What Have We Done (29)

Jenna walks confidently on the sidewalk, past the Flagship carwash, the Burger King, the ZIPS

dry cleaner, and stops at the perimeter. She’s dog-tired after the three-hour return drive and she probably looks it, but nothing a District cop on the night shift will give a second look.

The officer manning the perimeter gives her a weary once-over.

“I’m staying at the hotel.… Can I go in yet?”

The officer shrugs, lifts the yellow band of tape.

She strolls inside the lobby. It’s covered in a sickly haze from fluorescents. The guy working the reception desk wears a cheap suit and has a lazy eye, which seems fitting. He’s watching the cops outside, who seem to be wrapping things up.

“Eventful night,” Jenna says.

The guy turns his good eye to her. He seems surprised, perhaps because it’s 2:30 a.m. and she’s not a prostitute.

“I need a room for the night.”

The guy nods, asks for a credit card.

“I’d prefer to pay with cash, if that works?” She puts down three hundred-dollar bills, a tiny portion of the cash she took with her from the lockbox. The sign on the door says $200 for a single, a steal in D.C. where rooms average at least $500 a night. She probably won’t think it’s a bargain when she sees the room.

The clerk sighs, frowns at the bills. “Three hundred ain’t gonna cover it if you steal something.”

“What could there possibly be to steal?” Jenna asks.

The man chuckles. “Oh, I don’t know. The TV. Towels.”

Jenna puts another hundred on the counter.

“One more of those,” the guy says, “and you gotta be out by ten in the morning when my shift ends.”

“Deal,” she says, slapping another bill on the counter.

She takes the only elevator to the fifth floor. The ugly carpet in the hallway smells of rug cleaner and mold, and she’s thinking maybe it would’ve been worth the risk to go somewhere nicer in Bethesda. But it’s safer if she doesn’t register, doesn’t use credit cards, in case her aliases have been breached.

Inside, the room is exactly as one would expect. Heavy curtains with a layer of dust, floral

bedspread, stained carpet. But she’s so tired it doesn’t matter. She needs a shower and some sleep.

She turns on the television and finds Channel 7, the local twenty-four-hour news station. It’s not live, she knows. The news is on a loop in between infomercials.

There’s a story about the shooting downtown at the Capital Grille:

“Fear gripped downtown this afternoon as shots were fired near a popular D.C. restaurant where tech billionaire Artemis Templeton was dining,” the newscaster says. An image of Artemis’s bald head appears on the screen. “Templeton, a pioneer in the early days of social-media technology, and who in recent years has focused on everything from next-gen artificial intelligence to e-commerce, is number three on Forbes’s list of the richest tech titans. It’s unclear whether Templeton was a target of the shooter. Both police and Templeton have declined to comment.” The report goes on: An officer has a nasty leg wound after being injured by some type of weapon. Police are looking for two white females who are persons of interest.

Jenna presses mute on the remote, then strips down.

The shower is hot and feels wonderful. The water pressure is surprisingly good in the shower-tub combo and she doesn’t even mind the smell of the cheap minibar of soap. She breathes in the steam, her mind jumping about to a thousand variations of the same questions: Who wants Artemis Templeton dead and why? And more important, does Jenna also have a target on her back or was she merely considered collateral damage to the hit on Arty? She breaks unexpectedly into a crying jag, thinking about her family. She needs to stop, get it together. She can’t help them if she isn’t focused.

Sabine’s voice comes to her: Focus on nothing but the mission.

That’s what she’ll do. Tomorrow will be a big day.

After the shower, she gets between the sheets, careful not to touch the bedspread, imagining the horrors a black light would reveal. Pounding music seeps through the walls, the guests next door partying. Why not? The murder victim’s likely at the morgue by now.

She unmutes the television. The news has moved to footage of a mining accident in West Virginia.

A local reporter holds a microphone to a man’s face.

“We have sensors that picked up a problem. The pressure in the mine changed consistent with an explosion.”

“An explosion?”

“Yes, mines often capture methane gas and that can be extremely dangerous if there’s any kind of ignition, or spark. It’s odd here because the mine isn’t operational. It’s refurbished and mostly used for the television show The Miners, so it’s surprising but still possible there was a buildup of gas.”

Jenna half listens. A TV producer evidently was in the mine at the time of the explosion. A rescue team miraculously found him alive.

Remarkably, someone is having a worse day than even Jenna.

She falls asleep before she hears the rest of the report.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

DONNIE

“I’m scared, Benny.”

“It’ll be okay.”

“What if she—what if she doesn’t wanna see me?”