Lee Child: James Penney's New Identity

The car itself was gone. In the circumstances, that was good. But it had left a trail. It might have been seen in Mojave, outside the bank. It might have been seen at the gas stations where he filled it. And its plate number was on the motel form from last night. With his name. A trail, arrowing north through California in neat little increments.

He remembered his training from Vietnam. He remembered the tricks. If you wanted to move east from your foxhole, first you moved west. You moved west for a couple hundred yards, stepping on the occasional twig, brushing the occasional bush, until you had convinced Charlie you were moving west, as quietly as you could, but not quietly enough. Then you turned about and came back east, really quietly, doing it right, past your original starting point, and away. He’d done it a dozen times. His original plan had been to head north for a spell, maybe into Oregon. He’d gotten a few hours into that plan. Therefore the red Firebird had laid a modest trail north. So now he was going to turn south for a while and disappear. He walked back out of the woods, into the dust on the near side of the road, and started walking back the way he’d come.

His face he couldn’t change. It was right there on all the posters. He remembered it staring out at him from the bulletin board in the police building. The neat side-parting, the sunken gray cheeks. He ran his hands through his hair, vigorously, back and forward, until it stuck out every which way. No more neat side-parting. He ran his palms over twenty-four hours of stubble. Decided to grow a big beard. No option, really. He didn’t have a razor, and he wasn’t about to spend any money on one. He walked on through the dust, heading south, with Excelsior Mountain towering up on his right. Then he came to the turn dodging west toward San Francisco, through Tioga Pass, before Mount Dana reared up even higher. He stopped in the dust on the side of the road and pondered. Keeping on south would take him nearly all the way back to Mojave. Too close to home. Way too close. He wasn’t comfortable about that. Not comfortable at all. So he figured a new move. He’d head west to the coast, then decide.

He put himself thirty yards west of the turn and stuck out his thumb. He was a practical guy. He knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere by walking. He had to get rides, one after the other, anonymous rides from busy people. He decided as a matter of tactics not to look for rides from solid citizens. Not from anybody who looked like they might notice him or remember him. He had to think like a fugitive. A whole new experience.

After forty minutes, he came up with an ironic grin and realized he didn’t have to worry about avoiding the solid citizens. They were avoiding him. He was standing there, thumb out, no baggage, messy hair, unshaven, dusty up to the knees, and one vehicle after another was passing him right by. Glancing at him and accelerating down the road like he wasn’t even there. The sun wheeled overhead and dropped away into afternoon, and he started to worry about getting a ride at all. He was hungry and thirsty and vulnerable. Alone and on foot in the exact middle of the hugest and most contemptuous landscape he had ever seen.

Salvation arrived in the form of an open-topped Jeep, dusty and dented, a sandy color that really wasn’t any color at all. A guy about forty at the wheel. Long graying hair, dirty tie-dye shirt, some kind of a left-over hippy. The Jeep slowed and plowed into the dust. Stopped right next to Penney and the driver leaned over inside and shouted across over the throb of the worn muffler.

“I’m going to Sacramento, my friend,” he said. “But if you want the Bay, I can let you off in Stockton.”

Penney shook his head, vigorously.

“Sacramento is great,” he shouted. “Thank you very much.”

He put his right hand on the windshield frame and his left hand on the seatback and swung himself inside exactly like he’d done with Jeeps in Vietnam.

“You just lay back and look at the scenery, my friend,” the driver shouted over the muffler noise. “Talking is not an option in this old thing. Too loud, you know what I mean?”

James Penney nodded gratefully at him and the old hippy let in the clutch and roared off down the road.

The Laney County Medical Examiner’soffice was just that, an office, and a fairly rudimentary one. There were no facilities for post-mortem examination, unless Kolek wanted to clear his own desk and slice the carbonized lump open all over it. So he had taken the body bag down to the facility the County used over in northern Los Angeles. It was a big modern morgue, well equipped, and busy. It was busy because it sucked in all the business from the ring of small counties surrounding it, as well as handling its own substantial quota of unfortunates. So Kolek had parked the bag in the cold store and signed up for the first free visitor slot of the day, which was mid-afternoon. It was a half-hour slot, but Kolek figured that was going to be more than long enough. Not a hell of a lot of doubt about how Penney had died. All that was left was a routine ID through the dental data.

Laney itself had one dentist, serving the population of two thousand people. He had never seen Penney. But he was reasonably new, and the sheriff said it wasn’t unusual for Laney people to forget about their teeth. The factory gave health insurance, of course, but not the best in the world, and dentistry required a contribution. But the surgery nurse was a stout old woman who had been there through three separate tenures. She went through the system and found the Penney file where it had been stored after his last visit, twelve years before. It was a thin packet of notes and film in a buff envelope. Kolek signed for it and threw it into the back seat of his wagon. Checked his watch and headed south for the morgue.

James Penney got outof the old hippy’s jeep right on the main drag into the southern edge of Sacramento, windblown, tired, ears ringing from the noise. He stood by the side of the road and waved and watched the guy go, waving back, long gray hair blowing in the slipstream. Then he looked around in the sudden silence and took his bearings. All the way up and down the drag he could see a forest of signs, bright colors, neon, advertising motels, air and pool and cable, burger places, eateries of every description, supermarkets, auto parts. Looked like the kind of place a guy could get lost in, no trouble at all. Big choice of motels, all side-by-side, all competing, all offering the lowest prices in town. He walked down to level with three of them. Figured he’d use the middle one. Hole up and plan ahead.

But then he decided to try something he’d read about once in a travel guide. Check in late, and ask for an even lower price. Late in the day, the motel would be keen to rent another room. They’d figure something is better than nothing, right? That was the theory in the travel guide. It was a theory he’d never tried, but now was the time to start. So he went straight out for a late lunch or an early dinner or whatever it was time for. He chose a burger chain he’d never used before and sat in the window, idly watching the traffic. The waitress came over and he ordered a cheeseburger and two Cokes. He was dry from the dust on the road.

The forty-year-old left-over hippywith the long graying hair drove on downtown and parked the dusty and dented jeep right up against a hydrant outside the Sacramento Police Department’s main building. He pulled the keys and stepped out. Stood and stretched in the warmth of the afternoon sun before ducking inside.

The Drug Enforcement Agency’s Sacramento office was located in a suite of rooms lent to them by the police department. The only way in was through the precinct hall, past the desk sergeants. Agents had to sign in and out. They had to collect internal ID badges to wear inside the building, and they had to leave them there on their way out. Two reasons for that. They tended to look more like criminals than agents, and the badges kept confusion inside the station house to a minimum. And because they were working undercover, they couldn’t afford to slip their IDs into their pockets, absent-mindedly or by mistake, and walk out like that. If they did, and they got searched by whatever new friends they were trying to make, there could be some very bad consequences. So the strict rule was the IDs stayed at the precinct house desk, every moment the agents weren’t actually inside and wearing them.