Текст книги "Hit and Run"

Автор книги: Block Lawrence

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

12

He had done what he could to prepare himself for the prospect of sleeping on the fun couple’s sheets, but it turned out he didn’t have to. The room was furnished with twin double beds, and they’d only used one of them – and used it thoroughly, from the evidence. Keller covered that bed with its spread and turned down the other one. He treated himself to a shower, then slipped between the sheets and closed his eyes. He’d hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, but had he also remembered to lock the door so it couldn’t be opened from outside? He was trying to remember, and thinking he ought to go check, and before he knew it he was asleep.

He was awake before the maid started her rounds. He had another shower, and shaved, and put on clean clothes. He had one more change of underwear in his bag, and a clean pair of socks, and after that he’d have to start recycling the dirty ones, because he couldn’t afford to wash his clothes or buy new ones.

Two and a half million dollars in investments and he couldn’t afford underwear.

Nobody was going to dust the room for prints, but he wiped it down anyway, out of habit. Back in the Sentra, he ate the last hamburger and drank some bottled water and pretended he’d just had a hearty breakfast. He threw out the cold french fries, the cement milkshake.

He started the car, checked the gas gauge. He would be needing gas soon, and he supposed he could spare a twenty.

At first glance, he wasn’t entirely certain the gas station was open, or even still in business. The basic setup was fairly standard, a pint-size convenience store with a couple of pumps out in front, an air hose and a pay phone off to one side. The only vehicle in sight was a tow truck parked around back.

Was anybody home? Keller pulled up to the pump, where a home-made sign instructed all customers, cash or credit, to pay inside before pumping gas. Something felt off to Keller, and he thought about driving on to the next station, but he’d already passed up a couple of opportunities, and pretty soon he’d be running on faith and fumes.

He patted his hair down, put on his blazer and made sure it concealed the gun in the small of his back. Why couldn’t the happy fornicators at the Travelodge have left something useful, along with a set of spectacularly soiled sheets? A baseball cap, say, or a bottle of hair dye, or a few hundred dollars and a collection of live credit cards.

Keller had a twenty in hand when he cleared the threshold. Behind the counter sat a stocky man with a broad forehead and a nose that had been broken at least once. Iron-gray hair cut short enough for boot camp showed around the edges of a baseball cap on which an embroidered Homer Simpson held up a mug of beer. The man was reading a magazine, and Keller would have bet anything it wasn’t Soap Opera Digest. Nor did he seem to find his magazine as gripping as the girl had found hers, because he looked up from it before Keller could open his mouth or put the money on the counter.

“Help you?”

“Twenty dollars’ worth of regular,” Keller said, and handed him the bill.

“Hang on a second,” the man said, catching Keller just as he was turning around. He turned back, and the man was taking a good look at the twenty. Jesus, was there anything wrong with it?

“Been some funny twenties around lately,” the man said. “This here looks to be okay.”

Keller would have said he’d just made it himself, but couldn’t count on the man recognizing it for a joke. “It came straight out of an ATM,” he said instead.

“Is that a fact.”

Suspicious old bastard. Keller said, “Well, if everything’s okay,” and started for the door again, but the voice stopped him in his tracks.

“No, hold it right there, son. And turn around slow, you hear?”

Keller turned, and was not surprised to see the gun in the man’s hand. It was an automatic, and looked like a cannon to Keller.

“I’m not too good with names,” the man said, “but it seems like you’ve got a few of them, and who’s to say any of ’em’s the right one? Keep your hands where I can see ’em, you understand?”

“You’re making a mistake,” Keller said.

“Your damn picture’s all over the place, son. And if I’m not much on names I’m pretty good on faces. Bet there’s a pretty decent reward on you.”

“By God,” Keller said. “You think I’m the son of a bitch who shot that man in Iowa.”

“Shot that high-stepping coon,” the man said. “Well, if you had to gun somebody down, I got no problem with the choice you made. But that don’t mean God gave you the right to do it.”

“I know I look like him,” Keller said, “and you’re not the first person to notice the resemblance, but I’m not him and I can prove it.”

