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you d paid for.
He d driven in and out of a similar situation fifty miles back, unwilling to
risk giving an attendant a look at his face. Now the tank was getting low, and
even if he managed to find a full-service pump, that didn t mean whoever
pumped the gas for him wouldn t take a good look at him while he was at it.
He d been lucky with the young fellow in Morrison, but it wasn t as if he d
latched onto some magic formula.
But he wouldn t buy forty dollars worth this time. He d had time to think
about it, and what he d decided was that people who paid out that much money
for gas all at once did so with a credit card. The ones who paid cash didn t
part with more than ten or twenty dollars at a time. Pay forty and they might
remember you, and Keller didn t want to be memorable. CASH CUSTOMERS PAY
INSIDE FIRST THEN PUMP, the hand-lettered sign said, and the message, even
without punctuation, was clear enough. Keller, who d shucked out of his blazer
earlier, put it on now. He figured it made him look just a little more
respectable and just a little less deserving of a long look; more to the
point, it covered the revolver riding in the small of his back. And he wanted
the gun there, because he might have to use it.
He got a twenty from his wallet and had it in his hand when he entered the
store. Stores like this got robbed all the time, and he knew some of them had
security cameras installed, and wondered if this one did. In the middle of
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rural Indiana?
Oh, the hell with it. He had enough to worry about.
He entered the store, and the girl was all by herself, reading Soap Opera
Digest and listening to a country station. Keller slapped the bill down, said,
Hi there twenty dollars worth pump number two, all in one uninflected gush
of words, and was on his way out the door before she could lift up her eyes
from her magazine. She called out to him to have a nice day, which he took for
a good sign.
Of course she could be doing a double take now, he thought as he pumped the
gas. She could be thinking that he looked familiar, and deciding just why he
looked familiar, and he could see her jaw dropping and the sense of civic
purpose coming into her eyes as she grabbed for the phone and dialed 911.
Keller, how you do go on.
Sixty dollars so far for gas, fifteen for burgers and fries and shakes, ten
for bottled water. His bankroll was half of what it had been that morning,
just eighty dollars and change. He had burgers left, which were marginally
edible cold, and he had french fries, which weren t. And one full shake, which
had melted but still wasn t what you d call liquid. He could, he supposed,
live on that all the way back to New York. If he was hungry enough he would
eat it, and if he wasn t that hungry it meant he didn t need it.
But the Sentra s requirements were less flexible. He had to keep gas in the
tank, and even if OPEC flooded the market with oil, he was going to run out of
money before he ran out of highway.
There had to be an answer, but he was damned if he could see it. He d reached
a point where his problems didn t have solutions. Even if the skies opened up
and showered him with ball caps and clippers and hair dye, even if he was
suddenly blessed with the ability to transform his facial features into those
of a different person entirely, he d be broke, stranded somewhere in eastern
Ohio or western Pennsylvania with the philatelic equivalent of a handful of
magic beans.
Could he sell the stamps? They had been a genuine bargain, if not precisely a
steal, at $600. Could he offer somebody else an even greater bargain and get
half his money back for them? What, knock on doors? Go through small-town
phone books, looking for stamp dealers? He shook his head, dazzled by the
sheer impracticality of the idea. He stood a better chance of pasting the
stamps on his forehead and mailing himself to New York.
Other courses of action suggested themselves, and fell equally short. A train?
The railroads had pretty much given up on the job of transporting people,
although they still ran passenger trains from Chicago to New York and up and
down the eastern corridor. But he wasn t sure where he might go to catch a
train, and even if he worked that out, it would cost him more money than he
had. He d taken the Metroliner to Washington a while ago, and it was certainly
a nice way to travel, and you went from midtown to midtown and didn t have
airport security to contend with, but it wasn t cheap, not by a long shot. And
now they d changed its name to the Acela Express, which nobody could pronounce
and hardly anybody could afford. If he didn t have gas money, he certainly
didn t have train money.
The bus? He couldn t remember the last time he d been on an intercity bus.
He d traveled by Greyhound one summer during high school, and recalled a
jarringly uncomfortable ride in a crowded vehicle full of people smoking
cigarettes and drinking bottled whiskey out of paper bags. The bus would have
to be inexpensive, because otherwise nobody would willingly ride it.
But it was far too public for a man with his picture on the nation s TV
screens. He d be cooped up for hours with forty or fifty people, and how many
of them would take a look at his face? And, even if they didn t make the
connection right away, there he d be, with no place to hide, and there they d
be, with plenty of time to think about things, and what were the odds that one
of them wouldn t put two and two together?
No bus, no train. A voice on the radio, pondering his apparent escape via the
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Des Moines airport, had theorized that Montrose/Blankenship might have made
his way across the tarmac to the area where the private planes landed and took
off. He might have had a plane stashed there, with a confederate to fly it, or
he might even have possessed the skills to fly it himself. Or, the fellow had
gone on to suggest, the desperate assassin might have hijacked a private
plane, taking the pilot hostage and forcing him to fly the plane to parts
unknown.
Keller had welcomed the notion, because it was so wonderfully ludicrous that
it had given him a laugh when he d sorely needed one. Now, though, he wondered
if it was such a bad idea after all. There were small private airports all
over the country, with dinky little planes landing and taking off all the
time. Suppose he found one, some single-runway operation out in the boondocks.
And suppose he bided his time and waited until some hotshot bush pilot had his
plane all fueled and ready to go, only to have Keller, the desperate assassin
himself, stick a gun in his face and demand to be taken to the corner of East
Forty-ninth Street and First Avenue?
Well, maybe not.
The motel was a Travelodge, on the edge of a town the name of which he hadn t
bothered to notice. He d pulled around to the rear of the lot like a
registered guest on the way to his room, chosen an out-of-the-way parking
spot, and cut the lights and engine. He sat behind the wheel, eating one of
the cold burgers and drinking water, and watched a man and woman get out of a
square-back Honda and walk a short distance to a ground-floor unit. They
didn t have any luggage, Keller noted, and the inference he drew from this was
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