He looked at her as though he had not liked the gentle chiding, then turned and opened the cupboard and pulled out two glasses, set them on the table, and got two plates. They sat at the kitchen table and he divided the items from his El Taco Rancho bag with scrupulous care.
“I watched TV after you left,” she said. “They seem to be looking for me everywhere. Did you hear anything while you were at work? Do you think I’ll be able to leave tonight?”
He finished chewing, then said, “I saw a bunch of cops. They’re eyeballing people in cars, and stopping some of them, mostly women driving alone.” He shrugged. “They haven’t given up.”
“Then would it be all right with you if I stay longer?”
“I think you have to. If they catch you, then I’m in trouble too.”
“Why did you help me?”
He stared at her for a few seconds, then looked away. “I saw your picture. I thought you were nice looking. I wanted to do you a favor.”
“You could go to jail for it.”
“I know that.”
After dinner, they sat in the den on one of the couches and watched the television again, but there were no more special bulletins. At eleven, the local news shows repeated the whole story, with the same reporters standing in front of the hotel again, even though there was nothing to see. But one of them also showed a roadblock at an entrance to Interstate 40, where police officers shone flashlights on the faces of women in the cars, then waved them on.
Nicole felt her pulse rate increase again. She stood up and said, “I’d like to take a shower. Is that okay?”
Ty said, “I guess so.” Then he said, “Can I watch you?”
She was paralyzed for a second. “What?”
“Can I come and watch?”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I want to see you naked.”
She tried to laugh, but it came out hollow and false. “Of course not. That isn’t what you really want.”
“Yes. It is what I want,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it since I first saw you.”
“I’m so much older than you are. I’m twenty-eight, twelve years older. It would seem weird. I’d be embarrassed.”
“It’s not much to ask. If I hadn’t come, you’d be in jail now. Or maybe dead.”
“I’m grateful for what you’re doing. I want us to be friends. That’s just not the way.”
His face was darker and grimmer. He was feeling resentful, more and more unappreciated and ill-used, and she could see anger growing behind his eyes. She said, “Haven’t you ever seen a woman before?”
“No. Just movies. Pictures.”
She was desperate, miserable. She couldn’t afford to make him angry and resentful. “Look, Ty. You don’t have to feel rejected, or that I’m just too selfish to give you what you want. I like you. I really do. And I know that what you’re thinking about seems like something you really want, but this isn’t the right time. I’m not the one.”
His eyes were fixed on the wall ahead of him. “It’s not that big a thing to you. You take off your clothes in front of doctors, people like that, people who haven’t done anything for you.”
She said, “Please, Ty.”
“Please yourself. Please.”
She sighed. “All right then, I suppose.”
“Now?”
“If I have to.”
25
As soon as Catherine Hobbes had learned that Tanya had been sighted in Flagstaff, she had taken a plane to Arizona. Now, as she sat in the passenger seat of the police car, staring out the window while Officer Gutierrez drove, she wondered if she had missed her again. At night Flagstaff didn’t seem big enough to hide Tanya Starling. There didn’t seem to be enough places for strangers to sleep, enough people on the streets to keep her from being seen. There didn’t seem to be enough men.
Gutierrez was about forty years old and the sort of officer that Hobbes would have appointed to guide a visitor if she had been the one to pick. He was proper and experienced and pulled together like a military man, in a fresh uniform with razor creases and spit-shined shoes. All the steel on him shone in the dim light of the dashboard.
He drove past the hotel and around to the parking lot, then kept the car idling. “See the window up here with the blinds drawn and the bright lights?”
“Second floor, third from the end?”
“Right. That was her room.”
Catherine Hobbes looked around to determine the lines of sight from the nearest street. “Think she saw somebody waiting for her in her room?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I know there were a few unmarked cars parked back here, so she might have seen them. Or maybe she’s just getting into the habit of calling places to see if there are cops before she shows up. Whatever it was, she picked up the signs.” He pulled into a space. “Ready to go in?”
“Can you show me the bus station first?”
“Sure. It’s just up on South Malpais Lane.” He pulled across the lot and back out onto South Milton, drove a couple of blocks, then turned left. “It’s up ahead, there. It’s been about eight hours since she’s been here, though.”
“I’d like to take a look anyway,” she said. “I’m trying to get to know her, and I’d like to see what she saw.”
Officer Gutierrez drove a few yards past the station entrance and stopped the car at the curb, then got out with Catherine Hobbes. Catherine could see the pay telephone attached to the stucco wall at the front of the building. It could have been the one Tanya had used to call the hotel, but there were probably others inside or around the back in the boarding area. It was too late to take prints from any of them now.
She pushed through the glass doors, into the station. It was late evening, but she could see that the station had the forlorn, always-two-A.M. look that bus stations had, the fluorescent lights just bright enough to make a person who was stuck here feel defeated. She walked over to the counter and picked up one of the small folded bus schedules.
While she was examining it, Gutierrez said, “The first ticket she bought was to Santa Fe for ten o’clock tomorrow morning. She bought the one to Phoenix just before it was due to leave at five after three. That was the next bus out.”
Hobbes went to the front door, stepped out, and looked at the city. “The hotel is about four long blocks in that direction, right?”
“Right,” said Gutierrez. “Maybe a half mile.”
Catherine stepped back inside, then walked to the door on the opposite side of the waiting area, underneath the sign that said BOARDING—TO BUSES. She went outside again and stood under the overhanging roof. A bus came up South Malpais and made the wide turn, shouldering up the slight rise onto the blacktop, then emitting a hiss as it came to rest. The lights came on and the doors opened. The sign above the windshield that said FLAGSTAFF changed to HOLBROOK.
As Catherine watched, an assortment of people slowly made their way, one by one, down the bus’s narrow steps to the pavement. They were the people Catherine had become accustomed to seeing on sweeps through the bus stations in Portland: old men and women who stared down at their feet as they walked, or very young, solitary men with faces that were pinched with watchfulness, or teenage girls in twos or threes, talking and laughing as though the rest of the world could not hear them.
The driver and a ticket agent opened the luggage compartment on the side of the bus, hauled suitcases out, and set them in a row, where passengers came to claim them. Then Catherine saw the people she had been
