Two rows over, a man in his thirties got out of an SUV, locked its doors with a remote, plunged his hands in the hand-warmer pockets of his windbreaker, and headed across the asphalt toward one of the entrances to the mall. He didn’t look particularly furtive, not to Keller, and the odds were he didn’t have anything to feel furtive about. He was younger than Keller, and a littler chunkier in the midsection, and the hair that showed under his baseball cap was longer and lighter. The only point of resemblance, as far as Keller could make out, was the windbreaker.
Keller watched him until he disappeared inside the mall. Then he watched somebody else, a woman pushing a shopping cart, and then he watched a kid whose job it was to roam the lot and collect the shopping carts people had abandoned.
Keller wondered what a job like that paid. Minimum wage, he figured. Not a lot of money in a job like that, and not a whole lot of prestige, either, or much in the way of opportunity for advancement. Still, it had its good points. You weren’t likely to wind up with your picture on national television and every cop in the world hunting for you.
Maybe that was his mistake, one he’d made a whole lot of years ago. Maybe he should have picked a career of rounding up shopping carts, instead of one that sent him all around the country killing people.
It was just as well he hadn’t driven around too much. The Sentra’s gas tank was still a little more than half full. He wasn’t sure of its capacity, or what kind of mileage the car got, but if you figured ten gallons left at twenty miles to the gallon then that gave him something like two hundred miles before he needed to gas up.
He’d left his room at the Days Inn just as the day was starting to fade off into twilight, and he’d have liked to have it still darker for the short walk from his room to his car. There was no one around, but he still felt impossibly conspicuous, and he was pretty sure he looked at least as furtive as he had in the photograph, because now he had so much more to be furtive about. He’d tried not to let it show in his walk or in the way he held himself, and either it worked or there was nobody looking at him to begin with, but he reached his car and got in it and got out of there.
He hadn’t gone very far. He’d driven directly to this large shopping mall, and had picked a spot that was out of the main stream of traffic without being conspicuous in its isolation. His bag was in the trunk, his gun tucked into his waistband and pressing into the small of his back. The box with the remaining three slices of pizza was on the seat beside him, along with the cup the Coke had come in; he’d rinsed it out, and now it held the broken bits of the cell phone. He could have abandoned them in his room, but decided he’d rather leave the place as empty as he’d found it. And why give them anything to work with?
If he’d had the run of the mall, there was a lot he could have accomplished. A wig or a false beard would look ridiculous (though probably not much more so than the real beard he’d tried, years ago, to grow), but he ought to be able to change his appearance a little bit without calling attention to himself.
Glasses would help. He didn’t need glasses, not even for reading, although he had a feeling he would in a couple of years.
If he lived that long—
No, he thought, willing the thought away. He didn’t need glasses, not even for reading, but he kept a pair of reading glasses at home for when he put in long hours working on his stamp collection. They were nondistorting magnifying lenses, and all they did was make print a tiny bit larger and more visible. There was no reason to wear them away from his desk, but he didn’t get dizzy when he did, and he’d seen how he looked in them. They’d changed the whole shape of his face, and changed his affect at the same time. Glasses were supposed to make you look studious, and he supposed they did, but beyond that they made you look less threatening.
It would help if he had them now, he thought, because this would be a good time to look less threatening. And he could find a pair just like them in any drugstore, they were a standard and unexceptional item, but he couldn’t go shopping for them without giving people a look at his face, and that was something he didn’t want to do just now.
The same drugstore where he didn’t dare buy reading glasses (or sunglasses, which were even better at changing one’s appearance, but which had the disadvantage, especially when the sun was down, of looking like a disguise) would also be a source of hair dye and clippers. A short haircut would make him look less like his photograph, and so would a change of color. Both were on the tricky side, and he certainly didn’t want to wind up with a cut that was so amateurish as to attract attention, or hair that screamed Dye Job at the top of its roots. Better to wait until he figured out how to do it right, and in the meantime a cap of some sort would help.
How hard was that? It was almost more difficult to find a store that didn’t sell baseball caps than one that did. They were all over the place, in all colors and with all manner of logos — sports teams, tractors, brands of beer, anything to which your average unthinking lout could proudly proclaim his allegiance. The nonfurtive guy in the windbreaker had been wearing a cap, and Keller wondered if he owed some of his nonfurtiveness to the cap on his head. A ball cap made you look like a regular guy, just like everybody else.
He looked out the window, and there was a guy with a cap, and there was another.
Maybe that was the answer. Stick around, wait for some poor goober in a ball cap to come back to his car, logy and brain-dead after a carbo-laden meal at Applebee’s. Bop him on the head (but not too hard, you didn’t want him to bleed all over his baseball cap), snatch the thing off his head, and you were in business.
God, would it come to that? The people he typically dealt with had a five-or six-figure price on their heads. All this guy had on his head was a cap, and the price on it was three figures, with two of them coming after the decimal point.
Well, if he couldn’t do any better than that, he could follow the two-birds-with-one-stone principle and pick a guy wearing glasses. And they’d better be sunglasses, because otherwise they’d almost certainly have prescription lenses and he’d get dizzy the minute he put them on.
Bop the guy, grab the ball cap, snatch off the sunglasses — and then go through his pockets, because anybody rich enough to afford a cap and shades probably had fifteen or twenty bucks in his pocket, and, along with everything else, Keller was running out of money.
But he didn’t go looking for a man with a cap and sunglasses. He stayed in his car and listened to the radio.