“You just save your story for the law, why don’t you?” And the hand that wasn’t holding the gun reached for the phone.

“I’m not him, I swear it,” Keller said.

“What did I just say? You got an explanation, there’s men with badges’ll be happy to listen to everything you got to say.”

“The law’s after me,” Keller said, “but for something else.”

“How’s that?”

“Alimony and child support. Long story short, she’s a cheating bitch and the kid’s not mine, and we even proved that with DNA tests and the courts still say I gotta support him.”

“You must have had some lawyer.”

“Look, let me prove it, okay? I’m just going to get something from my pocket, okay?”

And without waiting for permission he drew the gun and put two bullets in the guy’s chest before he could get off a shot.

13

The impact had knocked the man backward, and he’d tipped his chair over and gone to the floor with it, losing his Homer Simpson cap on the way down. Keller went around the counter and checked him, but it was just a formality. Both bullets had entered the left side of his chest, and at least one of them had found his heart, and that was that.

Keller’s ears were ringing from the gunshots, and his hand ached a little from the revolver’s recoil. He straightened up, glanced through the window. There was a car parked at one of the pumps, and that was disconcerting for the second or two it took him to realize that it was his car, right where he’d parked it.

The dead man was still holding the gun, his finger on the trigger, and Keller had heard stories of men firing guns long after their own death, their trigger fingers curling at the onset of rigor mortis. He wasn’t sure it ever happened, and it might even have been a plot element in a comic book he’d read as a child, but in any event he wanted the gun. It was a SIG Sauer automatic with a fully loaded fifteen-shot clip, and his own revolver was down to two bullets, and had just been used in a homicide. The SIG wasn’t as huge as it had looked, there was nothing like having a gun pointed at you to make it increase dramatically in size, though it was in fact a little larger and heavier than the revolver. He tried it where he’d been carrying the revolver, and it rode there just fine, and he figured that closed the deal.

He wiped his prints from the revolver and put it in the dead man’s hand, shaping the still-warm hand to the butt and slipping the forefinger inside the trigger guard. No one was terribly likely to buy the idea that the old guy had shot himself twice in the heart, but it seemed as good a place as any to stow the revolver, and at the very least it would give somebody something to think about.

He looked for a cash register and didn’t see one. There was an old wooden Garcia y Vega cigar box on the counter, and that turned out to be where the fellow kept cash and credit card slips. The cash was all fives and singles, with a couple of tens in the mix. No wonder he’d looked long and hard at the twenty, Keller thought. It was probably the first one he’d seen all month.

He didn’t particularly want to touch the dead man, but he wasn’t squeamish, either, and from the right-hand hip pocket of the man’s camo jeans he drew a leather wallet with a design embossed on it, a design so worn and weathered that Keller could barely make out what it was. He could see it was a crest of some sort, and it looked familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

Inside the wallet, he found the very same crest on the card that identified its owner, Miller L. Remsen, as a member in good standing of the National Rifle Association. Guns don’t kill people, Keller thought. Sticking your broken nose in other people’s business, that’s what kills people.

Remsen’s Indiana driver’s license had his middle name as well, which turned out to be Lewis. It had his date of birth, and Keller worked it out that he was seventy-three, and would have turned seventy-four in October, if he hadn’t decided to be such a good citizen. There were cards for Social Security and Medicare, and a couple of very old pictures of children, smiling bravely for the school photographer. By now those children very likely had children of their own, but if so Remsen didn’t have pictures of them.

The wallet held cash, including two fifties and a batch of twenties and adding up to just over three hundred dollars. There were two credit cards as well, both in the name of Miller L. Remsen, but the Citibank Visa card had expired. The other was a Master-Card issued by CapitalOne, and it was good for another year and a half.

He pocketed the bills and the valid credit card, wiped everything else he’d touched and put it back, then returned the wallet to the dead man’s pocket. He opened the cigar box again, hesitated, then scooped up the small bills.

Something registered, something he caught out of the corner of his eye, and he looked again and saw it – on the ceiling, at the juncture of two walls. A security camera, and who would expect it in a run-down operation like Remsen’s? But they were everywhere these days, and when the cops found the body they’d check the camera, and he couldn’t let that happen.

