Jimmy the Kid by Donald E. Westlake Page A

forehead, folded his arms, and said nothing.
    Jimmy said, “Did you hear me, Maurice?”
    â€œI hear you.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œ I hear you !”
    â€œThank you, Maurice,” Jimmy said, and sat back to savor his triumph. After a moment he picked up the New Yorker again.
    Back at the intersection, Dortmunder stopped the Caprice and Kelp jumped out to move the sign. He picked it up, moved it to another side, and started back, when Dortmunder leaned out the window and shouted, “Not there! Where we follow the Cadillac!”
    â€œHuh?” Kelp looked around, pointing at various places, reorienting himself. Then, with a sudden sunny smile of recognition, he waved to Dortmunder and shouted, “Gotcha!” He ran back to the sign, picked it up, and put it back where it had been.
    â€œNot there !” Dortmunder yelled. He was leaning his whole upper torso out of the car, pounding the door panel with his arm and the flat of his hand. Waving that hand violently around, he yelled. “Over there !”
    â€œRight!” Kelp yelled. “Right! Right. I got it now!” And he picked up the sign and started trotting toward the last possible wrong choice.
    Dortmunder came boiling out of the Caprice. “I’m going to wrap that sign around your head !”
    â€œ Now what?” Kelp stood there, bewildered, while Dortmunder came over and wrenched the sign and sticks away from him and put them where they belonged. Kelp watched, and when Dortmunder was finished the two men met again at the car, where Kelp said, “I would have got it, I really would have.”
    â€œGet in the car,” Dortmunder said. He got behind the wheel and slammed the door.
    Kelp got in the back seat again. May shook her head at him, not pleased, and he lifted his shoulders helplessly. Dortmunder punched the accelerator, and the Caprice bounced forward.
    Van Gelden, his sullenness boiling over all at once into rage, pushed the button that rolled his window down, stuck his head out, and yelled toward the school bus, “Get with it, will ya! We don’t have all day!”
    Jimmy looked up from his magazine. “What’s the matter, Maurice?”
    â€œBus just sitting there,” Van Gelden said. “Tying up traffic.” Looking in the rearview mirror, he said, “And here comes somebody else.”
    Jimmy looked back, and saw the blue car approaching around the curve. The road here was hemmed in by trees and shrubbery on both sides. Scrub pine gave some swaths of green, but the rest of the trees had lost about half their foliage, making black trunks and branches form jagged lines against the orange and gold of autumn leaves. Dead leaves swirled around the tyres of the blue car as it came silently toward them, slowed, and stopped. The figures through the windshield were indistinct, but in some sort of motion back there.
    Jimmy faced front again. The woods were close on both sides, the rear of the tractor-trailer was like a looming silver wall directly in front of the Cadillac, and leaves kept fluttering down off the trees, rustling down past the windows. The driver of the school bus was a vague mound through the big flat windshield; afternoon sunlight glinted from that windshield, reddish-yellow with a bright white center.
    â€œThere’s something wrong,” Jimmy said.
    â€œWhat?” Van Gelden looked at Jimmy in the rearview mirror, and caught a glimpse of somebody going by with a Mickey Mouse mask on his head. “What the hell?”
    Jimmy said, “What?” and his right-hand door opened, and a woman wearing a Mickey Mouse mask slid in. “Hi, Jimmy,” she said. Her voice was so muffled by the mask he could barely make out what she was saying. It was, “Do you know whose face this is I’m wearing?”
    Dortmunder, trotting forward, yanked at the driver’s door, but it was locked. Van Gelden, seeing the big man with the jacket and the