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The rest of the ride was quiet. As we neared my destination, that familiar sliver of excitement began to rise, cold and exact, the same instincts that had kept me alive while I eliminated others. I closed my eyes and let it spread.

Perhaps my thirst had not been quenched after all.

❦ ❦ ❦

The cab turned off the frontage road and rolled into the motel car park, tyres crunching over gravel and broken glass.

Two storeys of peeling stucco wrapped around a cracked slab of asphalt. Every door opened straight onto an exterior walkway. Above the office a neon sign buzzed and blinked, VACANCY with the second A long dead, so that it read VAC NCY. Moths threw themselves at it in slow, stupid circles.

It was exactly the kind of place I would have chosen.

The driver pulled up beneath the sign and looked at me in the mirror. The prayer beads stopped swinging.

“This is the place, sir?”

“Yes.”

He climbed out to fetch my luggage. I took the first suitcase from his hands before he could carry it any further, then the second. Cash was already folded in my palm. Too little would be rude. Too much would be remembered. I gave him the exact amount between the two.

“Have a good night, sir.”

I nodded.

I stood still until his taillights had melted into the traffic on the frontage road. Only then did I look around.

Eleven cars. A pickup with a flat tyre. A van with its curtains drawn. One camera mounted above the office door, its cable hanging loose from the housing like a severed vein. A light on in the office window, a shape behind bulletproof glass, bent over a phone.

Security in name only.

The humidity wrapped itself around me again. Cicadas shrilled from the scrubby trees behind the building. Somewhere an ice machine clattered and went quiet. Beyond it all, the low, endless breath of the freeway.

The car was in the far corner, exactly where Zero had said it would be. A grey sedan, dented at one corner, forgettable by design.

I dragged both suitcases across the car park. The wheels rattled over the cracks, far louder than I liked. I did not hurry.

Zero had said the keys were beneath the car. He had not said where. I crouched beside the rear wheel and ran my fingers along the metal of the arch. Warm from the day. Gritty. Nothing. I moved to the bumper and felt a small magnetic box clinging to the underside.

Two keys inside. One for the car. One for the room, on a plastic diamond tag stamped 118. Zero had paid in cash, under a name that was not mine, and made sure no one would ever need to ask.

I checked the underside of the chassis with my phone light. Then the wheel wells. Then the doors, one by one, for anything that did not belong.

Nothing.

I popped the trunk and unzipped the bag. Beneath the neon blinking lights, I saw the small arsenal that Zero had left for me.

That rat-bastard.

This meant possible complications. I shook my head but pulled the sports bag full of weapons and ammunition out, slamming the trunk shut with more force than necessary.

The sound cracked across the car park. Behind the office glass, the shape did not look up.

Room 118 sat at the end of the ground-floor walkway, directly across from where the car was parked. A short run from the door to the driver’s seat. I would not have to ask Zero if he had thought of that. Of course he had.

The door stuck, then gave. Stale cigarette smoke. Damp carpet. A window unit rattling in the wall, pushing out air that was barely cooler than the night. A bed with a thin brown spread. A television bolted to the dresser.

I locked the door and swept the room before I put anything down. Behind the vents. Beneath the mattress. The window latches, the bathroom ceiling, the back of the television. I found nothing, and I did not trust that either.

Only then did I lay the contents of the bag out on the bed.