A Living: Three Stories About Killers

by Gavin Bell

  4

  2:27pm

  IF APPEARANCES WERE anything to go by, the Halfway Hotel was the oldest thing in town. Most of the motels I’d seen in the western states dated from the fifties and sixties: ugly, squat one or two story boxes designed around the convenience of driving right up to your room. The Halfway Hotel predated the ubiquity of the automobile. It was four stories, taller than it was wide, dignified and imposing. A long vertical sign hung from the façade, the name of the hotel tastefully picked out in copper, rather than the typical neon, and the date stone above the entrance was engraved ‘1902’. Unlike the modern motels, you had to go through the main entrance to get to the rooms. That made Travis’s condition more of an issue.

  There were spaces out front, but I drove around the building to the lot at the back, parking the Mustang so that it couldn’t be seen from the road. The hotel was west-facing, so we got the cooling benefit of the building’s shadow. I looked at my watch: two twenty-seven. The plan had been to meet in town at around two o’ clock, and there was still no sign of Frank. I realised I didn’t know what sort of car he’d be in, assuming he’d made the switch, and that we still didn’t know where we were supposed to meet. The rendezvous hadn’t been my department. Another reason I like to work with as few people as possible: less departments.

  I turned to face Travis in the back seat. He didn’t look as sick, but he was sweating a little more than the heat warranted. I twisted the cap off a bottle of water and handed it to him. He took a long gulp and then dribbled some over his forehead.

  “Why here?” I asked him.

  He took another drink and looked up at the windows on the back of the hotel. They were less ornate than those round the front. “Because it’s nowhere,” he answered, unconsciously chiming with my earlier thought. “It was nowhere and it was in the right place.”

  “Ever been here before?”

  He looked puzzled. “Why would I?”

  He winced at a wave of pain and clutched a hand to his shot shoulder, teeth gritted. I wasn’t going to find out any more about the town, or about our arrangements for meeting Frank or the fence from this source.

  “I’ll go in ahead and get a room organised,” I said. “We’ll need to cover you up and get you through reception fast. You’ll be fine when we get inside.”

  “Yeah, just fine,” he said, glaring at me like the pain was somehow my fault. His words hissed through clenched teeth, and at once he sounded almost on the verge of tears. “Why the fuck did that asshole have a gun? Frank said it’d be a breeze. He always says that.”

  ‘Always’. It crossed my mind that I didn’t know how well acquainted the others were with one another. I’d been a late addition, and if there had been a team-building trip to a bowling alley, I’d missed it.

  I turned back to Tony. “Have you two worked together before?”

  Tony nodded.

  “With Frank?”

  He nodded again.

  Travis laughed humourlessly from the back. “Yeah, we’ve worked a few jobs together. They always run this smoothly.”

  I was still looking at Tony, who was looking up at the windows on the top floor. I thought I detected a flinch as Travis spoke about previous jobs.

  “Working with Frank’s like seeing Dylan in concert,” Travis continued. “It’s either great or it’s fucking terrible.”

  “Why, what happened before?” I prompted.

  Travis looked back at me, like he’d been having a pleasant conversation with himself that I was interrupting. “What is this, fuckin’ This is Your Life?”

  I shrugged, indicating that I was just making conversation. “Just trying to get up to speed, seeing as I’m the new guy.”

  Tony said, “Stan’s new too.”

  “Stanley the kid,” Travis snorted. “I don’t like that guy.”

  I doubted that Travis particularly liked anybody, and his new body-piercing probably didn’t help with that. I was interested, though, interested enough to risk his ire by asking what made him say that.

  “He’s too quiet,” was the dismissive answer.

  “So? Tony’s quiet.”

  Tony smiled.

  “That’s different. Tony doesn’t have anything to say. Stan just seems like he’s always watching, listening, trying to figure people out, you know?”

  I’d only met Stan briefly, before the job. Like me he was new, but he’d obviously spent enough time with them for Travis to form a dislike of Stan. I’d be surprised if the feeling wasn’t mutual. It was true though, about him being quiet. I couldn’t recall Stan saying more than five words in a row, to me or to anyone else.

  “Fair enough,” I said, turning back to survey the area again. The lot was all but empty, just three cars besides ours. No others had arrived since we’d been talking. The sooner we got a room, the sooner we could discuss what to do if Frank and Stan failed to show. I told Travis and Tony I’d be five minutes and got out of the car, walking around the building to the main entrance.

  A few hundred yards down the street, the crowd across from the barber’s had swelled, and an ambulance had joined the police car. A cop was standing by the open doors at the back of the ambulance. I wondered where the nearest hospital was, and figured it would have to be a good distance. Whatever else it might be, Halfway was not a good town in which to have a heart attack.

  As I watched, two paramedics emerged from the barber’s bearing a stretcher. It bumped against the narrow doorframe on the way out and a slender, tanned arm rolled out and swung lazily. Maybe somebody had had a heart attack, maybe something else. Either way, the guy on that stretcher wasn’t going to a hospital. Not with a sheet over his face.