by Matt Richtel
“I think she wants to see if I can discover her and then . . .” He paused. “She’s putting out these clues. She’s trying to get seen, or discovered.”
“Pretty damn narcissistic if you ask me,” Jerry added.
Lyle pushed air out of his lips, realizing he wasn’t making a lot of sense. It was the risk of putting theories out before they were fully baked. He knew there was more to this idea in his head. Something fuller was forming. He couldn’t get at it.
It was totally dark now, raindrops pelting the windshield.
Lyle perked up. “What did the attendant say when you called the hotel?” he asked Eleanor. It took her a moment to orient to the question. Then she answered: “She just said she was connecting me to room 106.”
“Isn’t that an odd answer?” Lyle said.
“Why?”
“Because they don’t give out room numbers,” Jerry advanced.
“Exactly,” Lyle said.
They let this tiny clue sink in.
“So what?” Jerry asked. He wasn’t being an ass, just asking the legitimate follow-up question.
“Is she setting a trap? She wants us to go there,” Eleanor said. Then she laughed. “Listen to me. This is nuts.”
Lyle thought this over.
“Lyle,” Eleanor said after a minute, “you still with us?”
“I’ll get the food,” Lyle said. “Least I can do.” He took their orders and went inside while Jerry and Eleanor waited in the car. Inside, Lyle placed his order and thought about this clue about the room number. It was the first time he thought he might have a handle on what this disease called Jackie might be doing, and a plan took shape.
When he got back, Eleanor was stretching her legs. With Jerry out of earshot, she put a gentle hand on Lyle’s arm.
“Thank you.”
“I whipped you up a gourmet dinner,” he said, handing her fast food.
“Hey, you two, get a goddamned room,” Jerry said.
They pulled on the highway again. Trucks hummed and rattled by with decreasing frequency on the nearby highway. Lyle, chewing an In-N-Out burger, Eleanor sipping her soda, Jerry spooning handfuls of fries.
“Look,” Eleanor said. She gestured outside the front of the car. A shooting star finished its descent and disappeared. “Remind you of anything?” she asked Jerry.
He laughed. “Atlanta.”
“Jesus, if they had known . . .”
Lyle heard the friendship between them and wondered why he ever had doubted it was there. After another quiet minute, Jerry asked Eleanor: “Are you thinking of Frank?”
She shook her head. “Not really.”
She turned around and glanced at Lyle. “You want to hear a funny story?”
“Absolutely.”
She told Lyle about the time that she and Jerry had been at a continuing education training at Delta headquarters in Atlanta. They’d been teamed up for years and just hated this nonsense. When they were live-training new landing gear, they’d been asked to pause in a holding pattern when Jerry had seen a shooting star. He pulled out this new time-lapse feature on his iPhone and they’d started playing around with it. They hadn’t realized that they’d just missed altogether the second turn in the holding pattern. They looked up when the radio squawked asking what the hell they were doing flying directly at the radio tower.
In the front seat of the Miata, Jerry was laughing. “The best part was that I’d gotten the camera turned around so instead of snapping the shooting star—”
“He took a picture of me with an oh-shit-radio-tower look on my face,” Eleanor completed his thought. “Or maybe the best part was when you told the guy in the radio tower that we aimed for the radio tower to punish him for putting veterans into a holding pattern.” She turned to Lyle. “Gives you all the confidence in the world in your flight officers, does it not, Dr. Martin?”
Lyle smiled. His mind was half in the conversation and half in the comment Jerry had made earlier about someone named Frank. Lyle wondered if that was Eleanor’s boyfriend or husband, or ex. In any case, it was someone who she’d be reminded of by a shooting star.
“Less than two hours,” Jerry said.
“I’m beat,” Eleanor said. She put her head on the window.
No one spoke for nearly an hour. Lyle even dozed. Jerry tuned the radio to the only station he could find in the rural track, a talk show called “The Fringe,” where a guy who declared he was broadcasting from an “undisclosed basement location” speculated that the Million Gun March on Capitol Hill was easily understandable as the work of extraterrestrials. Aliens, the talk-show host said, had impregnated us with Civil War instincts so we’d wipe each other out and they’d harvest our organs.
