Of course, he might have ended up at one of the local watering holes or topless joints. In that case, all bets were off. He wasn’t the type who paid for companionship.
At least not in cash. For the rest, he’d trade his fucking soul and not bat an eye.
But the other side of the bed was unruffled. He had definitely slept by himself. His battered leather briefcase, which held his sample notebooks, was parked by the nightstand, his pants tossed on the floor.
A few coins had leaked from his pants pockets and glinted like dirty ice on the gray industrial carpet. He had undressed carelessly, his shirt tossed over the arm of a vinyl chair.
The bathroom door was ajar, a bar of light leaking from the opening. He wondered if he had vomited, bent in homage to the porcelain idol. His stomach fluttered up a wave of acid, though no nausea lingered.
Headache isn’t too bad, either. Must be getting back in the groove.
And blackouts are a good thing, when you get right down to it, because who wants to remember shit like that? Maybe God has a little mercy in Him after all.
The air was cold on his bare chest, shrinking his nipples to red points. The air-conditioning must have been set on “igloo,” because spring had been pushing hard to get winter the hell out of the way.
His face itched and he put a hand to his chin. Stubble, three days’ worth, at least.
Roland wondered how many appointments he’d missed, how many clients had called the home office asking about the sales rep who had scheduled a visit. Sometimes the benders went on for a week or more, but since taking the job with Carolina Sign, he’d been dependable.
The company had known of his past. The background check had turned up the DWI, two drunk and disorderly charges, the vandalism, and the court judgment against him in the civil suit brought by his estranged wife.
In a bit of undeserved serendipity, the company’s general manager was a recovering alcoholic who had shepherded Roland into a twelve-step program. “White chips and second chances,” Harry Grimes, the GM, had said.
What do you think about third chances, Harry? Or is this the fourth?
He bent to pick up his pants, blood rushing to his temples. He wondered if he’d spent all his money. Once, while living with Wendy, he had maxed out his credit card in a two-day stretch, $10,000 flushed.
The worst part had been the waiting, knowing Wendy would open the envelope, pull out the bill, and see the itemized stupidity. Wendy was past waiting, though, exhausted from serial second chances, and the separation agreement showed up in the mailbox before the credit card bill.
His pants looked relatively clean, so he probably had avoided crawling on his hands and knees, at least on the sidewalk. Keys jingled in his pocket. He fished the wallet out and flipped it open, thumbing through the leather folds. A couple of hundreds and some twenties.
Maybe he’d made a late-hour cash withdrawal from an ATM. He couldn’t imagine giving up a drinking bout while he still had some green.
The phone rang, its brittle bleat like a spear to his skull. The home office? A client? Escort service? Newfound-and-already-forgott en drinking buddy? The choices were endless and all were terrible.
Maybe it was Harry. As Roland reached for the phone, he realized there wasn’t a single person left in the world whose voice would cheer him, who would dispense kind and supportive words, who wouldn’t bring suspicion and disapproval to bear.
The phone was cold against his ear. “Hello?”
“Mr. Underwood, you requested a wake-up call at eight,” said a tired, smoke-strained female voice. “We tried three times but received no answer, so we assumed you had checked out.”
“Sorry, you must have the wrong room.”
“My apologies,” she said, though her tone suggested the exact opposite. “Is this room one-oh-one?”
Roland retrieved the rubber-flagged keychain that lay beside the alarm clock. “Right number, wrong person.”
“Sir, all check-ins require photo ID. The night clerk has ‘David Underwood’ in room one-oh-one.”
“Sorry, there’s no David here that I know of.” Unless he’d brought home a drinking buddy by that name. In which case, pitiful, hungover David was sleeping either under the bed or in the bathtub.
The clerk’s voice grew sour. “Either way, Mr. Underwood, checkout is ten o’clock.”
“Hold on a second,” Roland said, before the clerk could hang up. “What time did I…what time did David check in?”
He actually wanted to ask what day, but he didn’t want to arouse additional suspicion.
“We have it at seven ten. There’s a surcharge for having additional people in the room, Mr. Underwood. If you’d care to stop by the desk on your way out-”
“Never mind.” He had checked in last night, apparently, although the idiots had gotten his name wrong.
His barebones expense account covered a rental car, meals, and lodging. Extra charges would draw the attention of Carolina Sign’s purse-handlers, who, as in every other American business, were tasked with extracting nickels from the worker bees while shoving stacks of Hamiltons toward management.
Actually, the confusion might benefit him in the long run. Let “David Underwood” foot the charge and let the bitchy desk clerk deal with the inaccurate billing. One problem, though: his twelve-step program was built on rigorous honesty, both with himself and others.
But the twelve steps had apparently failed him. He had a roiling stomach and jangling head to prove it. The only steps he had taken were those that led down the basement to hell.
Funny, though, his mouth didn’t taste of liquor. Maybe he’d burned away his taste buds.
As he got up to shower, the wallet tumbled to the floor. Some of the plastic cards slid free of an inner sleeve. His driver’s license portrait glared at him, eyes startled wide by the examiner’s flash.
Roland had been dismayed when the examiner listed his hair as “gray.” The gray was there, sure, but he still thought of it as dark brown. He was only thirty-four, after all, even if half of them had been hard years.
He was sliding the license back into place when he paused. The license was the wrong color, issued in North Carolina. He’d registered in Tennessee to avoid excessive auto insurance.
Yet there was his face. His height was listed at five feet ten, just as he’d fudged it by an inch, and his weight, 205, was lower than his actual weight at the time. That was before the twelve-step surrender, back when dishonesty was a second skin. Now, healthier and without the boozy bloat, he weighed 185, but it had taken two years to bounce back into shape from the decade of hard drinking.
It was possible he’d updated his driver’s license after he’d settled near Raleigh. But he would have remembered something like that. He had been abusive, but he couldn’t have killed all of his brain cells.
And if he’d wandered into a driver’s license office during a blackout, chances were good he would have been denied a license and escorted to the nearest drunk tank.
One other problem with the license bearing his face: the name listed on it was David Wayne Underwood.
CHAPTER FOUR
“My psychiatrist is dead.”
As she considered her friend’s words, Wendy Leng sipped her coffee and ducked beneath the thin layer of cigarette smoke that hung about five feet above the waffle-house floor. The coffee tasted as if it had been dipped from the rolling mop bucket that stood in the corner.
Eggs, scrambled, had somehow managed to take on the dirty gray of the gravy. At nearby tables, newspapers flapped, people fidgeted with their cell phones as they ate, and lonely old men gazed out the window in the land of bottomless refills. They’d taken a back booth because of Anita’s sensitivity to light and her aversion to being recognized by adoring fans.
Wendy looked from the congealing grease rimming the plate to her twin reflections in Anita’s sunglasses. “Mind taking those off? I can’t tell when you’re kidding.”
Anita slid the glasses down her nose and peered over the lenses with her stunning blue eyes. “Like you could anyway?”
“The sun’s out, the fluorescents in here are bright enough to fry bacon, and you have absolutely nothing left
