The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake Page B

rope and his little black bag. They were all dressed in dark clothing and they communicated in whispers.

    Dortmunder took the coil of rope and went first up the ladder, Chefwick following him. Kelp, at the bottom, held the ladder steady until they were both on top of the truck and then pushed the ladder up after them. Dortmunder laid the ladder lengthwise on the truck top and then he and Chefwick lay down on either side of it, like Boccaccio characters flanking a sword. Kelp, once the ladder was up, went around back again and shut the doors, then got back into the cab, started the engine, and drove the truck slowly around the A&P and out to the street. He didn’t turn the headlights on.

    In the prison, Greenwood, looking at his watch and seeing it was five minutes to three, decided the time had come. He sat up, throwing the covers off, showing he was already fully dressed except for shoes. He put his shoes on now, got to his feet, looked at the sleeping man in the top bunk for a few seconds — the old man was snoring slightly, mouth open — and then Greenwood hit him in the nose.

    The old man’s eyes popped open, round and white, and for two or three seconds he and Greenwood stared at each other, their faces no more than a foot apart. Then the old man blinked, and his hand sidled up from under the blanket to touch his nose, and he said, in surprise and pain, “Ow.”

    Greenwood, shouting at the top of his voice, bellowed, “Stop picking your feet!”

    The old man sat up, his eyes getting rounder and rounder. His nose was starting to bleed. He said, “What? What?”

    Still at top volume, Greenwood roared, “And stop sniffing your fingers!”

    The old man’s fingers were still against his nose, but now he took them away and looked at them, and there was blood on the tips. “Help,” he said, in a very quiet voice, tentatively, as though to be sure that was the word he was looking for. Then, apparently sure, he let fly with a raucous string of helps, putting his head back, squeezing his eyes shut, yipping like a terrier, “Helphelphelphelphelp —” etc.

    “I can’t take it any more” Greenwood raged, taking the baritone part. “I’ll break your neck for you!”

    “Helphelpheiphelp —”

    Lights went on. Guards were shouting. Greenwood began to swear, to tramp back and forth, to wave his fists in the air. He yanked the blanket off the old man, wadded it up, threw it back at him. He grabbed the old man’s ankle and began to squeeze it as though he thought it was the old man’s neck.

    The big clang came that meant the long iron bar across all the cell doors on this side of the tier had been lifted. Greenwood yanked the old man out of bed by his ankle, being careful not to hurt him, clutched him around the neck with one hand, raised his other fist high, and stood posed like that, bellowing, until the cell door opened and three guards came rushing in.

    Greenwood didn’t make it easy for them. He didn’t punch any of them because he didn’t want them to punch him back with truncheons and make him unconscious, but he did keep poking the old man at them, making it difficult for them to come around through the narrow cell and get their hands on him.

    Then, all at once, he subsided. He released the old man, who promptly sat down on the floor and began to clutch his own neck, and he stood there slump–shouldered, vague eyed. “I don’t know,” he said fuzzily, shaking his head. “I don’t know.”

    The guards put their hands on his arms. “We know,” one of them said, and the second said quietly to the third, “Flipped out. I wouldn’t of thought it from him.”

    Not too many walls away, the rented truck had rolled silently and blackly to a stop against the outer wall of the prison. There were towers at both corners of the wall and there was a great deal of light in other parts of the wall, such as the part around the main entrance and the part near the exercise yard, but here there was