“I might need to run to my hotel room and grab it.”
“You can’t do that!” Iris protested. “What if the bad guys are waiting for you?”
“She’s right,” Lana said. “Trixie, that would be really dangerous. It’s best just to wait until we can get a hold of the guys and let them handle it.”
Trixie turned it all over in her mind a few more times. She shook her head. “But what if they checked me out of the room?” Glancing down at her phone, she noted the time. “Check-in is at three. That means if another guest gets that room, I might never get my key.” Her voice was full of desperation. “I have to get it!”
She watched as the other women exchanged nervous glances.
“But how will you get there?” Samantha asked.
“That part is easy.” Trixie waved her phone at her. “I’ll just call a rideshare.”
“Auntie won’t allow you to leave here,” Cami said. She cast a glance over her shoulder to where Trevon was sitting at a tableagainst the wall, sipping coffee and reading a newspaper. “But maybe she’d let you if you took him.”
The idea was tempting. But what if she asked Trevon, and he said no and told her to wait? Then she was back at square one and might lose the key.
She had to make sure she had it. Her life depended on it!
“I saw the back door against the wall, when we were doing the obstacle course.”
Lana groaned. Samantha frowned. Cami shook her head. Annika winced.
And Iris said, “Oh, honey, don’t do it. It’s not worth it.”
“I have to,” Trixie said. “Just do me a favor. If you have to tell—and I don’t mind if you do, because I don’t want you all to get in trouble—just give me a few minutes of a headstart. Deal?”
Iris was chewing on the inside of her cheek as she looked at her friends and then back at Trixie. “Be careful.”
Trixie nodded, hugged each one of them, and then scampered off quietly toward the back.
She just hoped this worked out. One way or another.
Chapter Nineteen
John put the Styrofoam cup to his lips and took a sip of coffee.
He was in the passenger seat of the Daddy Guard van, watching the street and Loews hotel.
In the driver’s seat, Jack said, “You know that coffee is technically illegal.”
“What?”
“I guess the coffee isn’t. But the cup that holds it is. It’s Styrofoam. Banned this last year.”
John held the thick white cup up and inspected it. “No kidding?” He thought back and remembered hearing something about a new city ordinance. Or maybe it was a statewide thing. “I forgot all about that.”
The two watched the scene in front of them in silence for a few minutes. Ahead, a billboard for an attorney towered over the street, but it was the only one that wasn’t advertising a movie or TV show. Even the ads on the buses and plastered on the bus stops were for upcoming releases.
Tourists came in and out of the hotel and the parking garage beside it. They walked on both sides of the sidewalk. A few individuals who looked to be unhoused shuffled into a building’s doorway and sat down.
Some guy clearly leading a walking tour of some kind stopped not far from the van and used his hands to gesture about and tell a story to a group of five people who stood before him, listening intently.
After a minute, they all moved on.
“So how come that bodega still sold this to me?” John asked.
“Probably bought their cups in bulk before the law went into effect and they are waiting until they run out of ‘em to buy paper ones.” Jack picked up his own coffee from the cupholder on the console and took a sip. “Everyone prefers the Styrofoam ones anyway.”
