The housekeeper had arrived. Her cart was partly blocking the end of the walkway, but otherwise I got to my car fast.
I drove a couple of blocks to a crowded shopping center parking lot and backed into a space near a lot of other silver SUVs. The main store was a home improvement big box with a large outdoor plant department on one side. I dumped stuff out of a small tote bag in the back of the Vue and grabbed a hoodie.
No one paid me any attention, and I did not see the white Camry. I walked into the store through the front door, went into the bathroom, and pulled on the hoodie. I put my backpack in the tote. Then I bee-lined it for the plant department and left that way, returning to the motel on foot.
I walked to a gas station across the street from the motel. From the back of the station I could see the walkway in front of Christine's room. I didn't wait long before the Camry drove into the parking lot. I thanked my instincts for having gotten out of there when I did.
Christine might have left in the few minutes that I had been gone. There was only one way to find out, and that was to watch. Part of me wanted to warn her, although to do that I’d need to turn my phone back on. I wasn’t willing to do that. After everything she had done, I wasn't going to risk my safety to protect her. Part of me was glad Passenger Guy was focused on her and not me, and another part was watching the whole thing like it was a movie, happening to people I didn't know.
Passenger Guy went into the front office and came out a couple minutes later, his head swiveling on his thick neck, looking around like someone might see him. Would he have killed the desk clerk after finding out Christine's room number? I was too far away to hear a gun if he were using a silencer, and he seemed like the kind of guy who would prefer to leave dead bodies rather than live witnesses.
He walked up the stairs, his head turning left and right. When he got to the top, he paused, probably counting the doors to her room. The door to the room before hers was open and the housekeeping cart was right outside. I hoped that the housekeeper wouldn't stumble into his path.
She didn't. He squeezed past the cart the way I had done and knocked on the door. A second later the noise of two semis driving down the highway muffled the sound of his kicking in the door. He went inside, staying for no more than thirty seconds.
I said another prayer for the maid. Maybe she hadn't heard the noise, or maybe she was used to people kicking in doors—it seemed like that kind of place—or maybe she was not in the room at all. No matter why, she didn't come out. When Passenger Guy opened the door, he looked both ways, walked past the cart like he was heading out to buy cigarettes, got in his car and drove off.
I waited at the gas station another couple of minutes to make sure he kept going. He did. I counted to sixty, then to two hundred. I pulled the hoodie up tight and put on sunglasses, trotting to the motel. Passenger Guy was gone, and nobody else drove up. The maid appeared from behind the building. She tossed a cigarette butt on the ground and put it out with her foot. I slowed in case she saw me and caught up with her on the stairs.
"Hey," I said. "My friend is in 213. We had sort of a rough night last night." I paused on the "rough night" part to let her draw her own conclusions. "We're actually going to stay another night, and we don't need the room cleaned today."
This did not seem to break her heart. She nodded and went back into the room she had been cleaning. I went inside Room 213, trying not to think about what I would see.
Christine's stuff was scattered on the bed as if she'd been packing up, and nothing looked broken. The first sign of something having gone badly was a sound, not a sight. I heard moaning from the bathroom.
I followed the sound.
Christine was on the bathroom floor next to the tub, her shoulders propped up against the wall. She was pale and it didn't take long to see why: she had blood coming out of her stomach. A lot of blood. It was pooling around her.
"Christine!"
At the sound of her name, she lifted her head and opened her eyes, barely. She moaned again. I pulled out my phone to call 911 without thinking of the consequences of that decision for both of us. Cops or no cops, money or no money, she needed an ambulance.
Before I could dial, she summoned all the energy she could and shook her head. "No," she said as firmly as a dying person can say. After that she needed a minute to recover.
"But you need a hospital." I squatted beside her and touched her shoulder.
"Too late." I leaned in to hear her. She closed her eyes, then pulled herself together again. "The money," she said. In the face of death she focused on what was important to her.
"Where is it?" I asked, despite the fact that she was in no condition to explain much.
