Page 59 of Warped

I marched back into the bedroom and checked under the mattress where we’d put the guns we’d taken from Harvey and the man back at Tony’s place. They were both gone. We should have taken them with us, but I’d known what security was like at the courthouse, and I hadn’t wanted a reason for the cops to arrest us should we be stopped. It didn’t matter so much, now we had the guns from X’s suitcase, but if he hadn’t gotten his memory back, we’d have been defenseless right now.

“Whoever was in here,” said X, “it appears they were looking for something, and I don’t think it was just the guns.”

“Like what? Neither of us has a thing to our name.”

“I have no idea. Maybe they were looking for a clue as to where we were.”

“If it was my father’s men, they’d know exactly where I was.”

“Wouldn’t Tony?”

“No, he wouldn’t have a way of knowing any schedule of mine—unless someone called him and told him, of course. He was listed as my contact number before you got me out of Tony’s, so there’s a chance someone called him by accident.”

“But what would he come here looking for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or else it wasn’t either Tony or your father, and someone completely different.”

I looked toward him. He had that same tone in his voice again. “Someone from your past, you mean. Is there something I need to know about?”

“I’m hoping not. Let’s go and have a little chat with the guy at the reception desk. Maybe he saw something, or at least would have some CCTV on the place. We might be able to see who was responsible for this mess.”

It was a good idea.

I nodded. “Let’s do it.”

We marched over to the building which housed the reception area. An older guy—in his sixties, at least, with a full gray beard and an equal amount of hair on his head sat behind the desk. He was watching a game, shouting at the small television and cursing even worse than I usually did.

He didn’t even bother to look up as we walked in, so X slammed his hand down on the little bell on the counter.

“Hey,” X demanded. “We need to speak to you.”

The older man looked up and frowned, then leaned over and flicked the sound down on the game. He looked pissed that we’d interrupted him.

“Did you see anyone going into our room?” I asked, thinking he might respond better to me than X.

“Huh? No, I didn’t see nothing.” His voice was gruff, but his eyes shifted away from us, a slight pink rising to his cheeks—at least to the small amount of cheek I could see through all the fur. I made a mental note to tell X he wasn’t going to be growing that much beard while I was still around.

“Do you even know what room we’re in?” X snapped.

“Yeah, you’re in room seventeen. I know that.”

“The room’s been trashed,” I said. “Are you saying you didn’t see anything?”

I leaned over the top of the desk. Several surveillance screens were placed underneath, showing the parking lot and the fronts of most of the doors.

“Can we take a look at those, then? It must have happened within the last couple of hours. Someone went into our room, and he would have been caught by your cameras.”

The man shifted awkwardly in his seat. “Ah, sorry. I just wiped them. They don’t have much storage, so I clear them off every so often and start again.”

X was staring at him. “You’re fucking with us, right?”

“Nope. That’s just how it went.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You can check. Look.” And he hit rewind on the payback, and sure enough, it ended about thirty minutes earlier. So that must have been when whoever had trashed the room had come in and threatened him to keep quiet. Or else they told him to delete it as soon as they’d left. Either way, we’d only just missed them. If X hadn’t been attacked in the alley, we’d probably have walked right in on them.

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