He stood on a chair, and climbed down a few minutes later shaking his head. The camera was mounted there, all right, but there was no tape or film or battery in it, and no wires connecting it to a power supply. It was like one of those decals announcing the presence of a burglar alarm system. A scarecrow, that’s all it was, and Keller wiped his prints from it and left it there to do its job.

The items on sale in the tiny store area didn’t amount to much, and most of them were auto parts or accessories of one sort or another. There were cans of motor oil, wiper blades, engine additives. He grabbed up a pair of six-foot bungee cords, thinking they might come in handy sometime, though he couldn’t guess for what. Remsen sold all manner of snacks, too, packages of chips and Slim Jims and those cracker-and-peanut-butter sandwiches, and he thought those might come in handy, too, and then decided to pass. All of the snacks looked as though they’d been there since the Carter administration. He left them where they were.

A door led to a bathroom, which was about as bad as he’d expected. He closed it quickly and opened another door, which led to a ten-by-twelve room that had evidently served as Remsen’s living quarters. There was a stack of magazines, all involving guns or hunting or fishing, and there were three hardcover Ayn Rand novels, and, most disconcertingly, there was, in Remsen’s bed with its head on one of the two pillows, an inflatable doll, which the man had outfitted with a rubber mask. The face was vaguely familiar, and after a moment Keller realized it was supposed to be Ann Coulter. Keller thought that was just about the saddest thing he’d ever seen in his life.

Something else was bothering him, and it took him a minute to realize what it was. Not the fact that he’d killed the man – he’d killed any number of men, and none of them for a more compelling reason. This guy had it coming, which was more than he could say for a lot of the men and women whose names belonged in the memoir Keller would never dream of writing. Often in the past he’d used a trick of mental gymnastics in order to diminish the memory of a killing, but he wouldn’t have to do that in Remsen’s case because it wouldn’t bother him a bit.

But what did bother him was something he had never done before. He was robbing the dead.

Keller had always wondered what was so terrible about robbing the dead. Compared to, say, robbing the living. Once you were dead, how could you possibly care what became of the watch on your wrist or the ring on your finger? There were, as the song said, no pockets in a shroud, and it was pretty generally acknowledged that you couldn’t take it with you, so why not rob the dead? It wasn’t like necrophilia, which was flat-out disgusting; it was simply a matter of making use of that which was no longer of any use to its owner.

It was still stealing, of course, since the dead might be presumed to have heirs, so you’d be stealing from them. That said, there were men of whom it was said that they would steal a hot stove, who would draw the line at going through a dead man’s pockets. Keller didn’t get it, and now that he thought about it he decided society had imposed the taboo out of necessity; if it weren’t such an awful thing to steal from the dead, why, everybody would do it.

So it gave him a turn, but once he’d had a chance to sort out his thoughts, it stopped bothering him. And he wasn’t taking a watch or a ring, nothing personal. Just some cash and a credit card, both of which he needed desperately.

Outside, he went to his car and filled the tank, and he didn’t stop at the twenty-dollar mark, either. The Sentra drank deeply and settled down on its tires, like a heavy man sitting back after a big meal.

Remsen’s sign was still hanging on the pump, advising cash and credit customers alike to pay before they pumped their gas. He replaced it with one he’d lettered at the counter, using what was very likely the same Magic Marker Remsen had used. CLOSED FOR FAMILY EMERGENCY, he’d printed in block caps. HELP YOURSELF AND PAY ME LATER. He somehow doubted that anyone who knew Remsen at all well would believe he’d display such trust in his fellow man, but who was going to argue with a free tank of gasoline? They’d all help themselves, he figured, and some of them might even pay for it later.

Back inside, he flipped the sign in the window from OPEN to CLOSED. He turned off lights, rearranged the scene behind the counter so that the body would not be visible from outside, walked to the open door and pushed the button that would lock it, and stepped across the threshold. And stopped there, one foot outside and one foot in, because it was almost as if he could hear Miller Remsen’s voice, halting him in his tracks.

