kitchen carrying a bottle of Coors beer. He paused by the desk long enough to pick up a set of keys. When he was barely within range, he tossed them in the general direction of where Joanna was standing. Despite his poor throw, she managed to snag them out of air.
“Good reflexes.” He nodded appreciatively. “You’re in room one oh nine,” he said. “It’s in the next building two doors down, just on the other side of the student lounge. The gold key is to your room. The silver one next to it opens the lounge door in case you need to go in after I lock it up for the night. The little one is for the laundry. It’s way down at the far end of the first floor, last door on left. There’s a phone in your room, but it’s only local calls. For long distance, there’s a pay phone in the lounge.”
‘Thank you ...” Joanna paused. “I don’t believe I caught your name.”
“Thompson,” he said. “Dave Thompson. I run this place.”
“And you live here?”
He took a sip of beer and gave Joanna an appraising look that stopped just short of saying, “You want to make something of it?” Aloud he said, “Comes with the job. They actually hired a dorm manager once, but she got sick. They asked me to handle the dorm arrangements on a temporary basis, and I’ve been doing it ever since. It’s not that much work, once everybody finally gets checked in, that is.”
Another little zinger. This guy isn’t easy to like, Joanna thought. Stuffing the keys in her pocket, she started toward the door.
“Class starts at eight-thirty sharp in the morning,” Dave Thompson said to her back. “Not eight thirty-five or eight-thirty-one, but eight-thirty. There’s coffee and a pickup breakfast in the student lounge. It’s not fancy—cereal, toast, and juice is all—but it’ll hold you.”
Joanna turned back to him. “You’ll be in class?”
He raised the bottle to his lips, took a swallow, and then grinned at her. “You bet,” he said “I teach the morning class. We’ve got a real good-looking crop of officers this time around.”
Joanna started to ask exactly what he meant by that, but she thought better of it. Her little go-round with Peewee Wright at the truck stop earlier that afternoon had left her feeling overly sensitive. Thompson probably meant nothing more or less than the fact that the students looked as though they’d make fine police officers.
“Any questions?” Thompson asked.
Joanna shook her head. “I’d better go drag my stuff in from the car and unpack. I want to put everything away, shower, and get a decent night’s rest.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Wouldn’t do at all for you to fall asleep in class. Might miss some important.”
As Joanna hurried out the door and headed for her car, she was suddenly filled with misgivings. If Dave Thompson was indicative of the caliber of people running APOA, maybe she had let herself in for a five-and-a-half-week waste of time.
After lugging the last of her suitcases into the room and looking around, she felt somewhat better. Although the room wasn’t as large or as nice as Dave Thompson’s, it was done in much the same style with floor-to-ceiling mirrors covering one wall of both the room and the adjacent bath. The ceilings weren’t nearly as high as they were in the office unit, and the floor was covered with a commercial grade medium-gray carpet. The bathroom, however, was luxury itself. The floor and counter tops were polished granite. The room came complete with both a king-sized Jacuzzi and glass-doored shower. All the fixtures boasted solid brass fittings.
Looking back from the bathroom door to the modest pressboard dresser, desk, headboard, and nightstand, Joanna found herself giggling, struck by the idea that she was standing in a cross between a castle and Motel 6.
