He snipped another couple of wires, both brown, and both live too. He stripped the end of each and then touched them together. They sparked, and the starter cranked at once. The car fired up, a good, healthy, throaty ignition, and once it had caught, he pulled the two starter wires apart and taped up both ends.
Success, part two.
Sighing with relief, he revved the engine a bit, turned on the headlights, and familiarized himself with what was where. Foot on the brake, he turned the wheel — and the steering wheel wouldn’t move. It was locked. He turned the wheel back and forth a few times, but it was stuck.
A wheel lock. He had been afraid of that. You couldn’t tell by looking a car over whether it had a wheel lock.
Shit.
He had to move on. He passed up car after car, all too modern. Car thief was apparently now a skilled profession.
Behind a closed restaurant-supply shop he finally found an old, well-maintained Mazda that also had to be vintage 1990 or so. He got into the car quickly and managed to get it started in less than five minutes. He was learning.
The Mazda ran well and smoothly, and it had about a quarter tank of gas. He’d written down the address of a house in Concord where Sarah had said he could stay. When he was about to reach for his iPhone to punch the address into his favorite navigation app, he suddenly remembered he didn’t have it; he’d deliberately left it back at the office.
And couldn’t use it anyway. Not anymore. How did people navigate before navigation apps? he wondered.
The library was probably closed by now. So much for Google Maps or whatever. What he needed was a gas station, but he learned quickly that not all of them sold maps anymore. He stopped at a McDonald’s and picked up a fast-food dinner, which he ate as he drove.
Eventually, by stopping and asking for directions the old-fashioned way, he found the right street in Concord. He parked on the street, not in the driveway. He pulled a wire from the ignition assembly to shut off the car and got out. Halfway down the block was a stuttering streetlamp; the dim light flickered.
This house was immense and modern and angular. From the front it looked like a Lego construction, but pleasingly so: a ziggurat of glass and concrete. He punched the code into the burglar alarm and disarmed it. Then he entered the combination on the front-door padlock and got the door open.
He could smell something faintly lavender, probably from a sachet placed in the front hallway by the listing agent. He pointed the mini-flashlight’s beam up and down, side to side, so he could see which way to go. Honed marble tiles on the floor, a small black table that bore a single orchid in a white vase, and—
— the door opened, and an angular man loomed in the entrance, a woman just behind him.
“Hello?” the man said.
“Can I help you?” said Tanner.
64
The man, who looked around forty, had short brown hair and a smudge of lipstick on his left cheek. He reeked of booze.
The woman right behind him was a pale blond whose lipstick was a mess. She was blushing a violent pink.
“N-no,” the man said. “We’re — we’re fine, we were just — I’m with Century 21 — are you from Coldwell Banker?”
Tanner shook his head.
“Sorry, I thought it was off the market,” said the man.
“No,” Tanner said. “I’ve got a buyer who’s going to show up at any second.” He tugged the backpack off his shoulder and set it down. “Sorry about that.”
The disappointed horny couple turned and stumbled down the broad concrete front steps into the night.
Next to the orchid on the black table stood a square white envelope with his last name on it, in Sarah’s neat printing. She must have come by.
On the card inside it said only
xx
“Huh?” he said aloud.
“Goes right to your hips”? Was that some kind of joke he didn’t get? Some women talked that way, about ice cream and slices of pie, but fortunately that wasn’t Sarah’s style. The only time she’d say something like that — actually, now he remembered — was quoting her mother explaining why there was never a cookie jar in the house. You eat that, it goes straight to your hips, her mother warned her. Which only made Sarah more fond of cookies. Because no one wants to be told something like that.
Cookies. She was talking, for some reason, about cookies.
He shone a path down a short hallway to a giant industrial kitchen with high ceilings. The inevitable Sub-Zero fridge and freezer, the obligatory Wolf range, a half-mile of white granite counter. The place was big and well equipped enough to service a bustling restaurant.
There, on a stretch of granite counter on his right, was a large white egg-shaped canister on a low metal stand. On the front of the egg it said COOKIES.
He lifted the lid. Inside was another white envelope. This one was fat. It was scotch-taped closed. He tore open the flap and saw a thick bundle of bank notes.
“Jesus.”
He counted out the hundreds and fifties and twenties. Three thousand five hundred dollars.
“Sarah,” he said aloud, chidingly, to no one. She must have taken out her own money, from her own, neglected account, and there sure wasn’t much. This had to be most of what she had. She shouldn’t have done it.
Still, he was relieved she had. He needed the money.
Tanner awoke early to make sure he wasn’t surprised by another Realtor. Since the house was temporarily off the market, he didn’t need to be quite as fastidious as at the last house. He bathed in an amazing glass-walled shower that produced steam and jetted water at him from all around.
He dressed in the new clothes and made a mental note to find a Walmart and buy some inexpensive ones. The shower had woken him up, but he still needed coffee, and badly. Like a lot of people, Tanner was a caffeine addict. Being in the business, he was used to having coffee throughout the day, an occupational hazard.
The walls of the front of the house were glass. He found the right button to electrically lower the blinds to provide some privacy. He peered outside through the slats, spent a good ten minutes that way, looking for watchers. Saw nothing, no one walking by. It was early, still dark out.
He left the house, locked it up and the padlock as well, and got into the stolen Mazda. Then there was another consideration: What happened when the car was reported missing? How long would it take for the police to do something about it? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to be pulled over and asked for license and registration. Yet he couldn’t imagine its owner was paying very close attention, since it had been left overnight behind a building. It wasn’t as if he’d stolen someone’s Ferrari. It was a cruddy old Mazda.
Connecting the wires to start the car took a matter of seconds. He wanted to get out of town, find another library — an analog solution to a digital problem — and figure out his next move. And call Tanner Roast to check in. Yesterday’s research had told him that you could buy bus tickets with cash, no ID. Traveling by bus was one way to stay under the radar, one of the few ways left. But he’d decided that today he would buy a used car with some of Sarah’s money, and ditch the stolen one.
In Framingham he found a diner that looked good. It was nothing like the one in Southie where he and Lanny sometimes used to meet. Didn’t have that abandoned-railroad-car look. But it already had customers, and it was before six.