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But if this worked, he’d have so theo with it They’d find the car, with his rental papers in the glove box They’d find the set a print off the pizza box, and what conclusion would they draw? That he’d switched cars? That he’d switched plates and kept the same old car?

No, they’d almost certainly assume that he’d come to the airport because it was in fact an airport, with the intention of getting on a plane And they’d have a tough tied to slip through Security and do just that

Eventually, of course, the real owner of the Sentra would return But he wouldn’t find his car, because they’d have long since hauled it away and very likely stripped the thing down to the chassis, until it would be about as easy to put back together as the cell phone

So ould he do? After he’d looked all over the lot for it, and very likely cursed a blue streak, ould the guy do?

Report it as stolen, most likely And the police would add the vehicle to the national hot car list, where it would have thousands of others for company That meant that police officers all over the country would be looking for it, but it didn’tvery hard If he was in an accident, if he got stopped for speeding, someone would run the plate and deter around and lance

It would be just as well, though, to point them toward the Sentra sooner rather than later It would probably be at least a day or two before the owner returned, but that wasn’t the only reason to get thingsAs soon as they identified the car and followed their noses into the airport ter for the car, and all Nissan Sentras, including the one he was driving, would stop attracting untoward attention

So should he call it in?

Caller ID, a staple on every 911 line, would i gone before anybody could stop by to ask questions, but was there a better way?

The station had a toll-free number, and it had imprinted itself on his memory somewhere in the course of the few hundred times they’d announced it He picked a pay phone at the far end of a strip ht When a ood radio voice said, "WHO, Central Iowa’s leader in news and opinion, you’re on the air," he took a breath and said, "Hey, is there a reward for spotting that car everybody’s looking for? On account of I just seen it out by the airport"

"You should have had your dial set to 740," the fellow said "They found the car, and we had it on the air a full five et the hter before the phone clicked in his ear

"I guess that’s a no," he said out loud And got back in the car and started driving

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One , some variant on a dream he’d had off and on his whole life, the one where he was naked in public It wasn’t a difficult dreas he and his therapist tackled in that long-ago failed experiment in self-discovery But he still dreamed it every once in a while, and after all these years a sense of recognition took a lot of the edge off the dreaain, he’d think, and then sink back into the apparent reality of the dream

This time the dream was suddenly over and he was as suddenly awake, with no real memory of the drea upright behind the wheel of his car, and he kept his eyes closed while he got his bearings He had the awful feeling that the car was surrounded byfor hi as he pretended to be asleep, so that’s what he had to do, just sit there with his eyes shut, his breathing regular and shallow