Now how hard was that? Guy suggests a meal and you follow his suggestion and it’s not bad at all. So what’s so bad about going along with the program?

But no, the patty melt was where the program ended. They make it easy, he told himself, and you have to make it hard. They supply a decent room at a clean, well-situated motel, and you won’t even use the john because you don’t want to leave your DNA in it. The only thing he was willing to leave in the room was the cell phone they’d provided — turned off, wiped free of prints, and tucked away under the very center of the king-size mattress. He’d thought about leaving the gun there as well, but in the end he’d decided to hang on to it for the time being, and it was in his suitcase.

He’d returned to the car they gave him, but only in order to wipe any surfaces he might have touched. He triggered the remote on the key fob to lock the car, and had the urge to fling the keys into a handy Dumpster. Could they use the car keys to track him? He wasn’t sure, and his sense of contemporary technology was that anybody could do anything, and if they couldn’t today they’d be able to tomorrow. Still, he didn’t see any reason to toss the car keys just yet, or the room key, either.

He’d walked across the street to Denny’s, finished his patty melt and fries and two cups of coffee, and now he used a pay phone next to the men’s room to call a taxi. “Going to the airport,” he said, and they wanted to know his name. He felt like telling them he’d be the only person in front of Denny’s waiting for a cab, but instead he just told them his name was Eddie. “Be ten minutes, Eddie,” said the woman on the other end of the line, and the cab showed up in eight.

The girl at the Hertz counter was happy to rent Holden Blankenship a Nissan Sentra. He called ahead on one of the courtesy phones across from baggage claim and booked himself into a Days Inn, and the room was ready for him by the time he drove there. He unpacked, took a shower, turned the TV on, surfed through a slew of cable channels, turned it off again, and stretched out on the bed. But he sat up almost immediately, convinced he’d left the wrong phone in Room 204 at the Laurel Inn.