She could see they were only a couple of miles from Ridge Road, where the Tuscarora Reservation started. She looked at the signs, watching for the garage, built outside the border of the reservation so people couldn’t watch its proprietor too closely. Finally, she saw it and said, 'Pull in up here, away from the gas pumps.' Felker drove the car up onto the cracked blacktop and kept the engine running.
'Want me to fill the tank?' he asked.
'No,' she said. 'Just wait for me.' Jane walked to the little lighted building beside the garage and went inside, away from the sounds of the cars flashing by on the road.
The man sitting on the stool behind the counter was watching a small television set next to the cash register. He smiled when he looked up to acknowledge that he had seen her, and his eyes returned to the television set. He said to it, 'Hi, Janie.'
'Hello, Cliff,' she answered. 'Nice night.'
'You come to watch the game with me?' Clifford Tarkington smiled his special smile, and his broad Tuscarora face seemed to widen and his dark eyes narrowed, but his mouth didn’t move. 'Big night. The Indians are playing the Yankees.'
The Tuscarora all had names like Wallace or Clifford or Clinton, just the way the Seneca did. The Seneca had never given children the names of Christian saints. The Mohawk at Caughnawaga, on the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence, had been called the Praying Indians. There had never been any praying Seneca, and if there had been any praying Tuscarora, they would have gotten cured of it in 1712. That was the year when a Swiss mercenary had led an army of South Carolina colonists and enemy tribes to take their homeland in North Carolina. The winners had feasted on the body of a dead Tuscarora and then sold their prisoners at the slave markets. The survivors had been taken in by the Seneca and given the village of Ga-a-noga to live in.
'I came to relieve you of one of those old junkers you keep around here,' said Jane. 'I can see you need the space.'
'I might be able to part with something elegant yet understated,' said Clifford. 'What kind?'
'Mid-size,' she said. 'Nothing eye-catching, not just out of the box.'
'But not too old either?' he guessed. 'I got a ’ninety-two Ford. Cherry, runs good, low miles.'
'What color? I don’t want one of those cars put together in the Ford plant in Hamilton with Canadian two- tone colors on it so everybody thinks I just came out of the woods.'
'Pearl-gray. Hell, they’re all gray now, or white. Five a week if it comes back the same color.'
Two years ago, she had been taking a twelve-year-old boy out of Ohio where two sets of cousins who had let him stay in foster homes all his life had learned he had an inheritance coming. They had put a description of the car on television. She had run the car through a one-hour painting shop and had them put the two-hundred-dollar special on it. Clifford had sometimes thought to mention it during subsequent negotiations.
'Five hundred?' she exclaimed. 'You misunderstood. I don’t want to own it. How about two hundred?'
'Four-fifty,' he muttered at the television. 'It’s a T-bird. It’s loaded.'
'Two and a half, and I won’t play with the power seats.'
'Hasn’t got them.'
'And you said it was loaded?'
'Three-fifty, and I throw in a full tank.'
'It’s already on full if it’s sitting back there. You’re afraid it’ll get water vapor in the tank. Three hundred, and I’ll forget about what you owe me for the paint job on the other one.'
'Three twenty-five and I’ll take back the rental you got parked out there.'
'Done,' she said, and handed him a check she had already written.
He looked at the amount and said, 'It’s always an education to do business with you, Janie.'
'Yeah,' she said. 'Except I always pay the tuition.'
He handed her a ring with two keys on it. 'Later, Janie.'
'Later,' she said, and walked out onto the pavement. She kept going around to the back of the building and found the car sitting on the cracked cement foundation of an old, vanished building that Cliff used as a parking lot. The Ford wasn’t bad to begin with, and when she started it she could hear and feel that he must have just tuned the engine. She let it idle and walked back around to find Felker standing beside the rented car, leaning on the door.
As they got in, she said quietly, 'It’s better at this stage of the trip not to stand around under a light unless you have to.'
'Why? Did you see somebody?' He checked his impulse to whirl and look behind him.
'I don’t know,' she said. 'At least fifty cars have gone by here since we stopped, but I don’t know who I’m looking for. They do.'
She drove around to the back of the building, where the other car sat running. 'Pull that one out so I can put this one in its place.'
He got in behind the wheel of the Ford and pulled it out, waited for Jane to stop, and lifted their two bags out of her car, then opened the door of the Ford to set them in.
Jane said, 'It’s cash, isn’t it?'
He shrugged. 'Well, yeah. I didn’t think I’d be in a position to cash a check or something.'
'Put it in the trunk. It won’t be any safer two feet closer to you on the back seat.'
He opened the trunk and put the two bags inside, then started to close it, but hesitated. 'I don’t want to keep guessing wrong. Is it all right to keep the gun up front with us?'
She was at the rear of the rented car, opening the trunk. She said, 'It’s fine with me. Keep the trunk open.' When she slammed the trunk and came around to the new car, she was carrying a backpack and a short-barreled shotgun. She put them in beside the bags.
'You still want me to drive?' he asked.
'If you don’t mind. People always take a second look if the woman is driving. It looks like the man is drunk or something.' She set the keys on the hood of the rented car and got in beside Felker.
'Drive straight north again. When you come to the intersection with Ridge Road, take a right.'
He bumped the car slowly around Clifford’s building and glanced past it to gauge the speed and distance of the next set of headlights coming toward them. She saw that his eyes focused on her for a second before he stepped on the gas.
'What’s wrong?' she said.
'It’s typical Harry. He didn’t bother to tell me what you looked like.'
'Why? What do I look like?'
He shrugged. 'Well, you don’t look like a bodyguard.'
She regretted having asked that way, as though she wanted him to tell her she was pretty. She regretted saying anything at all. She should have ignored it. She hadn’t been given enough time to prepare for that too, the special strain of traveling with a man who wasn’t too old and wasn’t too young and had gotten used to the fact that most of the attention he had given women was welcome. She had to keep him thinking in another way, so she pretended to misunderstand, as though the whole idea had never entered her head. 'That’s the way it’s done,' she said. 'You’ve got to get used to thinking one way and looking another way. Turn right at that light up there.'
He made the turn and accelerated onto the eastbound highway. Then he looked at her again. 'It’s a beautiful disguise.' He seemed to realize he had gone too far. 'Very smart.'
'Yours has got to be better. It has to come from inside your head. When was the last time you were afraid for your life?'
'That’s easy,' he said. 'When I was a cop.'
'Cops are dogs. Try to think in rabbit.'
'What?'
She said it carefully, so he would understand. ’’This is like dogs chasing a rabbit. When the rabbit wins, he doesn’t get to kill the dogs and eat them. He doesn’t get to be a dog. He just gets to keep being a rabbit.'
He opened his shirt and held out the pistol. 'You mean rabbits don’t need one of these.'
'It’s an asset if you think of it as a last resort. Just don’t imagine that a shoot-out with the people who are looking for us is going to help you. Once anybody has discharged a firearm, sooner or later everybody left standing has to talk to the police.'
'And we can’t talk to the police.'
