Glass Houses(82)

The first order of business was money, and that was the easy part. Bennie had never shown much talent for anything, but he was a pretty decent pick-pocket. He’d been able to keep himself in spending cash all through high school by the simple expedient of always riding public transportation in the morning. He’d get on the bus broke except for the fare and get off with two or three wallets in his back pocket. He’d even become very adept at spotting the people who would have cash and the ones who wouldn’t. You didn’t want to go after the guys in the expensive suits with the good leather briefcases. Guys like that who rode the bus were low-level associates at the better law firms. They had cards but practically no cash because they spent all their money trying to look like they were already one of the partners. You didn’t want young women either. They were always on hyperalert, tense as hell that some idiot was going to try to grab them. It was near impossible to distract them enough so that you could take their money without their knowing it. The best bets were always middle-aged guys in work uniforms, the kind of guys who made up the male population of the neighborhoods where he’d grown up. Those guys liked cash, as much as possible, to flash around. It was what made them forget that they were completely unimportant on the face of this planet, as far beneath the bastards who ran the place as any street-sleeping bum.

Bennie didn’t like the idea of a bus. The enclosed space was the wrong thing to look for. It was too easy to get caught in an enclosed space. He started walking out toward the edges of the city. People were looking for him, but he was hoping that those people were mostly looking for the him of the high school photograph. He hadn’t seen a policeman drawing on the news.

He got to a stretch where there were nothing but gas stations and pawn shops. Pawn shops were a bad bet. The people who patronized them were broke, and the guys who owned them knew every trick there was to know. That was their job. The gas stations were dangerous, but if you found the right one, set up in the right way, you could hit a bonanza.

Bennie went by two that had those fancy credit-card-payment setups at the pump. People used those because they preferred using credit cards to cash. He went by another one because the bullet-proof kiosk jutted out into the area reserved for the islands. There wasn’t a single pump that couldn’t be seen from the clerk’s little desk. What he wanted was a place that did repairs and towing as well as sold gas. He wasn’t looking for customers as much as he was looking for mechanics.

He went by two pawn shops in a row, both of them showing row after row of large television sets just inside their plate-glass front walls. The next place was a body shop that didn’t sell gas at all, and Bennie stopped there. He had no idea what time it was, but he assumed it was sometime into the working day because the place was busy and so was the street. Two of the garage bays were open, both showing cars up on lifts. The open space between the front of the shop and the street was full of cars, none of which looked as if it could run.

These were the guys, Bennie thought. These were the guys no serial killer ever thought to kill, and yet they were the perfect targets, the perfect—something. Bennie’s passive vocabulary was better than his active one. He understood words on the page that he then couldn’t remember on his own to save his life. Still, these were the guys. If anyone deserved to die, they did. If you wanted to strike a blow against mediocrity and hypocrisy and smug, self-satisfied, stuck-upness, this was where you had to do it. If he had had a knife on him right this minute or a gun—Why was it that the great serial killers never used guns? Maybe it was too easy. Maybe it lacked symbolism. Maybe it was like in that book, The Stranger. If the point was to live at the peak of experience, to get out beyond the ordinary emotions of ordinary people, then you’d want to make it last as long as possible. And you’d want to watch your victim bleed.

“Hey.”

Bennie came to. He’d been off in a trance somewhere. He’d had one of those visions where he was able to see the blood on his hands. He looked down at the man who had come up next to him. He was just one of those men, wearing a jacket that seemed to have been soaked through with grease and then dried. He was in his fifties somewhere. He smelled of cigarette smoke.

“Sorry,” Bennie said. “I drifted off there. I haven’t had much sleep.”

“There something I can do for you?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess. I think I’m lost. I wanted to find a decent exit I could use to go west.”

“Where west?”

“Ohio. My mother’s in Ohio. She moved out there to live with my aunt.”