He stuck the note on the kitchen counter, where she couldn’t miss it. Down the stairs he went, and out. Nobody called to him. Nobody shot at him. He stuck the suitcase in the Rambler’s trunk, then slid behind the wheel. When he turned the key, the car started. With a sigh of relief, he drove north.

At El Segundo, he turned right. He kept looking in the rearview mirror. As far as he could tell, no one was following him. He took El Segundo east to the Harbor Freeway and got on, heading north.

XV

At the four-level interchange, he drove east on the San Bernardino Freeway. He hadn’t gone very far before noticing he was low on gas. He got off the freeway at Atlantic, in East L.A. Boyle Heights, his father would have called it, but nobody much younger than his dad said that. In those days, this part of town had been Jewish and Japanese and Mexican. It was mostly Mexican now.

Jerry filled the Rambler at a Chevron station, muttering at paying sixty-two cents (well, actually 61.9) a gallon. Next to the station, a barber pole snaked its way to infinity. Eyeing its endless spiral, he had an idea. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t like anything about what he was doing. He asked the man who’d pumped his gas, “Can I park over there at the edge of your lot while I get my hair cut?”

“Sí, Señor. go ahead,” the fellow answered.

Two of the three barbers in the shop looked Hispanic, too. The third guy was black, his head shiny and shaved like Yul Brynner’s. Jerry didn’t have to wait; they waved him to the middle chair. “What can I do for you today?” the black man asked.

“Can you cut my hair just kinda regular, know what I mean?” Jerry said. “I’ve got a job interview tomorrow.”

“Sure can. Want me to shave your beard, too? Extra three bucks.”

“Do it.” Jerry knew he sounded bitter and disgusted, the way he should have. He felt bitter and disgusted, too. But if he wasn’t going to be easily recognized from here on out, he couldn’t fool around.

Forty-five minutes later, the barber waved to the mirror and said, “What do you think?”

“Christ! I just graduated from high school!” Jerry exclaimed. The black man laughed. Jerry felt his newly naked chin. It seemed smoother than he remembered after shaving himself. The barber’s straight razor was sharp.

He paid the tab (and it wasn’t Shave and a haircut—five cents, worse luck) and went out to his car. Heading back toward the freeway, he drove past a liquor store. In front of the place sat a dirty white Corvair of about the same vintage as the Rambler. A cardboard sign in the car’s window said FOR SALE—$1000 and gave a phone number.