"Bye," she said, or something that sounded like "bye." For a moment her eyes pleaded with me to understand. Then they closed. Her head dropped to her chest. I waited a minute and touched her neck to see if I could find a pulse. I could not.
I had been in the presence of death before, with my mother and also Joe's stepmom. They both had cancer, and both had slipped into a long sleep before they actually died. It was sad when they finally passed, yet very peaceful.
Christine's death was a whole different story. My mind was focused on my own survival, and all I could think about was how to get out of the mess she had put me in.
I was pretty sure I had some time before anyone was going to look in the room. The housekeeper was taken care of. At some point the desk clerk, if he were still alive, might wonder why Christine hadn't checked out, but that would be a couple of hours.
I returned to my plan. The first step had been to find Christine. Now I needed to get my "purse, etc." My etc. was spread over the bed along with Christine's clothes. Passenger Guy had not worried about being neat when he rifled through everything.
Luckily he had not wanted my ID, because I found my driver's license easily, although my wallet and purse were gone. I stocked my backpack with the rest of my stuff, including my comb, which I noticed had a couple of hairs on it.
This made me paranoid. I cleaned the hair off my comb and used a damp tissue to wipe up the area around where the comb had been laying, in case any strands had fallen off. I flushed all that down the toilet, turning my head as far away from Christine as I could.
Then I sat on the edge of the bed to catch my wits and think all this through.
The cartel now knew that Christine was dead, so they wouldn't care about me anymore. The police would find her soon enough. Frank most likely knew that I had been a patsy, so he wouldn't be after me, either. I was free, assuming I could get out of the motel room without leaving any evidence I had been here. I had accomplished my first goal, and probably should have tidied up any possible fingerprints and gotten the hell out.
But I still had my second goal, the twenty million dollars. And then the guy from Peru popped into my head—President Moreno. Christine had said he would be in Miami the day after tomorrow. I should just leave the room, let the police find her so that I would be cleared, and then call the police to tell them about Moreno. Everybody would have said that was the logical thing to do.
Except for me. I hated cops, and my experience with the marshals and the FBI didn't make me like them any better. Plus, I didn't think they'd believe me. Not only did I have no evidence, but my source of the information was a criminal informant they already suspected me of being involved with who had just bled out in the bathroom. If I told them, I would get sucked back into the whole mess.
And then I thought about where that would leave the money. Once I got on their radar I couldn't very well turn up with twenty million dollars. As far as I was concerned, Christine had stolen the money from criminals and she was now dead, so the money was up for grabs. But the FBI probably wouldn't see it the same way.
Until a few days ago I had never heard of President Moreno. For all I knew he was some sort of murderous dictator. But the way they talked about him on the news told me he had done good things for his people in Peru, and it wasn't righ
t for him to be assassinated for that. Plus, I knew that if I just took the money and left Moreno to his own devices, I would never forgive myself if he were killed. And there was no way I was going to pass on all that money.
And so to my second goal of getting the money, I added a third: save President Moreno.
Here I was, an unemployed middle-aged woman from Omaha whose most impressive job title to date had been "Senior Inbound Sales Associate" and who had gotten fired from that, who owned nothing more than her car and some clothes, and who had no idea of her next job. That last bit was particularly urgent since someone had wiped out my little bank account. Here I sat, in a cheap motel in Florida, deciding that I was going to steal twenty million dollars from drug dealers and save a world leader.
It's not like I had anything else to do.
My plan had only been how to find Christine, which I had done. Now I needed the next steps.
I tried to remember Christine's exact words. When I had asked her about the money, she'd made a sound: bye. Bye as in "bye bye?" Surely she would not have wasted her last breath saying that.
Maybe she meant "buy?" Buy what? Or maybe it was "by," like by the river? Or maybe "bye" was the first part of a word. Maybe I had completely misheard and she had said something else. Maybe it was just a random sound that came out as she died. This was leading me nowhere.
Her stuff was all over the bed and I started poking through it again. Although I had found my wallet easily enough, I did not see Christine's. There was no phone, either. Passenger Guy had probably taken them.
