Free at First Sight (2008) by Stephen Cannell Page B

much time, and I had a lot to do.
    I looked at my watch. It was still only 1:35 A . M . It seemed like a lifetime had passed since I'd hit Chandler, but in reality it had only been a little over two hours. I opened my wallet and counted my cash. Eighteen hundred dollars. I always carry a lot of cash when I travel because I sometimes incur personal expenses that I don't wan t s howing up on my Amex card. Don't ask, because I'm not going to explain that further.
    I got back in the Taurus and drove all night, heading north. I stopped at a self-serve car wash in Richmond around 5:30 A . M . and scrubbed the front end of the car until I was pretty sure there was no blood left. I bought some dark glasses and a ball cap at a drugstore. The tire store I eventually picked was in Newport News, Virginia. It was in a grungy neighborhood full of low-end businesses where it looked to me like cash would talk. It was seven in the morning when I parked out front of Dale's Tire Town and shut off the engine. Dale hadn't worked too hard for his slogan. In red script it read: DALE'S Where the Rubber Meets the Road. Pu-leeze.
    At nine-fifteen, a man who turned out to be Dale himself drove in and opened up. I waited until a few employees arrived, and then, wearing the sunglasses and ball cap, pulled up to one of the tire bays and got out. Dale was a speed-thin southerner with a skinny neck that looked like it was made up of gristle and rubber bands.
    "Cha' need?" he slurred at me through tobacco-stained teeth the same color and texture as a grape-stake fence.
    "New tires," I said, forcing a smile through my own too-dry pearlies.
    Dale squatted down and looked at the rear tires on the Taurus, then he got up and checked the front pair. He rubbed his chin like he was preparing to shave. Of course there was still over a half-inch of good rubber all around, and that turned out to be what was bothering him.
    "Zis a feckin' joke? You one a them TV consumer guys with a hidden camera, tryin' to see if I'll sell ya tires ya don't need?"
    "No . . . no. I, uh . . . I don't like the way these tires are riding. I'm gonna throw 'em in the trunk and put 'em on my wife's car." Even to me, this sounded more like an excuse than an explanation. Or was it just my guilty conscience revving?
    An hour later, I paid for four new Firestones. They were identical to the ones Dale had just taken off the car, minus the unique identifiers that could be used to match the tread marks on Chandler's chest and send me to prison. Dale threw the old set into the trunk. They didn't all fit, so the last one we rolled onto the floor behind the front seat. I muttered some nonsense about my wife's car, paid with cash, and left.
    As I pulled out I glanced in the mirror and saw Dale watching, shaking his head slowly. This bubba's definitely gonna remember me, I thought.
    "Yessir, Officer. Yankee in a suit. Guy came in here, swapped a perfectly good set of Stonies for a set of new ones. Didn't make no damn sense 'tall."
    When you watch this stuff on TV or in the movies, it seems pretty simple. It's another thing altogether when you're actually trying to cover up a murder yourself. Everything you say or do has repercussions. Trying to wipe a trail clean is no simple task. A tiny mistake is like a pebble thrown into a still lake; the circles of ripples roll out, but it's still pretty easy to judge where the stone originall y l anded.
    I parked by a body of water about ten miles away, went through the bushes, and found a good place to ditch the tires. I rolled them into a lake I didn't know the name of and watched while they sank.
    As I was doing this, I started to rehearse the story I was planning to tell at the auto body shop. I needed to find somebody who could fix this car immediately--somebody who had the right Taurus parts in stock--the headlight frame, the glass lens, and the correct color of paint so the rental agency wouldn't spot the damage. I couldn't be hanging around in a broken-up