She steered the car off I-95 and then seemed to drive aimlessly around the fringes of New Haven looking for a suitable motel. She checked out three run-down establishments, all equally unappealing to Shane, eliminating all three from consideration for reasons he could not discern.
Finally she selected one. The winner in the overnight housing sweepstakes featured a central parking lot separating two rows of attached wood-frame rooms that looked like mirror images of each other, right down to the peeling paint and crumbling cement foundations.
The motel appeared identical to the other three as far as Shane could tell, and he looked at her quizzically. “This is the best we can do, huh?”
She smiled. “I’m getting a little low on cash, so we’re going to have to slum it for tonight. Once we hit the bank tomorrow, money won’t be as much of an issue, but for now I’m afraid we’ll have to pass on the Four Seasons.”
“Not to worry,” he said. “I’m a cheap date. But just out of curiosity, if we were only going to stay at a roach motel, what was wrong with the first three places you scoped out?”
“They didn’t have the features I was looking for.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, you know, a little of this, a little of that.”
“You’ve already used that answer once today.”
“I know,” she said brightly, looking like the cat that ate the canary.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re one frustrating person to deal with?”
“All the time.”
Tracie parked the car in front of an office that looked like it had been designed by the architect who built the Bates Motel. An old-fashioned MOTEL sign hung in the front window, the glass tube letters filled with red neon gas. The “L” had burned out, leaving MOTE flickering weakly in the darkness. Above it, unlit, another sign said NEW HAVEN ARMS.
Shane looked at the “MOTE” with distaste. “I hope that’s not a warning of what’s waiting for us in the rooms.”
“Ah, come on, how bad could it be? Where’s your sense of adventure?” she said, stepping out of the car and stretching her legs. Shane reached for the door handle to join her and then stopped, admiring the view through the windshield as she reached for the sky. The night was mild and she hadn’t bothered to pull on her jacket, and her blouse lifted as she stretched, revealing a taut belly. Shane had already gotten an up-close and personal look at her legs last night while cleaning her injury, and he decided this young woman was the complete package.
She bent down suddenly and looked in the driver’s side window, catching him staring, and laughed. She waggled her index finger back and forth. “Naughty boy,” she said through the closed window. It looked to Shane like her face colored a little, but maybe that was his imagination.
He clambered out of the car after her. “Sorry about that,” he said, although he really wasn’t, and he knew she knew he wasn’t. “So, what now?”
“What do you mean, ‘what now?’ Come on, Romeo, haven’t you ever shacked up with a girl of questionable repute in a run-down motel before?”
“Sure,” he said. “But when you say it like that it sounds so cheap.”
They shared a laugh and she turned toward the door. “Just follow my lead,” she said, and entered the office.
The décor was Spartan and had gone out of date sometime before John Glenn orbited the earth. A potted plant stood in one corner covered in dust. It looked like it was dying despite the fact it was made of plastic. A small couch, the leather ripped and torn, lined the wall next to it. To the left of the entrance was a single rickety wooden chair.
They moved to the front desk and Tracie dinged a small bell. Through an open door behind the desk came a rustling sound and then the scraping of a chair, and a moment later a rumpled-looking scarecrow of a man appeared. He was dressed in loose-fitting jeans and a stained Rolling Stones T-shirt, and he gazed at them suspiciously through red-rimmed eyes, as if not quite able to believe a customer had actually entered his establishment.
“Help you?” he asked, making clear through the inflection in his voice it was the last thing in the world he really wanted to do.
Tracie flashed a smile and Shane thought she could have been a beauty queen if she wanted to. Or an actress. “We’d like to rent two rooms,” she said, and the clerk actually took a step back, blinking in surprise. Shane knew how he felt.
“Two rooms?” he said, and then paused, like he was waiting for the punch line.
“That’s right, and I know exactly which ones I want.”
“Oh-kayyyy,” the clerk said, now clearly convinced the world as he knew it had been thrown off its axis.
“We would like to rent the rooms at the far end of the parking lot, one on each side, facing each other,” Tracie said, still smiling, enjoying the clerk’s confusion.
Scarecrow-man shook his head, not even attempting to hide his skepticism. “Sign here,” he mumbled, picking a worn log book up from under the desk and sliding it across at Tracie. “That’ll be fifty bucks total.”
She dug the money out of her pocket, signed the log book — Shane watched as she wrote “Sally Field,” next to one room and “Kathleen Turner” next to the other, and the clerk shook his head again — and then received two keys, each attached to a red plastic fob with the words “New Haven Arms,” as well as the room numbers, stamped in faded gold lettering on both sides.
“Thanks,” she said, flashing another dazzling smile at the clerk, although she had to have known by now charming this guy was impossible.
They turned toward the door and the clerk mumbled, “Check-out time’s ten a.m.” Tracie waggled her fingers in response and then they were back in the parking lot, the smell of the nearby Atlantic Ocean floating across the night air as they walked to the Granada.
“Two rooms?” Shane asked.
“Security,” she said, the answer puzzling him. Was she afraid of him? If he was going to hurt her, he could have done it last night when she was passed out on his couch. Besides, he thought, remembering the pistol she had waved in his face. She’s the one with the gun.
Tracie laughed. She seemed to know exactly what he was thinking. “Not security from you, silly.” She started the car and drove slowly to the back of the lot, then nosed into the parking space directly in front of the last room on the right.
“Then from who?” Shane asked. “You don’t think those guys from the airport can find us, do you? I mean, how could they possibly know where we would be?”
“How, indeed,” she said thoughtfully.
Shane shrugged, exasperated. This was one strange young woman: beautiful and alluring and sexy, with a girl-next-door innocence about her, but also tough as nails and somehow world-weary, as if being chased by cold-blooded killers represented just another day at the office. “Okay,” he said, shaking his head. “I give up. Which room do you want me to take?”
She flicked her thumb in the direction of the room across the parking lot, directly behind the Ford. Shane held his hand out for the key and Tracie looked at the room numbers stamped on the plastic fobs, then handed him one. He took it without a word, annoyed, then opened the door and stalked off across the lot.
When he reached the other side, he stuck the key in the door, surprised by the motel’s poor lighting. The doorway was bathed in shadows despite the fact the moon was full. He opened the door and realized Tracie was right behind him. “I thought you wanted me to take this one,” he said.