I light the cigarette. The flame catches. The first drag fills my lungs with heat and tar and the familiar burn that has been the only constant in Charlotte Richardson's life for three years. I exhale against the windshield, and the smoke curls in the dashboard light.
"Thank you," I say.
"Don't thank me. You've been chewing that thing unlit for days. It was pissing me off."
I take another drag. The nicotine hits my bloodstream and the shaking in my knees finally stops.
He remembered. The coffee yesterday, black with one sugar. The lighter today. Small things. Practical things. The kind of things a man does when he's paying attention to a woman he's not supposed to be paying attention to.
I don't read into it. I can't afford to. The last man who paid attention to what I needed used that knowledge to figure out exactly how to take it away.
But the lighter is warm in my pocket. And the coffee this morning was good. And he noticed the exits.
Nobody notices the exits.
I smoke and watch the road and count the mile markers instead because mile markers don't mean the same thing as exits. Exits are escape. Mile markers are just distance.
Distance is all I have right now. Distance, and a lit cigarette, and a man with blood on his lip who brought me a lighter because he was paying attention.
Don't, Charlotte. Don't you dare.
I take another drag and blow smoke out the window and press my fingers to the back of my neck and count.
Chapter Five: Claudio
Themotelisthekind of place where people go to disappear.
I picked it because of the parking lot. Second floor has a direct sightline to every vehicle below, including ours, and the stairwell is external, which means one entry point and clear visibility from the room's window. There's a diner across the road that's closed for the night and a gas station two blocks east with a single overhead camera pointing at the pumps, not the street.
Cash only at the front desk. The clerk is a woman in her fifties with a crossword puzzle and a TV playing something I don't recognize. She doesn't look up when I give her the name. Michael Ricci. Not creative, but functional. She slides a keycard across the counter and tells me checkout is at eleven.
Room 214. Second floor, end of the hall, back corner. I requested it specifically. One way in, walls on two sides, window facing thelot. The door has a chain and a deadbolt that I test twice before I'm satisfied.
The room is exactly what you'd expect from a place that charges sixty-three dollars a night and doesn't ask for ID. Beige walls. Brown carpet. An old box TV bolted to the dresser. One bed, queen-sized, covered in a comforter that's been washed so many times it's lost its original color and settled into a defeated grey. The bathroom has a shower, a toilet, and a bar of soap the size of a matchbox.
One bed. One chair.
I look at the chair. Vinyl, cracked, pushed into the corner by the window. It's the kind of chair that exists in motel rooms purely as a surface for luggage, not designed for sitting, definitely not designed for sleeping.
Charlotte walks past me and sits on the edge of the bed. She hasn't spoken since the cigarette. Two hours of highway and silence, the only sounds the engine and the road and her occasional exhale of smoke through the slit in the window. She sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes forward and her spine so straight it looked like someone had welded a steel rod to it.
She looks around the room. Bed, bathroom, television, window, chair. Her eyes land on the chair last.
"You're not going to fight me for the bed," she says. Not a question.
"No."
"Because you're going to sit in that chair all night with a gun in your lap and pretend you're sleeping."
"I don't pretend. I don't sleep."
She looks at me. Those blue eyes, flat and cool. "Everybody sleeps, Claudio."
"Not when I'm working."
"Is that what I am? Work?"
I pull the chair to the window. Angle it so I can see the parking lot through the gap in the curtains and the door in my peripheral. I sit down, take the Glock from my waistband, and set it on my thigh.
