Sole Survivor (27 page)

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 color, 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 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, watching a small television, loafer-clad feet propped on a desk.

As he climbed the two steps and went through the open doorway, he heard a sportscaster doing color commentary on a baseball game.

The building consisted of a single large room with a rest room 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.”

“You came to the right place.” Fittich reached toward the portable television that stood on his desk.

“No, that’s okay, leave it on,” Joe said.

“You’re a fan, you might not want to see this one. They’re getting their butts kicked.”

Right now the transmission-repair shop next door blocked them from the surveillance team. If the camper truck appeared across the street, however, as Joe more than half expected, and if directional microphones were trained on the big picture window, the audio from the baseball game might have to be turned up to foil the listeners.

Positioning himself so he could talk to Fittich and look past him to the sales lot and the street, Joe said, “What’s the cheapest set of wheels you’ve got ready to roll?”

“Once you consider my prices, you’re going to realize you can get plenty of value without having to settle for—”

“Here’s the deal,” Joe said, withdrawing packets of hundred-dollar bills from a jacket pocket. “Depending on how it performs on a test drive, I’ll buy the cheapest car you have on the lot right now, one hundred percent cash money, no guarantee required.”

Fittich liked the look of the cash. “Well, Joe, I’ve got this Subaru, she’s a long road from the factory, but she’s still got life in her. No air conditioning but radio and—”

“How much?”

“Well, now, I’ve done some work on her, have her tagged at twenty-one hundred fifty, but I’ll let you have her for nineteen seventy-five. She—”

Joe considered offering less, but every minute counted, and considering what he was going to ask of Fittich, he decided that he wasn’t in a position to bargain. He interrupted the salesman to say, “I’ll take it.”

After a disappointingly slow day in the iron-horse trade, Gem Fittich was clearly torn between pleasure at the prospect of a sale and uneasiness at the way in which they had arrived at terms. He smelled trouble. “You don’t want to take a test drive?”

Putting two thousand in cash on Fittich’s desk, Joe said, “That is exactly what I want to do. Alone.”

Across the street, a tall man appeared on foot, coming from the direction in which the camper truck was parked. He stood in the shade of a bus-stop shelter. If he’d sat on the shelter bench, his view of the sales office would have been hampered by the merchandise parked in front of it.

“Alone?” Fittich asked, puzzled.

“You’ve got the whole purchase price there on the desk,” Joe said. From his wallet, he withdrew his driver’s license and handed it to Fittich. “I see you have a Xerox. Make a copy of my license.”

The guy at the bus stop was wearing a short-sleeve shirt and slacks, and he wasn’t carrying anything. Therefore, he wasn’t equipped with a high-power, long-range listening device; he was just keeping watch.

Fittich followed the direction of Joe’s gaze and said, “What trouble am I getting into here?”

Joe met the salesman’s eyes. “None. You’re clear. You’re just doing business.”

“Why’s that fella at the bus stop interest you?”

“He doesn’t. He’s just a guy.”

Fittich wasn’t deceived. “If what’s actually happening here is a
purchase,
not just a test drive, then there’re state forms we have to fill out, sales tax to be collected, legal procedures.”

“But it’s just a test drive,” Joe said.

He checked his wristwatch. He wasn’t pretending to be worried about the hour now; he was genuinely concerned.

“All right, look, Mr. Fittich, no more bullshit. I don’t have time. This is going to be even better for you than a sale, because here’s what’s going to happen. You take that money and stick it in the back of a desk drawer. Nobody ever has to know I gave it to you. I’ll drive the Subaru to where I have to go, which is only someplace on the West Side. I’d take my own car, but they’ve got a tracking device on it, and I don’t want to be followed. I’ll abandon the Subaru in a safe area and call you by tomorrow to let you know where it is. You bring it back, and all that’s happened is you’ve rented your cheapest car for one day for two thousand bucks tax free. The worst that happens is I don’t call. You’ve still got the money—and a theft write-off.”

Fittich turned the driver’s license over and over in his hand. “Is somebody going to ask me why I’d let you make a test drive alone even with a copy of your license?”

“The guy looked honest to me,” Joe said, feeding Fittich the lines he could use. “It was his picture on the license. And I just couldn’t leave, ’cause I expected a call from a hot prospect who came in earlier and might buy the best piece of iron I have on the lot. Didn’t want to risk missing that call.”

“You got it all figured out,” Fittich said.

His manner changed. The easygoing, smiley-faced salesman was a chrysalis from which another Gem Fittich was emerging, a version with more angles and harder edges.

He stepped to the Xerox and switched it on.

Nevertheless, Joe sensed that Fittich had not yet made up his mind. “The fact is, Mr. Fittich, even if they come in here and ask you some questions, there’s nothing they could do to you—and nothing they’d want to bother doing.”

“You in the drug trade?” Fittich asked bluntly.

“No.”

“’Cause I hate people who sell drugs.”

“I do too.”

