Hit and Run

8

The third time was supposed to be the charm.

The best place to find a car that no one would return to in a hurry, he’d decided, was the long-term parking lot at Des Moines International. And that was also the best place he could think of to abandon a car; whoever found it would figure he’d somehow slipped past them and caught a flight somewhere.

And this was a good time of day to be driving around the long-term lot. There were still flights arriving and departing, so the lot wasn’t entirely deserted, in which case he’d have been apt to attract attention. But the peak hours for air traffic in and out had passed, so he was less likely to pick a car that someone would be coming back for anytime soon.

What he wanted was a car just like his. He didn’t need to start it, because he wasn’t going to drive it anywhere, but he’d have to be able to get into it. He could probably manage that with his knife; failing that, he could break a window. But maybe there was a better way.

He tried three times without success, pulling up behind a parked Sentra, pointing his own remote device at its rear and pressing the trunk release. He didn’t think for a moment that every Nissan Sentra would respond to the same remote, but there were only so many frequencies, and sooner or later he almost had to get lucky.

Except he didn’t have forever. Eventually he’d run out of Sentras, if he didn’t run out of time first. One more, he told himself, hoping the fourth time would be the charm, pulling up to the fourth car, putting his own car in park, removing the key from the ignition, putting it back, starting the car so he could lower the window, then retrieving the key again — you’d really think, wouldn’t you, that he could have remembered to lower the window first, or left it down after the previous attempt? — and aiming the remote at the other car’s trunk, and pressing the button and holding it, because it wouldn’t open right away, you had to keep the thing pointed at the trunk and hold the button down for a few seconds, and what difference did it make because it wasn’t going to work anyway…

Except this time it did.

He had to act quickly now. First thing he did was open his own trunk (with a button on the dashboard, so he didn’t have to screw around with the remote). The trunk of the new Sentra was half full of stuff, and without paying any attention to what it was, he transferred everything but the spare tire to his own trunk. There it could keep his black suitcase company.

He used a rag to wipe down the inside of the now-empty trunk, then closed both trunks and used the remote to unlock the doors. It had worked on the trunk, so he wasn’t surprised when it worked on the doors, too, but it was a relief all the same, because he’d pretty much given up expecting anything to go right.

He emptied the glove compartment, gave it a wipe, and replaced its contents with the Hertz folder and operator’s manual from his own car. There were maps of Iowa and, less predictably, Oregon, in the door pocket of the new car, and he collected those, along with a couple of losing lottery tickets from the floor and a supermarket receipt from the back seat. When the car’s interior was empty, he wiped the surfaces that were likely to have accumulated prints, not to get rid of his own — he’d been careful not to leave any — but to erase the more obvious traces of the car’s owner.

They’d given him a claim check when he entered Long-Term Parking, and he’d stuck it in his breast pocket. But the owner of the other Sentra had guarded against misplacing his own claim check, and left it under the clip on the sun visor. Keller, who hadn’t even thought about that aspect of things, promptly switched checks.

But could he afford it? If he used his own check he’d pay the minimum, which was just a couple of dollars. But if the other guy had left the car for a week or two, the charges could eat into the small amount of cash he had left.

He checked, and the thing had a time and date stamped on it. It had been parked less than twenty-four hours earlier, so at most it would cost him an extra five dollars, and he decided it was worth it. He left his original tag under the visor, kept the new one in his pocket.

And he substituted a few touches of his own. The pizza box (minus the two remaining slices, which could remain on the passenger seat of his car, because he still didn’t know where his next meal was coming from) found a place on the passenger seat of the new car. The fragments of the cell phone went in the new car’s trunk, and he drew a certain grim satisfaction from the image of all the FBI’s horses and men knocking themselves out reassembling the thing. The cup that had once held Coca-Cola before it had held the ruined phone was now empty, tossed for verisimilitude onto the floor in back.

What else?

Well, he hadn’t gotten around to the most important thing of all. But the two cars didn’t have to be close to each other for the next step, and he’d be better off getting his own car out of the way. He started it up, found a place to park it, used his Swiss Army knife to remove the front and rear license plates, hunkered down in the shadows while a car crept by, and then carried them to the other car. He switched the plates, returned the new set to the original car, attached them, and drove off, wondering what he’d forgotten.

He couldn’t think of a thing.

Could it work?

Well, it seemed to him that it had a shot. For a while, anyway. The minute he left the long-term lot, he was no longer in a car of interest to the authorities. Well, the car was still of interest to them, it was the same car he’d been driving all along, but they didn’t know that, because it had a different license plate on it.

He could have switched plates with any car. It didn’t have to be the same make and model as his, nor did it have to be stashed in a lot at the airport. But that would only shelter him until the car’s owner noticed the switch, or got pulled over by someone who recognized the plate. As soon as that happened, the police would have a new plate number to look for, and he’d be back in their sights all over again.

But if this worked, he’d have some breathing room. Because he wasn’t just giving them the old plate, he was providing a car to go with it. They’d find the car, with his rental papers in the glove box. They’d find the smashed-up phone, and they’d probably get a print off the pizza box, and what conclusion would they draw? That he’d switched cars? That he’d switched plates and kept the same old car?

No, they’d almost certainly assume that he’d come to the airport because it was in fact an airport, with the intention of getting on a plane. And they’d have a tough time establishing unequivocally that he hadn’t somehow managed to slip through Security and do just that.

Eventually, of course, the real owner of the Sentra would return. But he wouldn’t find his car, because they’d have long since hauled it away and very likely stripped the thing down to the chassis, until it would be about as easy to put back together as the cell phone.

So what would he do? After he’d looked all over the lot for it, and very likely cursed a blue streak, what would the guy do?

Report it as stolen, most likely. And the police would add the vehicle to the national hot car list, where it would have thousands of others for company. That meant that police officers all over the country would be looking for it, but it didn’t mean they’d be looking very hard. If he was in an accident, if he got stopped for speeding, someone would run the plate and determine that the vehicle was stolen. But if he was just driving around and minding his own business, nobody would give him a second glance.

It would be just as well, though, to point them toward the Sentra sooner rather than later. It would probably be at least a day or two before the owner returned, but that wasn’t the only reason to get things moving. As soon as they identified the car and followed their noses into the airport terminal, they’d get out the word to stop searching for the car, and all Nissan Sentras, including the one he was driving, would stop attracting untoward attention.

So should he call it in?

Caller ID, a staple on every 911 line, would immediately pinpoint the pay phone he called from. He’d be long gone before anybody could stop by to ask questions, but was there a better way?

The station had a toll-free number, and it had imprinted itself on his memory somewhere in the course of the few hundred times they’d announced it. He picked a pay phone at the far end of a strip mall with all its stores closed for the night. When a man with a good radio voice said, “WHO, Central Iowa’s leader in news and opinion, you’re on the air,” he took a breath and said, “Hey, is there a reward for spotting that car everybody’s looking for? On account of I just seen it out by the airport.”

“You should have had your dial set to 740,” the fellow said. “They found the car, and we had it on the air a full five minutes ago. You missed the boat, hoss.”

He said, “So do I get the money or not?” and heard a short bark of laughter before the phone clicked in his ear.

“I guess that’s a no,” he said out loud. And got back in the car and started driving.