‘I’ll get it for you.’
As the employee left the room, he began at the top of the list.
‘I’ll be dipped in shit!’ he said, sitting up on his chair and once again, leaning closer to the monitor. He rewound the footage on the screen a couple of seconds and played it again before hitting the pause button. The screen froze at the same time that a smile parted his lips.
‘You clever little thing,’ he said before having a sip of the coffee that the Greyhound employee had brought him just a few minutes ago. ‘I almost got you wrong again, didn’t I? You didn’t even go for a change of clothes.’
On the screen, the same Mary that he had seen board the bus back in Franklin, then step out of that same bus in Birmingham that morning, was just boarding a new bus – twenty-nine minutes after arriving in Birmingham. There had been no change of clothes. She was still wearing the same baseball cap that she had purchased at the hotel, the same jacket, the same blue jeans, and the same cowboy boots. Just as she did in Franklin and when arriving in Birmingham, she kept her hands firmly tucked into her jacket pockets and her head low, eyes on the ground, so that the CCTV camera wouldn’t capture her face.
The man checked the list on the left of his screen. He was watching the footage from the seventh bus on that list – destined for Milwaukee, in Wisconsin. That was a long trip – eleven and a half hours. Arrival in Milwaukee was scheduled for 10:35 that evening.
He checked his watch – 3:40 p.m. There was no way that hecould jump straight back into his car and drive to Milwaukee. He needed to catch some sleep before he was able to do anything else. He reached for his smartphone and performed a quick Internet search. A flight from Birmingham to Milwaukee would get him there in three hours and forty-five minutes.
Another quick search.
There was a flight leaving Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport at 5:45 p.m., arriving in Milwaukee at 9:30 that evening – a full hour before Mary was due to get there. He could get a few hours of sleep in the plane, hire a car at the airport when he landed, and be at the Greyhound bus station in Milwaukee with a few minutes to spare to watch Mary step out of the bus.
‘You might not be a spy, Miss Mary Smith,’ the man murmured to himself, ‘but you certainly can think out of the box. Very smart.’ On his phone, he began the process of purchasing an airline ticket. ‘But I’m smarter. I’ll see you in Milwaukee.’
Twenty-Five
Mary had come up with the idea while still at the hotel in Franklin. Her train of thought had been simple: if gangster-suit man had managed to track her down in Nashville, it meant that he was good at what he did. It would be just a matter of time before he figured out that she had jumped into a cab and that she wasn’t going back to her apartment. From there, it wouldn’t take him long to find out about the hotel in Franklin and the early bus heading towards Birmingham.
Unlike airlines, bus companies did not have a passenger manifest, so the only way for gangster-suit man to confirm if Mary had boarded the bus in Franklin, then debarked it in Birmingham, would be by watching the CCTV camera footage at the bus stations. Sure, she had kept her head low so that the camera wouldn’t capture her face, but that wouldn’t really keep gangster-suit man from recognizing her. So, Mary’s plan had been to simply fake it – make him believe that she had used Birmingham as a springboard destination, boarding another bus shortly after arriving in town, but this time the bus would be heading somewhere far, somewhere where he couldn’t drive to so easily – a clear indication that she was trying to put as much distance between her and him as she possibly could. Another trick that she had picked up from spy films.
With that in mind, after arriving in Birmingham, Marychecked the departures’ board at the station. In less than half an hour there was a bus departing to Milwaukee, in Wisconsin. That was certainly far enough, and the timing was absolutely perfect.
Mary walked up to the teller window and used her credit card to purchase a ticket. She knew that that would leave a trail, but that had been exactly why she did it – in case, somehow, gangster-suit man had a way of tracking her credit card activity.
Minutes later, Mary boarded the bus, heading towards Milwaukee, with all the other passengers. Once again, for the sake of the CCTV camera, she kept her head low and her hands firmly tucked into her jacket pockets – fugitive style.
The bus departed exactly on time, but just a minute after that, as it veered right and came to a stop at a red traffic light, Mary asked the driver to open the door and let her out. The driver frowned at her, not really understanding what was going on. She simply told him that she had changed her mind about going to Wisconsin. With no luggage for her to retrieve from the luggage compartment, it would cause the driver no delay at all to let her out.
‘There are no refunds,’ the driver had said, in a heavy Alabama accent. ‘You know that, right?’
‘Yep. No problem.’
‘Fine, it’s your money lady,’ the driver had commented, before pressing the button to release the door.
As she stepped out of the bus, Mary didn’t know if gangster-suit man would end up in Milwaukee or not. Either way, with her little ‘hop-on hop-off’ trick, she was pretty sure that she would never see him again.
Twenty-Six
For the next seven weeks, Mary traveled through the Deep South like a tourist on holiday – sixteen cities across six different states – tangling the trail web behind her so thickly that even a spider wouldn’t be able to properly navigate it. But before leaving Birmingham, in Alabama, Mary decided to reinvent her look yet again. If gangster-suit man had managed to track her down, chances were that he had also managed to photograph her, and that would be what he, or whoever else took over from him, would use to try to pick up her trail again.
Mary’s hair stayed the same – short and raven black – but the reason for that was because short hair was easier to manage when wearing a wig.
This time, Mary decided to go with shoulder length, straight brown hair – a look that she could easily pull. At the opticians, she purchased a whole new batch of daily contact lenses – still brown in color, but a couple of shades lighter than the ones she’d been wearing for the past six months. She had checked the statistics on the Internet – the probability of a female in the USA being born with brown hair and brown eyes was one in every two – the most common eye/hair color combination in the land.
Mary was also extremely glad that she could now go back into a proper diet and exercise routine and lose all of the weight thatshe had put on since she’d left Massachusetts, and she couldn’t wait to get rid of her plump cheeks and her muffin top.
‘Goodbye burgers and fried food,’ she told herself, smiling at the mirror, on the same day that she left Birmingham.
The plan was to simply travel around – no specific place in mind… no exact number of days to spend anywhere. All that Mary really wanted to do was put as many cities and states in between her Nashville address and her new one – somewhere in Houston.
There was only one state in the Deep South that Mary had to visit before she settled down in Texas, and that state was Louisiana. The reason why she just couldn’t wait to visit the Pelican State was rather silly, but very personal.
Something that went back to her teenage years.