“All right!” Jerry said. Driving a car the CIA knew about had been one of his biggest worries. If he was driving something else, though …

Perhaps not coincidentally, the liquor store had a telephone booth by the door. Jerry drove around the corner. He got out of the car, went to the trunk, and loaded up his wallet as unobtrusively as he could—it was that kind of neighborhood. Then he walked back.

He stepped into the street and stared at the phone number till he had it memorized. As soon as he did, he fed a dime into the pay phone. It gave him a dial tone, which wasn’t guaranteed. He called the number.

One ring, two …

“Hello?” The guy on the other end had an accent, but not a heavy one. Jerry’d gone to school with people who talked the same way.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m in the phone booth by your Corvair. I’m interested.”

“Oh, yeah? Okay, I can be there in like fifteen minutes. My name’s Rodolfo. Who’re you?”

“I’m Jerry.” Jerry wished he’d given a false name, but he hadn’t.

“Okay, Jerry. See you soon.” The line went dead. Jerry hung up. The phone went click-chunk as it finished swallowing his dime. He went into the liquor store and bought a Coke. Sugar and caffeine would help keep him going.

Rodolfo showed up on a bike, which he chained to a lamp pole. He was about thirty-five, squat and strong looking, his hair retreating at the temples. After they shook hands, Jerry asked, “How many miles? I couldn’t read the odometer through the side window.”

“Ninety-two thousand—not quite ninety-three,” Rodolfo said. “Still runs pretty good—you wanna drive it a little, see for yourself?”

“Yeah.” Jerry tried not to think about Unsafe at Any Speed. If he hadn’t done what he needed to do with the Corvair inside a week, he’d probably wind up dead in some way that had nothing to do with the kind of car he was driving.

Rodolfo unlocked the door and waved for Jerry to get in. He had to move the seat back before he’d fit; he was six or eight inches taller than the man who wanted to sell. Rodolfo slid in from the curb and handed him the key. Before he started the car, he checked the odometer for himself. It said 92,741.6, so Rodolfo’d told the truth about that, anyway.

He turned the key. Like a VW Bug, the Corvair kept its engine in the rear. It was still noisy. “Air-cooled, you know,” Rodolfo said. “You don’t gotta worry about the radiator boiling over or nothin’.”

“I remember that, uh-huh.” Jerry had to look to see where the controls were. He didn’t reach for them automatically, the way he did with his own machine. He released the parking brake, put the Corvair in drive, and pulled out onto Atlantic.