Outside, he went to his car and filled the tank, and he didn’t stop at the twenty-dollar mark, either. The Sentra drank deeply and settled down on its tires, like a heavy man sitting back after a big meal.

Remsen’s sign was still hanging on the pump, advising cash and credit customers alike to pay before they pumped their gas. He replaced it with one he’d lettered at the counter, using what was very likely the same Magic Marker Remsen had used. CLOSED FOR FAMILY EMERGENCY, he’d printed in block caps. HELP YOURSELF AND PAY ME LATER. He somehow doubted that anyone who knew Remsen at all well would believe he’d display such trust in his fellow man, but who was going to argue with a free tank of gasoline? They’d all help themselves, he figured, and some of them might even pay for it later.

Back inside, he flipped the sign in the window from OPEN to CLOSED. He turned off lights, rearranged the scene behind the counter so that the body would not be visible from outside, walked to the open door and pushed the button that would lock it, and stepped across the threshold. And stopped there, one foot outside and one foot in, because it was almost as if he could hear Miller Remsen’s voice, halting him in his tracks.

Hold it right there, son. Where do you think you’re going?

He didn’t want to go back behind the counter, but he knew he had to. Hadn’t he already established that he wasn’t squeamish? So why draw the line now?

He braced himself, then reached for the Homer Simpson cap. He didn’t have to remove it from Remsen’s head, it had already fallen off on its own, so all he needed to do was pick it up, which wasn’t really all that hard, and then put it in place on his own head, which wasn’t all that easy.

In the car he checked his reflection in the rearview mirror. It seemed to him that the cap helped. The adjustable strap was a little loose, he’d noticed that Remsen had a pretty large head, and he tightened it a notch, and that was better. And he tugged at the brim so that it covered a little more of his forehead, and that was better, too.

He had a dead man’s gun pressing into the small of his back and a dead man’s money and credit card in his pocket, and he’d filled his tank with a dead man’s gas. And now he had a dead man’s baseball cap on his head.

It was a curious development, all in all. But now it was beginning to look as though he might make it back to New York after all.

The drive-up window at Wendy’s was even less threatening than the one at Burger King. He ordered a couple of burgers and a green salad, and ate them in the car a few miles down the road. He drove through the rest of Indiana and all the way through Ohio and a couple of miles of West Virginia, and he was across another state line and into Pennsylvania before he needed to stop for gas. He picked a big truck stop, pulled up to a self-service pump, and used Remsen’s credit card.

There was a moment when he realized another motorist was looking at him with interest, and he didn’t know what he would do; there were people all over the place, and he couldn’t shoot the guy and take off. He looked back at him, and the fellow — he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five — gave him a big grin and a thumbs-up.

Why, for God’s sake?

“Man, Homer’s the bomb,” the guy said, and Keller realized he’d been looking not at his face but at his baseball cap, and was expressing his approval of Homer Simpson, or endorsing Homer’s enthusiasm for beer, or whatever.

Until that moment Keller had been having mixed feelings about the cap. It unquestionably served to render him less identifiable, which was good, but at the same time it drew attention all by itself, which wasn’t. A John Deere cap, a Bud Light cap, a Dallas Cowboys cap — any of those would have offered a degree of invisibility which Homer, embroidered in Day-Glo yellow on a royal blue field, did not begin to provide. He’d even thought about cutting the threads and picking out the embroidery, taking Homer and his mug of suds out of the picture altogether.

But now he was beginning to be just as glad he’d held off. Homer drew attention, as he’d feared he might, but in this instance he’d drawn that attention not to Keller’s face but away from it. The more people noticed Homer, the less attention they paid to Keller. He was just a dude with Homer on his cap, and he’d be sending out the subliminal message that he was safe and unthreatening, because how dangerous was the sort of yokel who’d walk around with Homer Simpson an inch or two north of his eyebrows?

14

Somehow in the course of skirting the city of Pittsburgh, he managed to lose Route 30, and signs indicated that he was approaching the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It would get him to New York, but he seemed to recall having heard that the state troopers on the Pennsy Pike were hell on speeders. That bit of information might have been twenty years old, if it was ever true in the first place, and he hadn’t exceeded a speed limit since he left Des Moines, but according to another sign, the road he was on would get him to I-80, and that’s where he headed.

Before his encounter with Remsen, he’d have had a more compelling reason to pick I-80. It was free in Pennsylvania, while the Pennsylvania Turnpike was a toll road. When he’d been hoping to stretch his gas money so that it would get him home, it was worth driving out of one’s way to escape a highway toll. But now he had money in his pocket, and the worst thing you could say about a toll booth was that it would give one more person a quick look at his face.

It took him longer than he’d expected to get to the interstate, and he was glad when a rest area provided a chance to stop. He needed a restroom, and while he was there he checked his reflection in the mirror and couldn’t take his eyes off Homer Simpson. Did the image have to be so bright? Maybe he could rub a little dirt on it, tone it down some.

He left it alone, had a look at the map mounted on the wall outside, then returned to his car and sat there, trying to decide if he could make it all the way back to the city in one shot. He probably had enough gas, though there was no point in taking the chance of running out, say, in the middle of the George Washington Bridge, not when Miller Remsen was ready and willing to fill up the tank for him.

What he had to decide was whether to spend another night on the road. A few hours in a real bed had spoiled him, and the idea of trying to sleep in the car was unappealing now. How far was he from the city? Seven, eight hours? More, with stops for gas and food?

At a rough estimate, he calculated that he’d hit the city around three or four in the morning if he drove straight through. That might not be a bad time to turn up at his apartment. There’d be fewer people on the streets, and the ones who were out and about at that hour were apt to be too drunk to notice him, or to remember if they did.

A line of thought tried to intrude, and his mind deliberately pushed it aside…

If he drove straight through, he thought, he’d arrive tired and worn out, and was that the best way to land on his own doorstep? He’d want to crawl into bed the minute he got through the door, and he wouldn’t be able to, because he’d have tons of things to do. Never mind the mail, which always piled up when he took a trip. There’d be plenty of other things demanding his immediate attention. There always were.

That thought again, and again he never let himself become entirely conscious of it, warding it off almost without effort.

He switched on the radio for the first time since he’d left Remsen’s place, but he was in the mountains now and the reception was bad. The only station he could pick up was playing music, and the static was so heavy he couldn’t even tell what kind of music it was.