Lawrence Block - Hit and Run

He hadn’t bothered to check the time when he called it a night, but it couldn’t have been much later than one or two, and it was just past five now, so he’d slept three or four hours. That was time he couldn’t afford to spend standing still, but on the other hand he had clearly needed the rest. Now he could get back on the road. Or, even better, he could think things through with a sleep-refreshed brain, and then he could get back on the road.

He looked at the map, decided he’d do best to stay on 30. That was the most direct route. Earlier, Dubuque had held some appeal for him because he’d at least heard of it, which wasn’t true of Clinton. Now, in the cool light of day, or what would be the cool light of day in an hour or so when the sun came up, he could see that the most important thing was to get across a state line, not to pass through a town he’d heard of. (And it wasn’t as though he’d heard anything particularly alluring about Dubuque. In fact, the only thing he could recall about it was the advertising slogan The New Yorker magazine had used back when he was a boy. Not for the Old Lady from Dubuque , they’d boasted, which had had the effect of making the magazine sound wonderfully sophisticated, while no doubt pissing off any number of old ladies and Dubuquers.)

How you do go on, he thought to himself, only the voice he could imagine speaking those words was Dot’s. He wished he could hear her voice now, saying those words or almost any others. She was the only person he ever really had a conversation with. He didn’t spend his days in stony silence, he’d exchange a few words with his doorman, banter with the waitress in the coffee shop on Lexington Avenue, talk about the weather with the guy at the newsstand or discuss the fortunes of the Mets and Yankees, Nets and Knicks, Giants and Jets — depending on the season — with guys he ran into at the gym or in a bar or waiting for an elevator.

But he didn’t really know anybody except Dot, and hadn’t let anyone else know him. It was rare that he went more than a couple of days without talking to her. And now she was the one person he couldn’t call.

Well, actually, she was one of the several hundred million people he couldn’t call, because he couldn’t call anybody. But she was the one person he wanted to call and couldn’t, and it bothered him.

And then he heard her voice in his head. It wasn’t uncanny, it wasn’t some eerie visitation, it was just his own mind pretending to be Dot and telling him what it thought she would tell him. You damn near threw your back out shifting all that crap from one trunk to the other , the voice said. Don’t you think you ought to at least see what you’ve got?

Whoever’s idea it was, his or Dot’s, it wasn’t a bad one, and this was the perfect time to do it, with no one around to take an interest in him or what he was doing. He popped the trunk and pulled out a cardboard carton that he’d shifted intact and unexamined from one trunk to the other. He sorted through it now, and if he made it all the way to the ocean it might prove useful, because it was all stuff for the beach — little toy buckets and sand shovels, bathing suits, beach towels, and a Frisbee. That last wasn’t exclusively for the beach, you could throw a Frisbee just about anywhere, as long as you had somebody to throw it to. If he had to throw it, he supposed he would throw it away.

And why not toss the whole carton? There was a trash bin just steps from his car, and was there any reason to keep any of this junk? He hoisted it, headed for the bin, then changed his mind, returning to the car and distributing items from the carton on the back seat and floor. A blue and yellow plastic bucket here, a red shovel there. It would be good camouflage, he told himself, because anybody taking a quick peek at the car’s interior would know he was looking at the car of a husband and father, not an assassin on the run.

Unless they just figured him for a pedophile…

Back to the trunk. There was a metal tool chest of the sort he supposed most men carried in their cars, tricked out with all manner of tools and gadgets, not all of which he was able to identify. Some, he was pretty sure, had to do with fishing; he recognized lead sinkers and plastic floats, as well as a couple of lures with hooks attached, one shaped like a minnow, the other looking for all the world like the little spoons employed by cocaine users. For an instant he let himself imagine some pie-eyed fish, nostrils dilated in glorious anticipation, taking a deep sniff and getting hooked through the gills. Which, metaphorically, was what was supposed to happen to people, though he had no firsthand experience in that area. If Keller was addicted to anything it was to stamps, and they had never been accused of burning holes in anybody’s septum.

Though they could certainly burn a hole in a man’s pocket. The last purchase he’d made (aside from the pizza, the one remaining piece of which would serve as his breakfast as soon as he finished inventorying the trunk) was five Swedish stamps for $600, abruptly reducing his cash on hand to $187 plus the change in his pocket. Since then, the pizza had claimed $15 and the airport parking lot $7, and he had to buy enough gas to get him halfway across the country. Figure fifteen hundred miles, probably more with the inevitable to-ing and fro-ing, call it twenty miles to the gallon at $2.50 a gallon, and what did that come to?

He ran the numbers in his head and kept coming up with different answers, and finally he took out a pen and a scrap of paper and worked it out. The number he wound up with was $187.50, which seemed high to him, and especially so in view of the fact that it was twenty-two dollars more than he had to his name.

And he would need money for food. He’d worked out a way to buy food without giving anyone a good look at him, but he’d still have to part with cash. And sooner or later — and it had better be sooner — he was going to have to buy a baseball cap, and some product to change his hair color, and some implement he could use to give himself a haircut. (There was a pair of pruning shears in the tool chest, and if he’d been a rosebush they might have worked just fine, but he didn’t think they’d do a good job on a human being.) The places that sold the things he needed almost always took credit cards, but if he used one he’d be in worse shape than he was now.

If he had hung on to the $600, he’d be okay. He’d still have problems, and they might well prove insoluble, but running out of money wouldn’t be one of them.

Instead, he had five little pieces of paper. Once they could have been used to mail a letter, if he’d happened to be in Sweden and if there happened to be somebody he wanted to write to. Now they weren’t even good for that.

He felt like Jack, the young genius who’d traded the family cow for the magic beans. As he remembered the story, everything turned out all right for Jack in the end.

But that, he reminded himself, was a fairy story.

Two hours later he crossed the Mississippi at Clinton. A few miles into Illinois, with the gas gauge zeroing in on the big E, he pulled up to one of the full-service pumps at a gas station. They seemed to be in the middle of the local equivalent of rush hour, which struck Keller as all to the good.

The attendant looked to be just out of high school, and trying to come to terms with the prospect of spending the rest of his life on the outskirts of Morrison, Illinois. He had earbuds and looked like an intern with a stethoscope, but Keller could see the iPod in the bib pocket of his overalls, and whatever he was listening to was evidently more interesting than Keller.

He’d lowered the sun visor and positioned it to block the upper half of the side window, which gave the kid less of a view of his face. He asked for forty dollars’ worth of regular; he’d have just as soon filled the tank to the brim, but didn’t want to have to wait for change. The kid got things going, then came back to ask him if he wanted the oil checked. Keller told him not to bother.