LTD wagon

Tom Rogan arrives at Bangor International Airport on the night of May 29th, 1985, his face swollen and cut from his violent confrontation with Beverly two nights earlier. After every rental-car booth turns him away, frightened by his appearance, he buys a newspaper and finds a classified ad for a 1976 Ford LTD wagon priced at fourteen hundred dollars. He calls the seller, a young man, and arranges to meet at the airport terminal. When the seller arrives, Tom introduces himself as "Mr. Barr" and explains his battered face by claiming he took a bad fall while roller-skating with his wife. The transaction is completed in cash; the seller scribbles a bill of sale, which Tom stuffs indifferently into his overcoat pocket. Tom then watches the young man remove the LTD's Maine plates, pays him an extra three dollars for the screwdriver used to do it, and drives the wagon to the long-term parking lot. There he uses the same screwdriver to steal plates from a parked Subaru, swapping them onto the Ford. By ten o'clock that night he is driving east on Route 2, a Maine road map open on the passenger seat, the LTD's radio dead. He stops at a drugs-and-sundries shop in Newport to buy a carton of Camels, then continues on Route 7, turning onto Route 3 toward Derry. As he drives, he thinks about the cigarettes and imagines forcing Beverly to eat every one of them when he finds her. The wagon, a piece of junk with a whiny transmission, groaning universal joints, rattly body, and slushy brakes, carries him through the night toward his wife and the town where she grew up.