Keller's Fedora (Kindle Single) by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online

it was difficult to summon up the original image because you really had changed the look of it in your memory.
    This time around it was a little hard to get started, because the only image he had to work with didn’t start out with much in the way of color or detail. It had been dark by then, and while there were lights in the parking lot, the trio of white vans had been parked well away from them. You’d think it would be easier to blur and shrink and fade an image that wasn’t all that vivid to begin with, but for some reason it wasn’t.
    Well, he did what he could.
    A ND SLEPT WELL enough, although he awoke with a sense of having been troubled by dreams. He couldn’t recall a dream, couldn’t even say for certain that he’d been dreaming, but he got out of bed feeling less rested than untroubled sleep should have left him.
    He checked out, skipped breakfast, and drove back to O’Hare to return the car. While he was there, he checked the board and saw that United had a flight to Louis Armstrong Airport scheduled to depart at 11:45.
    No. Stick with the plan.
    He took a cab to the train station, picked up the ticket he’d reserved, and checked his bag. He walked around until he found a place to have coffee, got a croissant while he was at it, and took out his phone. The Pablo phone was in his bag, along with the burner he’d bought and never used, but he was in Chicago now, not Baker’s Bluff, and he was Nicholas Edwards once again instead of James J. Miller, so it didn’t matter if his iPhone pinged off towers left and right.
    He powered it up and called home, and Julia answered.
    “I’m in Chicago,” he told her. “My train leaves around eight and gets in at three-thirty tomorrow afternoon.”
    “And everything’s taken care of?”
    “All wrapped up. I thought it would take longer, but it went well.”
    “I bet it was the hat. I hope you’ve still got it.”
    He lifted a hand, touched the brim to make sure. “I’m wearing it now.”
    ‘Well, be careful,” she said. “You’re in the Windy City.”
    “That’s true.”
    “Although I read somewhere that they call it that because the local politicians are such windbags, but I don’t know if I believe it. If that’s how it worked, wouldn’t every city be the Windy City?”
    H E WALKED AROUND , looked at things, did a little shopping. Ate a meal, saw a movie. They had a lounge in Union Station for first–class passengers, and that’s what you became when you booked a roomette. He was in the lounge by 6:30, drinking coffee and watching CNN until they called his train for boarding.
    “Good evening, Mr. Edwards. Good to see you again, sir.”
    It was nice to have the same porter, nicer still that he happened to remember the man’s name. “Ainslie,” he said, and was rewarded with a smile, while Ainslie was in turn rewarded as before with a twenty-dollar bill.
    The dining car wouldn’t be serving until breakfast, Ainslie told him, but there’d be coffee and sandwiches in the café car as soon as they got underway. Keller looked out the window for a while, went and had something to eat, and got back to his roomette in time to have Ainslie make up the bed. He lay in the dark for a long time, while the train sped up and slowed down, passing through stations. The last one he was aware of was Centralia, sometime after midnight.
    He slept all right, surfacing every couple of hours but lulled back to sleep each time by the motion of the train. After breakfast he called home, but rang off when the call went to voice mail. He was only about a third of the way into Jake Dagger’s story, and he’d have returned to it if it hadn’t been in his checked bag.
    The roomette was supplied with the current issue of Amtrak’s magazine, and he read an article proclaiming Richmond, Virginia, as a hot destination for foodies. Keller, a longtime New Yorker now living in New Orleans, was somehow skeptical. He tried to imagine a couple of Tribeca sophisticates, say,