CHAPTER 33
Simone instructs Lucy to stay by the car while she goes into the shop. They’re less conspicuous apart, though Lucy being in the car alone is making Simone uncomfortable as she rushes around the aisles. She hesitates every few seconds, peering out.
American petrol stations are different from those in the UK.
The far wall is fake brick, lined with vending machines.
The rest of the shop is huge but sort of quaint, linoleum floor made to look like distressed wood.
It sells almost everything you can think of in small quantities at high prices.
Less of the UK focus on the practical, and more on pleasure.
Simone could linger for hours here at the SUGARED NUTS/DIPPIN’ DOTS aisle, but doesn’t.
Still, she catches glimpses of things as she makes her way around the shop: red Texas T-shirts, peanut butter, jalapeno popcorn, cowboy hats, candyfloss in buckets.
At the end of a small aisle is a display of Motorola phones, and she buys one in cash, forty dollars, looking away from the cashier. She makes sure it has internet, GPS, is a usable smartphone, but not so smart it will reveal their location to apps that don’t ask permission.
Back out to the car. ‘Leave the phones here but switched on,’ Simone says in a low voice through the window. Another bin, another roadside, but this time, they don’t destroy them. Simone wants them to be traced, for people to think they are hiding here, at least for a little while.
They drop down with two distinct thuds. To the authorities, Simone and Lucy’s movements will terminate here, and, together with the CCTV she’s just been captured on in the shop, the police will search here for them, especially as Simone avoided the hire car being caught on CCTV in the petrol station.
It doesn’t buy them anything except time, but that’s enough for now.
Simone approaches the scrapyard. It’s unmanned, cars abandoned on a rocky forecourt, no CCTV.
She only hopes she can persuade somebody to sell her a car.
She walks a loop around them, desperately trying a handle or two, wondering how she ended up here.
If someone looks and acts like a criminal, are they?
Back into the shop. ‘Isn’t the car place open?’ she asks.
‘No,’ the assistant says, his tone disparaging. A pointed glance at a clock above him.
Simone stares at it for just a few seconds, watches the hands slow-moving around its face.
‘When will it open?’
‘Nine, like most things,’ he replies.
They can’t spare the time.
‘You can’t sell me one of those cars?’ she asks desperately. Simone is good at getting things, at persuading people, but it’s a lost cause today; she knows it is. He will remember her. He will tell the police what car he sold them.
‘No, guy’s due in at nine,’ he repeats. ‘He’s got the keys.’
On the spur of the moment, Simone buys black tape. It isn’t what she wants to do. It isn’t even really a quick fix, but it’s something. She hides it in her shorts as she leaves.
She stands back in front of the car, which still remains in the shadows, away from CCTV, and looks out at the wide expanse of the desert. They can’t go anywhere on foot. They can’t steal a car – how would they? All they have is the hire car, and all they can do is disguise it as well as possible.
Simone bends in front of the number plates, insects acrobatic in the headlights’ beams, and rips the tape, adding a single black block to an F to make it an E.
It’s simple. It won’t buy them forever, but they might be able to get to Terlingua without triggering number plate recognition. She does the same at the rear.
She gets back in the car, and asks Lucy where Terlingua is.
‘It’s back in the direction we’ve come from,’ Lucy answers. ‘The coaches from camp went there all the time. Took a few hours.’
It’s a risk, but all misdirects are.
Simone’s hope is that the authorities will assume a straight line from the shooting, through this petrol station, and onwards to Albuquerque.
Meantime, they double back on themselves, their car not triggering ANPR.
They left the phones here, but no one will expect them to go backwards.
It’s a bodged plan, but it’s still a plan.
They drive. A car appears in the distance but passes them normally. Inside is a man in sunglasses even though it’s dark. Simone thinks it could be him. Anybody could be him. They know nothing about him.
She leans back and accelerates, dreaming of a little dodgy motel in Terlingua, anywhere with four walls and a window they can shut the curtains against, just for a little while. It sounds so ridiculous to Simone that she can’t help but say, ‘Well, here’s to hiding from the law.’
Lucy cracks a grim smile, but then her face sets into seriousness quickly after it. ‘And who knows who else,’ she says softly.