Lyle dipped in and out of sleep. He woke up and rubbed his eyes. He listened to the radio, the voice coming in and out, static sometimes. It was telling him something. Radio, static, frequencies, epilepsy, channelopathy.
They saw the first sign of Hawthorne. It was just the other side of midnight. “Heading due east,” Jerry said. “Not much of a tailwind.” He sounded nervous. Eleanor was still asleep. The horizon lurked deep dark. If there was a town up ahead, it wasn’t much of one. A distant, ambient light clung low to the ground, far away. Maybe some hotels or restaurants a few miles off. Then, a few miles later, something odd happened. The distant light flickered just at the moment the radio turned to static. Jerry instinctively reached for the dial and spun it, trying to regain the station, and got more static. All across the dial.
“Was that . . .” Lyle started. “That was odd, right?”
“Do you remember when we were landing?” Jerry said to Eleanor. “Hmm,” she said, groggily.
“Landing?” asked Lyle.
“In Steamboat.”
“Was there an electrical issue—when we landed?” Lyle asked.
“I think so,” Jerry said. “I feel like . . .”
“Turn off the radio,” Lyle suddenly commanded.
“Hold on, slow down there, Dr. Cowboy,” Jerry said. He was back to that officious tone. But he turned off the radio. He sensed they’d been through something like this before. “Wake up, Captain,” he said. “We’re almost there.” He shook her leg. She was way out of it. “I don’t like this place. No more chickenshit stuff.”
For a second, Jerry let go of the wheel and the car swerved. He twisted in the driver’s seat and, with impressive flexibility, removed the nine millimeter from the holster behind him. He set the weapon in his lap. Lyle tried not to laugh. Who or what was he going to shoot? The radio?
It all struck Lyle as familiar, one of those Steamboat flashes. Jerry with a gun and this was going to end badly.
Desolation defined the weigh station at the Nevada border. As they approached, two eighteen-wheelers parked on the right side of the road looked all but abandoned. A toll-like plaza hung over the highway and funneled drivers into booths. All booth lanes were closed but the one on the far right where Jerry pulled the Miata. A dark figure loomed, which Lyle thought odd. Why monitor a border when there was no toll, and in the middle of the night?
“Jerry, put away the . . .” Lyle said.
It was too late. Jerry had pulled into the lane and slowed to the booth. He’d forgotten to holster or hide the semiautomatic and now it lay there in the middle compartment. The worst thing he could do now would be to draw attention to it. Wasn’t this an open-carry state? In the booth, a woman wearing a hoodie, frizzy hair pouring out the sides, looked blankly at them, all bureaucrat.
“Evening,” Jerry said.
Lyle noticed a small TV in front of her. “Are you watching static?” he blurted.
She looked at her TV and before she could look back, Lyle tossed a blanket over the gun.
“Somethin’ weird with the signal all of a sudden,” the woman said. She looked over the car again, seemed to have noticed that there was a change but couldn’t place it or wasn’t letting on.
“What brings you to Nevada?” she asked.
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br /> “I’m sorry,” Jerry said. “Is this typical? I’ve never been stopped at a state border before. We’re Delta pilots heading to a training.”
The woman’s eyes settled on Lyle’s jacket covering the gun and quickly moved off them. The butt stuck out.
“Just a precaution. With all the stuff taking place in Washington and we’ve got a military base here, as you probably know if you’re pilots,” the woman said. “Where did you say you were training?”
Jerry reached for his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He extracted a card and held it up to her. “If there’s nothing else, we’ll be on our way . . .” He looked at her name tag. “Marsha.”
“Okay,” she said. But she looked skeptical. Lyle suspected she was told to be on the lookout for anything remotely suspicious, particularly if there was a military base located here. Even setting aside whatever the hell Jackie was up to, this world seemed to be boiling with tension.
Jerry hit the accelerator. Lyle looked over his shoulder and it sure looked to him like she picked up the phone.
