Maybe, maybe not. That wasn’t the sort of thing he could remember. But he was pretty sure he’d worn the windbreaker to Albuquerque, and he’d have still had it on when he rang Heggman’s bell and punched Heggman’s ticket, because he hadn’t had time to unpack and change. He’d checked into three different rooms under three different names, but never left his bag in any of them, never even opened it until he was back in New York.
So they were setting him up even then. Taking his picture. They’d probably have done more if he’d given them more time, but he was in and out in nothing flat, so all they had was that one picture of him.
And they’d managed to give it to the authorities. With what sort of story? “I saw this man running away, and then he stopped and turned and I got this picture of him.” It might not make much sense, but a picture was a picture, and it was something to hand to the media so they could plaster it all over the public consciousness, and maybe it would lead to something.
Did the bastards know his name? They wouldn’t have learned it from Dot, and he couldn’t think how else they might have found it out. If he’d taken his time in Albuquerque it might have been different, they might have searched his room, might have even tailed him back to New York. He’d flown to Albuquerque via Dallas but took the long way home, through Los Angeles, and it didn’t seem likely anyone could have followed him.
If they didn’t know his name, or where he lived—
But then the TV caught his attention again, and he found out that they — the authorities, not Al and his hairy-eared associate — knew a little more than they had a few minutes ago.
They had a name to go with the photo.
“Leroy Montrose,” the announcer said. The screen showed his photograph, then cut to an exterior shot of the Laurel Inn, then to a shot of Room 204, where a forensics unit looked to be hard at work, dredging the carpet for traces of the elusive Mr. Montrose.
While they kept at it, the off-camera voice informed Keller that a member of the Laurel Inn’s staff had recognized the photo as that of a patron who had checked in several days earlier — a neat trick, in Keller’s opinion, since he’d never checked in at all, or even passed the desk. He’d gone straight to his room from the parking lot in back via a flight of outside stairs, and he’d left the same way. He’d never passed Go, never collected two hundred dollars, and had never spotted or been spotted by anyone who worked for the hotel, or anyone who was staying there, either.
But then anyone could make a phone call. Anyone could claim to be a hotel employee with a good memory. The saving grace, it seemed to Keller, was that it wasn’t going to lead anywhere. They wouldn’t find his fingerprints in Room 204, or his DNA, or indeed anything of his other than the cell phone he’d left under the mattress, and who knew if they’d even get that far? And if they did, so what? He’d never used the phone, and had wiped his prints from it, so where could it lead them?
Across the street, he thought.
Across the street to Denny’s, where he’d sat at a well-lighted table eating that silly sandwich and fries. He could have used his credit card at Denny’s, which would have made things a little bit easier for them, but he’d paid cash, and then what had he done?
He’d called a cab from the pay phone inside the restaurant. And waited inside until the cab pulled up. And got in it and told the driver to take him to the airport.
By now they’d be canvassing stores and restaurants in the immediate vicinity of the Laurel Inn. By now, or within a matter of minutes, they’d have shown his picture to the waitresses and cashiers in Denny’s, and somebody would have identified it, and somebody would have remembered that he’d called a taxi. They’d check all the cab companies — they were the government, for Christ’s sake, they were the state and local cops and the FBI, they had enough manpower on the case to check everything — and they’d find the driver and know he’d gone to the airport, and they’d hit the car rental desks, and if they’d checked with them earlier they’d check them again, and they’d have the credit card and driver’s license he’d used, and they’d lighten up on Leroy Montrose and start looking real hard for Holden Blankenship. That was the name they’d be flashing on TV screens and shouting out over the radio, and the name they’d try on motel clerks throughout the Greater Des Moines metropolitan area.
How long before they got to his Days Inn? How long before they kicked his door in?
By the time they did, he’d better be someplace else.
But where?
7
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.