“Ruining our kids, ruining what’s left of our country.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“Not that there
is
much left.” Fittich glanced through the window at the man at the bus stop. “They cops?”

“Not really.”

“Cause I support the cops. They got a hard job these days, trying to uphold the law when the biggest criminals are some of our own elected officials.”

Joe shook his head. “These aren’t any kind of cops you’ve ever heard of.”

Fittich thought for a while, and then he said, “That was an honest answer.”

“I’m being as truthful with you as I can be. But I’m in a hurry. They probably think I’m in here to call a mechanic or a tow truck or something. If I’m going to get that Subaru, I want it to be
now,
before they maybe tumble to what I’m really doing.”

After glancing at the window and the bus stop across the street, Fittich said, “They government?”

“For all intents and purposes—yeah.”

“You know why the drug problem just grows?” Fittich said. “It’s because half this current group of politicians, they’ve been paid off to let it happen, and hell, a bunch of the bastards are even users themselves, so they don’t care.”

Joe said nothing, for fear that he would say the
wrong
thing. He didn’t know the cause of Fittich’s anger with authority. He could easily misspeak and be viewed suddenly as not a like thinker but as one of the enemy.

Frowning, Gem Fittich made a Xerox copy of the driver’s license. He returned the laminated card to Joe, who put it away in his wallet.

At the desk again, Fittich stared at the money. He seemed to be disturbed about cooperating—not because he was worried about getting in trouble but because the moral dimension, in fact, was of concern to him. Finally he sighed, opened a drawer, and slid the two thousand into it.

From another drawer, he withdrew a set of keys and handed them to Joe.

Taking them gratefully, Joe said, “Where is it?”

Fittich pointed at the car through the window. “Half an hour, I probably got to call the cops and report it stolen, just to cover myself.”

“I understand. With luck, I’ll be where I’m going by then.”

“Hell, don’t worry, they won’t even look for it anyway. You could use it a week and never get nailed.”

“I
will
call you, Mr. Fittich, and tell you exactly where I left it.”

“I expect you will.” As Joe reached the open door, Fittich said, “Mr. Carpenter, do you believe in the end of all things?”

Joe paused on the threshold. “Excuse me?”

The Gem Fittich who had emerged from the chrysalis of the cheerful salesman was not merely harder edged and edgier; he also had peculiar eyes—eyes different from what they had been, full of not anger but an unnerving pensiveness. “The end of time in our time, the end of this mess of a world we’ve made, all of it just suddenly rolled up and put away like an old moth-eaten rug.”

“I suppose it’s got to end someday,” Joe said.

“Not someday. Soon. Doesn’t it seem to you that wrong and right have all got turned upside down, that we don’t even half know the difference anymore?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and feel it coming? Like a tidal wave a thousand miles high, hanging over us, darker than the night and cold, going to crash over us and sweep us all away?”

“Yes,” Joe said softly and truthfully. “Yes, I’ve often felt just that in the middle of the night.”

The tsunami looming over Joe in dark hours was of an entirely personal nature, however: the loss of his family, towering so high that it blocked the stars and prevented him from seeing the future. He had often
longed
to be swept away by it.

He sensed that Fittich, sunk in some deep moral weariness, also longed for a delivering apocalypse. Joe was disquieted and surprised to discover he shared this melancholy with the car salesman.

The discovery disturbed him, because this expectation that the end of all things loomed was profoundly dysfunctional and antisocial, an illness from which he himself was only beginning to recover with great difficulty, and he feared for a society in which such gloom was widespread.

“Strange times,” Fittich said, as Joe had said
weird times
to Barbara a short while ago. “They scare me.” He went to his chair, put his feet on the desk, and stared at the ball game on television. “Better go now.”

With the flesh on the nape of his neck as crinkled as crepe paper, Joe walked outside to the yellow Subaru.

Across the street, the man at the bus stop looked impatiently left and right, as though disgruntled about the unreliability of public transportation.

The engine of the Subaru turned over at once, but it sounded tinny. The steering wheel vibrated slightly. The upholstery was worn, and pine-fragrant solvents didn’t quite mask the sour scent of cigarette smoke that over the years had saturated the vinyl and the carpet.

Without looking at the man in the bus-stop shelter, Joe drove out of the lot. He turned right and headed up the street past his abandoned Honda.

The pickup with the camper shell was still parked in front of the untenanted industrial building.

When Joe reached the intersection just past the camper truck, there was no cross-traffic. He slowed, did not come to a full stop, and instead put his foot down heavily on the accelerator.

In the rearview mirror, he saw the man from the bus stop hurrying toward the camper, which was already backing into the street. Without the transponder to guide them, they would have to maintain visual contact and risk following him close enough to blow their cover—which they thought they still enjoyed.

Within four miles Joe lost them at a major intersection when he sped through a yellow traffic signal that was changing to red. When the camper tried to follow him, it was thwarted by the surging cross-traffic. Even over the whine and rattle of the Subaru engine, he heard the sharp bark of their brakes as they slid to a halt inches short of a collision.