Free Drowned Hopes by Donald Westlake

is some goddamn piece of work,” Tom said, leaning closer over Wally’s head. “Let’s take a look to the left.” The angle of vision moved leftward, past the library. “Good,” Tom said. “No streetlight. Now the other way.”

    The person in the field turned all the way around, buildings sliding past in distorted perspective, as in a funhouse mirror, while Dortmunder’s stomach did that lurch again. And there was the low row of stores, facing the other way, and between two of them appeared another stick–figure streetlight.

    His grim voice hushed, Tom said, “Back up a little, and to the right.”

    Wally did it. The stores shifted; the streetlight disappeared.

    “Right there! ” Tom crowed, his mouth all the way open for once. “Right goddamn there! ”

TEN
----
    “Was I right?” Kelp demanded, grinning from ear to ear as he and Dortmunder and Tom Jimson walked east on West Forty–fifth Street, away from Wally Knurr’s decrepit apartment building — loft building, really, semiconverted to human use — half a block from the river. “Was I right? Is Wally the genius we wanted?”
    “He says,” Tom Jimson answered, his thin lips immobile, “the tunnel won’t work.”

    “I know that, I know that,” Kelp admitted, brushing it aside, or at least trying to brush it aside. “That isn’t the —”

    “Them graphics looked pretty good,” Tom Jimson added, nodding with satisfaction.

    The graphics, as a matter of fact, had looked far too graphic. Wally, his fingers scampering like escaped sausages over the keys, had described to them how he’d presented the salvage operation problem to the computer, and how he’d input the tunnel option, and then he’d shown them what the computer thought of the various potential tunnel routes.

    Not much. In beautiful blue and brown and green, the computer thought the routes were watery graves, every last one of them. Down would angle the tunnel, a beige tube eating its way into existence through the milk chocolate beneath and beside the baby–blanket–blue cross–section of the reservoir, inching cautiously but hungrily toward that tiny black cube of “treasure” placed just beneath the center of the blue mass like an abandoned novel under a fat man in a blue canvas chair, and sooner or later, at some horrible point in the trajectory, a crack would appear above the tunnel, a fissure, a seam, a funnel–shaped crevice, a swiftly broadening yawn, and in no time at all that ecru esophagus would fill right up with blue.

    At that point, despite himself, Kelp’s throat would close. Every time. Which had made it difficult to take much part in the immediately ensuing conversation about non–tunnel alternatives, so that it was only now he could say, casually, throwing it away, “Forget the tunnel. The tunnel was never a big deal. That was just to feed the old creative juices, get us thinking about ways that will work.”

    “Like,” said Tom Jimson.

    “Like we’ll find it,” Kelp assured him. “We didn’t come up with anything yet, that’s perfectly true, but old Wally and his computer, they’ll —”

    “Hmp,” said Dortmunder.

    Whoops; another precinct heard from. They had just stopped at the curb at Eleventh Avenue to wait for the light to change, so Kelp leaned forward to look past the stone outcropping of Tom Jimson’s face at the rubble outcropping of Dortmunder’s face, and what he saw there told him his old friend John was not entirely happy. “John?” Kelp said. “What’s the problem?”

    “Nothing,” Dortmunder said, and stepped out in front of a cab that, up till then, had thought it was going to beat the light. As the cabby stuck his head out his side window and began to make loud remarks, Kelp and Tom Jimson stepped off the curb after Dortmunder, Tom pausing to look at the cabby, who at once decided he’d made his point and, with dignity, retracted his head back inside his vehicle.

    Meantime, Kelp, pursuing Dortmunder,