Free Thieves Dozen by Donald E. Westlake Page A

Wright brothers’ first airplane, swooping and plunging down the middle of the street, that wall of buses getting closer and closer.
    “Here! In here!” Uniformed cops appeared on both sidewalks, waving to him, offering sanctuary in the forms of open doorways and police vehicles to crouch behind, but Dortmunder was
escaping.
From everything.
    The buses. He launched himself through the air, hit the black-top hard and rolled under the nearest bus. Roll, roll, roll, hitting his head and elbows and knees and ears and nose and various other parts of his body against any number of hard, dirty objects, and then he was past the bus and on his feet, staggering, staring at a lot of goggle-eyed medics hanging around beside their ambulances, who just stood there and gawked back.
    Dortmunder turned left.
Medics
weren’t going to chase him; their franchise didn’t include healthy bodies running down the street. The cops couldn’t chase him until they’d moved their buses out of the way. Dortmunder took off like the last of the dodoes, flapping his arms, wishing he knew how to fly.
    The out-of-business shoe store, the other terminus of the tunnel, passed on his left. The getaway car they’d parked in front of it was long gone, of course. Dortmunder kept thudding on, on, on.
    Three blocks later, a gypsy cab committed a crime by picking him up even though he hadn’t phoned the dispatcher first; in the city of New York, only licensed medallion taxis are permitted to pick up customers who hail them on the street. Dortmunder, panting like a Saint Bernard on the lumpy back seat, decided not to turn the guy in.
    His faithful companion May came out of the living room when Dortmunder opened the front door of his apartment and stepped into his hall. “
There
you are!” she said. “Thank goodness. It’s all over the radio
and
the television.”
    “I may never leave the house again,” Dortmunder told her. “If Andy Kelp ever calls, says he’s got this great job, easy, piece of cake, I’ll just tell him I’ve retired.”
    “Andy’s here,” May said. “In the living room. You want a beer?”
    “Yes,” Dortmunder said simply.
    May went away to the kitchen and Dortmunder limped into the living room, where Kelp was seated on the sofa holding a can of beer and looking happy. On the coffee table in front of him was a mountain of money.
    Dortmunder stared. “What’s
that
?”
    Kelp grinned and shook his head. “It’s been too long since we scored, John,” he said. “You don’t even recognize the stuff anymore. This is money.”
    “But— From the vault? How?”
    “After you were taken away by those other guys—they were caught, by the way,” Kelp interrupted himself, “without loss of life—anyway, I told everybody in the vault there, the way to keep the money safe from the robbers was we’d all carry it out with us. So we did. And then I decided what we should do is put it all in the trunk of my unmarked police car in front of the shoe store, so I could drive it to the precinct for safekeeping while they all went home to rest from their ordeal.”
    Dortmunder looked at his friend. He said, “You got the hostages to carry the money from the vault.”
    “And put it in our car,” Kelp said. “Yeah, that’s what I did.” May came in and handed Dortmunder a beer. He drank deep, and Kelp said, “They’re looking for you, of course. Under that other name.”
    May said, “That’s the one thing I don’t understand. Diddums?”
    “It’s Welsh,” Dortmunder told her. Then he smiled upon the mountain of money on the coffee table. “It’s not a bad name,” he decided. “I may keep it.”

A M IDSUMMER D AYDREAM
    I T HAVING BECOME ADVISABLE TO LEAVE N EW Y ORK C ITY FOR AN indefinite period, Dortmunder and Kelp found themselves in the countryside, in a barn, watching a lot of fairies dance. “I don’t know about this,” Dortmunder muttered.
    “It’s perfect cover,” Kelp whispered. “Who’d look for