Vince needed the car. He was supposed to go back to the lake today, so his father could drive the car home and get back to work when his vacation ended.
Vince wanted to kick the crap out of Saralee while wearing hobnail boots and brass knuckles.
Vince had to have the car, and he wanted to get his hands on Saralee. And since the car and Saralee were together, once he had found one of them, he would have both of them.
That brought up the first question. Where would Saralee have gone? Where would an ambitious, unscrupulous, good-looking nymphomaniac with a stolen car and about three hundred stolen dollars go?
She wouldn’t go east because there was nothing east of New York but New England, and New England was kind of famous for prudery, and a girl like Saralee wouldn’t even think of going to an area that was famous, rightly or wrongly, for prudery. And she wouldn’t go north, because there was nothing to the north but lots of New York State, and then the Canadian border, and she’d never get over the Canadian border in a stolen car for which she didn’t have any registration.
Come to think of it, Saralee didn’t even have a license. He remembered her telling him that, after she had driven the car from the parking lot to the hotel, and how relieved he’d been that she hadn’t been involved in any of the thousand minor accidents that happened every day in midtown Manhattan.
Getting back to the geography, she wouldn’t head west because that way lay Brighton. The only direction left was south. Okay, she would go south. Now what?
He turned it around and looked at it from another point of view. Where would a girl like Saralee fit in? Where would a girl like Saralee naturally gravitate for?
Only two places: California and Miami.
There were lots of things against California. In the first place, it was three thousand miles away. And Saralee only had about three hundred bucks left out of the five hundred she’d lifted from Bradley Jenkins. You don’t take a car three thousand miles on three hundred bucks. Not if you plan to do any eating yourself.
In the second place, in order to get to California she would first have to drive toward Brighton.
In the third place, Miami was to the south, which is the direction she would naturally take anyway.
In the fourth place, Miami was only one thousand miles away, which a girl could do on three hundred dollars.
Okay, that answered question number one. Saralee, without a shred of doubt, was headed for Miami. Now for question number two.
Question two: How the hell was Vince going to get to Miami? Once he was there, how the hell was he going to find one sharp broad in a town full of sharp broads?
He sat there for a long while, and he just didn’t get any answers to question number two. The coffee got cold, and the hamburger got colder, and the hamburger bun got hard, and he still didn’t have any answers to question number two. The waitress began to glare at him and he still didn’t have any answers to question number two.
He finally left the place, noticing that it was now one o’clock, and Saralee now had a five-hour start on him.
Saralee didn’t have a driver’s license and she was driving a stolen car. Therefore, Saralee was going to be obeying every speed law she came across. Which meant it would take her two days at the very least to get to Miami, and probably three. The first day, she would maybe be able to drive four or five hundred miles. Then she’d clock out at a motel somewhere, and start off bright and early tomorrow morning.
If Vince had a car, he’d be able to at least catch up with her. He could drive all night, if need be, and finally he’d catch up with her, because she’d be obeying the speed limits, and she’d be stopping for sleep.
But Vince didn’t have a car.
And he didn’t have lots of time either. He was supposed to be back at the lake today. He might be able to get away with overshooting for a day, coming back tomorrow, but it just wasn’t possible to never go back there, or to go back without his father’s car.
He wandered around and occasionally, when he saw a likely customer, he panhandled a bit, because he at least needed eating money, and within half an hour he had three bucks. Which was a pretty good wage, averaging out to six dollars an hour.
He could always stay in New York, of course. Stay here forever, panhandling at six bucks an hour. Because he definitely could not go back to the lake without his father’s car. He definitely could not, and that was all there was to it.
He saw a gas station, one of the cramped little hole-in-the-wall gas stations common to Manhattan, and stopped in, on impulse, to get some road maps. There wasn’t any one road map for all of the Eastern Seaboard, but he got a bunch of state maps, and could go from one to the next, and follow Saralee’s route from New York to Miami. Then he went down to 72nd Street and Broadway, where they had benches on the mall, and sat down to look at the maps.
The thing was, there were so many roads. You had your choice of half a dozen roads going out of New York, and about half a dozen roads the rest of the way.
But Saralee would be in a hurry. She would take the shortest, straightest route. Vince searched his pockets for a pencil, found one, and marked out on the maps what he thought would probably be her route. He worked at it slowly and carefully, and by the time was finished, he was ninety-nine percent sure he knew every inch of road Saralee would be traveling.
It was two o’clock. Saralee was six hours ahead of him.
He looked at his maps, and he swore under his breath, and he felt horribly frustrated. And all at once, he got his idea.
It wasn’t a very good idea, but that didn’t matter. That didn’t matter, because it was the only idea. It was his only chance. He was sure of his reasoning all the way, sure that Saralee would be heading for Miami, almost dead sure he had figured out her complete route. If his reasoning was correct, his idea just might work. If his reasoning wasn’t correct, his idea didn’t matter and it didn’t matter what he did, because Saralee and the car and everything else were gone forever anyway.
So the idea was worth trying, even though it wasn’t very good.
He got to his feet and crossed the street to the subway station. He paid fifteen cents of his panhandled money and took the subway downtown. He made a couple of transfers, paid another quarter, and wound up on the H&M tubes, headed for Jersey. While in that last train, he put his tie back on, buttoned his shirt, turned his coat collar back down, and tucked his shirt-tail in. When the train reached the last stop in Jersey, everybody got off, and Vince was alone in the car for a minute. He pulled one of the advertising posters down from the row above the windows, hid it under his coat, and left the station.
The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western railroad station was right next to the last H&M tube stop. Vince went over there and stopped off in the men’s room. There he washed the panhandling dirt from his face and hands, and carefully wrote “UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI” on the back of the poster, in large, thick, letters. Then he went out to the waiting room, found a likely-looking untended suitcase, picked it up, and left the depot. He spent a dollar and a quarter on a cab to take him to the highway, and then he stood beside the road, the stolen suitcase next to his feet, the sign in his left hand, and his right hand out, thumb extended.
He waited five minutes before a new DeSoto screeched to a halt. He picked up the suitcase, ran to the car, and the driver, a thirtyish salesman type with horn-rimmed glasses, said, “I’m only going as far as Baltimore.”
“That’s fine,” Vince told him. “Every little bit counts.”
He tossed his suitcase into the backseat, slid into the front seat beside the driver, and said it again, his eyes staring down the road, southward. “Every little bit counts.”