yours, you know, you get picked up for anything, you’ll get life.”

“Is that right?” Dortmunder said. He was really being very sour, even worse than usual.

Kelp drove one-handed for a minute while he got out his pack of Trues, shook one out, and put it between his lips. He extended the pack sideways, saying, “Cigarette?”

“True? What the hell kind of brand is that?”

“It’s one of the new ones with the low nicotine and tars. Try it.”

“I’ll stick to Camels,” Dortmunder said, and out of the corner of his eye Kelp saw him pull a battered pack of them from his jacket pocket. “True,” Dortmunder grumbled. “I don’t know what the hell kind of name that is for a cigarette.”

Kelp was stung. He said, “Well, what kind of name is Camel? True means something. What the hell does Camel mean?”

“It means cigarettes,” Dortmunder said. “For years and years it means cigarettes. I see something called True, I figure right away it’s a fake.”

“Just because you’ve been working a con,” Kelp said, “you figure everybody else is too.”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

Kelp could deal with anything at that point except being agreed with; not knowing where to go from there, he let the conversation lapse. Also, realizing he was still holding the cigarette pack in his right hand, he tucked it away again in his shirt pocket.

Dortmunder said, “I thought you quit anyway.”

Kelp shrugged. “I started again.” He put both hands on the wheel while he negotiated a right turn onto Merrick Avenue, a major street with a good amount of traffic.

Dortmunder said, “I thought the cancer commercials on television scared you off.”

“They did,” Kelp said. There were now cars both in front of him and behind him, but none of them contained police. “They don’t show them any more,” he said. “They took the cigarette commercials off, and they took the cancer commercials off at the same time. So I went back.” Still watching the street, he reached out to press the lighter button in. Windshield washer fluid suddenly sprayed all over the glass in front of him, and he couldn’t see a thing.

Dortmunder shouted, “What the hell are you doing?”

“God damn it!” Kelp yelled and stomped on the brake. It was a power brake, and the car stopped on a dime and gave them change. “These American cars!” Kelp yelled, and something crashed into them from behind.

Dortmunder, peeling himself off the dashboard, said, “I suppose this is better than life imprisonment.”

Kelp had found the windshield wipers and now they started sweeping back and forth over the glass, flinging gobs of fluid left and right. “We’re okay now,” Kelp said, and somebody knocked on the side window next to his left ear. He turned his head, and there was a heavyset guy in a topcoat out there, shouting. “Now what?” Kelp said. He found the button that would slide the power window down, pushed it, and the power window slid down. Now he could hear that the heavyset guy was shouting, “Look what you done to my car!”

Kelp looked out front, but there wasn’t anything in front of him at all. Then he looked in the rear-view mirror and saw a car very close to him in the back.

The heavyset guy was shouting, “Come look! Come see for yourself!”

Kelp opened the car door and got out. A bronze Pinto was nuzzling the purple Toronado in the rear. Kelp said, “Well, for Christ’s sake.”

“Look what you done to my car!”

Kelp walked down to where the two cars met and studied the damage. Glass was broken, chrome was bent, and what looked like radiator fluid was making a green puddle on the blacktop.

“I tell you,” the heavyset guy shouted, “to go ahead, just go ahead and look what you done to my car!”

Kelp shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “You hit me from the rear. I didn’t do anything to —”

“You jammed on your brakes! How’m I supposed to —”

“Any insurance company in the world will tell you the driver in the back is the one who —”

“You jammed on your — We’ll see what the cops say!”

The cops. Kelp gave the heavyset guy a bland, unworried smile and started to walk around the Pinto, as though to inspect the damage on the other side. There was a row of stores on the right here, and he’d already spotted an alley between two of them.

On the way around the Pinto, Kelp glanced in and saw that the storage area in back was full of open-top cardboard cartons full of paperback books. About five or six titles, with dozens of copies of each title. One was called Passion Doll, another Man Hungry, another Strange Affair. The covers featured undressed girls. There were Call Me Sinner and Off Limits and Apprentice Virgin. Kelp paused.

The heavyset guy had been following him, ranting and raving, waving his arms around so that his topcoat flapped — imagine somebody wearing a topcoat on a day like this — but now he stopped when Kelp did, and his voice lowered, and in an almost normal tone of voice he said, “So what?”

Kelp stood looking in at the paperback books. “You were talking about the cops,” he said.

Other traffic was now having to detour around them. A woman in a Cadillac shouted as she went by, “Why don’t you bums get off the road?”

“I’m talking about traffic cops,” the heavyset guy said.

“Whatever you’re talking about,” Kelp said, “what you’re gonna get is cops. And they’re likely to care more about the back of your car than the front.”

“The Supreme Court —”

“I didn’t figure we’d get the Supreme Court to come out for a traffic accident,” Kelp said. “What I figured, we’d probably get just local Suffolk County cops.”

“I got a lawyer to handle that,” the heavyset guy said, but he didn’t seem as sure of himself any more.

“Also, you hit me from behind,” Kelp said. “Let’s not leave that out of our calculations.”

The heavyset guy looked quickly all around, as though for an exit, and then looked at his watch. “I’m late for an appointment,” he said.

“So am I,” said Kelp. “What I figure, what the hell, we’ve got the same amount of damage on each car. I’ll pay for mine, you pay for yours. We put a claim in with the insurance company, they’ll just up our rates.”

“Or drop us,” the heavyset guy said. “That happened to me once already. If it wasn’t for a guy my brother-in-law knew, I wouldn’t have insurance right now.”

“I know how it is,” Kelp said.

“Those bastards’ll rob you deaf, dumb and blind,” the heavyset guy said, “and then all of a sudden boom — they drop you.”

“We’re better off we don’t have anything to do with them,” Kelp said.

“Fine by me,” the heavyset guy said.

“Well, I’ll see you around,” Kelp said.

“So long,” said the heavyset guy, but even as he said it he was starting to look puzzled, as though beginning to suspect he’d missed a station somewhere along the way.

Dortmunder wasn’t in the car. Kelp shook his head as he put the Toronado in drive. “Oh, ye of little faith,” he said under his breath and drove off with a grinding of metal.

He didn’t realize he’d carried the Pinto’s front bumper away with him until two blocks later, when he started up from a traffic light and it fell off back there with one hell of a crash.