[End of tape]
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It’s dusk before she feels free of the drug’s effects. She’d driven north, passing out of her native state and jumping on and off all the eerie New England highways that were cut through solid granite hills. The highways have smooth rock walls running on either side of them, rising up thirty feet high so that nothing can be seen but the road ahead. Over a period of time, they can cause a subtle claustrophobia. Lenore noted this as a secondary concern.
For lunch, she’d grabbed french fries from a drive-through burger chain visible from the road. By dinner, she felt safe enough to stop in at a small, lazy diner in a town she’d never heard of. She ordered soup and tea with milk, thinking this would soothe a nervous system so pushed beyond its liberal limits that a shutdown was not out of the question.
By seven, she’s back in Quinsigamond. She drives by the green duplex, but finds it in darkness. At ten, she’s still seated in the Barracuda, staring up at the back of the Hotel Penumbra, waiting until the top floor’s lights go on. She thinks about writing some kind of note and securing it to the steering wheel. An apology to Ike, begging him to forget the past week, maybe the past year, stating flat out her inability to explain both last night and this morning.
She thinks about leaving several notes: Instructions on what to do with any of her belongings that Ike doesn’t want. A word of encouragement to Shaw and Peirce. Advice to Zarelli to accept his shortcomings and learn to find pleasure in his family again. And something for Fred. What could she say to Fred?
The possibilities make her too uncomfortable to continue, so she scraps the note idea entirely and climbs out of the car. The Magnum is in the trunk, but she’s still got the.38 strapped near her ankle. She walks around the block to the front of the building and stops at the revolving door as a parade of Cortez’s women file out for the evening. They’re all dressed like it was Halloween and everyone chose the same costume.
Looking through the doors into the lobby, she sees Jimmy Wyatt trying to act stone-faced to the last of the women’s comments. When he sees Lenore, his hand instinctively jumps to the inside of his biker jacket, but when she doesn’t move, it stays there. They stare at each other for a while until she feels he’s assured she’s not an immediate threat, that this isn’t some bizarre assault, then she pushes her way inside.
She gives Wyatt a small smile, tries to make it look like she’s been unsuccessful at suppressing it. She holds her arms out and up slightly, like a bored version of halting for the police. But he’s not biting. Nothing about her being inside the hotel is going to be playful. His eyes are narrowed on her. She looks away from him to the rest of the lobby. It’s been restored beautifully. Everywhere there are Ionic columns shot through with veins of deep green marble. The lobby has a wonderful, slightly freezing feel to it. There’s a small rise of three stairs beyond Wyatt that opens out into an empty rest area where people once checked in at the front desk and then waited for the elevators. Huge Persian rugs of dark reds and greens cover the marble floor that’s been worn into shallow bowls in spots. Against the walls are couches and chairs, foreign-looking, experiments in furniture that went wrong. And hung above them are these out-of-place pastoral paintings hung in ornate thick gilt frames.
It’s not like a real place, Lenore thinks. Then she turns her eyes back to Wyatt and says casually, “I’m here to see the boss.”