He shut off the engine and got out of the Honda.
The pickup with the camper shell was not yet within sight on the street behind him.
He hurried to the front of the car and opened the hood.
The Honda was of no use to him any more. This time they would have concealed the transponder so well that he would need hours to find it. He couldn’t drive it to Westwood and lead them to Rose, but he couldn’t simply abandon it, either, because then they would know that he was on to them.
He needed to disable the Honda in such a fashion that it would appear to be not sabotage but genuine mechanical failure. Eventually the people following him would open the hood, and if they spotted missing spark plugs or a disconnected distributor cap, they would know that they had been tricked.
Then Barbara Christman would be in deeper trouble than ever. They would realize that Joe had recognized the storyteller on the airplane, that he knew they’d been following him in Colorado—and that everything he’d said to Barbara on the phone had been designed to warn her and to convince them that she had not told him anything important when, in fact, she had told him everything.
He carefully unplugged the ignition control module but left it sitting loosely in its case. A casual inspection would not reveal that it was disengaged. Even if later they searched until they found the problem, they were more likely to assume that the ICM had worked loose on its own rather than that Joe had fiddled with it. At least they would be left with the element of doubt, affording Barbara some protection.
The pickup with the camper shell drove past him.
He didn’t look directly at the truck but recognized it from the corner of his eye.
For a minute or two he pretended to study various things in the engine compartment. Poking this. Wiggling that. Scratching his head.
Leaving the hood up, he got behind the wheel again and tried to start the Honda, but of course he had no luck.
He got out of the car and went to look at the engine again.
Peripherally, he saw that the camper truck had turned off the street at the end of the block. It had stopped in the shallow parking area in front of an empty industrial building that featured a real-estate agency’s large For Sale sign on the front.
He studied the engine another minute, cursing it with energy and colour, just in case they had directional microphones trained on him.
Finally he slammed the hood and looked worriedly at his watch. He stood indecisively for a moment. Consulted his watch again. He said, “Shit.”
He walked back down the street in the direction he had come. When he arrived at the used-car lot, he hesitated for effect, then walked directly to the sales office.
Gem Fittich Auto Sales operated under numerous crisscrossing stringers of yellow and white and red plastic pennants faded by a summer of sun. In the breeze, they snapped like the flapping wings of a perpetually hovering flock of buzzards over more than thirty cars that ranged from good stock to steel carrion.
The office was in a small prefab building painted yellow with red trim. Through the large picture window, Joe could see a man lounging in a spring-back chair, loafer-clad feet propped on a desk, watching a small television.
As he climbed the two steps and went through the open doorway, he heard a sportscaster doing colour commentary on a baseball game.
The building consisted of a single large room with a restroom in one corner, visible beyond the half-open door. The two desks, the four chairs, and the bank of metal file cabinets were cheap, but everything was clean and neatly kept.
Joe had been hoping for dust, clutter, and a sense of quiet desperation.
The fortyish salesman was cheery-looking, sandy-haired, wearing tan cotton slacks and a yellow polo shirt. He swung his feet off the desk, got up from his chair, and offered his hand. “Howdy! Didn’t hear you drive up. I’m Gem Fittich.”
Shaking his hand, Joe said, “Joe Carpenter. I need a car.”