Davidoff turned his palms upwards and smiled at the memory. ‘Yeah. That’s why winning the lottery was on my mind,’ he admitted. Then, looking at his feet: ‘I spent two hundred pounds on tickets.’
Sherman wasn’t going to share with his partner that the same idea had occurred to him, at least briefly, before being dismissed. I mean, what if this thing really was that powerful? He’d conceived the suspicion that Ellis somehow wanted them to believe the story about the lottery winners, or at least know it. But if this magic device really did keep evading pursuit by making its pursuers so rich they gave up the chase, he didn’t imagine that Ellis would have assigned them to the task of hunting it down with quite such obvious relish.
No. Ellis had probably not been telling them the whole truth. It seemed far more likely, he reflected, that this probability machine had decided to change tack and start putting its pursuers off by, for instance, having them be hit by a meteorite, eat a Snickers bar infested with MRSA, or suffer a plague of agonising boils. It might bend the very laws of probability around it… but that was no reason to think it would necessarily be nice. If you could choose carrot or stick, you’d choose stick, wouldn’t you? Every time.
As he went over these speculations in his head, it occurred to Sherman that he’d started thinking oddly. He had used the word ‘decided’ of a piece of inanimate technology. He’d cast himself as its ‘enemy’, come to that. He’d started to think of this machine itself almost as a person: as if it, rather than the guy carrying it, was the one making the decisions. He had started to acquire the paranoid impression that this fugitive piece of property might not want to be recovered.
‘Two hundred pounds?’ he said. ‘You muppet. Did you win?’
‘Three numbers. A tenner.’
‘Unlucky.’
‘Yes. No note then?’
‘No note, lad. Now. Have we gone through all the motels?’
Davidoff looked at the page they’d torn from the phone directory.
‘Yup.’
Something nagged at Sherman. ‘Davidoff?’
‘Yup.’
‘Did we try our own motel?’
Davidoff let his jaw hang open for a moment while he considered the proposition.
‘No,’ he said at length. ‘We didn’t.’
‘Well, shall we go back and have a look, then?’
It took them thirty-five minutes to drive back to the Hazy Rest Motor Inn through rush-hour traffic.
The adenoidal kid in the faded Skynyrd T-shirt was back manning the office. Sherman noticed that the boy had painted his fingernails black. They offered, by now with more briskness than conviction, their line about why they were trying to find out whether there was an Alex Smart in the motel.
‘Aren’t you the guys in room 9?’
‘Yes,’ Sherman said.
‘Here y’go. Yeah. Yeah. He was here. English dude, yeah? I thought you were like together or something. Two doors down in room 7.’
He shuffled the register round so Sherman could read it.
Alex Smart. Checked out late that morning. They’d probably passed each other on the balcony.
They thanked the clerk and went back to the car where Davidoff had parked it across two spaces at an angle. They sat back down and Sherman thought for a while.
‘What are the chances of that happening?’ Davidoff asked. He put his sunglasses on and looked out of the window. Sherman thought he was probably admiring himself in the reflection. Something occurred to Sherman.
‘Car hire companies,’ he said.
‘Can’t we check them online?’ Davidoff grunted. ‘And get some lunch while we’re at it?’
‘No,’ said Sherman. ‘Most of them are at the airport. He’s only got a few hours on us at the moment, but by the time we finish buggering about on the Internet he’ll be long gone and they’ll all be shut. Let’s go.’
Davidoff sighed, turned the key, and wheeled round the car park just over-fast enough, and stopped at the junction with the highway just over-abruptly enough, to signal his exasperation.
They made good time. Twenty minutes later the two men were at the Hertz office in a Portakabin in the airport rental car park. They joined the queue behind a tall kid wearing a rucksack, Davidoff tapping his feet impatiently, Sherman looking about him, sucking his teeth, wondering the best line to spin the clerk… Conversational was what was needed, he thought. A bit of finesse. Use the English accent. Something about a stag party that got separated… phone not working in America… groom in danger of not making it to the church on time. That might – well, that or something like…
‘Smart,’ said an English voice, and Sherman’s awareness returned to the room. ‘S-M-A-R-T. Yes. As in clever.’
Well, I’ll be, Sherman thought. The boy in front of him in the queue pushed a British passport and driving licence across the counter. The woman smiled indulgently but professionally. Sherman risked a slight craning of the neck. Yes. Come to think of it, he did look vaguely familiar from the motel.
Davidoff wasn’t paying any attention. Sherman gently put finger and thumb around the bones of his elbow and dug the tips in harder than was necessary.
Davidoff hissed something and his head whipped round. He looked at Sherman crossly. The kid in front didn’t notice. Sherman made his face tense and looked at the boy’s back. Davidoff cottoned on. He blinked and frowned.
‘All right, Mr Smart, you need to sign here -’ she circled something quickly with her biro – ‘and here and here -’ a couple of dashed crosses. The boy cocked his head, started scribbling.
‘Here are your keys. The car’s a silver Pontiac, mid-size. It’s in space number 137, row 8. Remember to return it full.’
‘Thanks.’ The boy shouldered his rucksack and walked out of the building.
‘Next,’ she said, turning her empty smile on the two men waiting in the line. They looked at each other, then one of them mumbled about having forgotten something and they walked out of the office and round to the right, where young Mr Clever had gone. She looked at her nails and wondered what Chef Boyardee was going to prepare for her dinner tonight.
Outside, Sherman and Davidoff walked among the rows of cars keeping the kid in sight. They pretended to be looking for a car of their own – though Davidoff’s nervousness meant that he had to be prevented from hard-targeting behind the nearest SUV whenever the boy glanced round. As soon as they’d made the boy’s car and noted down the number plate, they returned to their own, parked up outside the fence within sight of the exit. Davidoff turned the engine on and let it idle.
He’d be nervous driving a new car. They had no way to know whether or not he’d driven in America before, but it was a safe bet he’d take a bit of time to familiarise himself with the controls. Sure enough, it was getting on for five minutes before the silver Pontiac rolled out of the car park and turned, hesitatingly, onto the road and rolled west.
The two men gave him six car-lengths or so of a start, and then pulled out behind him and began to follow.
He joined the 285 heading north towards the west side of the city. Davidoff was driving. Sherman opened the glove compartment and pulled out the little map of the area that they’d given him at the hire car place. Their own car, too, was a rental and they hadn’t thought to buy an atlas. Sherman thought that if the kid headed out of town that was a decision they might regret.
The silver Pontiac pulled out ahead of them and was momentarily obscured by a white eighteen-wheeler. It had ‘Xpress Global Systems’ written on the side in blue block capitals, and underneath, in smaller letters: ‘A division of MIC Industrial Futures’.
‘Fancy that,’ Sherman said whimsically. ‘On our team.’
‘What?’
‘The truck.’
‘Uh?’
Davidoff squinted.
‘This haulage company or whatever it is. Works for the same people we do. We should flash our lights.’