Hit and Run

36

They sat in the car, and he read the phone numbers out loud while she copied them down. “In case the phone goes ker-blooey,” she said. “First thing we can do is toss all the numbers with a five-one-five area code. You think there’s a chance on earth Al lives in Des Moines?”

“No.”

“What about Harry?”

“Harry? Oh, you mean the guy with hair in his ears.”

“If you’d rather,” she said, “I suppose we could call him Eerie. You think he was local?”

“He seemed to know the city. He found the Laurel Inn without any trouble.”

“So did I, Keller, and the closest I’ve ever been to Des Moines before was thirty thousand feet, and I was in a plane at the time.”

“He knew enough to recommend the patty melt at the Denny’s.”

“So he lives in a city that has a Denny’s. That sure narrows it down.”

He thought about it. “He knew his way around,” he said, “but maybe he was just well prepared. I don’t think it matters. Either way we can forget the five-one-five numbers. If Hairy Ears was local, then he was way down on the totem pole. They wouldn’t pick up someone locally and let him know much.”

“Point.”

“In fact,” he said, “if he was local, he’s probably dead.”

“Because they’d clean up after themselves.”

“If Al would send a team of men to White Plains to kill you and burn your house down—”

“Keller, that was me. Remember? I was the one who did that.”

“Oh, right.”

“But I take your point. We’ll concentrate on the out-of-towners.”

The most promising number, with three calls to it, had a 702 area code, and turned out to be a Las Vegas tip line for sports bettors. Another was a hotel in San Diego. Dot said the third time was the charm, and tried the third number, and got coo-wheeeet for her troubles.

“The only way to look at it,” she said, “is it’s enough of a miracle that the phone was still there, and we’d be asking too much if we expected it to do us any good. I’ve got one more number to try, and then we can go back to the Laurel Inn and stick this damn thing under the mattress where it belongs.”

He watched as she dialed, held the phone to her ear, raised her eyebrows as the call went through. Someone answered it, and she promptly pressed a button to put the call on speakerphone.

“Hello?”

She looked at Keller, and he hand-gestured Come on, wanting to hear more. In a voice a little higher than her own, she said, “Arnie? You sound like you got a cold.”

“You sound like you got a wrong number,” the man said, “not to mention the brains of a gerbil.”

“Oh, come on, Arnie,” she cooed. “Be nice. You know who this is?”

The phone clicked.

“Arnie doesn’t want to play,” she said. “Well?”

He nodded. It was the man with the Hairy Ears.

“Well, no wonder he hung up,” Dot said. “It turns out his name’s not Arnie after all.”

“There’s a surprise.”

“It’s Marlin Taggert. That’s Marlin like the fish, not Marlon like Brando. And he lives at seventy-one Belle Mead Lane in Beaverton, Oregon.”

“There was an Oregon map in the car.”

“This car? Just now?”

“The Sentra.”

“You think he left it there?”

“No, how could he? And it wasn’t the car I rented, it was the one I switched plates with at the airport. Never mind, it’s got nothing to do with anything. It’s an actual coincidence.”

“And a real interesting one, too, Keller. Brightens my whole day.”

“Sorry. Where’s Beaverton? Is it near anything?”

“Tell you in a second,” she said. “There you go. It’s just outside of Portland.”

And just like that they knew his name and where he lived. They were in a Kinko’s on Hickman Road, where they’d set her up at a PC for $5 an hour. He’d been watching over her shoulder, so he didn’t have to ask how she did it, but that didn’t render the performance any less remarkable. Google had led her to a site where all you had to do was enter a phone number and it would see if it could find it; once it determined that it was available, you had the option of buying it for $14.95. After a quick credit-card transaction, it coughed up the data.

“I knew the government could find out anything,” he said, “but what I didn’t realize was everybody else can, too. You’d think he’d have an unlisted number.”

“He does. Unpublished, anyway. It said so, right there on the screen, at the same time it was offering to sell it to me for fifteen dollars.”

“Can’t argue with the price, can you?”

“There’s probably a way to get it for free,” she said, “if I’d wanted to devote the time to it. And no, you really can’t argue with the price. I figured the absolute minimum it would cost us was thirty pieces of silver. I wonder who flies to Portland?”

“I’ll go,” he said. “There’s no reason why you have to.”

She gave him a look.

“What?”

“We’re both going to Portland, Keller. That goes without saying.”

“You just said—”

“What airline, Keller. And I don’t have to wonder, not since God created Google.”

