Perhaps he felt he talked a little too much and with a bit more enthusiasm than he'd intended, for he abruptly changed the subject. We chatted away about nothing in particular until he finished his beer, whereupon he headed for the door. After he was gone I asked the barkeep if he knew the fellow I was talking with.
"No," he said. "He's not a regular--just comes in once a month or so for lunch and a beer. He's not much of a talker. In fact, I think him talking to you was his first real conversation in this place. He really loves to fish, though. A friend of mine told me he was working on a building job here a while back, earning pretty good money as a carpenter, when he pulled the pin to go off trout fishing before the job was done. Can you beat that?"
Transportation
The unique aspect of the above disappearance is the transportation used. The disappearee prepared his transportation in advance. Most disappearees will not have the money to buy a car before they go. And as I have said previously, it is very unwise to take your old car with you into your new life.
If you do use a car to effect your disappearance, there are a number of ways to get rid of it. If you simply refuse to part with it then you should make plans in advance to store it for a while until whoever may be looking for you gets tired of the chase. The best bet for storage is to rent a lock-up garage in a residential neighborhood. This way the car will remain out of sight and you aren't likely to face a lot of prying questions as long as the rent is paid. When things cool down a little you may be able to find a buyer for the car who won't be too concerned about the legal formalities of the deal. You shouldn't even consider taking the car out of storage and using it again, unless you don't value your new identity very much.
Another way to get rid of your car once you have found your destination is to have it stolen. Simply drive your car into one of the poorer looking neighborhoods of a big city, park it on a residential street and leave the keys in the car and the doors unlocked. Before morning your car will probably have changed hands several times. Within a few days it should have a new paint job and a fresh set of plates.
One disappearee I talked with escaped by driving his car to the airport where he parked it, hopped an airport bus to the Greyhound station and there boarded another bus to his destination. All he took with him was a suitcase. Judging from the efforts made to find him, I imagine his "luggage" consisted of a considerable amount of someone else's money. The police discovered his car at the airport and spent several days circulating pictures of him to ticket agents, hostesses, etc. I found this to be a very clever way to throw people off the trail.
If you expect to be the object of a vigorous search, then bus transportation is an excellent way to go. Bus lines do not keep passenger lists. Nor do they require that you show ID to get a ticket. And fellow passengers on buses seem to be less concerned about who they're traveling with than your typical airline passenger.
But don't let the passenger lists scare you off from using a commercial airline. Ticket agents don't care what a passenger calls himself, as long as he pays the fare up front. In fact, every time a large, commercial flight crashes there are unidentified passengers. The people holding the names on the passenger list are often alive and well and may never have set foot on a plane in their life. You will have to wait until your new identity is documented before you board an international flight--passengers headed overseas are required to show their passport prior to boarding.
Renting a car is probably not an option for most vanishers. First, it's expensive. Most people who disappear are short enough on money without blowing half of it on a car rental. But more importantly, you'd be hard pressed to rent a car anywhere in America without a credit card. It doesn't matter how much money you wave in their faces; rental car companies won't even look at you if you can't come across with a VISA or American Express. And if there's one thing a recent disappearee lacks, it's credit.
The First Days
Unless you've prepared your disappearance well in advance or have a lot of money, you may have trouble finding a place to sleep until you get on your feet. A surprising number of disappearees stay with friends or relatives the first couple of nights. This is usually a mistake. These are the first places someone will come looking for you. Also, you leave a trail that could be easy to trace. A great deal of pressure may come to bear on your friends or relatives once you're gone if the people looking for you have good reason to suspect they gave you safe harbor.
One interesting exception to this rule was a disappearee I talked to who moved in with a former girlfriend. He claims he picked his destination city more or less at random. Once there he discovered that his old flame lived in that town. After a couple days of putting
