Elixir (25 page)

He needs a phone now. He spots his in the cup holder, useless without a battery though. He kneels on the asphalt. With a slow, steady hand he extracts Dante’s from his suit-jacket pocket. But the screen is locked, password required. “Shit,” he says to himself. He figures he might as well deprive his enemy of it. He spikes it on the blacktop, busting it to pieces. He considers taking the car and driving it up to San Francisco to meet the professor’s colleague. But he’d have to get the larger man out first. Any jostling could wake him. No good.

Thinking, he lowers his hands to his knees and stares at the dim glow of the businesses on Suddsfield Avenue, his heart still thumping, “Walk on Water” still roaring from the stereo.

A round-faced woman in her mid-thirties turns a page in her
Us Weekly
magazine behind the counter of Suddsfield’s only motel, the California Gold Inn, walls lined with faded tourism posters of state parks, Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Sequoia, couple others. She’s alone in the lobby, quiet other than her rhythmic chewing of gum, a click of her teeth every two seconds or so.

A bell on top of the door dings, snapping the lull. She glances up at a kid barging through the entrance with a panicky expression. “How can I help you?” she asks, lowering the magazine, looking at him funny.

“I need to use your phone,” Sean says with alarm. “Right now.”

She studies him for a few moments, then nods at an old cord telephone on the wall behind her. “Only for motel employees.”

“It’s an emergency. Please. I’ll be a second. Please.”

“Sorry sir. My hands are tied.”

“It’s an emergency dammit.”

She lays her
Us Weekly
flat on the counter, keeping her place, and leans forward with a squint. “Sir, if you keep using that sort of language with me I’ll pick up that phone myself and ring the sheriff,” she says, pronouncing “sheriff” with a tone of familiarity as if it’s someone she knows.

“Please, don’t call the police. You can’t do that.” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”

“What you can do is get a room.” She kicks her chin toward five keys hanging from hooks on a pegboard strip on the wall. “They all got phones inside.”

He digs his hand in his pocket, grabs his wallet, and smacks the James Crates credit card down. “Give me a room. Any one.”

As she punches the computer keys he spins around, gazing through the glass front door into the parking lot. No movement, nobody following him. He watches her take her time handling a manual credit-card-imprint machine. His good foot taps with anxiety. He needs to get to a phone, fast. He looks outside again, a pickup truck passing through, its abrupt alteration of the static scenery making his heart flutter for a split second in fear of the Lincoln.

He shifts his attention to the round-faced woman, peeling the perforated edges off some motel-record document, chomping her gum slower than before. She opens a file cabinet, sorts the paper among a bunch of others, then shuts the drawer. Once done she unhooks a brass key from the pegboard and sets it on the counter, a red plastic circle labeled “8” attached to it with a Zip Tie. “Through the door on the left, down the hall,” she says, pointing in the direction of her words. “Last one on the right.” He snags the key. “Mr. Crates? Your card.” He returns to her with two hops on his healthy foot, takes it, and begins hobbling away.

He drags himself out of the lobby and down a four-room hallway, two on each side, nature paintings on the walls from some local artist, a howling wolf, a sycamore tree, a stream with a fly fisherman in it knee-high. Stopping at the last room on the right, he opens up and steps in.

He flips on the lights and seals the door, fastening the knob lock, sliding the chain latch through its track. He yanks on the handle to make sure it’s secure, doesn’t budge. He limps to the comforter, sits, and grips the phone on a three-legged wooden stand. Resting his sore left ankle on the mattress, he dials a number.

It rings for a while, then he hears the professor’s outgoing greeting, the sound of the recognizable voice comforting in a way right now he never imagined a message recording could be. “It’s Sean,” he says, jumpy. “I’m somewhere up in San Luis Obispo County. I missed my flight. Someone...kidnapped me. A professional guy. Don’t know him. I got away. Don’t call the cops. They’ll just delay things. I need you to get in touch with your friend at Benley University and tell him I’ll be in the Bay Area soon. I’m gonna try to hitch a ride out of here and take a bus up. Something. I’ll figure it out.”

