“How come nobody stopped your car when you were driving east? They knew your license number and everything.”

Jerry told him how he’d acquired the Corvair after he lost his long hair and beard. Tim cracked up again. Jerry finished, “The Rambler’s still there, too, or it was when I checked it coming back into town.”

“You wanna go pick it up? You can leave the Corvair there instead. If you told a bunch of lies on the change-of-ownership form, they may never even trace it back to you.”

“I’m not sure the old car’ll start. It’ll have been there more than two weeks.”

“I’ve still got the jumper cables in the trunk. We can throw ’em in the Corvair, and we’ll use ’em on the Rambler if we need to.”

“Let’s do it,” Jerry said.

Tim drove back to Jerry’s apartment. “There’s the Ralph Nader special,” he said, seeing it on the street, so he remembered Unsafe at Any Speed, too. He parked behind the Corvair. They made the necessary transfers. When Jerry started the car, his friend made a face. “Noisy bastard.”

“I know. Air-cooled engine.”

“That’s right. I forgot. What kind of performance does it have?”

“About like the Rambler: zero to sixty in twenty minutes. Maybe eighteen if I’m going downhill.”

Sarcasm aside, forty minutes later they were in East L.A. Jerry turned off Atlantic and on to the side street where he’d left his car. “There it is,” Tim said. “Nobody else wants it.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Jerry took the Rambler’s plates out of the Corvair’s trunk and put them back on. Then he got in and turned the key. He could tell right away the battery was low. But he thought it might start. It might … It did. Blue-gray smoke farted from the exhaust.

Tim banged on the window. He was holding the jumper cables. Jerry rolled down the glass. “Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good,” Tim said.

“Better believe it. You wanna pace me on the way back in case I have trouble?”

“I was gonna,” his friend replied.

“Good deal. Thanks, man,” Jerry said. Tim waved that away and went back to his own car. They both turned onto Atlantic and headed back to the San Bernardino Freeway.

On the San Bernardino and on the southbound Harbor, Jerry worried that the cops would pull him over because of whatever bullshit story the CIA had given them. But a CHP cruiser and one from the LAPD zoomed by without paying any attention to the Rambler. Had the CIA pulled the APB? Had there never been one at all? He didn’t believe that, any more than Tim had.