“What the hell were you doing?” Jerry barked at Lyle. “I have a permit. You made it look like we’re doing something wrong.” He didn’t add the words you idiot, but his tone captured the sentiment. “Wake up, Captain.” He shook her leg again. She was really out. Was there something wrong with her?
From the weigh station, a car pulled out, now about a hundred yards behind them. Jerry stepped on it. So did the vehicle in the rearview mirror. In the dark, it was hard to tell if it was a cop car, though it stood to reason.
“I’ve never heard of a weigh station used for that purpose.”
“Maybe it’s Jackie Badger’s doing,” Lyle mused aloud.
“These are not ordinary times,” Jerry said dismissively. “Assholes with guns and now the government using that as an excuse to take away our rights. Freaking liberals couldn’t wait to institute martial law. Over my goddamned dead body.”
“You ever notice how often you contradict yourself on this subject, Jerry.”
“What’s wrong with Eleanor?” Jerry spat back at Lyle. “Captain, wake up.”
Behind them, red lights started spinning on the top of the cop car that was now a little more than fifty yards behind.
Ahead, in the dead of night, Hawthorne loomed. Jerry punched the accelerator.
Forty-Five
“Hey, Jerry . . .”
Jerry ignored Lyle and kept his foot to the floor.
“Jerry, this is no big deal. You’re a first officer with a permit to carry. Just show them the permit and we’ll be done with it.”
“And I crossed the border from a state that’s not open-carry. This all would have been easier before you put us all in harm’s way.”
“So just say I covered the gun by accident. I’ll tell them. We really don’t need to overreact to this. It’ll make it worse.”
Jerry ignored him and pulled a sharp right. They sped down an off ramp and fishtailed as Jerry took a ninety-degree left beneath the overpass, barely hitting the brakes. Lyle white-knuckled his pants legs. The Miata zoomed beneath the highway and emerged on the other side, the tiny town of Hawthorne suddenly looming in front of them. Jerry gunned it again on the empty, quiet, dark road that must’ve passed for Main Street. It cut through gas stations and fast-food joints and then modest paved tributaries.
Behind, Lyle could see the police car just getting off the highway. The cop must be taking it cautiously, he thought, recognizing there wasn’t much place for Jerry to go. And, besides, a wise cop would want no one hurt. Jerry took a quick right and then another and then screeched to a stop. It was a deft move, Lyle realized; the policeman would’ve been unable to see which turns they’d taken. So they were, in effect, temporarily hidden.
“Go get her, Dr. Martin.”
“Who?”
Lyle looked where Jerry was pointing. He had landed them in the parking lot of the Days Inn.
“Room 106,” Jerry said. He shook the pilot. “Wake up, Eleanor.”
Lyle took in the low-slung, low-budget motel. Or maybe it was high budget for these parts, nice as it got. A postage-stamp-size swimming pool surrounded by a metal fence took up a spot near the rooms in the center of the U-shaped complex. Not a single light shone in any room. But to the left, opposite the side of the lot where Jerry had parked, light shone from a small office. A sign blinked vacancy.
Jerry quietly shoved an ammunition clip into the nine millimeter. He ejected it and shoved it in again, double-checking. There was no other sound. They must have lost the police car, which probably was patrolling nearby, looking down streets and alleys.
“Draw her out,” Jerry said quietly. “That’s the plan.”
Lyle tried to hear the words and not the obnoxious tone. Did Jerry have a point? Lure Jackie from room 106 and then put a bullet in her? Of course that was too rash.
“I don’t think it’s going to be that simple. Let’s wait another minute to make sure that cop doesn’t swing by.”
Jerry stared at Eleanor. A touch of drool gathered by her lips. “We need to get her to a doctor,” he said. “A real doctor.”
Just then, they heard a sound and a car moved on the street, slowly. A searchlight swept the lot, narrowly missing them. The car passed. Lyle pushed the seat forward to get a look at Eleanor. He shook her and she lolled a bit and moaned. Lyle stepped out of the Miata. He looked across the lot and saw inside the little office. The woman looking their direction talked on the phone and quickly looked away when she saw Lyle’s gaze.
