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The dresser drawers were pulled out and scattered on the floor. Every bit of cheap carpet was covered with Fiona’s clothes.
The bed sheets and ratty comforter were balled up in a corner. The mattress was halfway off the box spring, and the mattress itself was slit all to hell with stuffing spilling out of it.
But she wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
No blood, either.
“Fiona!” I yelled, and made my way into the bathroom.
The ceramic top of the commode lay broken in pieces on the tile floor, but other than that, nothing. Nobody in the stained, yellowed bathtub/shower.
What the fuck?
I pulled out my phone – and, strangely enough, felt the first stirrings of hope.
30
Fiona
Isat there at Charlie’s Diner toying with my hashbrowns and toast, alternating between memorizing the two numbers that Eddie had given me and watching the horizon just begin to grow light outside the glass windows.
I could barely get any food down, but that wasn’t really the point. I made sure to chat with the waitress – Judy, one of the women I recognized from the night shift. She’d always left when I got on duty. When she asked me where I’d been, I told her about the Seven Veils and the shooting. She gasped and clutched her chest and Bless your heart-ed me over and over, then told me I needed to leave that den of sin and iniquity and come back to Charlie’s pronto.
She would remember me, alright. Alibi secured.
I thought about everything that had happened.
I had nearly been shot in a holdup…
I had sat for hours in Jack’s kitchen, waiting for news…
Then had crazy, mind-blowing sex…
Then was accosted and blackmailed by an undercover DEA agent posing as a biker…
And then found out a rapist-murderer had been sent to kill me.
Not to mention I now had to go back to a ransacked room and place a fake emergency call to Jack, panicked out of my mind. All as a ruse to try to keep myself from being killed by Lou.
God, this had been the night from hell.
Well, not all of it. The sex had been fucking fantastic.
… so just most of it was the night from hell.
I was utterly exhausted… and yet I still had hours to go.
I was about to leave when my phone rang.
Jack.
I thought about whether I should answer or not. Then I realized that was stupid – the whole plan was for me to call him as soon as I got back to the motel, right? He had just beaten me to the punch.
But I was still terrified to see his name on my screen.
For almost thirty minutes, I had had a time out.
But now I was back in the midst of the mostly deadly game imaginable.