They spent the night at the Laurel Inn after all, but in separate rooms. It was Dot’s idea, after she’d gone to the United website and booked them on a flight the next morning. “We have to stay someplace,” she said, “and we’ve already got the one room.”

His room was on the ground floor in the front. He checked in and had a shower, then went up to 204. She was drinking a bottle of Snapple from the vending machine and making a face every time she took a sip. She asked if he knew a decent place for dinner, and he said the only place he could think of was the Denny’s across the street, and he didn’t think it would be a good idea to go there.

“It’s probably not the only Denny’s in town,” she said, “but let’s not go to any of the others, either.” She found a steakhouse in the Yellow Pages that billed itself as Iowa’s best, and they agreed it was pretty good.

Back in his room, he watched cop show reruns on A&E. It seemed to him they were episodes he’d seen before, but that didn’t matter. He watched them anyway.

When he got home, he thought, he’d upgrade their TV, spring for a big flat-panel set like the one he’d left behind in New York. Get TiVo, too, and a decent DVD player. No reason not to, not if he had all that money in a bank in the Caymans.

He could think of a batch of reasons not to call Julia, but in the end he went ahead and called anyway. She said hello, and he said “It’s me,” and she said “Nicholas.” Just her voice saying his name, and he felt his chest swell up.

He said, “It worked. The thing was there, and it had what it was supposed to have, and she says you’re a genius.”

“All pronouns and nonspecific nouns. Because we’re on the phone?”

“The night has a thousand ears.”

“I thought it was eyes, but I suppose it could be ears, too. A thousand eyes, a thousand ears, and five hundred noses.”

“Because it worked,” he said, “I’ve got more places to go.”

“I know.”

“I won’t call until—”

“Until it’s over. I understand. You’ll be careful.”

“Yes.”

“I know you will. Give her my best.”

“I will. She says you’re a keeper.”

“But you knew that.”

“Yes,” he said. “I knew that.”

In the morning they had breakfast at the airport while they waited for their flight for Denver, where they ate again before the flight to Portland. The rental car there was booked in his name, and he showed his driver’s license and paid with his credit card. He didn’t have to worry about either of them, or any of the pieces of ID he was carrying, including the passport he’d shown at check-in. They were legitimate and authentic, even if the name they carried was not the one he’d been born with.

It was easy to locate Belle Mead Lane on the street map Keller bought, but not so easy to find it when you were driving. The development it was in, on the western edge of Beaverton, seemed to specialize in thoroughfares that twisted this way and that, often winding up more or less back where they’d started. Add in a rich complement of dead-end streets, plus some fantasy roads that existed only in the mind of the cartographer, and the whole business got tricky.

“That’s supposed to be Frontenac,” he said, glowering at a street sign, “but it says Shoshone. How do you suppose Taggert finds his way home at night?”

“He must leave a trail of bread crumbs. What’s that off to the left?”

“I can’t see the sign from here. Whatever it is, maybe it goes somewhere.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“Here we go,” he said a few minutes later. “Belle Mead Lane. Number seventy-one, wasn’t it?”

“Seventy-one.”

“So it’ll be on the left. Okay, that’s it.”

He slowed for a moment across from a red-brick ranch with white trim, set back on a spacious and well-landscaped lot.

“Nice,” Dot said. “Be a showplace when the trees get some size to them. I call it a positive sign, Keller. He’s got to be more than an errand boy to afford a place like this.”

“Unless he married money.”

“There you go. What heiress could resist a small-time crook with hair growing out of his ears?”

“Well,” he said.

“Well, indeed. Now what?”

“Now we find a motel.”

“And wait until tomorrow?”

“At the earliest,” he said. “This may take a while. He doesn’t live here all by himself. But we want to get him when he’s alone, and when he can’t see it coming.”

“It’s like when you work, isn’t it? You go out and have a look around and plan your approach.”

“I don’t know any better way to do it.”

“No, it makes sense. I guess I expected it to be more straightforward, the way it was yesterday in Des Moines. Go there, get what we came for, and leave.”

“We were just picking up a phone,” he pointed out. “Our task here is a little more complicated.”

“Just finding the damn house was more complicated than anything we did in Des Moines. Will you be able to find it again tomorrow?”

It wasn’t hard to find, not once he’d been there and knew when to disregard the map. When he turned onto Belle Mead Lane the next morning, he half-expected to see Marlin Taggert out in front of his house, watering his lawn. But that was Gregory Dowling who’d been watering his lawn, and who might be watering it still, never knowing what a close brush with death he’d had. No one was watering Marlin Taggert’s lawn.

