He couldn’t think of a thing.
Could it work?
Well, it seemed to him that it had a shot. For a while, anyway. The minute he left the long-term lot, he was no longer in a car of interest to the authorities. Well, the car was still of interest to them, it was the same car he’d been driving all along, but they didn’t know that, because it had a different license plate on it.
He could have switched plates with any car. It didn’t have to be the same make and model as his, nor did it have to be stashed in a lot at the airport. But that would only shelter him until the car’s owner noticed the switch, or got pulled over by someone who recognized the plate. As soon as that happened, the police would have a new plate number to look for, and he’d be back in their sights all over again.
But if this worked, he’d have some breathing room. Because he wasn’t just giving them the old plate, he was providing a car to go with it. They’d find the car, with his rental papers in the glove box. They’d find the smashed-up phone, and they’d probably get a print off the pizza box, and what conclusion would they draw? That he’d switched cars? That he’d switched plates and kept the same old car?
No, they’d almost certainly assume that he’d come to the airport because it was in fact an airport, with the intention of getting on a plane. And they’d have a tough time establishing unequivocally that he hadn’t somehow managed to slip through Security and do just that.
Eventually, of course, the real owner of the Sentra would return. But he wouldn’t find his car, because they’d have long since hauled it away and very likely stripped the thing down to the chassis, until it would be about as easy to put back together as the cell phone.
So what would he do? After he’d looked all over the lot for it, and very likely cursed a blue streak, what would the guy do?
Report it as stolen, most likely. And the police would add the vehicle to the national hot car list, where it would have thousands of others for company. That meant that police officers all over the country would be looking for it, but it didn’t mean they’d be looking very hard. If he was in an accident, if he got stopped for speeding, someone would run the plate and determine that the vehicle was stolen. But if he was just driving around and minding his own business, nobody would give him a second glance.
It would be just as well, though, to point them toward the Sentra sooner rather than later. It would probably be at least a day or two before the owner returned, but that wasn’t the only reason to get things moving. As soon as they identified the car and followed their noses into the airport terminal, they’d get out the word to stop searching for the car, and all Nissan Sentras, including the one he was driving, would stop attracting untoward attention.
So should he call it in?
Caller ID, a staple on every 911 line, would immediately pinpoint the pay phone he called from. He’d be long gone before anybody could stop by to ask questions, but was there a better way?
The station had a toll-free number, and it had imprinted itself on his memory somewhere in the course of the few hundred times they’d announced it. He picked a pay phone at the far end of a strip mall with all its stores closed for the night. When a man with a good radio voice said, “WHO, Central Iowa’s leader in news and opinion, you’re on the air,” he took a breath and said, “Hey, is there a reward for spotting that car everybody’s looking for? On account of I just seen it out by the airport.”
“You should have had your dial set to 740,” the fellow said. “They found the car, and we had it on the air a full five minutes ago. You missed the boat, hoss.”
He said, “So do I get the money or not?” and heard a short bark of laughter before the phone clicked in his ear.
“I guess that’s a no,” he said out loud. And got back in the car and started driving.
9
One moment he was dreaming, some variant on a dream he’d had off and on his whole life, the one where he was naked in public. It wasn’t a difficult dream to interpret, and had been one of the first things he and his therapist tackled in that long-ago failed experiment in self-discovery. But he still dreamed it every once in a while, and after all these years a sense of recognition took a lot of the edge off the dream. Oh, you again, he’d think, and then sink back into the apparent reality of the dream.
This time the dream was suddenly over and he was as suddenly awake, with no real memory of the dream and no other evidence that he’d been asleep. He was sitting upright behind the wheel of his car, and he kept his eyes closed while he got his bearings. He had the awful feeling that the car was surrounded by men with drawn guns, men who were just waiting for him to open his eyes. But they would go on waiting as long as he pretended to be asleep, so that’s what he had to do, just sit there with his eyes shut, his breathing regular and shallow.
He opened his eyes. There was nobody standing anywhere near the car. A pickup truck was parked at an angle half a dozen spaces away, its engine idling, and there was a big RV clear down at the other end of the strip, which he seemed to remember from when he pulled off the road and parked. Other than that the place was deserted.
He was in a rest area off U.S. Route 30 west of Cedar Rapids. He’d taken I-80 out of Des Moines, then decided he’d rather stay off the interstate, at least until he was out of Iowa. The map had shown him what looked like a good road angling northeast toward Marshalltown, and he took it as far as Route 30 and aimed himself at Cedar Rapids. From there he’d have a choice of a few routes — northeast to Dubuque, where he could cross the Mississippi into southern Wisconsin, or stay on 30 east to Clinton and cross into Illinois, or another road that angled between those two. He didn’t think it mattered much which route he chose, but the one thing he wanted to do was get out of Iowa and into either Illinois or Wisconsin as soon as possible. And it looked as though he could do that without having to fill the gas tank.
What he hadn’t taken into account was fatigue. It wasn’t that late, and he hadn’t gotten up that early, but the stress he’d been under had evidently taken its toll, and he started yawning and felt himself losing concentration well before the approach to Cedar Rapids. He tried to shake off the tiredness, and thought about stopping somewhere for a cup of coffee, but the whole point was not to stop before he had to and not to expose himself to human eyes if he could possibly avoid it. Besides, he knew coffee wasn’t going to do it. The last thing his body wanted was a stimulant. What it was crying out for was a chance to shut down for a while.
The rest area, when he came upon it, was a godsend. A sign announced that it was closed from two to five A.M., and that violators would be prosecuted. He’d heard somewhere that rules like that were designed to keep prostitutes from working the area, setting up shop and hailing passing truckers on their CB radios. Keller, who couldn’t imagine how either of the parties involved, the hookers or the truckers, could be quite that desperate, also couldn’t figure out what business it was of anybody else’s. But he gathered that an ordinary motorist closing his eyes for a couple of hours wouldn’t get bothered, and the presence of the trailer at one end of the rest area and a couple of cars at the midpoint suggested he wasn’t alone in this conclusion. So he’d found a place to park, far away from the others, and he’d shut down the engine and locked the doors, and then he closed his eyes, figuring twenty minutes or a half hour would have him as good as new.