“You want to do it,” she said, “because it’s who you are.”
“A man who kills people.”
“Except that’s not the point of it. It’s the resolution, but the point is solving a particular kind of a problem.”
“I guess. I wonder.”
“You wonder what?”
“Well, when Dot told me the complication—”
“Not knowing the identify of the target.”
“Right. That would have been the time for me to tell her to forget it.”
“But it’s when you found yourself getting drawn in.”
“That’s right. ‘Oh, that’s really crazy and stupid,’ I said to myself.”
“‘So sign me up!’”
“Just about. That’s insane, isn’t it? Perverse, anyway.”
“It makes it more interesting,” she said. “You like things to be interesting.”
The train had just pulled out of Greenwood, Mississippi, when he went to the dining car. It was still light out, and while he’d brought his book with him, he spent most of his time looking out the window, wondering who lived out there and what their lives were like. And maybe someone out there was looking at the passing train, and wondering about the people on it.
His meal was a leisurely one, and it was dark by the time he returned to his roomette. He read for an hour or so, then got Ainslie to turn the facing seats into a bed. He undressed and killed the lights and got under the blanket, and lay there wondering how much sleep he was likely to get.
Next thing he knew they were coming into Kankakee. That was in the song, wasn’t it? He looked at his watch, and it was a quarter after seven, and time for breakfast. And when he got back from breakfast, Ainslie had restored the roomette’s original configuration, and his dark gray fedora was perched on the opposite seat, along with his suitcase.
He could have checked the suitcase. You could do that before your train was available for boarding, and pick it up at Baggage Claim when you arrived. He hadn’t, figuring there might be something in it that he wanted en route, and of course there wasn’t.
He was wearing the hat when they got to Chicago, and he’d have been carrying the suitcase if Ainslie hadn’t insisted on performing that task for him. Once Keller was on the platform, Ainslie handed over the suitcase. “Here you go, Mr. Edwards,” he said. “Now you have a fine stay in Chicago, hear?”
A brief one, Keller thought.
He walked through the train station, found the queue of taxis, and took one to O’Hare Airport. Half an hour later, when he emerged from the taxi, he stopped being Nicholas Edwards.
That was the name on his Louisiana driver’s license and his US passport, the name by which everybody in both New Orleans and the philatelic world knew him. His wife’s name was Julia Roussard Edwards, and his daughter’s name was Jenny Edwards. The Edwards name had come from a gravestone, and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina it had been easy enough to explain away lost records and get a copy of a dead infant’s birth certificate as his own. Everything else had followed in due course, and at this point it would be a neat trick for anyone to prove that he was not Nicholas Edwards.
Which was just as well. There was still an open file somewhere, with one John Paul Keller of New York, NY, being sought in connection with a high-profile homicide in Des Moines, Iowa. Nobody was pressing the case, and it seemed likely they thought he was dead if they thought about him at all, but it was reason enough to protect his new identity.
And one way to protect it was to put it in mothballs for the time being.
In the passenger terminal, he looked for the Hertz counter, then walked on past it to the men’s room. There he switched his wallet for another, slimmer one. Nicholas Edwards now reposed in a zippered compartment in his suitcase, and the wallet on his hip identified him as James J. Miller, of Waco, Texas. There was a Texas driver’s license in that name, a pair of valid credit cards, and the usual filler — membership cards in hotel loyalty programs and the American Automobile Association, a courtesy card from the Ft. Worth Chamber of Commerce, and last year’s calendar, the gift of an insurance agent in Galveston.
All he had to show was the driver’s license and James Miller’s Visa card. They had his reservation, gave him a Japanese compact with the tank filled, and told him he could bring it back empty.
“But we had a gentleman two weeks ago who cut it a little too close,” the attendant told him. She was not quite flirty, but almost. “He made it into the lot, and he got halfway up the aisle, and the engine went dry and cut out. Now you just might want to give yourself a little more leeway.”
Touched his wrist as she spoke the last line. Well, semi-flirty, anyway.
“I’ll be careful,” he assured her, and gave her a smile, and went off to collect his car.
James J. Miller had booked a ground-floor room at the Super Eight motel on the north edge of Baker’s Bluff, and by one o’clock Keller was checked in and as unpacked as he felt the need to be. He’d brought three phones, and they were lined up on the coffee table, looking virtually identical.
Well, not entirely so. One was an iPhone, and it was the phone he carried all the time, except when he forgot and left it on the bedside table. He’d used it once since he left New Orleans, calling Julia as the train was approaching Chicago, telling her where he was and that all was well. Then he’d turned it off, and could only hope that would keep it from pinging off the nearest tower, telling the world where he was. It couldn’t ping if it was turned off, could it?
Hell, how was he supposed to know what it could or couldn’t do? Maybe he should have left it home.
He put it away for now and considered the other two phones, turning them over, studying them. It wasn’t really all that hard to tell them apart, not if you really looked at them. The Pablo phone was older by several years, and looked it, with scratches on the case.
He turned it on and placed a call. It rang a couple of times, and then Dot picked up.
“Well, I’m here,” he said. “Now what?”
When he was done talking, he put on his jacket, straightened his tie. The fedora was on the bed, and wasn’t that supposed to be bad luck? Not a fedora specifically, but any hat on a bed? It seemed to him that he’d read something to that effect, and thought it might be a superstition in the world of the theater, like telling one’s friends to break a leg rather than wishing them good luck. And never saying the word Macbeth, but referring to it as The Scottish Play.
There were explanations for these superstitions, and he could find out what they were and where they came from by calling up Google on his iPhone, but then it would be pinging off towers, so the hell with it.
Still, he picked up the hat and looked for a place to put it. The closet shelf? No, that would put it out of sight and thus out of mind, and all too easily left behind.
He’d worn it when he checked in, and it seemed to him that the desk clerk was more solicitous and respectful than usual. He’d put it down to Midwestern courtesy, but now he wondered if the hat might have had something to do with it.
It was on his head when he left the room.
From Dot he’d learned that the client’s name was Todd Overmont. He commuted every day to his office in Chicago, where he did something with commodities. Something profitable, Keller decided, once the Hertz car’s GPS had led him to Overmont’s house, a massive affair on Robin’s Nest Drive that might have been inspired by Mount Vernon.
Keller parked on the other side of the street, where he could keep an eye on the house and monitor activity coming or going. This was one of the things detectives did, he reminded himself. They called it being on a stakeout, and according to Jake Dagger, the hardest part was coping with boredom.