He turned around, exasperated beyond endurance. “What now?”

“That’s the wrong case,” Kirby said.

Harrington looked at the case in his hand, and it was the wrong case. It was his attaché case. “My God,” he said. “Good thing I didn’t throw that over, it has some rather important documents in it.” He hurriedly made the switch in the back seat of the car, getting the suitcase and leaving the attaché case. Then he went back to the railing.

The woman on the phone had emphasized that they shouldn’t hang, around, they shouldn’t be nosy, they should just toss the suitcase over the side and be off. So Harrington just tossed the suitcase over the side and was off. He turned at once, not even looking to see where it landed, and got back into the Cadillac.

As Dortmunder came out from under the overpass, the suitcase hit him on the head and knocked him cold.

“Ouch,” said Murch, when he saw that through the windshield. Dortmunder and the suitcase lay side by side next to the blacktop road. Neither of them moved.

Murch shifted into drive, steered the car over there, and shifted back into park. He loaded Dortmunder into the car, tossed the ransom on the back seat, and drove away to the hideout.

“I R E A L L Y am sorry,” Jimmy said. “I’m sure my father didn’t do it on purpose.”

“Yeah, okay,” Dortmunder said. “Just forget it, okay? Ouch!”

“Well, hold still,” May told him. “Let me wash the blood off.”

They were back at the farmhouse. There was a fire again in the fireplace; that, and the three kerosene lamps, gave the room its illumination. Dortmunder sat in a folding chair while May patted his cut head with a damp cloth, preparatory to putting on it the bandage Murch would soon be bringing back from the drugstore. At the card table, Kelp and Murch’s Mom were counting the stacks of bills in the suitcase; Kelp was chortling.

Jimmy said, “My father is really very nonphysical. Really.”

“I said forget it.”

“It’s all right, Jimmy,” May said. “Nobody blames your father. It was an accident.”

“By golly,” Kelp said, “it’s all here!”

“It ought to be,” Murch’s Mom said, “after all we went through.”

Murch came in then, revealing a quick view of late afternoon daylight on a rural autumn scene. He closed the door on all that, returning the room to fire lit night, and brought a package to May, saying, “No trouble. They’re getting to know me in town.” He seemed pleased by that.

Kelp said, “Stan, it’s all here, every penny.”

Murch nodded. “Good,” he said, but he didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic. Neither success nor failure surprised him; he had the born driver’s belief in the task being its own reward. Getting there is half the fun. It isn’t whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.

Murch’s Mom said, “You know what I’m getting sick of? I’m getting sick of living in this lousy farmhouse. This place is a landlord’s dream come true: no heat, no hot water, no electricity, no phone, and the john doesn’t work. I can get the same thing in New York, and be close to the cultural’ conveniences.”

“We’ll be leaving tonight,” Kelp said. “We unload the—”

“No, we won’t,” Dortmunder said, and winced while May put the neat white gauze bandage on his forehead.

Kelp was astonished. “We won’t? Why not?”

“We’ll leave tomorrow morning,” Dortmunder said, “and drop the kid in the city.”

“Hold still,” May told him.

“Well, take it easy,” he said.

Kelp said, “Wait a minute. That’s not what we do with the kid. In chapter nineteen it says we-”

“I’d hate to tell you,” Dortmunder said, “what you can do with chapter nineteen. In fact, with the whole book.”

Kelp was astounded and hurt. “How can you argue with it?” he demanded. He gestured toward Jimmy, temporarily out of earshot over by the fireplace, adding a piece of shelf to the fire. “We got the kid, didn’t we?” He gestured toward the money on the card table. “We got the cash, didn’t we?”

Dortmunder gestured at his new bandage. “I got this, didn’t I?”

“That’s not the book’s fault, you can’t blame the—”

“I can blame anybody I damn well want to blame,” Dortmunder said. “That book goes in for too much detail, it makes everything too complicated. You want to know how we’re going to give the kid back? I’ll tell you how we’re going to give the kid back.”

Kelp waved his hand in front of himself, then pointed toward Jimmy, who had come back over from the fireplace. “Not in front of the boy.”

“It don’t matter what he hears,” Dortmunder said. “What I got in mind is neat and simple. No school busses, no phone calls, none of that razzmatazz.”

“I don’t know,” Kelp said. His brow was grooved with worry. “I don’t think we oughta deviate from the plan,” he said. “It’s been working out, it really has.”

“I don’t care,” Dortmunder said. “This part we do my way.”

Behind Dortmunder’s bandaged head, May waggled a hand at Kelp not to argue. Shrugging, Kelp said, “You’re the boss, John, I always said that.”

“All right.” Dortmunder seemed to shrug his shoulders, to sit a little straighter in the chair. “Now,” he said. “We don’t let the kid go around here, because that leaves us the whole long run to the city with every cop in New Jersey looking for us. So we take him to New York, and we give him a subway token, and we let him out of the car in midtown. With a token he can’t make a phone call to turn the law loose on us right away. All he can do is take a subway or a bus. That gives us time to fade out.”

Murch’s Mom said, “Why can’t we do that tonight? Take him to the city, drop him off, I get to sleep in my own bed, cook a meal, flush a toilet.”

Dortmunder said, “Where’s the kid go at night? You’re gonna leave a kid in midtown at night? Some sex maniac comes along and kills him and we get blamed. Tomorrow he can go to his father’s office, or he can go up to that place on Central Park West, he can go wherever he wants.”

“Sure,” Jimmy said. “That sounds fine to me.”

Dortmunder pointed at him. “I don’t need any help from you,” he said.

May said, “John, the boy was just agreeing with you.”

“Well, I don’t need it.” Dortmunder knew he was being grumpily unfair, and that just made him grumpier. “Where was I?” he said. “Right. We drive him in tomorrow, let him off, get rid of the car, and we all go home. Finished. Done with.”

Kelp shook his head. “It just doesn’t have the scope of Richard Stark,” he said.

“I’ve had all the scope I need,” Dortmunder said. “I’ve been scoped enough.”

“Wonderful,” Murch’s Mom said. “Another night in the Antarctica Hilton.”

Murch said to Dortmunder, “What if we just let him off near his house? Tonight, I mean.”

“No,” Dortmunder said. “He immediately gets the law on us. We have sixty miles to get to New York, and they know that’s where we’re headed, and we never make it.”

“We can give ourselves an edge,” Murch said. “I happened to notice that for the last half mile on the county road to the kid’s place there isn’t any phone booth at all. No gas stations, no stores, no bars, nothing, just a couple farms, a couple private estates. And you know the way those places are set up for protection from strangers. The kid wouldn’t dare just walk in some driveway after dark. He’d get eaten up by a dog first thing, and he knows it.”

“That’s true,” Jimmy said. “On Halloween, when I used to go trick or treating, Maurice had to drive me.”

“You keep out of this,” Dortmunder told him. To Murch he said, “That still only gives us maybe fifteen minutes head start. In Jersey I can’t disappear. In New York I can fade away like that.” And he snapped his fingers.

Murch’s Mom said to her son, “It’s okay, Stan. He’s really right, and I can put up with this place one more night. I’m almost getting used to it.”