But he didnt really know anybody except Dot, and hadnt let anyone else know him. It was rare that he went more than a couple of days without talking to her. And now she was the one person he couldnt call.
Well, actually, she was one of the several hundred million people he couldnt call, because he couldnt call anybody. But she was the one person he wanted to call and couldnt, and it bothered him.
And then he heard her voice in his head. It wasnt uncanny, it wasnt some eerie visitation, it was just his own mind pretending to be Dot and telling him what it thought she would tell him. You damn near threw your back out shifting all that crap from one trunk to the other , the voice said. Dont you think you ought to at least see what youve got?
Whoevers idea it was, his or Dots, it wasnt a bad one, and this was the perfect time to do it, with no one around to take an interest in him or what he was doing. He popped the trunk and pulled out a cardboard carton that hed shifted intact and unexamined from one trunk to the other. He sorted through it now, and if he made it all the way to the ocean it might prove useful, because it was all stuff for the beach little toy buckets and sand shovels, bathing suits, beach towels, and a Frisbee. That last wasnt exclusively for the beach, you could throw a Frisbee just about anywhere, as long as you had somebody to throw it to. If he had to throw it, he supposed he would throw it away.
And why not toss the whole carton? There was a trash bin just steps from his car, and was there any reason to keep any of this junk? He hoisted it, headed for the bin, then changed his mind, returning to the car and distributing items from the carton on the back seat and floor. A blue and yellow plastic bucket here, a red shovel there. It would be good camouflage, he told himself, because anybody taking a quick peek at the cars interior would know he was looking at the car of a husband and father, not an assassin on the run.
Unless they just figured him for a pedophile
Back to the trunk. There was a metal tool chest of the sort he supposed most men carried in their cars, tricked out with all manner of tools and gadgets, not all of which he was able to identify. Some, he was pretty sure, had to do with fishing; he recognized lead sinkers and plastic floats, as well as a couple of lures with hooks attached, one shaped like a minnow, the other looking for all the world like the little spoons employed by cocaine users. For an instant he let himself imagine some pie-eyed fish, nostrils dilated in glorious anticipation, taking a deep sniff and
getting hooked through the gills. Which, metaphorically, was what was supposed to happen to people, though he had no firsthand experience in that area. If Keller was addicted to anything it was to stamps, and they had never been accused of burning holes in anybodys septum.
Though they could certainly burn a hole in a mans pocket. The last purchase hed made (aside from the pizza, the one remaining piece of which would serve as his breakfast as soon as he finished inventorying the trunk) was five Swedish stamps for $600, abruptly reducing his cash on hand to $187 plus the change in his pocket. Since then, the pizza had claimed $15 and the airport parking lot $7, and he had to buy enough gas to get him halfway across the country. Figure fifteen hundred miles, probably more with the inevitable to-ing and fro-ing, call it twenty miles to the gallon at $2.50 a gallon, and what did that come to?
He ran the numbers in his head and kept coming up with different answers, and finally he took out a pen and a scrap of paper and worked it out. The number he wound up with was $187.50, which seemed high to him, and especially so in view of the fact that it was twenty-two dollars more than he had to his name.
And he would need money for food. Hed worked out a way to buy food without giving anyone a good look at him, but hed still have to part with cash. And sooner or later and it had better be sooner he was going to have to buy a baseball cap, and some product to change his hair color, and some implement he could use to give himself a haircut. (There was a pair of pruning shears in the tool chest, and if hed been a rosebush they might have worked just fine, but he didnt think theyd do a good job on a human being.) The places that sold the things he needed almost always took credit cards, but if he used one hed be in worse shape than he was now.
If he had hung on to the $600, hed be okay. Hed still have problems, and they might well prove insoluble, but running out of money wouldnt be one of them.
Instead, he had five little pieces of paper. Once they could have been used to mail a letter, if hed happened to be in Sweden and if there happened to be somebody he wanted to write to. Now they werent even good for that.
He felt like Jack, the young genius whod traded the family cow for the magic beans. As he remembered the story, everything turned out all right for Jack in the end.