Don't Ask by Donald E. Westlake Read Free Book Online Page A

hurtling taxicabs, drunken commuters, and illegal aliens fleeing petty crimes could ever be called moderate--so Stan had merely stopped the borrowed Honda in the farthest right lane (there is no shoulder, no verge, no space to pull over on the FDR Drive) and everybody got out.
    Stan opened the hood and stood in front of the car and from time to time glowered at the inoffensive little engine in there as though it had failed him in some way. Meantime, not very satisfactorily, they cased the joint.
    Hell of a joint. The boat was tucked into that old ferry slip beyond a blocky brick three-story building that had been empty and unsafe and unused for years. On the boat's rounded black stern, seen beyond the building, Pride of Votskojek was faintly visible in dirty white letters.
    Access. A potholed blacktop road came out from under the FDR, pointing toward the ferry building, but before getting even halfway there it ran into an eight-foot-high chain-link fence with rolls of razor wire across the top. The metal support poles of this fence were sunk into concrete right in the roadway, making it absolutely clear that no more cars or other vehicles were ever going to be invited through there ever again.
    This side of the fence, to the right of the truncated road, a small parking area was illuminated by one floodlight; it contained five beat-up old cars parked with their noses to the fence, two of them with red-white blue diplomat plates visible at the rear. Near the cars, a narrow chain-link door was inset in the chain-link fence and was guarded by two short, squat guys in uniforms with side arms.
    Beyond the fence, if it were possible to get beyond the fence, hulked the ferry building, as dark and dense as a Mayan temple, its boarded-up top-floor windows at the same height as the FDR Drive, so that from where they were standing they would be able to look right in, if the boards weren't there and the lights were on inside (and there were lights inside to be on), and if they cared, which they didn't. It was about twenty yards from where they now stood to the facade of the dead ferry building, not too far to bloop a little forward pass on a trap play, but far too far to stretch a plank over in case you had this idea, for instance, to crawl along, one end to the other, above the fence.
    The top two stories of the building stood on two fat legs, which were the ground floor and between which used to be access (for cars? horse-drawn wagons? how long ago was this eminently sensible technology abandoned?) to the ferries. Beyond the building --best seen from just north of it on the FDR, where they were stopped, Stan giving the finger to the occasional wise-guy honker --was the slip where ferries used to dock for loading and unloading vehicles and foot passengers (eminently sensible) and where the Pride of Votskojek now wallowed, round rusty stern toward the building, blunt prow nodding stupidly at the river.
    "The guards," Kelp said, "those armed guards down there, can see the parking lot. From the corner there, where they're stationed, they can see the whole fence. Those guards, those armed guards right there, could see us if they looked up, and they could see all along the FDR here. And those look to me like walkie talkies they got on their belts there, next to the guns. So what I think, I think if we go and put a bunch of sleeping pills in some hamburger meat and throw it over the fence, it won't work."
    "I knew they were gonna get me on a boat," Dortmunder said. Not too long ago, he'd been involved in an involved little caper upstate involving a reservoir, which most of the time had been on top of him. His attitude toward boats and large bodies of water remained negative.
    "Well, Dortmunder," Tiny said, leaning on the crumbling low wall of the FDR, "it does kinda play like that. A boat. At least to get a better look at the thing. By daylight."
    "Nighttime, right now," Dortmunder pointed out, "is the best conditions we can hope for. And right