Lawrence Block - Hit and Run

“They can do that?”

“My rule of thumb is anybody can do anything. So if they tried to locate the phone, all it would do was lead them to the Laurel Inn, because that’s where I left it.”

“In your room.”

“Room two-oh-four.”

“You remember the number. I’m impressed, Keller. It’s almost as impressive as your trick with the presidents. Who was our fourteenth president, do you happen to remember?”

“Franklin Pierce.”

“That’s my boy. Now for the bonus round, what color stamp was he on?”

“Blue.”

“Blue, Franklin Pierce, and room two-oh-four. That’s some memory, but—”

“But so what? Dot, it’s possible that they bought that phone the same way I bought this one, and never made a call with it before Hairy Ears handed it to me.”

She was right on it. “But if not,” she said, “you could press a button and get a list of the last eight or ten numbers called.”

“Right.”

“And you might even be able to trace it, find out who bought it and when.”

“It’s possible.”

“Same question, Keller. So what? I never stayed at the Laurel Inn, and maybe the maids there aren’t in the same league with your average Dutch housewife, but do you really think the phone’s going to be there after all this time?”

“It might be.”

“Seriously?”

“They gave me a room with a king-size bed,” he said.

“Which is nice, I suppose, but since you were never going to sleep in it—”

“And when I left the phone, I didn’t want anybody using it. So I lifted up the mattress and stuck the thing all the way in the middle of the bed.”

“Can you imagine the way the cops must have tossed that room?”

“After a high-profile political assassination? Yes, I think I can.”

“All they had to do was take the mattress completely off the bed.”

“They might have done that.”

“But maybe not?”

“Maybe not.”

“Assuming it’s still there, would it even work? Wouldn’t the battery be dead by now?”

“Most likely.”

“But I suppose they sell batteries.”

“Even in the middle of Iowa,” he said.

“The Laurel Inn. You wouldn’t happen to remember their phone number, do you? No, of course not. They never put it on a stamp.”

He went over to the window and looked out at the city while she used the phone and spoke first to an information operator, then to the reservations person at the Laurel Inn. She hung up and said, “Well, there’s a woman who’s convinced I’m completely out of my mind.”

“But it worked.”

“‘We have to be on the second floor, because my husband can’t bear to have footsteps overhead. And I don’t want traffic noise, and I’m sensitive to light, and we both need to be near the stairs, but not right on top of the stairs, and I looked at a diagram on the Web and you know what room would suit us perfectly?’”

“It sounds nuts,” he agreed, “but when you were talking to the clerk, you sounded perfectly reasonable.”

“We’ve got two-oh-four for three nights starting tomorrow. What’s the matter?”

“Oh, I don’t know. That seems like a long time to share a room.”

“One night would be a long time for the two of us to share a room, Keller. You’re not going to be spending even one night at the Laurel Inn, and neither am I. The only reason to book us in there is so that we can get the key. You didn’t happen to keep your key all these months, did you? Along with that phone number?”

“No, and it wouldn’t be good anyway. They use key cards and they reset the system every time they turn the room over.”

“You have to pity all the guys who spent years learning to pick locks, and woke up one morning in an electronic world. They must feel like linotype operators in the age of computerized type-setting, with these sophisticated skills that turned out to be completely useless. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Never mind. I had to book three nights because I couldn’t go through all that song and dance about how only two-oh-four would do, not if I was only going to keep the room for a single night. I wonder if they’ve even got a diagram of the layout on their website.”

“I wonder if they’ve even got a website.”

“Everybody does, Keller. Even I have a website.”

“It’s under construction.”

“And it may stay that way for quite a while. I’ll book us a couple of tickets, or do you want to drive? How far is it?”

“It’s got to be a thousand miles, or close to it.”

“And our reservation’s for tomorrow night, so I guess we fly. Do you still have a gun?”

“The SIG Sauer I picked up in Indiana. I can’t take it on a plane.”

“Not even in checked luggage?”

“There’s probably a regulation against it, and even if there isn’t, it’s too good a way to draw attention. Some clown sees the outline of a gun in your bag and you’re in for a long day.”

“You want to drive? I’ll fly up and pick up the room key and you can hit the road in your dusty pickup. Des Moines’s north of here, right?”

“Like most of the country.”

“But pretty much due north? Right there on the Mississippi, isn’t it?”

He shook his head. “West of it.”

“Weren’t you in Iowa, that time the client did a number on us—”

“That other time a client did a number on us.”

“The Mercenary Times case. Wasn’t that Iowa, and didn’t you throw something into the Mississippi?”

“That was Muscatine.”

“ That’s the name of the damn place. I was trying to think of it earlier and I kept getting Muscatel, and I knew that wasn’t it. Des Moines is west of there, not on the Mississippi?”

“Now you’ve got it.”

“Unless I get on Jeopardy! I don’t know why I need to fill my head with all this crap. You want to do that, drive up while I fly?”

“Just so I can bring a gun? No, the hell with it. Anyway, I don’t want to be there in a vehicle that somebody could trace back to New Orleans.”

“I didn’t even think of that. We’ll both fly.” She picked up her phone. “I’ll book our flight. Tell me your name again, will you? I don’t know why I can’t remember it. What they need to do, Keller, is put your picture on a stamp.”

They flew Delta to Des Moines, with a change of planes in Atlanta. Both legs of the flight were routine, except that they had to sit three rows apart from Atlanta to Des Moines, and Dot was sure the man next to her was an air marshal. “I kept telling myself not to do anything suspicious,” she said. “It was nerve-racking and reassuring at the same time.”

She’d booked her ticket in her new name, Wilma Ann Corder. She’d found the name years ago, the same way Keller had found Nicholas Edwards, and had assembled a whole identity kit, passport and driver’s license and Social Security, along with half a dozen credit cards. She’d rented a post office box in that name and even subscribed to a needlepoint magazine, which she tossed every month when she checked her box. “Then for three years,” she said, “they sent me these plaintive requests to renew my subscription. But what the hell do I care about needlepoint?”

As Wilma Ann Corder, she picked up a rental car in Des Moines. It wasn’t from Hertz and it wasn’t a Sentra, and Keller thought that was all to the good. On the way to the Laurel Inn she said, “You were lucky, Keller. Nick Edwards suits you, especially with the new haircut and glasses. And Edwards is common as dirt. Corder’s pretty rare, but there are just enough of them around so that I keep getting asked if I’m related to this one or that one. I tell them it was my ex-husband’s name and I don’t know anything about his family. As for Wilma, don’t get me started.”