And Now She's Gone(92)

Trapped.

Call Dom.

Dominick Rader knew that Sean had been beating her. She could tell that he knew, when they’d bumped into each other at Target just a few weeks before. He’d left his card beneath that box of tampons and had told her to call anytime.

That card … Since then, she’d taken it out from the false bottom of her bathroom waste can countless times. The number was different from the number Victor had made her memorize back in college. Looking at this new card, Mrs. Dixon had studied Dominick’s new phone number, but she hadn’t memorized it backwards like her dad had demanded. And now she glimpsed part of it in her mind’s eye.

213 …

But the shakes and fear kept her from focusing. Her mind was slippery, and her memory bumped and skidded around “213.”

Nighttime here was the color of kitschy neon and steel. Cars entered and exited the parking lot in a cloud of rusty squeaks and scrapes. Sunburned tourists slurred their sentences as they dragged luggage across the asphalt.

She closed her eyes. Breathe, Natalie, breathe. And that’s when she saw those seven numbers after 213. She scrounged around her car—seats, carpets, ashtray—and found $1.56 in coins. She hurried to the public phone booth near the lobby entrance. Threw cautious glances at those sunburned tourists, at those parked cars.

Focus.

She grabbed the receiver and deposited a quarter. Punched in the number. Deposited another dime.

Two rings, and a man on the other end said, “Nick Rader.”

A sob burst from her gut and she cried for nearly a minute. Once she managed to breathe, she pushed out, “Help me.”

“Where are you?”

She told him.

“Get a room, okay?”

She had no money.

“Go in and I’ll take care of that.”

She told him that Sean had eyes everywhere, that her Jaguar probably had some location device on it, and that he might find out that she was there.

“Don’t worry about that. Tell the desk clerk that your name is Alicia Smith. Lock the door. Don’t let anyone in except me. If you need a weapon, use the curtain rod or the toilet plunger. Plug in the iron, let it get hot, then use that if you have to. See you soon.”

The desk clerk, a bored-looking white woman with frizzy black hair, didn’t blink at the fake name, or at the cuts and bruises on Alicia Smith’s face, or at the bloodstains as big as sin on Alicia Smith’s T-shirt and jeans. She simply handed Alicia Smith a key to room 303 before returning her attention to the iPad on the desk.

Sean would have freaked out if he knew that his wife would be sleeping on a bed in a rat hole like this. But fancy hotels like the Sheraton—hell, like the Travelodge—would force her to be someone. Not-so-fancy places like the Gold Mine Motor Inn only cared if the customer could pay cash. And that was okay for its primary clientele: prostitutes, johns, and estranged husbands. This Shangri-la welcomed the anonymous with its twenty-nine-dollar-a-day rooms and RCA color televisions.

How soon would Dominick be there?

Would Sean find her first? He always did. And when he did, he would explode, though maybe not immediately. Waiting for him to explode exhausted her. It was like waiting for a single bolt of lightning to strike the tallest tree. It was like waiting for the storm of the century to destroy a weak roof. On those days, she was so anxious, so dread-filled, that she nibbled at herself like a nervous rabbit, chewing through her lipstick and breaking the skin on her bottom lip.

How had she dealt with that all day, every day, for two years and without snapping?

But she had snapped. The blood on her clothes—the blood that hadn’t come from her—told her that she had snapped.

In room 303, she perched at the end of the hard bed as the colors of the silent RCA television made shadows dance across the walls. Her bladder ached but she didn’t dare … Because what if …

A groan caught in her throat, and tears burned in her eyes, and she sent her attention back to Matlock, and then Murder, She Wrote, and then Matlock again.

Footsteps clomped up and down the walkway outside of her room. Shapes and shadows in the curtains sometimes lingered too long at her window.

Her eyes hurt, but then so did the rest of her. Her bladder was so full that she feared drowning. Fear of catching a urinary tract infection sent her to the bathroom. There, she pulled down her jeans, and that’s when she knew: it was over. And as she released her bladder, realizing that it was over, she prayed that Sean had died in a pool of blood just like their baby had. And if he hadn’t, she’d make sure that he would one day.

Numb, she returned to the edge of the bed and to The Andy Griffith Show. She returned to those lingering shadows and lingering doubts of her worth, back to Dominick’s promise and Sean’s condition. And just as she thought of leaving the motel room, just as she thought of calling Sean to apologize, just when she’d found her resolve not to call him—Fuck him. Go back and kill that motherfucker—someone knocked on the door.

Dominick Rader stood there, just as he’d promised.

“I want to leave this place,” she told him. “Leave it forever. I need to die.”

“You sure?” he asked, as they pulled out of the motel parking lot in his rented Audi.

“Yes.”

He would help Natalie Dixon die. It wouldn’t be complicated. She had no kids, little credit history, no family. She had a house near Monterey Bay, but Sean didn’t know about that. Nor had she told him about her small trust, left by Faye and Victor Grayson.