In fact
Wasnt that a car just like his up ahead in the next row? It was hard to tell in this light, but it was definitely a Sentra, and the color looked right. Was this an opportunity? It certainly felt like an opportunity. He could leave his car and take this one, if he could break in and hot-wire it. Or, even better, he could just
He could just forget the whole thing, because while he was looking at the car its lights flashed on and off. There was an instant when he thought the car was winking at him, trying to get his attention, but a second later he realized it was simply signaling its response to its owner, who had just unlocked its doors with her remote control. And he watched as she loaded her purchases into its trunk and opened the door on the drivers side and settled in behind the
wheel.
If hed beaten her to it, if hed switched his car for hers, it wouldnt have done him any good. Shed have realized the deception as soon as she returned to her car, and in no time at all the police would have a new plate number for him. And they might have more than that, if her car had a GPS unit in it.
Oh, hell. Did his?
It stood to reason that the rental car companies would put something in their cars in case they lost track of them. He didnt know that they did, but he knew some long-haul trucking firms equipped their rigs in that fashion, to guard against the occasional amphetamine-crazed driver on his way from Little Rock to Tulsa suddenly deciding hed be happier in San Francisco.
He really had to do something. And he had to do it in a hurry, and it had better be something that wouldnt just substitute one peril for another.
He turned off the radio it was just making it harder to concentrate and he took a bite of pizza and wished he had some Coke left to wash it down.
And then it came to him. He forced himself to sit still, forced himself to chew the pizza and swallow it, forced himself to wait while he thought it through to make sure it was sound. And, when he decided he couldnt see anything wrong with his idea, he turned the key in the ignition and put the car in gear.
8
The best place to find a car that no one would return to in a hurry, hed decided, was the long-term parking lot at Des Moines International. And that was also the best place he could think of to abandon a car; whoever found it would figure hed somehow slipped past them and caught a flight somewhere.
And this was a good time of day to be driving around the long-term lot. There were still flights arriving and departing, so the lot wasnt entirely deserted, in which case hed have been apt to attract attention. But the peak hours for air traffic in and out had passed, so he was less likely to pick a car that someone would be coming back for anytime soon.
What he wanted was a car just like his. He didnt need to start it, because he wasnt going to drive it anywhere, but hed have to be able to get into it. He could probably manage that with his knife; failing that, he could break a window. But maybe there was a better way.
He tried three times without success, pulling up behind a parked Sentra, pointing his own remote device at its rear and pressing the trunk release. He didnt think for a moment that every Nissan Sentra would respond to the same remote, but there were only so many frequencies, and sooner or later he almost had to get lucky.
Except he didnt have forever. Eventually hed run out of Sentras, if he didnt run out of time first. One more, he told himself, hoping the fourth time would be the charm, pulling up to the fourth car, putting his own car in park, removing the key from the ignition, putting it back, starting the car so he could lower the window, then retrieving the key again youd really think, wouldnt you, that he could have remembered to lower the window first, or left it down after the previous attempt? and aiming the remote at the other cars trunk, and pressing the button and holding it, because it wouldnt open right away, you had to keep the thing pointed at the trunk and hold the button down for a few seconds, and what difference did it make because it wasnt going to work anyway
Except this time it did.
He had to act quickly now. First thing he did was open his own trunk (with a button on the dashboard, so he didnt have to screw around with the remote). The trunk of the new Sentra was half full of stuff, and without paying any attention to what it was, he transferred everything but the spare tire to his own trunk. There it could keep his black suitcase company.
He used a rag to wipe down the inside of the now-empty trunk, then closed both trunks and used the remote to unlock the doors. It had worked on the trunk, so he wasnt surprised when it worked on the doors, too, but it was a relief all the same, because hed pretty much given up expecting anything to go right.
He emptied the glove compartment, gave it a wipe, and replaced its contents with the Hertz folder and operators manual from his own car. There were maps of Iowa and, less predictably, Oregon, in the door pocket of the new car, and he collected those, along with a couple of losing lottery tickets from the floor and a supermarket receipt from the back seat. When the cars interior was empty, he wiped the surfaces that were likely to have accumulated prints, not to get rid of his own hed been careful not to leave any but to erase the more obvious traces of the cars owner.