The Man With the Getaway Face by Richard Stark

There were six twenties, and these he held out over the dashboard where the light from the street light would hit them. "There's been some trouble with twenties lately."
    "I'm not in that business," Parker said.
    "It always pays to be careful." The florid man finished inspecting the bills. "That's fine. Well, you're all set now. You got yourself a good buy."
    He opened the door and clambered down to the street. He slammed the door and waved, and went on into the garage, stuffing the bills back into the envelope. Parker fought the gearshift into second again, and started off.
    He took 117 north out of Goldsboro and picked up 301 the other side of Fremont, then 301 north into Virginia. The friction tape on the hoses hadn't been enough. The radiator itself leaked. Parker had to make his first stop at Richmond, after going one hundred and seventy miles. He had the radiator filled, and a can of sealant added. They checked the oil, and he needed a quart already.
    The other side of Richmond, he stayed on 301 to bypass Washington and Baltimore. He crossed Chesapeake Bay, kept on 301 across the state line into Delaware, and had to stop short of Wilmington because the radiator had run dry again. The truck also took another quart of oil.
    He'd now done three hundred and fifty-some miles, and it was ten o'clock in the morning. The steady hard jouncing in the cab and the number of hours he'd gone without sleep caught up with him, and he pulled into a motel south of Wilmington. He didn't start again until eleven o'clock that night. It was better to drive at night anyway, less likelihood of being stopped by the law.
    After Wilmington, he crossed into Pennsylvania for a while, on 202, by-passing Philadelphia, then crossed into New Jersey at New Hope. He passed through Flemington at three in the morning, and just the other side of there the oil gauge told him he had trouble. He pushed fifteen miles to Somerville, but couldn't find a gas station open, so he kept going, switching to 22, and picking up 18, to limp into New Brunswick.
    He found a good-sized garage open, but they had no mechanic on duty Sunday night. He'd come on at seven o'clock, so Parker left the truck there and went away to get something to eat. He was glad to be out of the cab for a while. It had bucked and tossed him for five hundred miles, and he was a little surprised it had made it this far.
    After eating, he went back and talked with the nightman at the garage. The pumps were all lit up out on the tarmac, but at five o'clock on a Monday morning there were no customers. After a while the nightman took a nap and Parker sat in the office, smoking and looking out at the truck. It was a bad truck, but it had done better than he'd expected. So maybe the job wouldn't go completely sour after all, despite Alma and Stubbs and the bored state trooper.
    When the mechanic came in at seven o'clock he looked at the truck in disgust. He got interested, though, being a professional, and worked on it till nine-thirty. By then, the boss was in, and he charged Parker thirty-seven dollars.
    Parker asked for a receipt, and thanked the mechanic. The mechanic told him he had maybe five hundred miles left in the truck, and where he should drive was straight to a dealer for a trade-in, while it could still make it under its own power. "The way I got it fixed," he said, "a dealer might think it was worth taking in and doing some work on."
    Parker gave him five for himself and told him he'd probably be back with the truck some time. Then he left New Brunswick on route 1, took it north to where it met 9, and turned south.
    He got to the Shore Points Diner at ten after ten and pulled in to the side lot, just to the left of where the armoured car usually stopped. He climbed down from the the cab and went across the highway to the furniture store parking lot. Handy was there, in the Ford. Parker slipped in beside him. "That's it. Over there. Cost me thirty-seven bucks in New Brunswick to keep it