Book of Night(101)

The last text she had from him was from four months ago: Vince’s cell died & he wants me to tell you he’ll be home in 1hr w veg lo mein.

It was such a normal message that she couldn’t stop looking at it.

Charlie thought about the horrible moment when she’d been sure it was Vince’s body on the couch, Vince’s blood on the walls. She had to find him before Red did.

She called the number. Craig picked up.

“This is Vince’s girlfriend,” Charlie said. “I know he’s in the doghouse at work, which is why I’m calling you.”

“Is he okay?” Craig asked, sounding like his usual friendly self. “Winnie and me were saying it wasn’t like him to just drop off the face of the earth.” She always found it a little funny how upbeat Craig and Winnie were, considering what they did.

Their boss, not so much.

“He got really sick,” Charlie said, thinking that covered a host of possibilities. “When he’s feeling better he’ll give you a call, but he wanted me to ask about a place he cleaned. It’s the room that wasn’t going to be able to have guests for a week or two? He thinks he left his watch there.”

“In Chicopee?” He sounded a little wary, but not yet suspicious.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “But he totally spaced on the room number and he doesn’t want to ask at the desk.”

“Gimme a sec.” The tension had gone from his voice. She hadn’t asked for the name of the hotel, after all, or an address. He believed that she knew the place. “Says here it was 14B.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Vince’ll give you a call when he’s feeling better.”

“Tell him to hang in there,” Craig said, and disconnected the call.

Charlie typed in “murder” and “Chicopee” into her phone’s search engine and sorted the results by most recent. It appeared that there’d been a stabbing at the East Star Motel, on Armory Drive, eight days before.

She gave herself a victory spoonful of peanut butter and went to get her jeans out of the dryer.



* * *



The East Star Motel hunched on the corner of two streets, a one-story building with exterior entrances to the rooms, not unlike where her mother lived. But if that place was intended for long stays, this was the opposite. It rented by the hour, its sign promising vacancies, Wi-Fi, color television, and discretion.

Charlie pulled into the lot. The Corolla made a strange sound as she did, a sputtering sort of cough. And then the engine died.

“No,” she told the car, in what she hoped was a stern manner. “This cannot happen. Not right now. Come on. Come on.”

But all it did was drift a short ways forward and then stop, halfway in and halfway out of a parking spot.

She slammed both hands down on the steering wheel, but that did nothing. Turning the key in the ignition did even less.

Finally she got out, slung her bag over her shoulder, and pushed the car so the back of it wasn’t sticking out. It was on a weird angle and taking up more than one parking space because of it, but there wasn’t much she could do.

At least her car had gotten her to the motel before it died.

There was no white van in sight, which wasn’t a great sign. But then, Vince might have gone out—or even stolen himself a new vehicle. She could hear a television on in room 12B and some moaning from 15B. Her gaze went to the locks on the rooms with a professional eye.

They were digital, but not expensive and not all that secure. Unless someone had done up the dead bolt, it was possible that she could force it with a well-aimed kick.

The blinds on 14B were drawn and shut. She hesitated, hand on knob, thinking of walking into another darkened room just hours before. Thinking of the husk of Adam’s body and a single dripping word written all over the walls.

The idea that Vince might actually be on the other side of the door gave her pause too, as much as she hoped for it.

She needed to be ready for the possibility that Remy Carver wasn’t much like Vince. He could have played her. He could have been acting. He might even be in a relationship with Adeline, which was deeply messed up, but people in messed-up families did messed-up things.

If Vince didn’t exist, then better she observed it for herself. Like going to an open casket funeral: sometimes that was the only way you could accept someone you loved was truly gone.

She tried her Big-Y-card-in-the-seam trick, but the lock resisted. In her car, she had a wire bent into an under-the-door-device. These didn’t look great to use, since you had to squat down and shove a wire into the seam between the door and ground. Once inside, the wire bent up, and if you angled it right, the loop at the end grabbed the lever. You tugged, and the knob turned.

Glancing around the parking lot, she was ready to go back for the wire when a woman came out of one of the rooms, holding an ice bucket.

While she waited for the woman to get her ice, then mess around with the vending machine, Charlie wondered if there was a simpler way to get inside the room.

Her shadow. She sent it out deliberately for the first time. Pushed it through the open spaces between door and frame. Her vision split, and a headache started between her eyes.

She tried to concentrate on her shadow hand becoming solid enough to turn the lever, but it felt like grasping at nothing. Part of her was conscious of the woman moving back toward her room, of a light drizzle starting up. The rest of her was fumbling in the dark.