Page 54 of I Dream of Danger
Few cars passed by on their way to somewhere else. Nobody was walking on the sidewalks which were narrower than normal, cracked in places from the roots of the big, old, unpruned trees lining the street the motel was on.
Elle drifted over the rooftops, all sense of anxiety gone. It was peaceful up here in the chill air, under the star-filled sky. The moon had set. The brightly-lit center of town was a glow in the distance, like a huge camp fire. Two streets over, where the shops started selling something other than cheap clothes and liquor, some young kids spilled out of a bar, reeling in the street, shouting. They were drunk and laughing. One kid, tall and lanky, bent over from the waist, hands on knees, and threw up in the gutter. They all laughed harder.
Students, she thought with an inward smile. Always the same…
What was that?
Thick, untrimmed bushes across the street two blocks down from the motel quivered, as if a wind had passed through. But it was a windless night. Two men stepped out, clad in black—black mask, black goggles. Black holsters with thick black handles sticking out of them.
They didn’t speak, instead communicating with hand signals, easy to follow. Two more men stepped out from the bushes another block down and they met up with the first two.
The men were utterly silent, almost invisible in the blackness of the night. Nobody noticed them. One man, taller than the rest, pointed his finger at one of them, then pointed the finger down the street, at the motel whose flickering sign could be seen. The man who’d been singled out pulled off his mask and pulled a windbreaker from a side pocket. In a second, he looked almost normal.
Maybe an observant person would notice a bulge on his hip, but the stoned guy at the front desk wouldn’t notice if a grenade went off right beside him.
The man in the windbreaker walked down and across the street, stride easy and relaxed. Guy crossing the street to a motel.
The other men melted back into the bushes.
Elle followed the man into the lobby where the night clerk was gently dozing, a Justice League Dark comic draped across his chest. His mouth was open and he was snoring lightly.
At the sound of the bell over the door ringing, he gave a slight start and opened his eyes. They were unfocused. When he saw the man in the windbreaker he smiled. “Hey, dude.”
“Hey.” The man dug into his pocket. “I need to ask you a question. I just had a fight with my girlfriend. A big one.” He winced and gave a rueful smile. “She’s right and I was wrong and I need to talk to her now that I’ve sobered up.”
The clerk waggled his head. “I hear you, man.”
The man in the windbreaker placed a photograph on the counter and tapped it. “That’s my girlfriend. She isn’t with any of her friends so I’m making the rounds of hotels and motels. I really need to talk to her. Did she check in here?” A hundred-dollar bill slid across the counter and disappeared behind it.
“Pretty, pretty lady.” The clerk smiled dreamily.
“Yeah. That she is. So…you seen her this evening?”
“Yeah man. Came in about two hours ago.”
The man in the windbreaker slumped in relief. “Thank God! I was so worried that she was walking around in the dark. What’s her room number?”
That rang a bell of alarm. The clerk’s eyes opened wide. “Hey man. Sorry. I’m not supposed to?—”
Another hundred dollar bill slid across. “I really need to talk to her. Tell her how much I love her.”
The bill was pocketed. “Awww. Okay. I can tell you’re a good guy. She’s in room number nine. Down the hall and to the right. She’s checked in until?—”
Elle watched the man pulled a stunner from his holster, set to green. Lethal charge. In a second, he’d pulled it, placed it against the clerk’s heart and pulled the trigger. He turned around before the clerk fell to the floor, and gestured out the door.
The three other men came at a dead run while the man in the windbreaker shot out the lights in the lobby. The only illumination came from the clerk’s old-fashioned flat computer monitor, which illuminated the scene with an eerie pale glow.
Without speaking a word, the man in the windbreaker pointed down the hall then gestured right. The four men pulled their stunners, all set to yellow, a voltage guaranteed to knock out a bull, and moved silently down the corridor toward Elle’s room.
Where her defenseless body waited, unable to wake itself up.
Chapter
Nine
The hovercar had been tested at 200 mph. Nick pushed it to 160 off-highway in hovercraft mode. Coming down off Mount Blue, Nick had to be careful not to ram into trees. The hovercar responded like a dream, and he speed-slalomed his way down the mountain.
Once he was off the mountain and into the flatlands, though, Nick took off, paralleling the interstate, sailing over ditches and fences. The hovercar had excellent forward radar, and he swerved around obstacles the hovercar couldn’t clear. When the quickest way forward was the interstate, he simply jumped the guardrails, went to wheel mode and flew down the fast lane. The hovercar was invisible to radar and not too visible to other drivers. By the time a driver could flip him the bird, he was twenty miles away. He could outrun any police car. And frankly, he didn’t give a shit about anything except getting to Elle as fast as humanly possible.
