Page 65 of Roadrunner

Then I looked at the door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Alex

Now

I went the next morning.

Not at noon. Not in the afternoon when I knew people would be coming and going. Morning. Early enough that the parking lot would be quiet.

I wore jeans. A plain shirt. The kind of clothes that didn’t announce anything. I’d spent twenty minutes in front of the hotel bathroom mirror and then walked away from it because examining myself too closely was not going to improve anything.

I drove to the clubhouse.

The lot had four bikes in it. The building was quiet. The front door was closed.

I sat in the Jeep for eleven minutes. I know because I watched the clock.

I called Martina first, because I needed to hear a voice that would tell me the truth without performance.

“You haven’t gone in yet,” she said. Not a question.

“I’m working up to it.”

“You’ve been working up to it for four days,” she said. “What’s the actual thing you’re scared of?”

I looked at the closed front door of the clubhouse, one hundred feet away, a distance I had covered a thousand times without thinking about it and now could not seem to cross.

“That he’ll say it’s too late,” I said.

“And if he does?”

“Then I’ll know,” I said. “And I can stop wondering.”

“That’s not actually a bad outcome,” she said, “The bad outcome is you flying home without knowing anything at all.” A pause. “Go find out.”

I got out and started walking on legs that weren’t vaguely familiar.

The inside of the clubhouse smelled like motor oil and coffee and something underneath both of those that was specific to this building and nowhere else. I’d walked through this door a hundred times. A thousand times. I knew the way the light fell from the windows on the left side. I knew the sound the floor made in the back hallway.

I stopped just inside the door.

Two men I didn’t recognize were at a table near the back. They looked up.

“Help you?” one of them asked.

“I’m looking for Riley,” I said. “Panzolini.”

They looked at each other.

“Who’s asking?” the second one asked.

“Alex,” I said. “Carver.” I paused. “He knows me.”

One of them got up and went through the door at the back without another word. The other looked at me with the expression of a man conducting a quiet assessment and not making the results available.

I looked back at him.