“I think you should come with me,” Lyle blurted. “Let’s bring her.”
Jerry burst out with a bitter laugh. He caught himself for making too much noise and then just shook his head. “You think we’re walking into that trap with you? Are you even paying attention to what you observed earlier? Jackie, or whatever her name is, she wants us to walk into that room. That’s why she had the room number given to us.”
Lyle let the words sink in. He tended to agree with Jerry. This was a trap.
“I think you should come with me,” he repeated.
“Oh, okay, Dr. Martin,” Jerry said as sarcastically as he could muster.
Lyle closed his eyes and looked for a reason. He said, “I’m not sure why. Just a gut feeling.”
It was unfolding as he’d expected, and now he was starting to chicken out of his plan. It was such a risk. He steeled himself.
“Suit yourself,” Lyle said.
“Smartest thing you’ve said since we met.” Jerry felt the need to pile on. “I’m going to find a medical clinic. Or a diner. Captain needs a cup of coffee.”
Lyle walked to the motel room door just in front of number 102. Lyle moved along the outer walkway. He could feel his cortisol levels—his fight-or-flight neurochemicals—through the roof. They kept his eyes and ears at superheightened levels. It was his hearing he found himself focused on. Something told him to prepare for a buzz or hum, a radio burst, an electrical surge.
He passed an ice and vending machine and stood in front of room 106. He knocked.
No answer.
Knock, knock.
No answer.
Lyle put his hand on the knob. He heard a screeching sound behind him. He turned to see a police car, lights spinning, pulled on to the street behind him. An officer stepped out of the car. He had his hand on his holster.
Jerry opened the driver’s-side door. The officer withdrew his weapon and raised it.
“Drop the gun, Officer,” Jerry said. “I’ve got a permit. It’s okay.”
“You drop the gun, sir. Right now. Put your hands in the air.”
Instead of dropping the gun, Jerry crouched, putting him largely behind the Miata. Lyle could see the shattering of fragile trust, the proverbial fear of the other guy. Each side reverting to fear and aggression. He turned the knob on room 106 and pushed open the door. He blinked with surprise.
He saw the odd walls. Long metal or aluminum sheets covered them. They covered
the window, hidden from view from the outside by the darkened curtains. It was like the entire inside was wallpapered in this odd metal covering.
“Put the gun down!” the officer shouted. “Step from behind the vehicle!”
Lyle stared at the metal-colored walls.
A shot rang out.
Forty-Six
Another shot. Lyle took a tentative step inside. “Down,” Jerry screamed. It wasn’t clear who he was talking to. Lyle stared at the room, captivated. Calculating, things falling into place. He picked up movement in his periphery. Bang, bang, more shots. A punctured tire hissed.
“Jerry! In here!”
Jerry said something, like, “I got this.”
Lyle’s head spun with information, ideas. He hardly heard the commotion now. Suddenly, he muttered, “Trap, yes a trap,” Lyle muttered.
He shut himself inside, dulling the noise. He looked at the walls, and another oddity: a clock on the bedside table blinking with rapidly changing numbers. Now there was no sound from outside whatsoever.
Suddenly, a high-pitched sound pierced the air. Lyle resisted the urge to cover his ears, during the thirty seconds before the sound passed. He turned around and saw the door.
He saw the bodies.
Jackie, tight jawed, stared at the video feed streaming on a second monitor she’d set up on her desk. The video showed a dark hotel room, number 106. Lyle stood at the doorway, back to her. She looked down at the desk. It was covered with papers and take-out food containers. It smelled. Didn’t bother her at all, not when she felt such elation. He’d fallen right into it, or, more likely, he’d gotten her clue and acted on it. Either way, all according to plan. Lyle alive and well, and Hawthorne frozen around him.
She cleared her throat. There was a bit more to do before the last of the clock counted down. And she still needed Lyle to show up to celebrate with her. He’d figure it out, and be so grateful for the awakening, his rebirth. He owed it all to her. And in this new world, there would be time to think and process, slow down, take their sweet time to share the peace.