He was in front of a transmission-repair shop. The business was housed in a badly maintained stucco and corrugated-steel building that appeared to have been blown together by a capricious tornado, using parts of several other structures that it had previously torn asunder. Fortunately, the shop was closed; he didn’t want any good-Samaritan mechanics coming to his rescue.
He shut off the engine and got out of the Honda.
The pickup with the camper shell was not yet within sight on the street behind him.
He hurried to the front of the car and opened the hood.
The Honda was of no use to him anymore. This time they would have concealed the transponder so well that he would need hours to find it. He couldn’t drive it to Westwood and lead them to Rose, but he couldn’t simply abandon it, either, because then they would know that he was onto them.
He needed to disable the Honda in such a fashion that it would appear to be not sabotage but genuine mechanical failure. Eventually the people following him would open the hood, and if they spotted missing spark plugs or a disconnected distributor cap, they would know that they had been tricked.
Then Barbara Christman would be in deeper trouble than ever. They would realize that Joe had recognized the storyteller on the airplane, that he knew they’d been following him in Colorado — and that everything he’d said to Barbara on the phone had been designed to warn her and to convince them that she had not told him anything important when, in fact, she had told him everything.
He carefully unplugged the ignition control module but left it sitting loosely in its case. A casual inspection would not reveal that it was disengaged. Even if later they searched until they found the problem, they were more likely to assume that the ICM had worked loose on its own rather than that Joe had fiddled with it. At least they would be left with the element of doubt, affording Barbara some protection.
The pickup with the camper shell drove past him.
He didn’t look directly at the truck but recognized it from the corner of his eye.
For a minute or two he pretended to study various things in the engine compartment. Poking this. Wiggling that. Scratching his head.
Leaving the hood up, he got behind the wheel again and tried to start the Honda, but of course he had no luck.
He got out of the car and went to look at the engine again.
Peripherally, he saw that the camper truck had turned off the street at the end of the block. It had stopped in the shallow parking area in front of an empty industrial building that featured a real-estate agency’s large For Sale sign on the front.
He studied the engine another minute, cursing it with energy and color, just in case they had directional microphones trained on him.
Finally he slammed the hood and looked worriedly at his watch. He stood indecisively for a moment. Consulted his watch again. He said, “Shit.”
He walked back the street in the direction he had come. When he arrived at the used-car lot, he hesitated for effect, then walked directly to the sales office.
Gem Fittich Auto Sales operated under numerous crisscrossing stringers of yellow and white and red plastic pennants faded by a summer of sun. In the breeze, they snapped like the flapping wings of a perpetually hovering flock of buzzards over more than thirty cars that ranged from good stock to steel carrion.
The office was in a small prefab building painted yellow with red trim. Through the large picture window, Joe could see a man lounging in a spring-back chair, watching a small television, loafer-clad feet propped on a desk.
As he climbed the two steps and went through the open doorway, he heard a sportscaster doing color commentary on a baseball game.
The building consisted of a single large room with a rest room in one corner, visible beyond the half-open door. The two desks, the four chairs, and the bank of metal file cabinets were cheap, but everything was clean and neatly kept.
Joe had been hoping for dust, clutter, and a sense of quiet desperation.
The fortyish salesman was cheery-looking, sandy-haired, wearing tan cotton slacks and a yellow polo shirt. He swung his feet off the desk, got up from his chair, and offered his hand. “Howdy! Didn’t hear you drive up. I’m Gem Fittich.”
Shaking his hand, Joe said, “Joe Carpenter. I need a car.”
“You came to the right place.” Fittich reached toward the portable television that stood on his desk.
“No, that’s okay, leave it on,” Joe said.
“You’re a fan, you might not want to see this one. They’re getting their butts kicked.”
Right now the transmission-repair shop next door blocked them from the surveillance team. If the camper truck appeared across the street, however, as Joe more than half expected, and if directional microphones were trained on the big picture window, the audio from the baseball game might have to be turned up to foil the listeners.
Positioning himself so he could talk to Fittich and look past him to the sales lot and the street, Joe said, “What’s the cheapest set of wheels you’ve got ready to roll?”
“Once you consider my prices, you’re going to realize you can get plenty of value without having to settle for—”
“Here’s the deal,” Joe said, withdrawing packets of hundred-dollar bills from a jacket pocket. “Depending on how it performs on a test drive, I’ll buy the cheapest car you have on the lot right now, one hundred percent cash money, no guarantee required.”
Fittich liked the look of the cash. “Well, Joe, I’ve got this Subaru, she’s a long road from the factory, but she’s still got life in her. No air conditioning but radio and—”
“How much?”
“Well, now, I’ve done some work on her, have her tagged at twenty-one hundred fifty, but I’ll let you have her for nineteen seventy-five. She—”
Joe considered offering less, but every minute counted, and considering what he was going to ask of Fittich, he decided that he wasn’t in a position to bargain. He interrupted the salesman to say, “I’ll take it.”
After a disappointingly slow day in the iron-horse trade, Gem Fittich was clearly torn between pleasure at the prospect of a sale and uneasiness at the way in which they had arrived at terms. He smelled trouble. “You don’t want to take a test drive?”
Putting two thousand in cash on Fittich’s desk, Joe said, “That is exactly what I want to do. Alone.”
Across the street, a tall man appeared on foot, coming from the direction in which the camper truck was parked. He stood in the shade of a bus-stop shelter. If he’d sat on the shelter bench, his view of the sales office would have been hampered by the merchandise parked in front of it.
“Alone?” Fittich asked, puzzled.
“You’ve got the whole purchase price there on the desk,” Joe said. From his wallet, he withdrew his driver’s license and handed it to Fittich. “I see you have a Xerox. Make a copy of my license.”
The guy at the bus stop was wearing a short-sleeve shirt and slacks, and he wasn’t carrying anything. Therefore, he wasn’t equipped with a high-power, long-range listening device; he was just keeping watch.
Fittich followed the direction of Joe’s gaze and said, “What trouble am I getting into here?”
Joe met the salesman’s eyes. “None. You’re clear. You’re just doing business.”
“Why’s that fella at the bus stop interest you?”
“He doesn’t. He’s just a guy.”
Fittich wasn’t deceived. “If what’s actually happening here is a purchase, not just a test drive, then there’re state forms we have to fill out, sales tax to be collected, legal procedures.”
“But it’s just a test drive,” Joe said.