taken on the mannerisms of middle age. He never smiled, and the only thing that seemed to give him pleasure was his own efficiency. He spoke in a monotone, as though he were reading, held the registration card so that it faced her, and used his pen to point to the room rate, the check-out time, and the place for her signature. As she signed, he said, “And I’ll need a major credit card.”
She stared at him, and her mind was blank for a second. She had become so exhausted she hadn’t thought this through. She reached into her purse and pulled out a stack of bills. The rate was a hundred and sixty-five dollars a night, so she placed two hundred-dollar bills on the counter. “I’ll pay in cash. I don’t use credit cards.”
He looked at her closely for the first time, but she sensed that it was only because she was a curiosity—a person who had gotten herself into trouble because she didn’t know when to stop charging things. He took her money, went to the back room, and returned with her change. He handed her a small envelope with her key in it. “Up the elevator behind you to the second floor, then turn right.” As Nicole Davis left, the young man busied himself clicking the keys of his computer terminal.
She entered her room, locked both of the locks and set the chain, put her purse where she could reach the gun, took a hot shower, and collapsed on the bed.
Several hours later she awoke and sat up, then reminded herself of what this room was, and that she was Nicole Davis. She stood and opened the curtain on the window just an inch, and the light blasted in to illuminate the whole room. She squinted out at the parking lot. The sun splashed off the roofs and windshields of the cars and into her eyes. She retreated.
The idea of stopping here to sleep had seemed brilliant last night. She had been on the edge of collapse, driving a car that belonged to a dead woman. She had felt she needed to be rid of Mary Tilson’s car, and she was at least four hundred miles from Los Angeles. But now she was stranded.
She was in a hotel in a place where she had never been before, and she had no easy way out of here. How long had she slept? She looked at the clock by the bed, then picked up the watch she had left on the nightstand. It was nearly noon, check-out time. She remembered that geek downstairs saying it in his monotone voice. She stepped to the bed and picked up the telephone, then pressed the button for the front desk. “This is Miss Davis in —what is it—room 256. I’d like to stay another day. Is that all right?”
“Let me see.” This time it was a girl’s voice. A child’s voice. “Um . . . you paid cash in advance for one night. What credit card did you give us?”
“I didn’t. I don’t carry credit cards, but I can come down there in a few minutes and pay for another day in cash.”
“Well, there’s a problem. I’m afraid your room, the one you’re in right now, is rented for tonight. We might be able to move you to a new one, but check-in time isn’t until four.”
“All right. I’ll just wait. Give me a call when the new room is ready.”
“I’m so sorry. The thing is, we need the room you’re in, and it’s check-out time now. The staff has to clean it and change the sheets and so on before the new people arrive. They can’t wait until four to do that. See?”
“So I have to check out now, and then check back in at four?”
“I’m afraid that’s the only way we can accommodate you.”
Nicole Davis had to be very, very careful. She closed her eyes to keep the frustration from turning into a red, blinding rage. “I can do that. I’ll be right down.”
She dressed quickly, then went through her suitcase. She removed all of the cash she had been carrying there, and the jewelry that David Larson had given Rachel Sturbridge, and put it into her purse. She closed her suitcase, and then opened it again. She couldn’t leave the two-pound .357 magnum Colt Python with its four-inch barrel in the outer pocket the way it was. Somebody might brush against it or read its shape in the bulge it made. She slipped it inside the suitcase among her clothes and locked the suitcase.
She took the elevator to the lobby. At the front desk she found the female clerk she had spoken to, and she was glad she had kept her temper. The clerk was a small blond girl who seemed to be about seventeen. She smiled and tried to be helpful, but she didn’t have enough authority to accomplish much.
Nicole Davis made a formal reservation for the first room that became available, and managed to force the girl to take the money for it in advance. Then she said, “Can I leave my suitcase with you and go out for a while?”
That was something the girl knew how to do, so she came around the desk with a label, wrote “N. Davis” on it and attached it to the suitcase, then wheeled it around the desk into a back office.
Nicole Davis found that it wasn’t as hot outside as she had feared. The sun was bright and the sky cloudless, but the altitude in Flagstaff was much higher than she was used to along the coast.
Nicole was uneasy. The police were looking for her, and Flagstaff wasn’t big enough to hide her for long. She needed to get out of town, but how she did it made a difference. She couldn’t get on an airplane or rent a car without identification, and the police were waiting for her to use ID that said Tanya Starling or Rachel Sturbridge. When she thought about the police hunting her, she always pictured the woman cop from Portland. That Catherine Hobbes had followed her to San Francisco, and she was still thinking about her every day, waiting for her to make some tiny mistake.
Nicole needed a car. She couldn’t buy one at a car lot, because they would ask to see a driver’s license. She needed to find a car on the street that had a For Sale sign on it. She would give the owner a few grand in cash and drive away with it. She began to examine every car parked along her way for a sign, but she couldn’t find one. Then she turned a corner and saw something better—a bus station.
Nobody who was looking for Tanya Starling would imagine her getting on a bus. Everything they knew about her habits would lead them to look in the most expensive hotels or expect her to turn up at the luxury car lots. They knew Tanya Starling. But what they knew was a person she had invented. They didn’t know that she had ever been anything but rich and spoiled. They didn’t know that she knew how to be poor and alone.
She walked into the bus station, stepped to the counter, and picked up a copy of the printed bus schedule. She could see that business was slow today. There were a couple of men who looked like drunks slouching in and out of sleep in the waiting area, a couple of old people she decided were Indians, and a middle-aged woman with two children who looked the right ages to belong to her daughter. The bored man behind the window seemed to have nothing to look at but her, so she left with her schedule.
Thirty feet away, Tyler Gilman let his small blue Mazda coast to a stop at the traffic light on South Milton near the bus station. He looked at the clock on his dashboard. It was twelve forty-nine, and he still had to park and carry the five lunch orders to the women in the insurance agency on the next block by one.
He let his eyes drift to the sidewalk and saw the girl step out into the bright sunshine, looking down at a bus schedule she held open in her hands. Tyler’s lazy glance settled on her and he didn’t want to look away. She had straight brown hair that she had tied up in a neat bun like a dancer’s, because it was so hot on the street. The sunlight caught the wisps of hair at the back of her delicate white neck. As though she sensed someone was staring, she abruptly looked up, then, not seeing Tyler behind his tinted side window, looked down at the schedule again.
He had seen her wrong at first. She was older than he was—not a girl of sixteen or seventeen but a young woman, at least twenty-five. Tyler felt a sadness that he knew was irrational. He knew he would have had little chance of attracting a female like her at any age, but her extra years moved her entirely out of his reach. Looking at her, he regretted it profoundly. He studied her rounded hips and breasts, feeling cheated. Wanting her wasn’t his fault: she was a creature who had been deliberately designed to arouse his sexual longing. In his peripheral vision he caught the red light going out and the green coming on. He stepped on the gas.
Tyler drove to the next block, stopped in front of the insurance office, and turned off the engine. As he got out of the car, he looked back along South Milton, but he couldn’t see the woman anymore. He leaned into the back seat to pick up the box of bagged orders from El Taco Rancho and thought about his reaction to her. He knew it was another odd thing about him he could thank his parents for. When he had started to be curious about sex at the age of nine, they had insisted on sitting down together to explain it to him. They were both religious people, so everything that existed was God’s plan to accomplish something else. God wanted people to be fruitful and multiply, so he made women in a shape that you could barely keep your hands from touching, and that you kept thinking about and couldn’t get out of your mind, even while you were asleep and dreaming.
Tyler kicked the car door shut, hurried across the sidewalk, and leaned his back against the door of the
