Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

He would drive out, and the place where he would go was a place he would know but that nobody in Chicago would. After a year in jail, that might be anywhere. After eight in jail and a fresh murder, he would go home.

She put the file into her flight bag and walked down the stairs to catch the shuttle to the airport. She didn’t mind waiting in the terminal for a flight to Syracuse. She could use the time to buy the next batch of newspapers and read.

23

Jane checked into a motel near the airport in Syracuse and read newspapers. She started each day by finding more of them. When she had read all the ones she could buy, she spent the afternoon in a branch of the public library that subscribed to even more.

The car had about 530 miles on its odometer when he had gotten it from Lewis Feng. Jane guessed he had then driven it five hundred miles to Medford, six hundred to Santa Barbara, one hundred down to the big east-west routes that started in Los Angeles, and almost three thousand to Upstate New York. Make it five thousand miles, then. Jane searched the newspapers for the dealers’ ads. There was a nearly new Honda Accord in a dealer’s lot in Watertown, but it had a standard transmission. A lot in Ogdensburg had a Honda Accord and it was even gray, but seventeen thousand was too many miles. There was nothing in Massena.

As she moved outward, the odds got worse. Syracuse, Rome, Utica, Troy, Albany all had lots of used-car dealers, and she wasn’t sure anymore whether she was seeing all of their ads. Her best hope was that it was the sort of car they could clean up in half an hour and then use as bait to draw people onto the lot. John Young would have taken their second offer, right after the ridiculous low-ball one they always tried. As soon as they could get the Oregon plates off it, they would have it in the front row, all shined up and looking seductive.

It would have to be a dealer. He couldn’t abandon it, because leaving a new car would set off a search for John Young. He couldn’t sell it himself, because that meant staying in one place, having an address and, probably, a phone number in the papers for a few days. And by now there probably wasn’t anybody alive who would buy a barely driven new car from a stranger who didn’t advertise it and couldn’t wait a day for a decision, without checking to see if it was stolen. It had to be a dealer. He would be relying on the fact that in a few days it would be in the hands of a new owner with a set of New York plates on it.

Then, after three days of staring at identical advertisements for identical cars in newspapers from all over the state and calling dealers on the telephone who wouldn’t tell her no until they had offered her everything they had, she found it. The ad was small but effective. "Almost new! Less than five K mi.! Dave’s Honda-Subaru in Saranac Lake." When she called, she talked to Dave himself.

Jane rented a car in Syracuse, drove to Saranac Lake, and saw the car. It was sitting in the front row, right under the line of colored pennants, gleaming in the sunlight. She found a motel and checked in, spent a few minutes dressing in a modest schoolteacher’s spring dress, then strolled back to the lot. She walked into the showroom and let Dave find her.

"Hi there!" said Dave. He was tall and blond, with eyes so blue that they seemed to be clouded somehow. There was another man with a tie in the showroom, sitting at a desk with a telephone on it, but from the look of the place, he was just there so Dave would have someone to talk to. "What can I show you today?"

"That Honda out there," said Jane. "Is that the one in the paper?"

"That’s it," said Dave gleefully. "You don’t often see a used one that new. Want to drive it?"

Jane thought for a moment, then glanced at her watch. "I guess so." They hated that. The whole game was taking as much time as possible, talking to you, making friends, and getting you to accept what they thought about cars and money. If they were really good at it, at the end they could get you to feel ashamed of using up so much time and then quibbling over a few hundred dollars.

She followed Dave out to the lot and stood by the door while he dropped the key chain into her hand. Then he said diffidently, "Mind if I come along? I can answer any questions you might have."

"If you want to," said Jane. "But I don’t want to take up too much of your time."

He slipped into the passenger seat and buckled his seat belt. "No problem," he said. "I got Bob in there to mind the store, and to tell you the truth, it’s a real treat to get out." He looked like a dog going with the family on a picnic, gazing around him happily and pushing his muzzle toward the half-open window. "You from around here?"

"No," she said. "I just came up on vacation and I saw your ad."

"That’s pretty much what happened to me. That was twelve years ago. Somehow I had the idea it would be fishing in the spring and summer, hunting in the fall, skiing in the winter. But I seem to spend just as much time on this lot as I did in Jersey."

She drove south on Route 3 toward Tupper Lake. It was a good road, and in the spring it was cold and clear at this altitude. The green pine forests on the sides of the mountains looked sparse, turning thick and wet where they merged into the leafy trees halfway down, and below them the lake started so abruptly that it looked like the mountains went down into it.

"See that?" asked Dave.

"See what?"

"The miles. Less than five thousand."

"Are you sure the one who sold it to you didn’t turn it back?"

Dave laughed. "You’re just like my wife. Suspicious. No. The cable’s untouched, and I checked the labels on the doors. It only cleared customs from Japan two months ago. The guy drove it here from Oregon. Those are all good miles."

"Good miles?"

"Yeah. He broke it in right. He didn’t beat it to death in city traffic, just drove the long, easy straightaways across the country."

"It’s a nice car," she conceded. "What made him get rid of it?"

"If you’d seen him, you wouldn’t have to ask. He was a big, tall fellow. I’ll bet he was six-foot-six. This is a fine piece of machinery, but for a man that size driving it four thousand miles—well, it was pretty hard on him. The Japanese don’t design a car for a man that size. It would be stupid: They don’t have any."

"You’d think he would know how tall he was when he bought it."

Dave was stumped for a moment. "You would, wouldn’t you?" He recovered quickly. "He fit in okay, but I guess a long trip like that makes little problems seem like big problems."

Jane pulled the car onto the shoulder, then hooked into the far lane to drive back to Saranac Lake. Dave didn’t like the look of that. "This is a real steal. I don’t know if you read the papers, but the dollar has gone way down against the yen since this baby was built. You try to buy one of these right off the boat, it’s going to cost you an extra three thousand dollars."

"Is that right?" She had read so many newspapers in the past three days that she could have quoted the figures. The small papers always printed the car ads at the end of the business section. She turned into the lot and drove the car into its space with its nose to the sidewalk.

As they got out, Dave said eagerly, "Well, what do you think?"

"I just don’t know," she answered, her eyes fixed wistfully on the car. "I like it, but ..."

"But what?" he asked.

"I just keep wondering why the last owner got rid of a new car."

"I told you why."

"What did he buy when he traded it in?"

"Nothing. He said he made one mistake by being too hasty and that he wanted to look around some more first."

Jane was beginning to feel a hope. It was too early to let it grow. Of course he wouldn’t buy another car from the same lot; it would be too easy to trace. But if he had no car at all, maybe he was still in the area. "I wonder ... I know this is kind of unusual, but I can’t afford to buy a car and go buy another one next month like he did. Do you think I could talk to him?"