He peers out the window between the ugly drapes, darkness, no headlights, no pursuer, then says, “If I’m gonna make it up there in one piece I need to know who’s after me. Get to Hank dammit. I don’t care how. Figure out who he talked to. Who else heard I’m doing this. It’s not the government. The guy tonight mentioned that. It’s someone different. It has to be a connection through Hank. Nobody even knows I’m back except...you, Mrs. Merzberg, my aunt, and my friend Kyle. And I trust you all. Hank. Find him. No matter how. Or bribe it out of his wife. I’ll pay her. Seems like she knows something. Then call me here. At the motel. I don’t have my cell. Call the front desk and ask to be put through to room eight. Okay. Eight. The name is...” He thumbs the key from his pocket and peeks at the back of the red circle, the motel’s faded logo on it. “The California Gold Inn. I don’t have the phone number. Get it online. Room eight. California Gold Inn.” He glances out the window again. “I don’t want to stick around here with this guy in the area. If you don’t call back in twenty minutes I’m gonna split and take my chances getting to San Francisco without knowing who else might come after me. I’d rather have a Goddamn clue though. Call me back. The second you get this.” He hangs up, heart pounding.

Resting his hands on his knees, he tries to gather himself. The physical sensation his thoughts have been taking on has intensified in the last half hour or so, heavy now to him like metal marbles banging around his skull.

He drinks in the details of this strange room in this strange town, purple carpeting, cheap bedspread with rows of multi-colored triangles on it, matching drapes, TV from the 1990s. He reflects on the chain of events that happened today leading him here, everything so fast he hasn’t been able to process much at any level higher than base instinct, Hank’s backing out, the plane ticket to San Francisco, the car crash, the movie fire alarm, the drive up to the mountains, year changing to a new one somewhere along the road, the diner, the bathroom stall, the toilet paper holder, the attack on that man, slow hobble up the street to this place. He begins to realize just how close and just how far he is from saving Natasha.

His insides burst with guilt from his gut to his throat. He wonders how he let himself wind up all the way out here. He longs for the past, just twenty-four hours of it, the hope he’d do something different though unsure what. A heavy marble of thought whacks into his skull, an image of his girlfriend gasping her last breath through a machine behind that six-inch glass wall in pod two.

The concept of a future without her frightens him, this room and everywhere he’d go from here seeming part of someone else’s life, not his, his life lost somewhere along today’s sequence of events, things ahead part of some alien reality he couldn’t imagine living in.

Outside an eighteen-wheel truck idles by the freeway on-ramp, the rumbling of its engine drowned out by Eddie Money’s “I Wanna Go Back,” a few songs down from “Walk on Water” on Dante’s mix CD. A trucker, late fifties, flannel shirt, rubber boots, jumps from the vehicle to the pavement.

In the shine of his headlights he sees the Lincoln butted against the busted “101 North” sign, door swung open, silhouette of a motionless body in the driver’s seat. He leans in his truck, clutches his CB radio, and pulls it outside, a spiraled black cord stretching tight from it. “Blue Dog here,” he says in the handset. “Looks like someone banged himself up pretty all right by the on-ramp in Suddsfield. Probably need an ambulance. I’ll check it out. Over.” He plops the radio on the seat in his cabin and approaches the sedan with caution.

Stopping about a foot from the car, he bends and gazes inside. Studying the left of Dante’s body, he doesn’t spot any injuries. He walks around the vehicle, peeking through the passenger’s window, noticing a hole about the size of a quarter on the driver’s right temple. “Jesus,” he says to himself. He returns to the other end, grabs Dante’s arm, and shakes, his body flopping around, expression remaining devoid of life. Sticking his index and middle finger on the injured man’s neck, he detects a pulse. “Hey partner.” He shakes some more. “Fella.”

Dante’s eyelids spring open, consciousness setting back in. He catches his reflection in the rearview, angling his neck to examine the head wound. The ghastly sight of it doesn’t bother him, but the fact he let himself get in this position does. The trucker tries to help him out of the car. “Come on now,” he says, hands on his arm. “You gotta get a doctor to give that a look.”

“Get off me.”

The trucker backs away, startled by the dismissal of good-old-fashioned common courtesy. “I’m just trying to help.” He holds both palms up.

Dante climbs out of the sedan and observes his surroundings, the lights of Suddsfield Avenue, the hills, the dark stretch of freeway on the other side of the ramp. Feeling something under his feet, he makes out the smashed fragments of his phone. He figures the kid wanted to make a call. Since he had a password in place he reasons Sean had no luck and went off searching for the closest available alternative.

