The Hot Rock Read Online Free

he’ll pay up?”

    Kelp laughed. “Sure he’ll pay up,” he said. “He wants the emerald, he has to pay up.”

    “What if he doesn’t? We wouldn’t find any buyer anywhere else.”

    “Insurance company,” Kelp said promptly. “They’d pay a hundred fifty gee for a half million dollar rock any day.”

    Dortmunder nodded. “Maybe,” he said, “that would be the better system anyway.”

    Kelp didn’t get it. “What would?” he said.

    “We let Iko finance the job,” Dortmunder said. “But when we get the emerald we sell it to the insurance company instead.”

    “I don’t like that,” Kelp said.

    “Why not?”

    “Because he knows who we are,” Kelp said, “and if this emerald is this big symbolic thing for the people in his country, they could get awful upset if we cop it for ourselves, and I don’t want some whole African country out to get me, money or no money.”

    “Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Okay. We’ll see how it plays.”

    “A whole country out to get me,” Kelp said and shivered. “I wouldn’t like that.”

    “All right.”

    “Blow guns and poison arrows,” Kelp said and shivered again.

    “I think they’re more modern now,” Dortmunder said.

    Kelp looked at him. “Is that supposed to make me feel better? Tommy guns and airplanes.”

    “All right,” Dortmunder said. “All right.” To change the subject, he said, “Who do you think we should bring in with us?”

    “The rest of the team?” Kelp shrugged. “I dunno. What kind of guys do we need?”

    “It’s hard to say.” Dortmunder frowned at the lake, ignoring a girl going by in a tiger stripe leotard. “No specialists,” he said, “except maybe a lock man. But nobody for safes, nothing like that.”

    “We want five or six?”

    “Five,” Dortmunder said. He announced one of the rules he lived by: “If you can’t do a job with five men, you can’t do it at all.”

    “Okay,” said Kelp. “So we’ll want a driver, and a lock man, and a utility outfielder.”

    “Right,” said Dortmunder. “For the lock man, there was that little guy in Des Moines. You know the one I mean? Something like Wise? Wiseman? Welsh? Whistler! ” said Dortmunder.

    “That’s it!” said Kelp and shook his head. “He’s in stir. They got him for letting a lion loose.”

    Dortmunder turned his head away from the lake and looked at Kelp. “They did what?”

    Kelp shrugged. “Don’t blame me,” he said. “That’s just what I heard. He took his kids to the zoo, he got bored, he started to play around with the locks kind of absentminded, like you or me might doodle, and the first thing you know he let a lion loose.”

    “That’s nice,” Dortmunder said.

    “Don’t blame me,” Kelp said. Then he said, “What about Chefwick? You know him?”

    “The railroad nut? He’s crazy out of his head.”

    “But he’s a great lock man,” Kelp said. “And he’s available.”

    “Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Give him a call.”

    “I will.”

    Kelp watched two girls in various shades of green and gold go by.

    “Now we need a driver,” he said. “How about Lartz? Remember him?”

    “Forget him,” Kelp said. “He’s in the hospital.”

    “Since when?”

    “A couple weeks ago. He ran into a plane.”

    Dortmunder gave him a long slow look. “He did what?”

    “It ain’t my fault,” Kelp said. “The way I heard it, he was at the wedding of some cousin of his out on the Island, he was coming back into town, he took the Van Wyck Expressway the wrong way by mistake, the first thing he knew he was out to Kennedy Airport. He was a little drunk, I guess, and —”

    “Yeah,” Dortmunder said.

    “Yeah. And he got confused by the signs, and he wound up on taxiway seventeen and he ran into this Eastern Airlines plane that just come up from Miami.”

    “Taxiway seventeen,” Dortmunder said.

    “That’s what I heard,” Kelp said.

    Dortmunder pulled out his Camels and stuck one