The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake Page B

to the exit from this building and waited there, clustered around the doorway, looking at the black cube of the laundry across the way. Dortmunder checked his watch and it was three–twenty. “Five minutes,” he whispered.

    Four blocks away, Kelp looked at his watch, saw it was three–twenty, and got out of the truck cab again. He was finally getting used to the fact that the interior light didn’t go on when he opened the door, he having removed the bulb himself before they left the city. He closed the door quietly, went around back, and opened the rear doors. “Set,” he whispered to Murch.

    “Right,” Murch whispered back and began pushing a long one–by–twelve board out of the truck. Kelp grabbed the end of it and lowered it to the ground so the board leaned against the rear edge of the truck body in a long slant. Murch pushed out another board and Kelp lined it up beside the other one, with a space of about five feet between the two.

    They had chosen the most industrial area of Utopia Park for this part of the plot. The streets directly contiguous with the prison were all shabby residential, but starting two or three blocks out the neighborhoods began to change. To the north and east were residential neighborhoods, steadily improving the farther away they got, and to the west was a poorer residential area that got progressively slummier till it petered out in a flurry of used car lots, but to the south was Utopia Park’s industry. For block after block there was nothing but the low brick buildings in which sunglasses were made, soft drinks were bottled, tires were recapped, newspapers were printed, dresses were sewn, signs were painted, and foam rubber was covered with fabric. There was no traffic here at night, there were no pedestrians, a police car prowled through only once an hour. There was nothing here at night but all the factories and, parked in front of them, hundreds of trucks. Up this street and down that, nothing but trucks, bumpy–fendered, big–nosed, hulking, dark, empty, silent. Trucks.

    Kelp had parked his truck in with all the other trucks, making it invisible. He had parked just beyond a fire hydrant so there would be room behind the truck, but other than that one open space the rest of the block was pretty well full. Kelp had had to drive around half a dozen blocks before he’d found this space, and it pleased him.

    Now, with the two boards slanting out from the truck to the street, Kelp stepped up on the curb and waited. Murch had disappeared into the blackness inside the truck again, and after a minute there was the sudden chatter of an engine starting up in there. It roared a brief second, then settled down to a quiet purr, and out from the truck nosed a nearly new dark green Mercedes–Benz 250SE convertible. Kelp had run across it earlier this evening on Park Avenue in the Sixties. Because it wasn’t going to be used very much, it still bore its MD plates. Kelp had decided to forgive doctors.

    The boards bowed beneath the weight of the car. Murch, behind the wheel, looked like Gary Cooper taxiing his Grumman into position on the aircraft carrier. Nodding at Kelp the way Coop used to nod at the ground crew, Murch tapped the accelerator and the Mercedes–Benz went away, lights out.

    Murch had spent some of his idle time in the back of the truck reading the owner’s manual he’d found in the car’s glove compartment, and he wondered if the top speed of one hundred eighteen miles an hour was on the up and up or not. He shouldn’t test it now, but coming back maybe he’d have enough of a straightaway to find out.

    Back in the prison, Dortmunder had checked his watch again, found that five minutes had passed, and said, “Okay.” Now the three of them were trotting across the open space toward the laundry, the searchlight having flashed by just before they started.

    Dortmunder and Chefwick put up the ladder and Greenwood led the way up it. The three got to the roof,