Hit and Run

Keller would have passed, too, but it was the only show on offer that he hadn’t already seen. There were eight screens at that theater, screening a total of six films — the two most popular pictures got two screens apiece, so that you never had more than an hour’s wait for either of them. Keller had seen them both, and three of the other four, and now he’d seen the geek picture, too. He checked his watch, and it was early enough so that he could have slipped into one of the other rooms and taken a second shot at one of the other films, but most of them hadn’t been that much fun the first time, and he didn’t suppose a repeat viewing would uncover subtleties he’d missed the first time around.

The theater was part of a mall on the edge of Jackson, Mississippi. He’d spent the previous night in another of what he’d taken to thinking of as the Patel Motels, as if they constituted a vast chain of independents. This one was not far from Grenada, Mississippi, its official location a wide place in the road with the improbable name of Tie Plant. He’d weighed his options during the movie, but he hadn’t quite decided whether he’d drive a little farther or start looking for a motel on the way out of Jackson. Decisions of that sort, like where to go next or what to do when he got there, tended to make themselves.

He left the theater, walked to his car. He was wearing the Homer Simpson cap, as always, but a few days ago he’d expanded his wardrobe with the addition of a denim jacket that someone had conveniently abandoned in another movie house somewhere in Te

Keller liked the garment well enough. It smelled a little of its former owner, just as his own blazer smelled a little of him, but it wasn’t rank enough to put him off. It made a change, and an appropriate one in his current surroundings. A blue blazer, as Playboy and GQ assured their readers a couple of times a year, was the keystone of a man’s wardrobe, perfectly acceptable at every sartorial situation short of a black-tie di

There were two impulses that seemed to come naturally to a fugitive, or at least to the sort of fugitive Keller seemed to have become. The first was to run hard and fast, and the second was to go to ground somewhere, to get in bed and hide under the covers.

Obviously, you couldn’t do both. But what Keller had come to see was that you couldn’t do either one, not if you wanted to remain safe.

If you holed up, if you found one place and stayed there, you would keep ru

And if you ran for the border, there you’d be, going through post-9/11 security with no passport and no driver’s license and a face every cop in the country was looking for. And if some miracle got you across the border, you’d be in some Mexican border town crawling with cops and informants, all on the lookout for gringo fugitives. Not exactly where he wanted to be.

So the trick, as far as he could make out, was to steer a course between the two extremes, to keep forever on the move without ever moving too far or too fast. One hundred miles a day, two hundred tops, and pick safe places to sleep and safe ways to get through the days.

You couldn’t beat daytime movies. The theaters were virtually empty, and the employees bored out of their skulls. And at night you couldn’t do better than a motel room, with the door locked and the TV on, but the sound turned down so nobody would complain.

He hadn’t risked a motel every night. In Virginia, off I-81, he’d walked up to the door of a typical independent motel only to pick up some sort of vibe that stopped him in his tracks and sent him straight back to his car. Just nerves, he told himself, but whatever had prompted the impulse, he felt he had to honor it. He wound up spending that night in a rest area, and woke up with a big truck parked close on one side and what looked like the entire Partridge family having a picnic on the other. He was sure someone must have seen him, he was right there in plain sight and the sun was shining away, but he’d slept sitting up with his head tilted forward and the cap hiding his face, and he got out of there without incident.

Two nights ago, in Te

And if someone showed up at daybreak to show the house? Or if some neighbor with a place farther along on the dirt road noticed his car as he drove by?

He drove instead to the barn, and parked his car where it wouldn’t be seen. He shared the barn with an owl, who made more noise than he did, and some unidentifiable rodents, who made as little noise as possible, as intent on avoiding the owl as he was on avoiding human beings. The place smelled of animals and hay mold and other less definable barn odors, but he figured he was a long ways away from the nearest human, and that was worth something. He spread some straw around, smoothed it out, and stretched out on it, and he wound up getting a good night’s sleep for his troubles.

On his way out the next morning he went and had a look at the Ford. The wheels were off, as he’d noted earlier, and somebody had pulled the engine, but the old car still sported a pair of license plates. TENNESSEE / THE VOLUNTEER STATE, he read, and there didn’t seem to be anything on the plate to indicate the year. Rust made one of the bolts hard to turn, but he kept at it, and when he drove out of there the Sentra had Te

The motel he found outside of Jackson had a sign on the counter indicating that one Sanjit Patel was its proprietor, but evidently this particular Patel had raised himself to that level of the American dream where he could hire people outside his family, and even outside his tribe. The young man behind the counter was a light-ski

Keller smiled in return, asked the price of a room, learned it was $49. He put three twenties on the counter and pushed the proffered registration card an inch or so toward the young man. “Maybe you could fill this out for me,” he said. After a pause he added, “I wouldn’t need a receipt.”

Wheldon’s eyes were thoughtful behind the thick lenses. Then he smiled broadly again and handed over a room key and a ten-dollar bill. With tax the room ought to come to something like $53, Keller knew, but ten dollars change struck him as a good compromise, because the state of Mississippi wouldn’t see the tax, anymore than Sanjit Patel would see any of the fifty dollars.