Arthur Hailey - Wheels

Though there had been adaptations and changes in outlook since, Farstar had retained its basic concept.

Here and now Adam was circumspect about the words he used because a product policy board meeting was no place to wax overly poetic, and notions about Picasso took second place to pragmatism. Nor could he speak of Rowena, though it had been the thought of her which inspired his own thinking that night.

Rowena was still a beautiful memory, and while Adam would never tell Erica about her, he had a conviction that even if he did Erica would understand.

The discussion about the visual look of Farstar ended, though they would return to the subject, Adam knew.

"Where were we?" Hub Hewitson was turning pages of his own agenda.

"Page forty-seven," Braithwaite prompted.

The chairman nodded. "Let's get on."

An hour and a half later, after prolonged and inconclusive discussion, the group vice-president of manufacturing pushed away his papers and leaned forward in his chair. "If someone had come to me with the idea for this car, I'd not only have thrown it out, but I'd have suggested he look for employment elsewhere."

Momentarily, the auditorium was silent. Adam, at the lectern, waited.

The manufacturing head, Nolan Freidheim, was a grizzled auto industry veteran and the dean of vice-presidents at the table. He had a forbidding, craggy face which seldom smiled, and was noted for his bluntness. Like the company president, he was due for retirement soon, except that Freidheim had less than a month of service remaining and his successor, already named, was here today.

While the others waited, the elderly executive filled his pipe and lit it. Everyone present knew that this was the last product policy meeting he would attend. At length he said, "That's what I'd have done, and if I had, we'd have lost a good man and probably a good car too."

He puffed his pipe and put it down. "Maybe that's why my time's come, maybe that's why I'm glad it has. There's a whole lot that's happening nowadays I don't understand; plenty of it I dislike and always will. Lately, though, I've found I don't care as much as I used to. Another thing: Whatever we decide today, while you guys are sweating out Farstar - or whatever name it gets eventually - I'll be fishing off the Florida Keys. If you've time, think of me. You probably won't have."

A ripple of laughter ran around the table.

"I'll leave you with a thought, though," Nolan Freidheim said. "I was against this car to begin with. In a way I still am; parts of it, including the way it looks, offend my notion of what a car should be.

But down in my gut, where plenty of us have made good decisions before now, I've a feeling that it's right, it's good, it's timely, it'll hit the market when it should." The manufacturing chief stood up, his coffee cup in hand to replenish it. "My gut votes 'yes.' I say we should go with Farstar."

The chairman of the board observed, "Thank you, Nolan. I've been feeling that way myself, but you expressed it better than the rest of us."

The president joined in the assent. So did others who had wavered until now. Minutes later a formal decision was recorded: For Farstar, all lights green!

Adam felt a curious emptiness. An objective had been gained. The next decision was his own.

Since the last week of August, Rollie Knight had lived in terror.

The terror began in the janitor's closet at the assembly plant where Leroy Colfax knifed and killed one of the two vending machine collectors, and where the other collector and the foreman, Parkland, were left wounded and unconscious. It continued during a hasty retreat from the plant by the four conspirators - Big Rufe, Colfax, Daddy-o Lester, and Rollie. They had scaled a high, chain-link fence, helping each other in the darkness, knowing that to leave through any of the plant gates would invite questioning and identification later.

Rollie gashed his hand badly on the fence wire, and Big Rufe fell heavily, limping afterward, but they all made it outside. Then, moving separately and avoiding lighted areas, they met in one of the employee parking lots where Big Rufe had a car. Daddy-o had driven because Big Rufe's ankle was swelling fast, and paining him. They left the parking lot without using lights, only turning them on when reaching the roadway outside.

Looking back at the plant, everything seemed normal and there were no outward signs of an alarm being raised.

"Man, oh man," Daddy-o fretted nervously as he drove. "If I ain't glad to be clear o' that!"

From the back seat, Big Rufe grunted. "We ain't clear o'nuthin'yet."

Rollie, in front with Daddy-o and trying to stem the bleeding of his hand with an oily rag, knew that it was true.

Despite his fall, Big Rufe had managed to get one set of chained cash bags over the fence with him. Leroy Colfax had the other. In the back seat they hacked at the bags with knives, then poured the contents - all silver coins - into several paper sacks. On the freeway, before reaching the city, Colfax and Big Rufe threw the original cash bags out.

In the inner city they parked the car on a dead-end street, then separated. Before they did, Big Rufe warned, "Remember, all we gotta do is act like there ain't nuthun' different. We play this cool, ain't nobody gonna prove we was there tonight. So tomorrow, everybody shows their faces just like always, same as any other day." He glared at the other three.

"Somebody don't, that's when the pigs start lookin' our way."

Leroy Colfax said softly, "Might be smarter to run."

"You run," Big Rufe snarled, "I swear I'll find 'n kill you, the way you did that honky, the way you got us all in this . . ."

Colfax said hastily, "Aint gonna run. Just thinkin' is all."

"Don't think! You showed already you aint got brains."

Colfax was silent.

Though he had not spoken, Rollie wished he could run. But to where? There was nowhere; no escape, whichever way you turned. He had a sense of his own life seeping out, the way blood was still seeping from his injured hand. Then he remembered: The chain of happenings leading to tonight had begun a year ago, when the white cop baited him, and the black cop gave a card with a hiring hall address. Rollie's mistake, he recognized, had been to go there. Or had it? If what had overtaken him had not happened in this way, there would have been some other.

"Now listen good.." Big Rufe had said, "we all in this together, we stick together. If nobody of us four blabs, we gonna be okay."

Perhaps the others believed. Rollie hadn't.

They parted then, each taking one of the paper sacks of coins which Big Rufe and Colfax had divided in the back seat of the car. Big Rufe's was bulkier than the others.

Choosing his route cagily, conscious of the implications of the paper sack of coins if he should be stopped by a police patrol, Rollie reached the apartment house on Blaine near 12th.

May Lou wasn't in; she had probably gone to a movie. Rollie bathed the gash in his hand, then bound it roughly with a towel.

After that he counted the money in the paper sack, dividing the coins into piles. It totaled $30.75 - less than a day's pay at the assembly plant.

If Rollie Knight had had the erudition or philosophy, he might have debated, within himself, the nature of risks which human beings take for trifling amounts such as $30.75, and their degrees of losing. There had been earlier risks which frightened him - the risk of refusing to be swept along into deeper involvement with plant crime, and the risk of backing out tonight, which he could have taken, but didn't, when Big Rufe thrust the gun into his hand.

These risks had been real, not just imagined. A savage beating, accompanied by broken limbs, could have been ordered for Rollie by Big Rufe as easily as groceries are ordered from a store. Both men knew it; and that way Rollie would have been a loser too.