Jimmy the Kid

"But isn't there a fallacy," Jimmy asked, "in the concept of competition with one's own capabilities? There can't be failure, because an apparent failure would merely indicate a faulty original estimate of the capabilities. The estimate should then be geared down to the actual accomplishment, thus obliterating the apparent failure. And if failure is impossible, ipso facto victory is also impossible. Without the potential for either victory or failure, how can there be competition?"

Dr. Schraubenzieher smiled at the back of the boy's head. Very well, he would give the child a rest; particularly since Jimmy had behaved so decently about the motion picture slip. For the remainder of the session they played word games.

At the end, when Jimmy was leaving the consulting room, he paused in the doorway, looked at the doctor with a troubled frown, and said, "Do you suppose by any chance somebody is watching me?"

The doctor smiled indulgently. He's projecting the motion picture director theme, he thought, but of course didn't say that. "Certainly not," he said. "We both know better, don't we?"

"I suppose so. See you Friday."

11

Kelp, sitting in the back seat with the Mickey Mouse masks, said, "Here he comes."

"I see him," Dortmunder said. Dortmunder was driving, and May was sitting next to him. Kelp was the one who had gotten this car, a blue Caprice with MD plates, and it had been his intention to drive it, but Dortmunder had said, "I'll drive." No explanation, just a sort of heavy determination that Kelp had found it impossible to argue with. So Kelp was now in the back seat, leaning forward between Dortmunder and May, watching through the windshield as the kid-somewhat tall for his age, but very skinny-came out of the apartment building and was escorted into the gray Cadillac by the doorman.

Dortmunder started the engine of the Caprice. Kelp said, "You don't want to follow too close. Hang back a couple cars."

"Shut up, Andy," Dortmunder said, and May turned to look at Kelp and give him a little nod, suggesting that he should humor Dortmunder at the moment by leaving him alone.

"Anything you say," Kelp said, and relaxed against the seat back as Dortmunder eased the Caprice into the line of traffic.

The Cadillac led the way down Central Park West to Sixty-ninth Street, then across to Ninth Avenue and straight down to the Lincoln Tunnel. It was shortly after four on a Wednesday afternoon, and the rush-hour traffic had already started to build. It was stop-and-go through the tunnel, but over on the Jersey side things loosened up, and they were driving almost up to the speed limit as they headed west, across route 3.

Kelp had been nervous and full of anticipation all day, but now that they were actually in motion he found himself growing increasingly calm. In fact, sifting in the back seat of a car heading west across New Jersey was essentially a dull and monotonous occupation no matter what the purpose, and Kelp soon had to admit he was getting bored. Conversation might have helped, but he suspected Dortmunder wasn't in any mood for chitchat, and in any event it's always hard to maintain a conversation between the front and back seats of an automobile. So after a while he pulled from his pocket one of his copies of Child Heist and began to read again the part where they grabbed the kid. Chapter eight.

12

CHAPTER EIGHT::

When Parker got to the intersection he made a U-turn and stopped, facing back the way he had come. He and Angie waited in the Dodge while Henley took the ROAD CLOSED-DETOUR sign out of the trunk and set it up blocking the numbered county road, with the arrow pointing toward the smaller blacktop road leading off into the woods to the right. This was a completely empty intersection, the crossing of a minor county road and an almost-abandoned old connector road, with no buildings of any kind anywhere in sight. On two sides there were dense woods, on the third a scruffy weed-grown meadow, and on the fourth a cornfield now dry and brown after the harvest.

Henley got back into the car, and Parker drove a quarter mile back toward the city, then backed off into the dead-end dirt road he'd found last week. There was nothing to do now but wait; Krauss and Ruth had already been dropped off, Krauss would be setting up the other detour sign, and everything was set.

Six miles away, the black Lincoln limousine took the curving ramp down from Northern State Parkway to the county road and turned north. The chauffeur, Albert Judson, drove steadily at fifty-five, undisturbed by other traffic in this sparsely populated area early on a Tuesday afternoon. In the back seat, Bobby Myers read his comic books, sprawling comfortably across the seat.

Seven minutes later Henley said, "Here they come."

"I see them," Parker said, and put the Dodge in gear as the Lincoln sailed by them. The Dodge moved out from the dirt road and accelerated in the Lincoln's wake.