The next lot I tried was full of dodgems, not a roadworthy car in the place. They had a good mechanic though. He’d done a few tricks to make the cars look and sound nice. You had to study the trick twice or even three times to see how he’d done it. The Americans have a love affair with their cars, as a result of which there are a million products on the market for the home mechanic. You can pour gunk into your car which will temporarily stop an oil leak, or make the engine sound smoother, or stop the thing sounding like a cancer patient. They weren’t even remission, these cures. They were quack.
The next place along had some nice newer models. There was a Volvo I liked the look of, and an older Mercedes. A Ford Mustang was an expensive option I toyed with for a couple of minutes, but then I saw the VW Camper. I knew it was by no means perfect. It wouldn’t outrun a bicycle, was slow on hills, and was noisy. In its favour, we could get out of town and sleep in it instead. The guy was asking $4,000 for it, but when we had trouble sliding open the side door, he came down to three and a half. I studied the engine. It had been twin-carbed, and not by an expert. I told him I didn’t want anything twin-carbed.
‘Brings the life span and the resale down.’
I walked away from the vehicle, then turned and looked at it again, ready to banish it from my thoughts.
‘Oh, did I mention I’d be paying cash?’
He came down to three and told me he was cutting his throat.
‘Just don’t splash blood on the hubcaps,’ I said. I shouldn’t have: it made me flash back to the Trans-Am and Sam Clancy’s death.
We settled the paperwork and I drove out of the lot. The steering felt slack, but not too slack to be fatal. The indicators weren’t working either, so I didn’t make many friends crossing the traffic into the motel. I parked right outside our room. Bel was standing at the door, hugging herself, bouncing on her toes. I didn’t imagine the sight of the VW had got her so excited.
‘He’s alive!’ she said. I got her inside and shut the door.
‘What?’
‘He’s okay, he’s not dead. It was on the TV news.’
I sat down on the bed. ‘Clancy?’ I said. She nodded, biting back tears. We watched the TV together in silence, holding hands. It took a while till we got another news bulletin. There was a reporter at the hospital.
‘That’s the same hospital I went to.’
The reporter said that the driver of the vehicle, Sam Clancy, a local journalist who had been in hiding after what he claimed at the time were attempts on his life, had been shot four or five times, once in the head, once in the neck, and at least twice in the shoulder. He was in a stable condition, but was still unconscious. Police were at his bedside and were on armed guard outside his room.
‘I’ll be damned,’ I said.
There was an interview with a senior police officer. They asked him about the previous attempts on Sam Clancy’s life, but the cop had nothing to say at this juncture. Then they spoke to Sam’s editor and to a colleague. It could have been the man I spoke with the first time I phoned the paper. And finally they showed pictures of the Trans-Am and the repair shop.
‘Shit.’
So they would have talked to the owner, who would tell them that it wasn’t Sam Clancy’s car, no sir, it belonged to a couple of English friends of his... Which would set the police wondering: where were those friends now? And if they were really clever, or really lucky, they’d connect Sam and his friends with the late-night disappearance of three people, one of them injured, from a campground near where a man had died.
Bel saw it all too, of course, and she squeezed my hand all the tighter.
‘We’ve got to move,’ she said. ‘Before this starts falling around our heads.’
I nodded slowly, and she smiled at me. ‘He’s alive, Michael. He’s alive.’ We hugged one another, then I pulled her off the bed. ‘Come on, places to go, people to see.’
‘By the way,’ she said, ‘what were you doing in that rattle-wagon?’
That rattle-wagon took us back over to Bremerton and into the Olympic Peninsula. The gearbox had a habit of springing back into neutral, but apart from that there were no problems. The van didn’t have air conditioning of course, or a radio. But Bel lolled in the back and opened all the little cupboards and took the cover off the sink, and seemed to like it well enough in the end.
It was true there wasn’t anywhere to park on the road along Hood Canal. I suppose they’d done it on purpose so tourists wouldn’t stop and gawp at the nice houses. However, you couldn’t always see the house from the driveway, and vice versa, so I stopped in a driveway across the road from Nathan’s house and a couple of houses down. Effectively, I was blocking the access, but the only people likely to complain were the occupants of the house, and they might never know. Clancy had pointed out that a lot of the homes here were used only at weekends and vacation time. I went round the back of the VW and propped open the engine, so we could claim mechanical trouble if anyone asked us. I’d tell them we were waiting for the triple-A.
We seemed to sit in the van for a long time. We hadn’t brought anything with us, nothing to eat or drink or read. Bel found a pack of cards in the glove compartment, but there were only thirty-three of them. She found a few other bits and pieces too. A soiled dollar bill, a cushion-cover, the whistle from a steam-kettle, an unused stick of Wrigley’s, and a bicycle pump.
‘If we had a boot,’ she said, ‘we could have a car-boot sale.’
‘Hey, come and look at this.’ She came forward and peered through the windscreen. A car was coming out of Nathan’s drive. It hadn’t been there earlier when we’d passed, so must have been parked in the garage. It was smart, long at the front and squat at the back. I guessed it to be a Buick sedan. We’d seen enough cars on the road to make us expert.
‘It’s a Lincoln,’ Bel said.
‘Is it?’
As it passed our drive, I caught a glimpse of the figure in the back. All I could make out was platinum hair and a suit, but by this time that was enough.
‘You want to break into the house?’ Bel asked.
I’d been thinking this over, and now I shook my head. ‘The house is just a meeting place. I don’t think we’d find anything there.’
‘So what now?’
‘Now,’ I said, ‘we follow Kline. Here, you drive.’
‘What?’ We started to change places.
‘He doesn’t know you,’ I said. ‘At least, he hasn’t met you. If we’re going to tail him, it better be you in the front seat and me in the back.’
‘He saw me when I got out of the car that time outside Oban.’
‘He didn’t see much more than the back of your head. Besides, you weren’t wearing sunglasses then.’
Bel squeezed into the driver’s seat. ‘He’s probably halfway to Seattle by now.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I think I know where he’s headed.’
The problem was the ferry, or it could have been. But we stayed in the van, sitting in the back, pretending to play cards with our incomplete pack.
‘Snap,’ Bel said. We didn’t look up much from the table, just in case Kline happened to stroll past and glance in. To the outside world, we must have appeared as engrossed as any poker fiends. We needn’t have worried. Kline’s sedan was in a different line, and about eight vehicles ahead of us. He stayed in his car, while his driver went for a smoke on-deck. I saw the driver very briefly, and recognised him as the same man who’d been driving for Kline that day in Oban.