He’d bought a whole day’s worth of food at the Burger King, but he’d been thirsty to begin with and the salty food made him thirstier. And the shakes, almost too thick for the straw, didn’t help much. On the way into Joliet — a town he knew only as the home of a state penitentiary, which struck him as an even worse way to be famous than Dubuque’s — he spotted a strip mall and pulled in. There was a bank of vending machines out in front of the coin laundry, with no end of sweet and salty things that he didn’t want, but the Coke machine also offered sixteen-ounce bottles of water. He fed it ten dollars and got four bottles of what the label assured him was pure natural spring water. It was the same price as the soft drinks, and all they had to do was bottle it. They didn’t have the expense of adding sugar or artificial sweetener or flavorings or caramel color or really anything at all. On the other hand, it was pure and natural, which was more than you could say for the other offerings, so you really couldn’t complain about the price.
When Keller was a boy, the only time he ever saw water in a bottle was on his mother’s ironing board; the bottle had a cap with holes punched in it, and she’d sprinkle some water on whatever she was ironing, for reasons Keller had never quite understood. Keller, like everyone he knew, drank water from the tap, and it didn’t cost anybody anything.
Then there came a time when stores began to stock bottled water, but the only people who bought it were the kind of people who ate sushi. Now, of course, everybody ate sushi, and everybody drank bottled water. Outlaw bikers, guys with equal space on their bodies for scars and tattoos, badass bruisers who opened beer bottles with their few remaining teeth, all had their little bottles of Evian to wash down their California rolls.
Keller sat in his car and drank one of the bottles in a few long swallows. On the far side of the coin laundry, next to the Chinese restaurant, was a wall-mounted pay phone. Keller couldn’t swear to it, but it seemed to him that you didn’t see as many pay phones as you used to, and he supposed it was just a matter of time before they disappeared. Everybody had a cell phone nowadays. Pretty soon you’d have to have a cell phone, either that or learn how to send Indian smoke signals.
The hell with it. He got out of the car, walked over to the phone, dialed Dot’s number. The vending machine had given him all his change in quarters, and he actually had the $3.75 the robotic voice demanded for the first three minutes. He loaded the coins into the slot, heard that coo-wheeeet sound it made when it couldn’t put a call through, followed by a recording telling him the number he had dialed was not a working number. The phone gave him back his quarters.
He tried it again, on the slim chance that he’d misdialed, and the same voice told him the same thing, and once again he got his quarters back.
Well, he thought, evidently she got out, which was all to the good. But would she take the time to disconnect the phone? Would she even want to disconnect the phone? Wouldn’t it be better as well as simpler to leave the phone alone, so that anyone trying to get to her would waste time looking for her at home?
Too many questions, and no way to answer them.
He stopped for gas a couple of hours after he crossed into Indiana. The station was small, just a couple of pumps in front of a Circle K convenience store, and they were all self-service. You dipped your credit card, filled your own tank, wiped your own windshield, and drove off without ever seeing or being seen by another human being.
But not if you had to pay cash. Then you had to go inside first and pay the girl behind the counter, and she would program the pump to dispense whatever you’d paid for.
He’d driven in and out of a similar situation fifty miles back, unwilling to risk giving an attendant a look at his face. Now the tank was getting low, and even if he managed to find a full-service pump, that didn’t mean whoever pumped the gas for him wouldn’t take a good look at him while he was at it. He’d been lucky with the young fellow in Morrison, but it wasn’t as if he’d latched onto some magic formula.
But he wouldn’t buy forty dollars’ worth this time. He’d had time to think about it, and what he’d decided was that people who paid out that much money for gas all at once did so with a credit card. The ones who paid cash didn’t part with more than ten or twenty dollars at a time. Pay forty and they might remember you, and Keller didn’t want to be memorable. CASH CUSTOMERS PAY INSIDE FIRST THEN PUMP, the hand-lettered sign said, and the message, even without punctuation, was clear enough. Keller, who’d shucked out of his blazer earlier, put it on now. He figured it made him look just a little more respectable and just a little less deserving of a long look; more to the point, it covered the revolver riding in the small of his back. And he wanted the gun there, because he might have to use it.
He got a twenty from his wallet and had it in his hand when he entered the store. Stores like this got robbed all the time, and he knew some of them had security cameras installed, and wondered if this one did. In the middle of rural Indiana?
