Since that put me back in the days of horsepower, I trotted over to the automobile rental and hired a few hundred of them under the hood of a Rolls. That was about the only brand of car that fit me. I hadn't been able to get my legs into any other foreign car since I was fifteen, and I have steadfastly refused to enter an American model since they all sold out their birthrights as passenger cars and went over to the tractor-trailer combinations they used only for cargo trucks when I was a boy. Dragging around thirty feet of car is sheer nonsense, even for prestige.
It was a tiresome fifty-mile drive, on manual all the way after I left the radar-channel area of the city. Up and down, slowing for curves, flipping into second for the hills.
The whole trip hardly seemed worth it when I saw the cluster of painted frame buildings that was Granite City. They looked like a tumble of dingy building blocks tossed in front of a rolled-up indigo sports shirt. That was Granite Mountain in the near foreground. But I remembered that over the course of some forty years the people in these few little stacks of lumber had taken Manhattan-Universal for three quarters of a megabuck.
I turned off onto the gravel road, spraying my fenders with a hail of a racket. Then I stepped down hard on my brakes, bracing myself to keep from going through the windscreen. I had almost sideswiped an old man sitting at the side of the road, huddled in his dusty rags.
"Are you okay?" I yelled, thumbing down the window.
"I've suffered no harm at your hands—or your wheels, sir. But I could use some help," the old man said. "Could I trouble you for a lift when you leave town?"
I wasn't too sure about that. Most of these guys who are on the hobo circuit talking like they owned some letters to their names besides their initials belonged to some cult or other. I try to be as tolerant as I can, and some of my best friends are thugs, but I don't want to drive with them down lonely mountain roads.
"We'll see what we can work out," I said. "Right now can you tell me where I can find Marshal Thompson?"
"I can," he said. "But you will have to walk there."
"Okay. It shouldn't be much of a walk in Granite City."