“And no one ever has to,” Dot said, “because we’re in Oregon, where God waters everybody’s lawn. How come the sun’s out, Keller? Isn’t it supposed to rain here all the time? Or is that just a rumor they started to keep Californians from moving in?”

He parked two doors down on the other side of the street. That gave him a good view of Taggert’s house, but put them where he wouldn’t spot them unless he decided to take a good look around.

Still, they couldn’t park here long enough to sink roots. Taggert might not be expecting trouble, but his was a line of work where trouble was never entirely out of the question. Even if there was no one with a reason to wish him ill, he almost had to be a person of interest to law enforcement officers of all descriptions, local and state and federal. He and his boss might have gotten away clean in Des Moines, but Taggert couldn’t have lived this long without getting tied into something somewhere. Keller, who’d met the man, was willing to bet he’d done time, though he couldn’t have said where or for what.

So he’d be cautious out of habit, whether or not he had anything specific to be cautious about. Which made surveillance complicated. You couldn’t park on the block for too long, or come back too often.

That afternoon they returned to the airport, where Dot went to a different rental car counter and rented a car for herself, paying extra for an SUV so that it would be recognizably different from the sedan Keller had rented. With two cars, Keller figured they were that much less likely to be spotted. But even with a whole fleet, they had to be circumspect in their surveillance, or Taggert would simply conclude that he was being watched by a government agency with a whole motor pool at its disposal.

A couple of times a day they took one of the two vehicles and found their way back to Belle Mead Lane. They’d do a couple of drive-bys, park at curbside for five or ten minutes, circle the block a time or two, and then return to the motel. They were staying nearby at the Comfort Inn, and there was a shopping mall with a multiplex theater just half a mile from the motel, and plenty of places to eat. But most of the time they sat in their separate rooms and read the paper or watched television.

“If we had a gun,” Dot said, “we could speed things up a little. Just walk up to the front door and ring the bell. He answers, we shoot him and go home.”

“And if someone else answers?”

“‘Hi, is your daddy home?’ Bang. But even if you drove from New Orleans to Des Moines with the gun in the car, we still couldn’t have brought it to Portland. Not without driving across the whole damn country. You think it would be impossible to buy a gun here?”

“Probably not.”

“But you don’t want to.”

“No. Anyway, how can we shoot him dead and then expect him to talk?”

Saturday morning they had breakfast across the street from the motel. Over coffee they went over what they’d learned in several days of intermittent surveillance:

— A couple of sightings had confirmed that Marlin Taggert, if that was the name of the man residing at 71 Belle Mead Lane, was definitely the man who’d been Keller’s contact in Des Moines. The same fleshy face, the same big nose, the same loose mouth, and the same characteristic walk, not quite shambling but not far from it. And, of course, the same Dumbo ears, though they were too far away to see if his barber had done anything to make them more presentable.

— The rest of the family included a woman, presumably Mrs. Taggert, who was younger than her husband and a lot better-looking. There were three children, a boy and two girls, ranging in age from ten to fourteen. The dog was a Welsh corgi, its puppyhood barely a memory. Once they’d seen Taggert and one of his children take it for an agonizingly slow walk around the block.

— There were two cars housed in the Taggert garage, a brown Lexus SUV and a black Cadillac. When Mrs. Taggert left the house, with or without her children, she took the Lexus. Except for the single excursion with the dog, Taggert barely left the house and never ventured off the property, and the Cadillac stayed put in the garage.

“Monday morning,” Keller said. “Until then I don’t want either of us to go anywhere near Belle Mead Lane. We’re not going to catch him alone over the weekend, and just in case he noticed our cars parked on the block or driving by, he’ll have a couple of days not to notice them. Then Monday morning we’ll take him.”

Later he asked Dot if she felt like a visit to the mall, but she’d found something she liked on television. He went to a hardware store and picked up a few things, including a heavy steel pry bar with its end bent into a U, a roll of wire for hanging pictures, a roll of heavy-gauge duct tape, and a pair of wire-cutting pliers. He put his purchases in the trunk and drove around to the theater entrance. He watched a movie, and when it ended he stopped at the men’s room, then bought popcorn before sneaking into one of the other theaters to watch another movie.

Just like old times, he thought. But at least he wouldn’t have to spend the night in the car.