“I don’t know,” she said. “Ed? Would you come and take a look at this, please?”
The man in the horn rims came over and said he thought a hand-lettered look was best for a lost-dog notice. “It makes it more personal,” he said. “I could do it in type for you, but I think people would respond to it better as it is. Assuming somebody finds the dog, that is.”
“I don’t suppose it’s a matter of national importance anyway,” Keller said. “My wife’s attached to the animal and I’d like to recover him if it’s possible, but I’ve a feeling he’s not to be found. My name’s Gordon, by the way. Al Gordon.”
“Ed Vandermeer,” the man said. “And this is my wife, Betty.”
“A pleasure,” Keller said. “I guess fifty of these ought to be enough. More than enough, but I’ll take fifty. Will it take you long to run them?”
“I’ll do it right now. Take about three minutes, cost you three-fifty.”
“Can’t beat that,” Keller said. He uncapped the felt-tipped pen. “Just let me put in something about a reward,” he said.
Back in his motel room he put through a call to a number in White Plains. When a woman answered he said, “Dot, let me speak to him, will you?” It took a few minutes, and then he said, “Yeah, I got here. It’s him, all right. He’s calling himself Vandermeer now. His wife’s still going by Betty.”
The man in White Plains asked when he’d be back.
“What’s today, Tuesday? I’ve got a flight booked Friday but I might take a little longer. No point rushing things. I found a good place to eat. Mexican joint, and the motel set gets HBO. I figure I’ll take my time, do it right. Engleman’s not going anywhere.”
He had lunch at the Mexican café. This time he ordered the combination plate. The waitress asked if he wanted the red or the green chili.
“Whichever’s hotter,” he said.
Maybe a mobile home, he thought. You could buy one cheap, a nice doublewide, make a nice starter home for her and her fellow. Or maybe the best thing for them was to buy a duplex and rent out half, then rent out the other half when they were ready for something nicer for themselves. No time at all you’re in real estate, making a nice return, watching your holdings appreciate. No more waiting on tables for her, and pretty soon her husband can quit slaving at the lumber mill, quit worrying about layoffs when the industry hits one of its slumps.
How you do go on, he thought.
He spent the afternoon walking around town. In a gun shop the proprietor, a man named McLarendon, took some rifles and shotguns off the wall and let him get the feel of them. A sign on the wall said, guns don’t kill people unless you aim real good. Keller talked politics with McLarendon, and socioeconomics. It wasn’t that tricky to figure out McLarendon’s position and to adopt it as one’s own.
“What I really been meaning to buy,” Keller said, “is a handgun.”
“You want to protect yourself and your property,” McLarendon said.
“That’s the idea.”
“And your loved ones.”
“Sure.”
He let the man sell him a gun. There was, locally, a cooling-off period. You picked out your gun, filled out a form, and four days later you could come back and pick it up.
“You a hothead?” McLarendon asked him. “You fixing to lean out the car window, shoot a state trooper on your way home?”
“It doesn’t seem likely.”
“Then I’ll show you a trick. We just backdate this form and you’ve already had your cooling-off period. I’d say you look cool enough to me.”
“You’re a good judge of character.”
The man grinned. “This business,” he said, “a man’s got to be.”
It was nice, a town that size. You got in your car and drove for ten minutes and you were way out in the country.
Keller stopped the Taurus at the side of the road, cut the ignition, rolled down the window. He took the gun from one pocket and the box of shells from the other. The gun — McLarendon kept calling it a weapon — was a .38-caliber revolver with a two-inch barrel. McLarendon would have liked to sell him something heavier and more powerful. If Keller had wanted, McLarendon probably would have been thrilled to sell him a bazooka.
He loaded the gun and got out of the car. There was a beer can lying on its side perhaps twenty yards off. Keller aimed at it, holding the gun in one hand. A few years ago they started firing two-handed in cop shows on TV, and nowadays that was all you saw, television cops leaping through doorways and spinning around corners, gun gripped rigidly in both hands, held out in front of their bodies like a fire hose. Keller thought it looked silly. He’d feel self-conscious, holding a gun like that.
He squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked in his hand, and he missed the beer can by several feet. The report of the gunshot echoed for a long time.
He took aim at other things — at a tree, at a flower, at a white rock the size of a clenched fist. But he couldn’t bring himself to fire the gun again, to break the stillness with another gunshot. What was the point, anyway? If he used the gun he’d be too close to miss. You got in close, you pointed, you fired. It wasn’t rocket science, for God’s sake. It wasn’t neurosurgery. Anyone could do it.
He replaced the spent cartridge and put the loaded gun in the car’s glove compartment. He spilled the rest of the shells into his hand and walked a few yards from the road’s edge, then hurled them with a sweeping sidearm motion. He gave the empty box a toss and got back in the car.
Traveling light, he thought.
Back in town, he drove past Quik-Print to make sure they were still open. Then, following the route he’d traced on the map, he found his way to 1411 Cowslip, a Dutch colonial house on the north edge of town. The lawn was neatly trimmed and fiercely green, and there was a bed of rosebushes on either side of the path leading from the sidewalk to the front door.
One of the leaflets at the motel told how roses were a local specialty. But the town had been named not for the flower but for Aaron Rose, a local settler.
He wondered if Engleman knew that.
He circled the block, parked two doors away on the other side of the street from the Engleman residence. Vandermeer Edward, the White Pages listing had read. It struck Keller as an unusual alias. He wondered if Engleman had picked it out himself, or if the feds had selected it for him. Probably the latter, he decided. “Here’s your new name,” they would tell you, “and here’s where you’re going to live, and who you’re going to be.” There was an arbitrariness about it that somehow appealed to Keller, as if they relieved you of the burden of decision. Here’s your new name, and here’s your new driver’s license with your new name already on it. You like scalloped potatoes in your new life, and you’re allergic to bee stings, and your favorite color is blue.
Betty Engleman was now Betty Vandermeer. Keller wondered why her first name hadn’t changed. Didn’t they trust Engleman to get it right? Did they figure him for a bumbler, apt to blurt out “Betty” at an inopportune moment? Or was it sheer coincidence, or sloppiness on their part?
Around six-thirty the Englemans came home from work. They rode in a Honda Civic hatchback with local plates. They had evidently stopped to shop for groceries on the way home. Engleman parked in the driveway while his wife got a bag of groceries from the back. Then he put the car in the garage and followed her into the house.