Hold it right there, son. Where do you think you’re going?

He didn’t want to go back behind the counter, but he knew he had to. Hadn’t he already established that he wasn’t squeamish? So why draw the line now?

He braced himself, then reached for the Homer Simpson cap. He didn’t have to remove it from Remsen’s head, it had already fallen off on its own, so all he needed to do was pick it up, which wasn’t really all that hard, and then put it in place on his own head, which wasn’t all that easy.

In the car he checked his reflection in the rearview mirror. It seemed to him that the cap helped. The adjustable strap was a little loose, he’d noticed that Remsen had a pretty large head, and he tightened it a notch, and that was better. And he tugged at the brim so that it covered a little more of his forehead, and that was better, too.

He had a dead man’s gun pressing into the small of his back and a dead man’s money and credit card in his pocket, and he’d filled his tank with a dead man’s gas. And now he had a dead man’s baseball cap on his head.

It was a curious development, all in all. But now it was beginning to look as though he might make it back to New York after all.

The drive-up window at Wendy’s was even less threatening than the one at Burger King. He ordered a couple of burgers and a green salad, and ate them in the car a few miles down the road. He drove through the rest of Indiana and all the way through Ohio and a couple of miles of West Virginia, and he was across another state line and into Pennsylvania before he needed to stop for gas. He picked a big truck stop, pulled up to a self-service pump, and used Remsen’s credit card.

There was a moment when he realized another motorist was looking at him with interest, and he didn’t know what he would do; there were people all over the place, and he couldn’t shoot the guy and take off. He looked back at him, and the fellow – he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five – gave him a big grin and a thumbs-up.

Why, for God’s sake?

“Man, Homer’s the bomb,” the guy said, and Keller realized he’d been looking not at his face but at his baseball cap, and was expressing his approval of Homer Simpson, or endorsing Homer’s enthusiasm for beer, or whatever.

Until that moment Keller had been having mixed feelings about the cap. It unquestionably served to render him less identifiable, which was good, but at the same time it drew attention all by itself, which wasn’t. A John Deere cap, a Bud Light cap, a Dallas Cowboys cap – any of those would have offered a degree of invisibility which Homer, embroidered in Day-Glo yellow on a royal blue field, did not begin to provide. He’d even thought about cutting the threads and picking out the embroidery, taking Homer and his mug of suds out of the picture altogether.

But now he was beginning to be just as glad he’d held off. Homer drew attention, as he’d feared he might, but in this instance he’d drawn that attention not to Keller’s face but away from it. The more people noticed Homer, the less attention they paid to Keller. He was just a dude with Homer on his cap, and he’d be sending out the subliminal message that he was safe and unthreatening, because how dangerous was the sort of yokel who’d walk around with Homer Simpson an inch or two north of his eyebrows?

14

Somehow in the course of skirting the city of Pittsburgh, he managed to lose Route 30, and signs indicated that he was approaching the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It would get him to New York, but he seemed to recall having heard that the state troopers on the Pennsy Pike were hell on speeders. That bit of information might have been twenty years old, if it was ever true in the first place, and he hadn’t exceeded a speed limit since he left Des Moines, but according to another sign, the road he was on would get him to I-80, and that’s where he headed.

Before his encounter with Remsen, he’d have had a more compelling reason to pick I-80. It was free in Pennsylvania, while the Pennsylvania Turnpike was a toll road. When he’d been hoping to stretch his gas money so that it would get him home, it was worth driving out of one’s way to escape a highway toll. But now he had money in his pocket, and the worst thing you could say about a toll booth was that it would give one more person a quick look at his face.

It took him longer than he’d expected to get to the interstate, and he was glad when a rest area provided a chance to stop. He needed a restroom, and while he was there he checked his reflection in the mirror and couldn’t take his eyes off Homer Simpson. Did the image have to be so bright? Maybe he could rub a little dirt on it, tone it down some.

