It was the sort of thing you had to accept, and so hed accepted it, but it had wounded him profoundly, and there was never a day that he didnt think about Nelson, and about Andria.
Until one day he didnt.
And it was not as though it was suddenly over forever, and that neither the girl nor the dog ever came to mind again. Of course they did, both of them, and when they did he felt the same emotions hed felt that first day, and had felt even more acutely a day later when the shock wore off. But the thoughts came less and less frequently, and the emotional charge that accompanied them grew less and less powerful, until the day came when those twin losses, while never forgotten, were just a part of his own long and curious history.
But why dig them up now as an example? He didnt have to look that far in the past. Just over a week ago hed suffered the two greatest losses of his life in the course of a single day. His best friend was killed and his stamp collection was stolen, and he thought about them all the time, and yet already he could see that the thoughts were coming less frequently, and that each day they lost a little of
their immediacy and began to find their way into the past. They still filled him with pain and regret, they still burned like acid, but each day he lived with them he got a little further away from them.
So it turned out you didnt have to forget things, not really. You just relaxed your grip on them and they floated off all by themselves.
21
Besides, why look at blight? Hed been to Ground Zero as a volunteer, dishing out food to rescue workers, but he hadnt felt the need to return since then to stare at a hole in the ground. He wasnt about to pick up a hammer and help rebuild New Orleans, and wouldnt even be staying long enough to watch others rebuild it, so why stand around slack-jawed, gawking at the wreckage?
He drove around, found a neighborhood that looked interesting, and parked the car right on the street. There were no signs saying you couldnt, and no meters to feed. He tried to decide between the blazer and the denim jacket. It was too warm out for either, so he tugged his T-shirt out of his pants and arranged it to conceal the gun. It didnt really work, it was too snug and he was sure a person could see the guns outline through it, and did he really need to walk around packing a pistol? He stashed the gun in the glove compartment, locked the car, and went off to see New Orleans.
Was it a good idea?
Probably not, he had to admit. The safest course of action would consist of doing what hed been doing, keeping human contact to a bare minimum, spending his afternoons in darkened movie houses and his nights in motel rooms, getting his food from drive-up windows at fast-food outlets, and letting time pass with as little risk as possible. He knew how to do all of that, and there was no reason why he couldnt go on doing it indefinitely.
Well, that was a stretch. He was still using Miller Remsens credit card to fill the Sentras gas tank, and any day now that might stop being a good idea. He wasnt using much gas, because he wasnt putting in any high-mileage days behind the wheel, and he still had most of a tank of gas left from the last fill-up, not long after hed crossed from Tennessee into Mississippi. And maybe he ought to make that the last tank of gas the late Mr. Remsen bought for him.
It was hard to say, because for all he knew Remsen was still lying undiscovered behind his counter, while all his neighbors filled their gas tanks at his expense. Each issue of USA Today had a page of news from all over, including one item each day from each of the fifty states. The stories were presumably of local interest, so that if you were from Montana, say, on a business trip to Maryland, with no access to the Missoula Misery or the Kalispell Cat Box Liner , good old USA Today would keep you connected to all the news back home.
It didnt really work for New York; anything halfway important that happened there was considered national news, but maybe it worked for Indiana. Keller had been checking every day, and had read brief items from all over the state, few of them remotely interesting, and none of them having to do with a man found dead in his ramshackle gas station. But that didnt mean they hadnt found him yet. Even by the standards of the news-from-all-over page, Keller had to admit it wasnt much of a story.
Whether or not theyd found the body, Keller knew the safe way to play it was to ditch Remsens credit card. He could probably risk buying gas for cash, now that he wasnt using too much of it, and who was to say another credit card wouldnt come his way, as unexpectedly as Remsens had?
But the Sentra had plenty of gas in its tank for now, and it wasnt burning any of it at the moment, and wouldnt as long as it stayed parked. The more immediate question was whether he was running a risk by walking around New Orleans, and that was one he didnt much want to ask himself because he knew he wasnt going to like the answer.