Hed left his room at the Days Inn just as the day was starting to fade off into twilight, and hed have liked to have it still darker for the short walk from his room to his car. There was no one around, but he still felt impossibly conspicuous, and he was pretty sure he looked at least as furtive as he had in the photograph, because now he had so much more to be furtive about. Hed tried not to let it show in his walk or in the way he held himself, and either it worked or there was nobody looking at him to begin with, but he reached his car and got in it and got out of there.
He hadnt gone very far. Hed driven directly to this large shopping mall, and had picked a spot that was out of the main stream of traffic without being conspicuous in its isolation. His bag was in the trunk, his gun tucked into his waistband and pressing into the small of his back. The box with the remaining three slices of pizza was on the seat beside him, along with the cup the Coke had come in; hed rinsed it out, and now it held the broken bits of the cell phone. He could have abandoned them in his room, but decided hed rather leave the place as empty as hed found it. And why give them anything to work with?
If hed had the run of the mall, there was a lot he could have accomplished. A wig or a false beard would look ridiculous (though probably not much more so than the real beard hed tried, years ago, to grow), but he ought to be able to change his appearance a little bit without calling attention to himself.
Glasses would help. He didnt
need glasses, not even for reading, although he had a feeling he would in a couple of years.
If he lived that long
No, he thought, willing the thought away. He didnt need glasses, not even for reading, but he kept a pair of reading glasses at home for when he put in long hours working on his stamp collection. They were nondistorting magnifying lenses, and all they did was make print a tiny bit larger and more visible. There was no reason to wear them away from his desk, but he didnt get dizzy when he did, and hed seen how he looked in them. Theyd changed the whole shape of his face, and changed his affect at the same time. Glasses were supposed to make you look studious, and he supposed they did, but beyond that they made you look less threatening.
It would help if he had them now, he thought, because this would be a good time to look less threatening. And he could find a pair just like them in any drugstore, they were a standard and unexceptional item, but he couldnt go shopping for them without giving people a look at his face, and that was something he didnt want to do just now.
The same drugstore where he didnt dare buy reading glasses (or sunglasses, which were even better at changing ones appearance, but which had the disadvantage, especially when the sun was down, of looking like a disguise) would also be a source of hair dye and clippers. A short haircut would make him look less like his photograph, and so would a change of color. Both were on the tricky side, and he certainly didnt want to wind up with a cut that was so amateurish as to attract attention, or hair that screamed Dye Job at the top of its roots. Better to wait until he figured out how to do it right, and in the meantime a cap of some sort would help.
How hard was that? It was almost more difficult to find a store that didnt sell baseball caps than one that did. They were all over the place, in all colors and with all manner of logos sports teams, tractors, brands of beer, anything to which your average unthinking lout could proudly proclaim his allegiance. The nonfurtive guy in the windbreaker had been wearing a cap, and Keller wondered if he owed some of his nonfurtiveness to the cap on his head. A ball cap made you look like a regular guy, just like everybody else.
He looked out the window, and there was a guy with a cap, and there was another.
Maybe that was the answer. Stick around, wait for some poor goober in a ball cap to come back to his car, logy and brain-dead after a carbo-laden meal at Applebees. Bop him on the head (but not too hard, you didnt want him to bleed all over his baseball cap), snatch the thing off his head, and you were in business.
God, would it come to that? The people he typically dealt with had a five-or six-figure price on their heads. All this guy had on his head was a cap, and the price on it was three figures, with two of them coming after the decimal point.
Well, if he couldnt do any better than that, he could follow the two-birds-with-one-stone principle and pick a guy wearing glasses. And theyd better be sunglasses, because otherwise theyd almost certainly have prescription lenses and hed get dizzy the minute he put them on.
Bop the guy, grab the ball cap, snatch off the sunglasses and then go through his pockets, because anybody rich enough to afford a cap and shades probably had fifteen or twenty bucks in his pocket, and, along with everything else, Keller was running out of money.