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Keller would have passed, too, but it was the only show on offer that he hadnt already seen. There were eight screens at that theater, screening a total of six films the two most popular pictures got two screens apiece, so that you never had more than an hours wait for either of them. Keller had seen them both, and three of the other four, and now hed seen the geek picture, too. He checked his watch, and it was early enough so that he could have slipped into one of the other rooms and taken a second shot at one of the other films, but most of them hadnt been that much fun the first time, and he didnt suppose a repeat viewing would uncover subtleties hed missed the first time around.
The theater was part of a mall on the edge of Jackson, Mississippi. Hed spent the previous night in another of what hed taken to thinking of as the Patel Motels, as if they constituted a vast chain of independents. This one was not far from Grenada, Mississippi, its official location a wide place in the road with the improbable name of Tie Plant. Hed weighed his options during the movie, but he hadnt quite decided whether hed drive a little farther or start looking for a motel on the way out of Jackson. Decisions of that sort, like where to go next or what to do when he got there, tended to make themselves.
He left the theater, walked to his car. He was wearing the Homer Simpson cap, as always, but a few days ago hed expanded his wardrobe with the addition of a denim jacket that someone had conveniently abandoned in another movie house somewhere in Tennessee. It had been a warm evening, so the jackets owner could have gotten all the way home before he missed it, and when he came back in a day or two and failed to recover it, he could walk around scratching his head and wondering why anyone would walk off with such a ratty old thing, its cuffs and collar frayed and some of its seams starting to come undone.
Keller liked the garment well enough. It smelled a little of its former owner, just as his own blazer smelled a little of him, but it wasnt rank enough to put him off. It made a change, and an appropriate one in his current surroundings. A blue blazer, as Playboy and GQ
assured their readers a couple of times a year, was the keystone of a mans wardrobe, perfectly acceptable at every sartorial situation short of a black-tie dinner or a wet T-shirt contest. That seemed to be true, and Keller had appreciated the garments versatility ever since he left Des Moines, but in the rural South it had a harder time passing in a crowd. Keller wasnt whooping and slapping his knee at truck-pulling contests or handling serpents at Baptist jamborees, but all the same he felt less conspicuous in some good old boys denim jacket.
There were two impulses that seemed to come naturally to a fugitive, or at least to the sort of fugitive Keller seemed to have become. The first was to run hard and fast, and the second was to go to ground somewhere, to get in bed and hide under the covers.
Obviously, you couldnt do both. But what Keller had come to see was that you couldnt do either one, not if you wanted to remain safe.
If you holed up, if you found one place and stayed there, you would keep running into the same people over and over. Sooner or later one of them would take a good long look at you, and the next thing hed do was pick up a phone.
And if you ran for the border, there youd be, going through post-9/11 security with no passport and no drivers license and a face every cop in the country was looking for. And if some miracle got you across the border, youd be in some Mexican border town crawling with cops and informants, all on the lookout for gringo fugitives. Not exactly where he wanted to be.
So the trick, as far as he could make out, was to steer a course between the two extremes, to keep forever on the move without ever moving too far or too fast. One hundred miles a day, two hundred tops, and pick safe places to sleep and safe ways to get through the days.
You couldnt beat daytime movies. The theaters were virtually empty, and the employees bored out of their skulls. And at night you couldnt do better than a motel room, with the door locked and the TV on, but the sound turned down so nobody would complain.
He hadnt risked a motel every night. In Virginia, off I-81, hed walked up to the door of a typical independent motel only to pick up some sort of vibe that stopped him in his tracks and sent him straight back to his car. Just nerves, he told himself, but whatever had prompted the impulse, he felt he had to honor it. He wound up spending that night in a rest area, and woke up with a big truck parked close on one side and what looked like the entire Partridge family having a picnic on the other. He was sure someone must have seen him, he was right there in plain sight and the sun was shining away, but hed slept sitting up with his head tilted forward and the cap hiding his face, and he got out of there without incident.
Two nights ago, in Tennessee, hed left it too long, and he came to three motels in a row with their NO VACANCY signs lit. He spotted a sign, FARM FOR SALE, and drove half a mile on a dirt road until he came to the property in question. There were no lights in the farmhouse, no vehicles to be seen except for an old Ford with its wheels removed. He thought of breaking into the house, if an actual break-in was even required; it seemed altogether possible the doors had been left unlocked.