Billie did not scream. She did not flinch. She just looked at him.
Con Zervos’s uniform was hanging over a chair, but he wasn’t in it. He was dressed in a suit with some of the shirt undone, but he was on his back on top of the white bedsheets, his eyes bulging and unseeing, his tie wrapped tightly around his neck, making everything above it blue. He was looking straight at her, through her, one hand at his neck, the other hanging down at the end of a dangling arm and almost touching the patterned carpet of room 305.
Twelve
Waiting for water to boilwas nothing on waiting for the police to arrive at two in the morning on a Saturday night at the People’s Palace. In the green-lit lobby, Samuel Baker sat next to Billie Walker on one of those threadbare couches she’d spotted earlier and tried from time to time to rouse his boss as she unwillingly drifted off to sleep. The adrenaline had passed and now she felt tired again, and queer, only it was so much worse.
You’re going to get me into trouble, lady,Zervos had said.You’re going to get me into trouble.
Time moved strangely. There were voices, and then nothing, and then she blinked and wondered how much time had passed. The night watchman was confused and sheepish and drifted by at odd moments.
“Lady, we’ve just been up to 305,” someone was saying now. “We don’t know what kind of prank you are pulling here but we don’t appreciate it one bit.”
Billie opened her eyes and focused them with effort. It was a red-haired cop, heavyset and cross, looming over her and staring with green eyes shot with red veins. Watching him was like observing a scene through several layers of foggy glass. She became aware that there were two police officers there. They seemed to have been there for a while.
“Sorry, Officer, what?” Billie replied. Her eyes threatened to close again and Sam elbowed her in the ribs.
“There is no one in room 305 of this hotel,” he reiterated curtly. “This Zervos character you’re talking about isn’t in.”
“He’s in. He’s in all right. He’s dead. It’s... It’s terrible. That poor man,” she rambled, his anxious words repeating in her mind.You’re going to get me into trouble...
The officer looked at her with utter distaste. “Take her home,” he said to Sam, and turned away.
Billie was confused. “I’ve been waiting for you guys for...” She looked at the clock. “Forty-five minutes and you come here and tell me that a dead man has vanished.”
“Did you go up there?” The cop was talking to Sam now, ignoring Billie entirely.
“Well, no,” he admitted. Billie had instructed him to wait with her downstairs until the police came, though she’d never imagined it would take so long. How many bodies were found in this town on a Saturday night? Scratch that, she didn’t want to know.
“There is no one in there. Get her out of my sight,” the cop said to Sam, who put his arms under hers and pushed her up. “I suggest you get her to lay off the drink,” he added as Sam helped her out of the lobby and into the fresh night air. “It’s not good for the ladies. It’s biology,” she heard him say as the doors swung shut.
Billie was too tired to walk back inside and slap him.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to take you up?” Sam asked at the threshold of Cliffside Flats.
The night air was bracing, Edgecliff quiet. Billie shook her head stubbornly at her assistant’s suggestion, though she was swaying on her feet. What a queer feeling she had, the world swimming around her. Sam was frowning and searching her face. “I don’t need help. I’m fine,” she lied to him, looking away. It was the drink, she was sure now. Those last few sips. They had tasted funny. Something hadn’t been right. It was the only way this made sense. Thank goddess she hadn’t finished it. But she’d be damned if she let her employee put her to bed, even if it appeared she’d been drugged.
“I’ll call you in the morning,” he told her, concern in his voice. Billie nodded and let herself into the building, fumbling with the keys, as he watched. The front door shut behind her, locking out Sam and the sounds of the night with him, and her legs burned as she climbed the few stairs to the small lift. She pressed the button and got inside the timber-lined cab, and as the inner door closed she caught a glimpse through the square glass panel of Sam still standing at the front entrance of the building, watching to make sure she got to her floor.
It was half past two in the morning when Billie tossed her keys onto the hallstand and missed. Shaking her head, she began undressing as she approached her bathroom, items of clothing trailing behind her like bread crumbs, first the right shoe, then the left, then an unclipped stocking that her tired brain still couldn’t quite leave on the floor. She looked at it with blurry vision. Blasted expensive things. She scooped it up, which took more effort than wascomfortable, fishing in the half-light with clumsy fingers. She propped herself against the back of one of the dining chairs to unclip the other stocking and roll it down. The bathroom. She had to get there next. What a horrible night it had been. Horrible and mystifying. And her head felt awful.
Billie removed her makeup haphazardly, her bedtime habits too deeply ingrained to ignore completely. She filled a glass with water and gulped it down, then filled it again. She washed her hands and pulled her cursed crepe dress off before leaving the bathroom. Her head felt leaden, and she was pleased to make herself horizontal on her bed, still wearing her slip and underthings, including her garter belt, its clips dangling around her thighs. Her mother’s necklace was heavy on her neck. She tried the clasp and the blasted thing stuck and she gave up, instead pulling the earrings off and putting them both on the nightstand without dropping them. A small triumph. Struggling with the heaviness in her limbs, she shoved her Colt under her pillow, the closest place at hand. It was an effort to climb under the sheet.
She quickly sank into the mattress with a sick heaviness as the room turned darkly under her lids.
Thirteen
Dark, dark world.
Through the thin slits of vision his swollen eyelids afforded him, Adin Brown could make out only a mottled film of dark color that shifted and shrank as he tried to focus, the dim light moving as if he were still underwater, still fighting for air, his lungs straining. Yet he could not be in water now; that much he felt sure of. This place was too gritty and dusty, too dry. The air itself hurt his eyes. His body itched and his head throbbed, and under his hand he felt things that were sharp and hard. Was he dead? Was this Sheol, the shadowy land of forgetfulness where he was destined to dwell, or the Hades his grandmama had warned him of? A place without his loved ones, without God?
He ran a hand over his face and found the surface changed, his flesh painful to touch and adorned with grit that fell in clumps. His hands were free, he realized. He was no longer bound; the ropes that had held him were gone and the flesh where they had been was raw. He was no longer in the tub. No longer in that strange room. Hadhe been freed? Had he really been left to live after seeing the faces of his captors? The face of his interrogator? He turned his body over painfully, stretched out, and kept feeling blindly, reading this new dark place as if by braille. He found something cold like iron, something solid. Did he bring his injuries into death? Should he not be free of pain if he was dead, or was this punishment? As if in answer, ears that had only heard ringing now heard something else—a roar. A deep, powerful roar was building. His hand shrank from the iron and he rolled over, finding more of it with the other hand. Under his body was dirt and planks of wood as well as lengths of iron, he now realized. And something was approaching, something building. The iron under his hand began to vibrate, harder and more urgently. He strained his eyes, catching only faint details. Tracks. Train tracks. He was on train tracks.
And a locomotive was coming.
Fourteen
She was right back inthe moment.