He left it alone, had a look at the map mounted on the wall outside, then returned to his car and sat there, trying to decide if he could make it all the way back to the city in one shot. He probably had enough gas, though there was no point in taking the chance of running out, say, in the middle of the George Washington Bridge, not when Miller Remsen was ready and willing to fill up the tank for him.

What he had to decide was whether to spend another night on the road. A few hours in a real bed had spoiled him, and the idea of trying to sleep in the car was unappealing now. How far was he from the city? Seven, eight hours? More, with stops for gas and food?

At a rough estimate, he calculated that he’d hit the city around three or four in the morning if he drove straight through. That might not be a bad time to turn up at his apartment. There’d be fewer people on the streets, and the ones who were out and about at that hour were apt to be too drunk to notice him, or to remember if they did.

A line of thought tried to intrude, and his mind deliberately pushed it aside…

If he drove straight through, he thought, he’d arrive tired and worn out, and was that the best way to land on his own doorstep? He’d want to crawl into bed the minute he got through the door, and he wouldn’t be able to, because he’d have tons of things to do. Never mind the mail, which always piled up when he took a trip. There’d be plenty of other things demanding his immediate attention. There always were.

That thought again, and again he never let himself become entirely conscious of it, warding it off almost without effort.

He switched on the radio for the first time since he’d left Remsen’s place, but he was in the mountains now and the reception was bad. The only station he could pick up was playing music, and the static was so heavy he couldn’t even tell what kind of music it was.

He switched it off. It seemed unlikely that they’d have discovered Remsen’s body. The sign he’d left would explain the man’s absence, and they’d need a compelling reason to break down his door and look around inside. The man lived alone, and if he had a friend in the world, Keller hadn’t seen any evidence of it.

He glanced over at the squat brick building that housed the restrooms and vending machines. Alongside the entrance he’d noticed a coin box with copies of USA Today, but hadn’t thought to pick one up. It struck him now that it might not be a bad idea to find out what was happening in the world, especially since the radio wasn’t going to do much for him for the next few hours. He opened the door and got out of the car, and a big SUV picked that moment to pull into the rest area and park right in front of the little brick building, and its doors opened to let out two adults and four small children, all in a hurry to use the john.

Far too many people all at once. He got back in his car. The paper could wait.

He got on the road again and thought about the man he’d killed in Indiana. There might be another crusty old fart who went hunting and fishing with Remsen, or came over and played gin rummy with him, and sooner or later somebody would pop the door and find the body, but by then he’d have long since ditched the man’s credit card – and the Sentra as well, as far as that was concerned, because he’d be back in New York, where you didn’t need a car and had to be crazy to own one.

Whether he made it in one day or two, whether he drove straight through or found a place to sleep, he’d be back in New York in a matter of hours. Out of harm’s way, and safe at home.

A sign advertised a restaurant at the next exit, boasting that the place offered Pennsylvania Dutch home cooking. Keller found the prospect irresistible, although he wasn’t quite sure what the Pennsylvania Dutch cooked at home. Nowadays, he thought, they probably brought something home from the Grand Union and popped it in the microwave just like everybody else, but he guessed the restaurant harkened back to a simpler era. He took the exit, found the restaurant, pulled into the parking lot, and wondered what the hell he thought he was doing.

Because it was a regular walk-in-and-sit-down restaurant, where you sat at a table and ordered from a menu, and the waitress brought your food to you. And she got a look at you, and so did the other customers, and that was precisely what he’d gone to great lengths to avoid, ever since his face first turned up on the television screen in the Days Inn back in Des Moines. True, he had a baseball cap now, but it wasn’t as though he was hiding behind an Ann Coulter mask. His face was still out there for all the world to see.

He put the car in gear, backed out of the lot, and found a Hardee’s with a drive-up window. He picked up his food, parked a dozen yards away, ate it, dropped his trash in the can, and found his way to the entrance ramp and back onto the interstate.

Now what was all that about? The mouthwatering prospect of shoofly pie and apple pandowdy? Had his appetite somehow taken over for his brain?

He thought about it, and figured out what it was.

