AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“That’s the best part anyway,” he said. “If you’re not here by eleven o’clock I’m going to start without you.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
I tried the Sheraton first since it was the convention center hotel. No luck there. I tried some other budget hotels. Nothing. I sat down on a bench, looked at a map, and called some of theclassics. Caesars, Showboat, Bally’s, Tropicana, Harrah’s. I tried Hard Rock last. No Benjamin Crup.
I left my bench and walked over to Lula and Grandma, standing watch a short distance away. “I’ve tried the most obvious hotels, and no one has Benji registered,” I said.
“Maybe he’s not using his real name,” Grandma said.
“Yeah, or maybe he’s with somebody,” Lula said. “Maybe Sparks is here parading around like Sir Lancelot and the room is under his name. You said the Sir Lancelot costume was missing from his closet, right? We didn’t see him but maybe that’s on account of we weren’t looking for him. Maybe the Sir Lancelot people were hanging out in a different part of the building.”
I went back to my bench and started calling my way through the hotels asking for Sparks. Halfway through I stopped to think about the three men. If they were working together, who would most likely be in charge? Carpenter Beedle. He had the most education, and more important, he was an accountant before becoming a panhandler. He was a detail guy. I continued calling hotels but now I was asking for Beedle. I got a positive hit on the Hard Rock. Mental head slap. I should have gone to the Hard Rock first. It was the right fit for a guy who’d just reinvented himself with new clothes and an expensive car.
“They’re staying at the Hard Rock,” I said to Grandma and Lula.
“Good choice of hotel,” Lula said. “What’s the plan?”
“Benji ran when he saw me,” I said. “He had no reason to do that. It’s not as if he’s one of Vinnie’s skips. He ran because he didn’t want to talk to me. I’m sure he knows we’re onto him about the coin.”
“He thinks we know something,” Grandma said, “but what hedoesn’tknow is that we really don’t know anything. So we have the advantage.”
“All true,” I said.
“We gotta be sneaky about this,” Lula said. “You can’t go busting down the door at the Hard Rock. And ordinarily we could be pizza delivery people or offer our services as erectile engineers, but since Benji saw Stephanie, they’re going to be suspicious.”
“I can legally apprehend Beedle,” I said. “We can wait in the lobby and get him on the way to the elevators. It will be easier to catch him in the more confined space.”
“I like that idea,” Lula said. “It’ll be comfy in the Hard Rock lobby. And the café is right there.”
I drove out of the parking garage and got onto Virginia Avenue, and it took us straight to the Hard Rock. I parked in a nearby lot, and we marched into the hotel lobby. We stopped after a couple feet and looked around.
“I haven’t been here in a while,” Grandma said. “I’d forgotten how big it is.”
I was having the same thought. The lobby was larger than I’d remembered, and at this time of the day there were a lot of people passing through. And a lot of them were from GoComic. They were carrying GoComic bags, and they were in various stages of GoComic dress. If Benji, Beedle, and Sparks came through the lobby as stormtroopers or Wookiees, I wouldn’t recognize them.
“We’d be better off waiting for them in their room,” Lula said. “We could easily miss them here.”
“Two problems with that,” I said. “We need to get their room number and we need to get into the room.”
“I can get us into the room if you can get the number,” Lula said. “I got to be real good at getting into men’s hotel rooms when I was a ho.”
I called Ranger and asked if he could hack into the hotel system to get Carpenter Beedle’s room number. Ten minutes later I got a text with the number.
“You all wait here,” Lula said. “I’ll text you when I’m in and you come up and do the secret knock.”
“What’s the secret knock?” Grandma asked.
“Knock, knock, knock. And then you wait a beat and do another knock.”
Grandma and I hung out in the lobby, scanning the crowd. She was still wearing her red cape, and oddly enough, it made us less conspicuous. We fit right in with the geeks and freaks and uber-fans who were filing in after a long day at the convention center.
“This is just like being on another planet,” Grandma said. “It’s like in theStar Warsmovies when Han Solo goes into a cantina and all the people have two heads or it looks like their faces got melted. Maybe we want to blow off finding Benji and go to the casino.”
“That would be fun, but we’re supposed to be rescuing Connie.”
“I forgot about that for a minute.”
Lula called and said she was in Beedle’s room.
