“What if it’s in her name?”
“If it was, it won’t be. He has to insure it in the new state, be able to get pulled over and ticketed without getting hauled in.”
“He’ll need a license to do any of that.”
“If she didn’t get him anything else, she got him a new license and birth certificate and Social Security card. Those I can’t start with. But the new car registration I can probably get at the end of the month.”
“Suppose he just drove it to an airport outside of Las Vegas? That’s what I’d do.”
“Yeah,” said Earl. “We’ll have to cover that possibility too. It’s not going to be simple. This woman is a problem. She didn’t let him make a lot of mistakes. There’s nothing easy left: no personal letters, no pictures, not even any old credit card bills. Oh, that reminds me. Where’s the bank statement we got? He just might have written a check to his new name.”
“In my purse.”
He snatched her purse off the doorknob where she had hung it, pulled out the statement, and opened it. He quickly shuffled through the checks, then sighed. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, then slapped the checks down on the table.
“What’s wrong?”
“He had a balance of sixty-two thousand bucks. He wrote a check for sixty to ‘Cash.’ You want to know who took it and gave him the sixty in cash?”
“No bank I ever heard of would.… Oh, don’t tell me.”
“Yep. Pleasure Island Casino. The stupid bastards had him under surveillance, and they let him walk up to a cashier and write a check for his fuck-you money.”
“That’s got to be his idea,” said Linda. “I’m sure he’s seen them do it for gamblers. But he wrote it for less than his balance, so he doesn’t have the bank and the police looking for him too. That’s her.”
Earl shrugged. “Her again. Yeah.” He stared into space for a few seconds. Slowly, his jaw began to work, the knotted muscles grinding his teeth together. “Let’s think about her. She sees, probably before he does, that his time is coming. They’ve watched him enough so if they were just going to fire him, he’d be gone already. She knows they’re not going to take their eyes off him while he’s alive unless she makes them. She tells him how to do a quick housecleaning. She gets him a car, and some papers. She arranges to meet him in the one place in Las Vegas where there aren’t a million lights. She gets him out.” Earl’s face assumed a look of puzzlement. “But then she doesn’t go too, she hangs in to buy him time.”
Linda sighed. “This isn’t getting me anywhere. So she bought him time.”
Earl’s irritated look froze her. “You’re not thinking. You know any pros who are going to hang around to get in a fight in an elevator if the client’s already driving out with a big head start?”
“No women, anyway.”
“No men either. The pay doesn’t go up any for bruises. She must have thought he needed the extra minutes, and that means he wasn’t safe until a particular time.”
“It can’t be anything but an airport,” said Linda. “He wasn’t going to be invisible until the plane was in the air.”
“How much time did she need to buy him?” Earl leafed through the piles of tourist literature the maids had left on the coffee table. He found a number and dialed. “Yes. I’m interested in the midnight show, but I want to see another show, too. Is it one of those things where you have a bunch of warm-up acts? What time does the Miraculous Miranda actually get on stage?” He wrote something down. “Then when does the show end?” His pencil scribbled another note. “That’s too bad. I may have to catch her act on another trip. Thanks.” He hung up and studied his notes. “Okay. Miranda comes on right at twelve, first thing. She’s on the stage for two hours.”
“So what?”
Earl scowled. “So this woman figures Hatcher is going to have two hours to drive before the lights come on again and somebody sees he’s not sitting next to her. He’s driving to an airport, and she’s planned on two hours. His plane has to leave pretty soon after he gets there, because she doesn’t want him sitting in an airport when Seaver’s people start looking for him. She wants him to arrive about the time the plane is boarding, so he can walk right in and disappear.”
“Seaver said she bought him an hour after that.”
“Right,” said Earl. “She did it, but she couldn’t know in advance that she could do it. How could this one woman think she could tie up those guys that long? No, she was counting on two hours, and whatever she got after that must have been insurance. Figure he drives sixty miles an hour, so there’s no chance he’ll lose twenty minutes getting a speeding ticket.”
Linda stood up and pulled the map out of her suitcase. She measured 120 miles on a piece of dental floss, tied it to Earl’s pencil, and ran it in a circle around Las Vegas. “Kingman, Arizona, on Route 93; Bullhead City, Arizona, on 95. Maybe Lake Havasu if he pushes it on Route 95 south. Baker, California, on 15 south. There’s no airport for another hundred and twenty miles, so scratch 15 south. Nothing at all on 93 or 95 north, so scratch them. That leaves 93 or 95 south into Arizona or 15 north, into Utah. If it’s 93, it’s Kingman. If it’s 95, it’s Lake Havasu City. Both have airports.”
“What about Utah?”
“No airport until Cedar City. About a hundred and eighty miles.”
“Okay, scratch that too. We’re down to two possibilities, then,” said Earl. “He flew out of Kingman or Havasu City. Now what we’ve got to do is see what flights go out on a Tuesday night at those airports between two in the morning and, say, three. There can’t be many.”
“What if they go to Chicago and Dallas? Little airports usually just feed big ones.”
“We’ll just hope the other things we’re doing give us a break, and tell us which one.”
“What other things?”
He pawed through her purse and saw the apartment rental bill. “First thing is, put on some gloves and mail this in with some cash. I want to make sure his landlord doesn’t evict him, in case we need to go back there.”
“Okay. But where would he fly?”
“Put yourself in his place. This woman must have asked him what places he could go. He can’t go to Atlantic City or Reno or some other place where they gamble. He’s going to pick a place he knows a little about. A place he likes, right?”
“I would think so. The better he likes it, the longer he’ll stay put, and the harder he’ll be to find.”
Earl clasped his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. “No close relatives, no permanent girlfriend, lots of friends, too many to narrow down …”
“Vacations?” asked Linda. “Business trips?”
“Maybe. If we can get a hotel charge on a credit report, we’ll have a place to start.”
Linda lay perfectly still. “I just thought of something. He knows he’s in danger. He knows she got him out in the nick of time. He’s never done this before, and he doesn’t know if we’re stuck in this motel or already staring at the back of his head, right?”
“That sounds right,” said Earl. “But—”
“What’s the first thing he’s going to buy?”
“If he dumped his car at some airport, he’ll buy another one.”
“I’m not saying he won’t do that,” said Linda. “But what else do they always do? They buy a gun. If he flew out, he doesn’t have one. If she set all this up in a couple of days, she probably wouldn’t have time to get him one and leave it for him in the new town. Unless it’s stolen, she’d still have the five-day waiting period.”
Earl grinned and squeezed her so hard her neck hurt. “Whatever else he does, he’ll do that. And that puts him on a list. It’s a list we can get, because it’s a public record. She’ll probably tell him not to, but the minute he’s on his own in a strange place, looking over his shoulder, he’ll do it.” He sat down and wrote more notes. “First, we’ve got to find out what airport he used, then what flight he took. Tomorrow I think we’ll drive into Arizona and see if we can find a car with Nevada plates that got left in one of those two airports at two in the morning on Tuesday.”
Linda Thompson pumped harder on the stationary bike, slowly adding speed, watching the digital readout on the little electronic podium in front of the handlebars. Thirty miles an hour, thirty-five, forty. She moved her legs faster, then pushed the thumb-lever forward to jump to a higher gear, and the speedometer told her she was going fifty. She gradually worked the gears back until the pedaling was almost effortless. She kept moving her legs for a