He was in Pennsylvania, and a lot nearer to home than to Iowa. And the closer he got to New York, the safer he felt. Add in the sense of security that came with having money in his pocket, and the way his baseball cap had smoothed the way for him the last time he filled the gas tank, and he had evidently come to believe he had nothing to worry about.

Soon, he thought. Soon he’d be home. But he wasn’t there yet.

A couple of hours later, he managed to convince himself that the motel wasn’t nearly as risky as the Pennsylvania Dutch restaurant.

There would be no other patrons involved, for one thing. The only person he’d see would be whoever checked him in. And he’d be wearing the baseball cap with the brim down over his forehead, and he’d have his head lowered while he filled out the registration card. And the motel was an independent, not affiliated with a national chain, and that increased the odds that the owner-operator would be an immigrant from the Indian subcontinent. In fact, he’d probably be from Gujarat, and the odds were good that his surname would be Patel.

For years now, people from the Indian state of Gujarat, most of them named Patel, had been buying American motels all over the country. It seemed likely to Keller that there was at least one training academy in Gujarat’s main city, whatever they called it, devoted to schooling ambitious locals in motel management. Our topic today, good students, concerns the proper placement of the mint upon the pillow. Tomorrow we will discuss the paper band proclaiming the toilet to be sanitized for your protection.

If Keller’s face was an unremarkable one, rarely warranting a second glance, wouldn’t it be even less remarkable to someone from a significantly different ethnic background? Keller wasn’t overly given to racial or ethnic stereotypes, and had never been one to say that all Asians or Africans looked alike, but there was no dodging the fact that, when he got an initial look at someone racially different from himself, what he saw first and foremost was that difference. He saw a black man, or a Korean woman, or a Pakistani; later, through familiarity, he was better able to make out the individual.

And, if you were a man or woman from Gujarat, wouldn’t it work in about the same fashion when you looked over the counter of your motel at a white American? Wouldn’t you see what your prospective customer was before you saw who he was? And, since all you had to do was run his credit card and hand him a room key, would there ever be any reason for you to pay attention to any more of him than you saw on first glance?

Keller decided to risk it.

There was no one at all behind the desk when Keller opened the door to the motel office, but he didn’t need to see anybody to know that his first assumption was correct. The owners were from India, if not necessarily from Gujarat. The rich smell of curry left no room for doubt.

It was not an aroma you expected to encounter in the hills of central Pennsylvania, and it had an even stronger effect upon Keller than had the phrase Pennsylvania Dutch home cooking. Here was a smell that promised everything that had been missing from all those fast-food hamburgers and fries. Keller wasn’t hungry, he’d eaten not that long ago, but hunger was somehow beside the point. He wanted to find the source of that wonderful bouquet and roll around in it like a dog in carrion – an image, he reflected, that flattered neither himself nor the food, but even so—

He broke off the thought when the tinkling of a beaded curtain heralded the arrival of a young woman, dark-skinned and slender, dressed in a white blouse and plaid skirt that might have been the uniform of a parochial school. She was almost certainly the daughter of the proprietors, and she was very pretty, and in other circumstances Keller might have allowed himself some light flirting. At the very least he might have commented on how good the food smelled.

But not now. All he did was ask about a room, and all she did was tell him the price was $39, which struck him as perfectly reasonable. If she looked at him at all, at his face or at Homer’s, he never saw her do it. He was just a burdensome duty to be dealt with as quickly as possible, before she got back to polishing the essay portion of her application to Harvard.

He filled out the card she gave him, making up a name and address, leaving the space for his car’s make and license number blank. They always had a space for it on the card, but they didn’t seem to care if you filled it in or not, and this girl, who wouldn’t have noticed if he’d registered as Mahatma Gandhi, was no exception.

He paid cash, because his credit card was in Remsen’s name and he’d already signed in as somebody else. He could have used Remsen, the name would be safe for days if not weeks, and by tomorrow he’d be back in New York and none of this would matter. But he had the money, so what difference did it make?

She asked him if he would want to make phone calls, because then he would need to leave a deposit, or allow her to take an imprint of his credit card. He shook his head, picked up his room key, and filled his nostrils for one last time with the sweet smell of curry.