He had it tuned to WHO, an AM station right there in Des Moines, one that billed itself as offering “a well-balanced mixture of news and good old American talk radio.” According to the labeling laws, you were supposed to list the ingredients in order, according to the relative proportion of each in the product. If WHO had been playing by the rules, they’d have to call it “a well-balanced mix of commercials, news, and good old etc.” And a person would be within his rights to question the use of the word well-balanced.
The trouble with radio, Keller had come to realize, was that you couldn’t mute it. You could turn it off when a commercial aired, but then how would you know when to turn it on again? Well, you wouldn’t. About the best you could do was lower the volume when a commercial came on and raise it again when it ended, but that was really more trouble than it was worth, especially in light of the fact that, more often than not, one commercial ended only to be followed by another.
Between the commercials, though, what got said was pretty interesting. The news was centered almost entirely upon the John Tatum Longford assassination and the ensuing manhunt for Leroy Montrose aka Holden Blankenship.
And so, not too surprisingly, was the talk radio. That was the topic of choice for the great majority of the callers, and those few who got through wanting to discuss something else got short shrift from the host, who was far more interested in the ramifications of the shooting. His callers had a variety of points of view on the subject; while nobody came out and said it was just as well that Longford was permanently out of the running for the presidency, it was clear some of them felt that way, just as others saw the man as a tragic victim right up there with a King and a pair of Kennedys.
And, as with those earlier assassinations, the conspiracy theorists were already sharpening their blunt instruments. Montrose/ Blankenship, they were quick to assert, was as much a victim as the Ohio governor, an innocent man conveniently on the scene to divert suspicion from the real killers. The several callers who took this stance all agreed on this much, but here their scenarios diverged as each found a different cabal to blame for hatching the plot in the first place. One woman had the whole thing linked to the forcible inoculation of young girls with “that alleged anticancer virus,” while another saw it as part and parcel of the whole proabortion campaign. A man with a tobacco-raddled throat was sure the use of a handgun smacked of a campaign to discredit the NRA, and by the time he was through, Keller was alarmed to realize he’d been nodding along in agreement.
It was almost comforting that there were people who thought he hadn’t done it, although their tendency to tag him with phrases like “pathetic dupe” and “hapless moron” didn’t thrill him. What was a little disquieting, though, was that every last one of the folks on his side, if you wanted to call it that, came off sounding absolutely barking mad.
The actual news wasn’t a whole lot more comforting. It hadn’t taken the cops long to follow the route Keller had already sketched out for them in his mind, from the Laurel Inn to Denny’s to the cab and the airport and the Hertz counter, and at that point he began to hope they’d get to the Days Inn in a hurry and spend a lot of time there.
Because now that they knew what kind of car he was driving, and knew the number on its license plate, it hardly mattered whether he was driving or parked. Either way it was just a matter of time before they found him, and probably not very much time at that.
He couldn’t just walk away from the Sentra. He needed a car, and he couldn’t rent another to replace this one. He could probably steal one, he’d learned long ago how to pop a door lock and hot-wire an ignition, and those skills of one’s youth were like swimming and riding a bicycle. Once learned, they were never forgotten.
Which was to say he’d have no trouble stealing a 198 °Chevy, say. His Swiss Army knife was enough to cope with a car of that vintage. But automobiles had changed since he’d learned how to steal them, and they had computers now, and security devices that could lock the steering wheel if they sensed that something illicit was going on. What was he going to do, look for an old car?
The kind of car he knew he could steal would probably break down after a few hundred miles. Even if it held up, it would be conspicuous. That was one great advantage of the car he had now — it was pretty ordinary in appearance, and at least in Des Moines it was as common as dirt. Driving around, it had seemed as though one in ten cars was the same make and model as the one he was driving, and the greater portion of them seemed to be the same color, too, a kind of indescribable hybrid of beige and gun metal. He had no idea what the manufacturer called the color, but suspected it was something abstract, like Seabreeze or Perseverance, that managed to sound okay without narrowing things down too much. Whatever you called it, the Nissan people had used it on half the cars they sold that year, and they’d evidently found a lot of takers for it in Iowa.
In fact—
Wasn’t that a car just like his up ahead in the next row? It was hard to tell in this light, but it was definitely a Sentra, and the color looked right. Was this an opportunity? It certainly felt like an opportunity. He could leave his car and take this one, if he could break in and hot-wire it. Or, even better, he could just—
He could just forget the whole thing, because while he was looking at the car its lights flashed on and off. There was an instant when he thought the car was winking at him, trying to get his attention, but a second later he realized it was simply signaling its response to its owner, who had just unlocked its doors with her remote control. And he watched as she loaded her purchases into its trunk and opened the door on the driver’s side and settled in behind the wheel.
If he’d beaten her to it, if he’d switched his car for hers, it wouldn’t have done him any good. She’d have realized the deception as soon as she returned to her car, and in no time at all the police would have a new plate number for him. And they might have more than that, if her car had a GPS unit in it.
Oh, hell. Did his?
It stood to reason that the rental car companies would put something in their cars in case they lost track of them. He didn’t know that they did, but he knew some long-haul trucking firms equipped their rigs in that fashion, to guard against the occasional amphetamine-crazed driver on his way from Little Rock to Tulsa suddenly deciding he’d be happier in San Francisco.
He really had to do something. And he had to do it in a hurry, and it had better be something that wouldn’t just substitute one peril for another.
He turned off the radio — it was just making it harder to concentrate — and he took a bite of pizza and wished he had some Coke left to wash it down.
And then it came to him. He forced himself to sit still, forced himself to chew the pizza and swallow it, forced himself to wait while he thought it through to make sure it was sound. And, when he decided he couldn’t see anything wrong with his idea, he turned the key in the ignition and put the car in gear.