Throughout the novel, various vehicles stand as tangible legacies of the characters’ actions, debts, and settlements. This pattern is first introduced when Harley, who is still enraged that Toke managed to swindle him out of a decent selling price for his GTO, uses this grievance to justify his attacks on Joe. Toke bought the GTO from Harley for $5,000, then failed to honor the men’s verbal agreement that he would pay Harley an additional $15,000 when he was able. Notably, the car then became a prop in Toke’s second alibi. At the end of the novel, Dub demonstrates how Toke tied a balloon to an oscillating fan and lit it with a hand lamp to create moving shadows on the office wall, simulating his ongoing presence while he slipped out the back to murder Jeannie. (The same trick was running the night Toke died, which is why Toke never returned to clean it up.)

Toke’s previous vehicle, the red truck, carries a similar level of significance, for it is implied to be the vehicle that collided with Vicky’s mother years ago, sending her car into the river and killing her outright. Vicky tells Joe that Toke’s red truck disappeared the night her mother was killed, and that the red paint on the wreckage was never matched because Toke conveniently reported his truck stolen. The car’s absence protects Toke from a charge that would have ruined him a decade before the novel begins. Finally, in the novel’s climax, Joe’s sedan is destroyed in the fire that Charlie sets at the inn, hoping to kill him. Bob Mullen later points out to Joe that the GTO is the only piece of property that Toke legitimately owned, and as such, it becomes the only inheritance that Joe receives from his father, the slayer statute having indirectly deprived him of the Hix estate.