He turns to the trucker and asks, “Are you from around here?”

He looks into Dante’s eyes, coldness, black holes in milky white, no gratitude for the help. “No sir. Modoc County. Born and raised. Drive through here ‘bout once every couple months on my route though. You sure you’re okay?”

“If someone were here, right where we’re standing now, and that person needed to make a phone call, where would they go?”

“I can dial you up anyone you want from inside my truck.”

“I’m not talking about myself. I’m talking about someone in general. Assume they didn’t have a cell phone. Or car. And there were no other people around. Where would they likely walk to make a call?”

Hands on his hips, the trucker inspects Suddsfield Avenue. “Well you got a Denny’s on the main road. But that’s all the ways up. Before it you got a few gas stations.” He scratches his chin. “I don’t think they got pay phones though. I filled up there a bunch, can’t remember seeing any pay phones. Like I said I can call anyone in these United States up right from my truck. Then you got a motel. I suppose they’d probably let you use their phone.” Dante peers at the signs along the street, stopping on one for the California Gold Inn. He gets back in his sedan. “Sir, you good to drive?”

“You should leave. Don’t worry about me. Or the car. And don’t call the police. Make sure of that. Do you understand?”

Dante’s unfazed demeanor disturbs the man. “Will do.”

He slams the Lincoln door, drowning out the thrum of the idling eighteen-wheeler. He drives, moonlight glimmering on the dented grille, not much other damage to the car. He shuts off the music as he nears the inn.

He parks in the lot and enters the lobby, bell dinging above. The attendant lifts her eyes from her
Us Weekly
, lays it down, and asks, “How can I help you?”

“I’m trying to find my nephew. He needs my help. I believe he used your phone before...”

She fixates on his wound, bright lobby lights showcasing the depth of it. “What the hell happened to you?”

“What’re you talking about?” She nods at his face. He shakes his head. “I’m fine.”

“You ain’t look fine.”

“I’m fine. My nephew. Was he here?”

“Some kid came by a little while ago bugging me to use the phone, but I wouldn’t let him. Motel policy.”

“Did you see where he went after he left?”

“Never left. Got a room.”

His eyes widen. “He’s here? Now?” She nods, her attention still on the grotesque dent in his flesh. “What room?”

“I can’t tell you that. Motel policy.”

“Yes you can.”

“Sorry sir. My hands are tied.”

He lingers on her, then peeks out the glass door into the street. Nobody around. He taps his fingers on the counter for about five seconds, deciding whether or not to kill her. He could then go through the booking records himself.

It wouldn’t make the most sense he concludes, cops would get involved soon enough, always a problem. Instead he peels a hundred-dollar bill from his wallet and slides it on top of her magazine. She gapes at it.

Sean, still on the bed in room eight, glimpses the antiquated clock on the wall, the second hand quivering a bit after moving to each new notch. Tick. He glances at the phone next to him, quiet. Tick. He looks back at the clock. Tick. Then the phone again. Tick. He’s angry with the professor though he assumes his excuse is innocent, sleeping in all likelihood. Tick. Call, come on, call. Nothing.

The bell above the front door chimes as Dante marches out the lobby back into the parking lot. He sticks a key in the Lincoln trunk and unlocks it, a bunch of gear inside, duct tape, crowbars, rags, tools. He fishes out bolt cutters, red metal with black-rubber handles. He throws down the hatch and veers toward the back of the motel, the tool dangling from his right hand a couple inches above the asphalt. He passes the small pool, blue tarp over it for the winter, and shoves open the backdoor.

He strides through the hallway with the nature paintings, approaching room eight. When he gets there he leans the bolt cutters against the wall, grabs his wallet, and slips out his Nevada driver’s license. He bends the ID into an L-shape. Pressing the smaller edge above the knob, he sweeps his wrist down, catching the lock with the ID, popping it free with a soft clicking noise.

He sticks the license in his pocket with one hand and clamps the bolt slicers with the other. He cracks the door about an inch, scanning inside, noticing Sean on the foot of the bed. That pre-attack predatory readiness gleams on him. He noses the opened blades through the doorway, around the latch chain. Sean spots the bolt cutters in his periphery. Startled, he breaks focus from the tick of the clock and crawls off the bed.