“My lips are sealed.”
“And I’ll throw in those Norway stamps you picked out, though I don’t guess that’ll save you much. They can’t come to more than ten dollars, can they?”
“More like six or seven.”
“Well, that’ll buy you a hamburger, if you don’t want fries with it. Call it an even six hundred and we’re good.”
Keller gave him the money. McCue was counting it while Keller made sure he had all of the stamps he’d bought, tucking them away in an inside jacket pocket, adding the pair of tongs to another, closing the stamp catalog, when abruptly McCue said, “Oh, holy hell! Hold everything.”
Were the bills counterfeit? He froze, wondering what was the matter, but McCue was on his feet, walking over to the radio, turning up the volume. The music had stopped and an agitated announcer was interrupting with a news bulletin.
“Holy hell,” McCue said again. “We’re in for it now.”
2
Dot must have been sitting right next to the phone. She picked it up halfway through the first ring and said, “That wasn’t you, was it?”
“Of course not.”
“I didn’t think so. The picture they showed on CNN didn’t look much like the one they sent us.”
It made him nervous, talking like this on a cell phone. The technology kept improving, to the point where you had to take it for granted that there was a record somewhere of every call you made, and that the authorities could access the information in a heartbeat. If you used a cell phone, they could pinpoint the location of it when you made the call. They kept building better mousetraps, and the mice had to be correspondingly more resourceful. Lately, whenever he had a job, he would buy two prepaid cell phones for cash from a store on West Twenty-third Street, making up a name and address for their records. He’d give one to Dot and keep the other for himself, and the only calls either would make were to the other. He’d called a few days ago, to report his arrival in Des Moines, and he’d called again earlier that morning to say that they’d told him to wait at least one more day, although he could have hit the guy and been on his way home by now.