I didn't drive west as she instructed. I didn't drive east. Instead I made a few random loops around town, watching the mirrors.
I saw nothing unusual. I found the way back to Highway 220 and headed south, crossing the muddy Platte River on a four lane concrete bridge with low steel guard rails, my eyes still on the mirrors.
After negotiating several miles of residential sprawl, the road brought me out into open range and through a small range of low, brown hills, and eventually broke out into a wide valley, paralleling what used to be the Oregon Trail. I only knew that because I occasionally saw the state historic marker signs along the shoulder of the road. The signs were about the only thing to see. The land around was arid and featureless. Nothing but scrub brush and very little of that. In the distance, low wrinkles of dark hills marked the far boundaries of the valley.
Fifty miles down the road, I came to a rest area and pulled in. It was adjacent to a state historic site where travelers heading to Oregon and California in covered wagons used to chip their names in a huge outcropping of granite. Today it would be considered vandalism, but I guess one hundred and fifty or sixty years changes peoples' minds on what constitutes graffiti.
The rest area was deserted. I drove to a far corner of the parking area and climbed out. Stretched my arms over my head, then stared off into the distance. Thinking.
The Riviera's engine ticked as it cooled. A bit of wind sifted through the low brush along the edge of the parking lot. Other than that, there was no sound, none at all. I remembered the old phrase: "The silence was deafening." The person that came up with that must've coined it after being out on the high plains of Wyoming. Off beyond the rest area, the giant hump of rock gathered shadows from the late afternoon. It wasn't hard to imagine pioneers dressed in sun-bleached clothing, clambering over the rock, chipping their names into its surface as the clink-clink noise of their tools etching the stone carried back to the wagons.
I turned back to the car. Walked a circle around it, studying it. I popped the trunk again. Checked it more thoroughly than I did at Pearl's. I did the same to the interior, practically crawling up under the dash at one point. Looked at the paperwork again, what little there was of it.
Finally I closed the trunk. Locked the doors with the little chrome lock button in the door panel. Headed over to the deserted welcome center. I entered, walked past the colorful displays and historical information and found the men's room. I went into a stall and closed the door, dropped my pants and took a seat. I sat for a long time, much longer than necessary.
Thinking.
See, here's the thing: the odds of a little old lady handing a hulking stranger a thousand dollars to drive a cherished car a thousand miles are slim and none. Sure, it was possible, but it wasn't the likely answer. The most likely answer, the first thing that came to mind was a smuggling scheme, with me as the unwitting mule tasked to unknowingly deliver several hundred pounds of contraband—drugs, weapons, whatever—to a third party.
But a slim chance was still a chance, especially when she opened the garage to reveal a car that would blend in on the road the way I would blend in a school room full of kindergarteners. Smuggling is an activity best conducted as inconspicuously as possible. And a woman of Pearl's vintage having a '72 Riviera in her garage wasn't a stretch of the imagination.
So contraband was not as likely as it first seemed. Instinct told me to search the car anyway, but two searches—the quick one in front of Pearl's garage and the one there at the rest stop—turned up nothing. That left the car itself as the item being smuggled.
So here's Pearl. Pearl sitting in a restaurant with sets of keys for two different cars and a thousand dollars in an envelope in her purse.
Seemed easy enough to figure out. She had money and keys for a driver who hadn't shown up. After twenty minutes of waiting, she aborted whatever plan she was working and out of desperation made the spontaneous decision to get me to take the other driver's place. Somebody had already taken her original driver out of play, either by violence or with a monetary incentive. That tells me the son or whoever Pearl was worried about is already in town.
The slow laps around town were on the off chance I might pick up a tail, maybe get an idea of what I'm dealing with and who the players might be. But whoever they were, they weren't biting. There's no way the Riviera could drive around town for almost an hour without being noticed by somebody with even one eye open. They had something else in mind.
I finished business and pulled up my pants. Flushed. Exited the stall and the men's room. Walked back past the displays and information, and out of the building. I paused in front of it and listened. The chill air of purple dusk was as quiet as when I arrived. I walked back across the parking lot to the Riviera, unlocked it, and slid in.
I popped open the glove box and pulled out a map again. One side showed the state of Wyoming. The other side, Colorado. I looked at the map in the yellow light of the dome fixture in the roof liner, first the Wyoming side, then the Colorado side, where I would find out one way or the other if I was right or wrong about Pearl.
I started the Riv and steered it back out onto the road again, keeping an eye on my mirror, but it was Wyoming. It was a secondary road, at night, in winter. Nothing showed in the mirrors but the occasional flare of my own brake lights as I slowed for a curve. I made it down to Interstate 80, picking it up near Rawlins through landscape that hadn't gotten any greener or less deserted.
Before getting on the interstate, I stopped to fill up the car even though it wasn't empty because I wasn't sure when or where I'd have a next chance to get gas. To put gas in the car, the rear license plate under the big chrome bumper had a hinge that flipped down to expose the fuel cap. Felt a little like a James Bond kind of design. I twisted off the cap and used it to wedge the plate spring open. Even though the tank was full in Casper, it took almost eleven gallons to fill again, and the gauge hadn't even been down to halfway. How big was the gas tank in this thing? I was only getting something like 10 or 11 miles to the gallon. Might as well have been back in the Army driving a Hum-Vee. I started to wonder if the extra $500 would be enough.
Finishing up, I got back in the car and headed west along the interstate. The Riviera ran strong and smooth through the empty darkness. No sign of mechanical trouble. I didn't want to stay on the interstate though. It was the obvious way to go, and obvious is not the way I do things.
The first chance I got, I took another secondary road south into Colorado, still keeping an eye in the rear-view. I zig-zagged across the corner of the state, working my way west and south, and that's where I found the dog.
