While standing in various roadside ditches of Forks County, holding a flashlight as the medics wielded the Jaws of Life, he had got a pretty clear idea of which cars were well built and which weren’t. If getting T-boned by a one-ton pickup at a rural crossroads didn’t reveal all of a vehicle’s structural deficiencies, then the Jaws of Life sure did.
Forks County was an especially good place to learn these lessons. County Sheriff Kevin Mullowney was not the kind of politician who spent a lot of time worrying about policies, but he did have one hard and fast rule: never arrest drunk drivers. Follow them home if you like, but don’t arrest them. Methodical application of this rule over a twelve-year reign had led to a situation in which Forks County had the lowest drunk-driver arrest rate, and the highest traffic fatality rate, in the state of Iowa.
So for quite some time, especially since the pregnancy, Clyde had been itching to swap the Celica for something with a little more stopping power. He had tried many arguments out on Desiree, told her many gory car-crash anecdotes. Desiree always had a devastating rebuttal handy: the Celica was “cute” and “a neat little car.”
Now, this very morning, with her mind occupied with long-range strategization, she had made the crucial error of telling him to ditch the Celica without saying anything about whether the replacement needed to be cute. Clyde changed the subject to something very different, ate hastily, excused himself, stripped all known copies of Celica keys from all known key chains, snatched the title out of the bill-paying desk, hopped into the cute little thing itself, and careened down the street. Just in case the Big Boss had second thoughts and tried to run him down, he did not look into the rearview mirror until he was out of shouting and waving range. Another torrential rainstorm had just commenced, which helped.
Fortunately, Desiree always kept the Celica pretty clean on the inside, so that it would stay cute. Clyde threw the few remaining personal items into a garbage bag, ran the vehicle through a car wash so that the rain would bead up attractively on its hood, and then drove straight over to the First National Bank of NishWap, a structure that had been gleamingly modern twenty years ago and now looked older than its nineteenth-century neighbors. It had a gravel parking lot in back, and before going inside, Clyde swung through that lot one time, looking for a particular vehicle.
It was still there. Clyde grinned and whacked the Celica’s steering wheel with the palm of his hand, feeling that everything was going his way for once. He parked right next to it; it was so heavy that he almost felt the Celica rocking toward it on its flimsy suspension, drawn in by its gravity.
The vehicle in question was a 1988 Buick Roadmaster station wagon. It was red inside and out. It possessed many luxury features, none of which Clyde cared about. He had done much theoretical car-shopping during the last nine months. At first he had paid careful attention to the various features and options. But as time went on, his mind became more focused, and he became fixated on one single number: namely, throw weight. And this vehicle right here weighed more than anything else you could buy. To exceed it, you had to go all the way back to the Lincoln Continentals of the mid-1960s. This beast had enough mass to drive all the way through a car like the Celica with only minor turbulence; but just in case—on the off chance you might hit two or three Celicas at the same time—it had an airbag, too.
“I’ll trade you my Celica for the Roadmaster, straight up,” Clyde said.
That Jack Harbison, branch manager, did not immediately chortle and scoff at this suggestion told Clyde that he almost certainly had himself a deal. For the first time in more than half a year, Harbison saw a way to get rid of the Murder Car.
The late owner of the Murder Car, a longtime EIU football booster and season-ticket holder, had come home unexpectedly early from a Twisters game and surprised his wife and her lover in bed. A fight had ensued. His head had got bashed in. Wife and lover had lined the inside of the Roadmaster with lawn and garden bags, laid the husband out in the middle, put more bags on top of him and an old rug on top of that. By the time they had got him out to Palisades State Park, he had died of asphyxiation or brain swelling—Barnabas Klopf, the coroner, flipped a coin and put down brain swelling. They had dragged him out over the tailgate and put him in a shallow grave at the edge of the woods. But the edge of the woods was just where hunters and their dogs were likely to be during the months that coincided with the football season, and so not more than a week later the body was found by someone’s golden retriever. Clyde himself had helped haul the body bag out to the main road.