But he wouldnt buy forty dollars worth this time. Hed had time to think about it, and what hed 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 didnt part with more than ten or twenty dollars at a time. Pay forty and they might remember you, and Keller didnt 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, whod 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 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 werent. And one full shake, which had melted but still wasnt what youd 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 wasnt that hungry it meant he didnt need it.
But the Sentras 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. Hed reached a point where his problems didnt 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, hed 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 wasnt 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. Hed 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 didnt have airport security to contend with, but it wasnt cheap, not by a long shot. And now theyd changed its name to the Acela Express, which nobody could pronounce and hardly anybody could afford. If he didnt have gas money, he certainly didnt have train money.
The bus? He couldnt remember the last time hed been on an intercity bus. Hed 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 nations TV screens. Hed 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 didnt make the connection right away, there hed be, with no place to hide, and there theyd be, with plenty of time to think about things, and what were the odds that one of them wouldnt put two and two together?