Oh, the hell with it. He had enough to worry about.
He entered the store, and the girl was all by herself, reading Soap Opera Digest and listening to a country station. Keller slapped the bill down, said, “Hi there twenty dollars’ worth pump number two,” all in one uninflected gush of words, and was on his way out the door before she could lift up her eyes from her magazine. She called out to him to have a nice day, which he took for a good sign.
Of course she could be doing a double take now, he thought as he pumped the gas. She could be thinking that he looked familiar, and deciding just why he looked familiar, and he could see her jaw dropping and the sense of civic purpose coming into her eyes as she grabbed for the phone and dialed 911.
Keller, how you do go on.
Sixty dollars so far for gas, fifteen for burgers and fries and shakes, ten for bottled water. His bankroll was half of what it had been that morning, just eighty dollars and change. He had burgers left, which were marginally edible cold, and he had french fries, which weren’t. And one full shake, which had melted but still wasn’t what you’d call liquid. He could, he supposed, live on that all the way back to New York. If he was hungry enough he would eat it, and if he wasn’t that hungry it meant he didn’t need it.
But the Sentra’s requirements were less flexible. He had to keep gas in the tank, and even if OPEC flooded the market with oil, he was going to run out of money before he ran out of highway.
There had to be an answer, but he was damned if he could see it. He’d reached a point where his problems didn’t have solutions. Even if the skies opened up and showered him with ball caps and clippers and hair dye, even if he was suddenly blessed with the ability to transform his facial features into those of a different person entirely, he’d be broke, stranded somewhere in eastern Ohio or western Pennsylvania with the philatelic equivalent of a handful of magic beans.
Could he sell the stamps? They had been a genuine bargain, if not precisely a steal, at $600. Could he offer somebody else an even greater bargain and get half his money back for them? What, knock on doors? Go through small-town phone books, looking for stamp dealers? He shook his head, dazzled by the sheer impracticality of the idea. He stood a better chance of pasting the stamps on his forehead and mailing himself to New York.
Other courses of action suggested themselves, and fell equally short. A train? The railroads had pretty much given up on the job of transporting people, although they still ran passenger trains from Chicago to New York and up and down the eastern corridor. But he wasn’t sure where he might go to catch a train, and even if he worked that out, it would cost him more money than he had. He’d taken the Metroliner to Washington a while ago, and it was certainly a nice way to travel, and you went from midtown to midtown and didn’t have airport security to contend with, but it wasn’t cheap, not by a long shot. And now they’d changed its name to the Acela Express, which nobody could pronounce and hardly anybody could afford. If he didn’t have gas money, he certainly didn’t have train money.
The bus? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on an intercity bus. He’d traveled by Greyhound one summer during high school, and recalled a jarringly uncomfortable ride in a crowded vehicle full of people smoking cigarettes and drinking bottled whiskey out of paper bags. The bus would have to be inexpensive, because otherwise nobody would willingly ride it.
But it was far too public for a man with his picture on the nation’s TV screens. He’d be cooped up for hours with forty or fifty people, and how many of them would take a look at his face? And, even if they didn’t make the connection right away, there he’d be, with no place to hide, and there they’d be, with plenty of time to think about things, and what were the odds that one of them wouldn’t put two and two together?
No bus, no train. A voice on the radio, pondering his apparent escape via the Des Moines airport, had theorized that Montrose/Blankenship might have made his way across the tarmac to the area where the private planes landed and took off. He might have had a plane stashed there, with a confederate to fly it, or he might even have possessed the skills to fly it himself. Or, the fellow had gone on to suggest, the desperate assassin might have hijacked a private plane, taking the pilot hostage and forcing him to fly the plane to parts unknown.
Keller had welcomed the notion, because it was so wonderfully ludicrous that it had given him a laugh when he’d sorely needed one. Now, though, he wondered if it was such a bad idea after all. There were small private airports all over the country, with dinky little planes landing and taking off all the time. Suppose he found one, some single-runway operation out in the boondocks. And suppose he bided his time and waited until some hotshot bush pilot had his plane all fueled and ready to go, only to have Keller, the desperate assassin himself, stick a gun in his face and demand to be taken to the corner of East Forty-ninth Street and First Avenue?
