But he didn’t really know anybody except Dot, and hadn’t let anyone else know him. It was rare that he went more than a couple of days without talking to her. And now she was the one person he couldn’t call.

Well, actually, she was one of the several hundred million people he couldn’t call, because he couldn’t call anybody. But she was the one person he wanted to call and couldn’t, and it bothered him.

And then he heard her voice in his head. It wasn’t uncanny, it wasn’t some eerie visitation, it was just his own mind pretending to be Dot and telling him what it thought she would tell him. You damn near threw your back out shifting all that crap from one trunk to the other, the voice said. Don’t you think you ought to at least see what you’ve got?

Whoever’s idea it was, his or Dot’s, it wasn’t a bad one, and this was the perfect time to do it, with no one around to take an interest in him or what he was doing. He popped the trunk and pulled out a cardboard carton that he’d shifted intact and unexamined from one trunk to the other. He sorted through it now, and if he made it all the way to the ocean it might prove useful, because it was all stuff for the beach — little toy buckets and sand shovels, bathing suits, beach towels, and a Frisbee. That last wasn’t exclusively for the beach, you could throw a Frisbee just about anywhere, as long as you had somebody to throw it to. If he had to throw it, he supposed he would throw it away.

And why not toss the whole carton? There was a trash bin just steps from his car, and was there any reason to keep any of this junk? He hoisted it, headed for the bin, then changed his mind, returning to the car and distributing items from the carton on the back seat and floor. A blue and yellow plastic bucket here, a red shovel there. It would be good camouflage, he told himself, because anybody taking a quick peek at the car’s interior would know he was looking at the car of a husband and father, not an assassin on the run.

Unless they just figured him for a pedophile…

Back to the trunk. There was a metal tool chest of the sort he supposed most men carried in their cars, tricked out with all manner of tools and gadgets, not all of which he was able to identify. Some, he was pretty sure, had to do with fishing; he recognized lead sinkers and plastic floats, as well as a couple of lures with hooks attached, one shaped like a minnow, the other looking for all the world like the little spoons employed by cocaine users. For an instant he let himself imagine some pie-eyed fish, nostrils dilated in glorious anticipation, taking a deep sniff and getting hooked through the gills. Which, metaphorically, was what was supposed to happen to people, though he had no firsthand experience in that area. If Keller was addicted to anything it was to stamps, and they had never been accused of burning holes in anybody’s septum.

Though they could certainly burn a hole in a man’s pocket. The last purchase he’d made (aside from the pizza, the one remaining piece of which would serve as his breakfast as soon as he finished inventorying the trunk) was five Swedish stamps for $600, abruptly reducing his cash on hand to $187 plus the change in his pocket. Since then, the pizza had claimed $15 and the airport parking lot $7, and he had to buy enough gas to get him halfway across the country. Figure fifteen hundred miles, probably more with the inevitable to-ing and fro-ing, call it twenty miles to the gallon at $2.50 a gallon, and what did that come to?

He ran the numbers in his head and kept coming up with different answers, and finally he took out a pen and a scrap of paper and worked it out. The number he wound up with was $187.50, which seemed high to him, and especially so in view of the fact that it was twenty-two dollars more than he had to his name.

And he would need money for food. He’d worked out a way to buy food without giving anyone a good look at him, but he’d still have to part with cash. And sooner or later — and it had better be sooner — he was going to have to buy a baseball cap, and some product to change his hair color, and some implement he could use to give himself a haircut. (There was a pair of pruning shears in the tool chest, and if he’d been a rosebush they might have worked just fine, but he didn’t think they’d do a good job on a human being.) The places that sold the things he needed almost always took credit cards, but if he used one he’d be in worse shape than he was now.

If he had hung on to the $600, he’d be okay. He’d still have problems, and they might well prove insoluble, but running out of money wouldn’t be one of them.

Instead, he had five little pieces of paper. Once they could have been used to mail a letter, if he’d happened to be in Sweden and if there happened to be somebody he wanted to write to. Now they weren’t even good for that.

He felt like Jack, the young genius who’d traded the family cow for the magic beans. As he remembered the story, everything turned out all right for Jack in the end.

But that, he reminded himself, was a fairy story.

10

Two hours later he crossed the Mississippi at Clinton. A few miles into Illinois, with the gas gauge zeroing in on the big E, he pulled up to one of the full-service pumps at a gas station. They seemed to be in the middle of the local equivalent of rush hour, which struck Keller as all to the good.

The attendant looked to be just out of high school, and trying to come to terms with the prospect of spending the rest of his life on the outskirts of Morrison, Illinois. He had earbuds and looked like an intern with a stethoscope, but Keller could see the iPod in the bib pocket of his overalls, and whatever he was listening to was evidently more interesting than Keller.

He’d lowered the sun visor and positioned it to block the upper half of the side window, which gave the kid less of a view of his face. He asked for forty dollars’ worth of regular; he’d have just as soon filled the tank to the brim, but didn’t want to have to wait for change. The kid got things going, then came back to ask him if he wanted the oil checked. Keller told him not to bother.

“I had one just like that,” the kid said. “That li’l bucket? With the yellow puppy dogs on it? For the beach, you know?”

“My kid’s crazy about it,” Keller said.

“Wonder what ever became of it,” the kid said. He went away, and the next thing Keller knew he was wiping the windshield and making a surprisingly thorough job of it. Keller wanted to tell him to skip that, too, but then the boy would have to wonder what Keller was doing in the full-service section if he didn’t want any service. He let him continue, and studied the road map, shielding his face with it.

He wiped the rear window, too, and when he’d finished he came over to the driver’s side and Keller handed him a pair of twenties. He thought of offering him a third twenty for his cap, which said OshKosh B’Gosh in flowing script that matched the logo on his overalls.

Yeah, right. Or maybe he could trade him the beach bucket for it. A good way to avoid attracting attention.

He’d have welcomed the chance to pick up a few things in the station’s convenience store. Or use the men’s room. But he had the tank filled, or mostly filled, and that was going to have to be good enough for now.

He kept going eastbound on Route 30, holding the car to fifty-five miles an hour on the stretches of open road, and slowing to the posted speed limit whenever he came to a town. Right after he crossed I-39 he spotted a Burger King with a drive-up window, and he ordered enough burgers and fries and shakes for a whole family. He didn’t get a look at the server, and didn’t think anyone could have gotten a look at him, and in no time at all he was back on the road.

The next town he came to was called Shabbona, but before he got to it he saw signs for Shabbona State Park, and there he was able to eat at a picnic table and use a restroom, all without encountering another human being.