The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake Read Free Book Online

ahead.”

    Kelp smiled. “Thanks, Major.” He picked up the cue, sank the twelve, sank the fourteen, took two shots to sink the fifteen, and finished off by sinking the cue ball on a three cushion rebound. “There,” he said and put up the cue.

    The Major let him out, and he stood ten minutes in the rain before he got a cab.

Chapter 10
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    The New York Coliseum stands between West 58th Street and West 60th Street facing Columbus Circle on the southwest corner of Central Park in Manhattan. The Coliseum faces the park and the Maine Monument and the statue of Columbus and Huntington Hartford’s Gallery of Modern Art.
    On the 60th Street side, midway along the beige brick wall, there is an entrance surmounted by a large chrome number 20, and 20 West 60th Street is the address of the Coliseum staff. A blue–uniformed private guard is always on duty inside the glass doors of this entrance, day and night.

    One Wednesday night in late June, at about three twenty in the morning, Kelp came walking eastward along West 60th Street wearing a tan raincoat, and when he was opposite the Coliseum entrance he suddenly had a fit. He went rigid, and then he fell over, and then he began to thrash around on the sidewalk. He cried, “Oh! Oh!” several times, but in a husky voice that didn’t carry far. There was no one else in sight, no pedestrians and no moving automobiles.

    The guard had seen Kelp through the glass doors before the fit started, and knew that Kelp had not been walking as though drunk. He had in fact been walking very calmly until he had his fit. The guard hesitated a moment, frowning worriedly, but Kelp’s thrashing seemed to be increasing, so at last the guard opened the door and hurried out to see what he could do to help. He squatted beside Kelp, put a hand on Kelp’s twitching shoulder, and said, “Is there anything I can do, Mac?”

    “Yes,” Kelp said. He stopped thrashing and pointed a .38 Special Colt Cobra revolver at the guard’s nose. “You can stand up very slow,” Kelp said, “and you can keep your hands where I can see them.”

    The guard stood up and kept his hands where Kelp could see them, and out of a car across the street came Dortmunder and Greenwood and Chefwick, all dressed in uniforms exactly like the one the guard was wearing.

    Kelp got to his feet, and the four marched the guard into the building. He was taken around the corner from the entrance and tied and gagged. Kelp then removed his raincoat, showing yet another uniform of the same type, and went back to take the guard’s place at the door. Meanwhile Dortmunder and the other two stood around and looked at their watches. “He’s late,” Dortmunder said.

    “He’ll get there,” Greenwood said.

    Around at the main entrance there were two guards on duty, and at this moment they were both looking out at an automobile that had suddenly come out of nowhere and was hurtling directly toward the doors. “No!” cried one of the guards, waving his arms.

    Stan Murch was behind the wheel of the car, a two–year old Rambler Ambassador sedan, dark green, which Kelp had stolen just this morning. The car had different plates now, and other changes had also been made.

    At the last possible second before the impact, Murch pulled the pin on the bomb, shoved the door open, and leaped clear. He landed rolling, and continued to roll for several seconds after the sounds of the crash and the explosion.

    The timing had been beautiful. No eyewitness — there were none but the two guards — would have been able to say for sure that Murch had leaped before the crash rather than been thrown clear because of it. And no one would have supposed that the sheet of flame that suddenly erupted from the car as it crashed to a stop halfway through the glass doors was not the result of the accident but had been made by the small incendiary bomb with the five–second fuse whose pin Murch had pulled just before his exit.

    Nor would anyone suppose