Well, maybe not.
The motel was a Travelodge, on the edge of a town the name of which he hadn’t bothered to notice. He’d pulled around to the rear of the lot like a registered guest on the way to his room, chosen an out-of-the-way parking spot, and cut the lights and engine. He sat behind the wheel, eating one of the cold burgers and drinking water, and watched a man and woman get out of a square-back Honda and walk a short distance to a ground-floor unit. They didn’t have any luggage, Keller noted, and the inference he drew from this was strengthened when the man extended a hand and grabbed the woman by the butt. She swatted his hand away, but when he replaced it she let him keep it there, and the hand stayed in place until he needed it to unlock the door. Then they disappeared into the room.
Keller envied them, and less for what they were about to do than for having a room to do it in. He had no idea what this Travelodge got for a room, but it had to be at least fifty dollars, didn’t it? All that money, and they weren’t even going to sleep there. They were married, he was fairly certain, but not to each other, and they were going to roll around on rented sheets for an hour, two at the most, while Keller was destined to spend another night sleeping in his car.
Was there an opportunity here? Suppose he waited until they finished. Would they lock the door after they left? He somehow doubted it would be their top priority, and they might leave it ajar, in which case he could walk right in the minute they were out of sight.
And even if they locked it, how hard would it be to get in? He had his Swiss Army knife, and if it wouldn’t get him through the lock he could try kicking the door in. This was a roadside motel, not Fort Knox.
As far as the management was concerned, the room was rented for the night. Even if they suspected the room had been vacated, they couldn’t hand it out again until the maid had serviced it. Judging from the number of cars in the lot, the place was half empty, so that left them with plenty of other rooms to rent. Keller could be in and out of this one without anyone ever knowing he was there.
He could catch a couple of hours of real sleep in an actual bed. God, he could take a shower.
Waiting wasn’t that easy. He couldn’t turn his mind off, and it kept telling him he was wasting time, that he ought to be back on the highway knocking off the miles.
And how did he know they’d be leaving anytime soon? Maybe they were travelers, too tired from a long day on the road to bother hauling their luggage inside. She’d been carrying a purse, and that might hold all she needed until they had a chance to go out to the car for their bags in the morning. That seemed a little odd to Keller, but people did odd things all the time.
He went over to their car, and there was nothing in the back seat, but they could have stowed their bags in the trunk, as he’d done with his. Their car carried an Indiana plate, but did that necessarily mean they were local? Indiana was a pretty big state. He couldn’t say exactly how big it was, or where he was in it, because the only maps he had were for Iowa, where he didn’t intend to return, and Oregon, where he wouldn’t be going, either, the considerable allure of Roseburg and Klamath Falls notwithstanding. But he knew Indiana had some size to it. It might not be Texas, but it wasn’t Delaware, either.
He returned to his car. They were probably local, he had to admit, but they might still stay until morning. Say he lived with his parents, and she had a roommate. They’d need a place to be together in private, but they could stay all night in it without making trouble for themselves. And here he was, sitting in his car, staring with eyes that kept wanting to close at a door that might not open until dawn.
When the door did open, he checked his watch and was surprised to note that they’d only been in there for a little under an hour. The guy emerged first, and stood there in the doorway, holding the door for the woman, then giving her another proprietary pat on the rear as she passed. They were dressed as he’d seen them before, and there was nothing in their appearance to indicate they’d spent the preceding fifty minutes doing anything more adventurous than watching Indiana’s own David Letterman, but Keller suspected otherwise.
C’mon, he urged them silently. Leave the door open.
And for a moment he thought they were going to, but no, the son of a bitch had to reach for the handle and pull the thing shut. They walked toward their car, and then the guy held up something, a white card of some sort, and offered it to the woman. She backed away, holding up her hands as if to ward the thing off, and he reached to tuck it into her purse, and she grabbed it away from him and threw it at him. He ducked and it sailed over his shoulder, and they both laughed and walked the rest of the way to their car, his hand on her behind once again, and Keller watched where the white card landed because now he knew what it was.
The room key, of course. Here, honey, a little souvenir of the evening. Let me just tuck it in your purse. Keller picked it up and brushed it off, tried it in the lock, opened the door. Then he went back for his suitcase and wheeled it to his room, just like any legitimate tourist.