That made me start thinking about the situation from Passenger Guy's point of view. He wanted Christine dead, but he also wanted the money. He didn't have a lot of time, which was proven by the fact that he hadn't even made sure she was dead before he left. He might have taken the wallets and phone for information or to make it look more like a robbery. He had left my ID, perhaps because it might have caused some confusion for the local police if they thought the dead body in the motel room was Tina Johnson. Christine's key ring consisted of two keys: one to her car, and one which looked like a house key. Nothing else in the pile of stuff on the bed looked valuable.
I looked in her suitcase and in the small pile of clothes that were partly packed. Nothing there seemed to be a clue to the money. I checked the pockets of the pair of jeans and jacket that were lying on the bed. Nothing. I tried to figure out whether there could be some sort of hidden compartment, but it was really more a duffel bag than a suitcase, so no, there was nothing hidden.
Frustrated, I started repeating "bye, bye, bye" to myself. I checked under the bed, but it was one of those platform beds with no room underneath. I looked in the drawer of the nightstand and then it hit me as I saw its only contents: a black leather book.
"Bye bye bye BIBLE!"
Thumbing through the pages—which had not been overly thumbed through—I found a business card. Kevin Andrews, Vice President at National Bank and Trust in Miami. On the back there were two lines of handwritten numbers. The top line was nine digits. Not a phone number. The second line was eleven digits, then a space, then four more. Maybe these were account numbers?
I pulled out my checkbook from the purse Christine had stolen from me. I counted the numbers on the bottom of a check. The first number, the bank routing number, was nine digits. My bank account number was only ten digits, but different banks could certainly have different lengths of account numbers, and personal identification numbers were four digits long.
Bingo. I memorized the name and address on the card and then tucked it in my pocket.
No, that wasn't safe enough. I wrote all the information from the card, front and back, on a piece of the motel's paper. I folded up that sheet and put it in my pocket, and then put the card in my wallet. I felt like I was holding a winning lottery ticket.
Yes, Passenger Guy had certainly left with less than he had come for.
But not me. Although I was sorry that Christine had died, I was not completely sorry about where I found myself. Up until this point I'd been letting somebody else set the agenda: Christine, Passenger Guy, the cops. Now it was my turn.
14
The first step was simple: get to Miami.
I was pretty sure no one would be following me anymore, but I still decided to keep my cell phone off. I could use the tablet's GPS. I thought about checking in with Mark and decided to call him after I got to Miami.
Unfortunately, I was not the only person being careful about cell phones. Christine's burner phone blinked red when I first turned on the tablet and showed it was still in Lake City, although heading south. After a couple of minutes it went off, and it did not come back on again. I had not planned—or wanted—to track Passenger Guy, because he was about the last person in the world I wanted to meet. If he knew I was a witness, however indirect, to Christine's murder, I would most likely become top of his priority list. Knowing where he was would have been helpful, not to find him, but to avoid him.
I stopped to pick up snacks, hoping to give him a head start so I wouldn't run across him. Lake City is at the north end of Florida, and it's five and a half hours to Miami. The whole trip I kept an eye out for the white Camry and never saw it.
During the time it had taken me to get from the motel in Lake City to the gas station outside of Palm Beach, I had been developing a plan.
Helping President Moreno seemed simple: find where he was staying and warn his security people. I figured I would be able to find out the hotel from the news or from asking around, and how hard would it be to find security people once I found the hotel?
As for the money, I'd been trying to decide what to do about Kevin Andrews, having concluded that he was the other part of "we" who Christine said shut off my bank account. He would have known how to do that, and I could not think who else the "we" would include. Initially I had thought it might have been Frank, her mobster boss. But Christine wouldn't answer my question, and it would have been easy enough for her to have blamed Frank. Plus, Frank would rely on Christine for access to the accounts, so she knew at least as much as he did, making him unnecessary. That left Kevin.
I wasn't going to be able to contact Kevin directly: he was Christine's guy. Initially I thought dropping his name might be a good tactic if I came across a bank employee who needed a little encouragement to help me. "Gosh, Mr. Andrews said that you were the right person to talk to on this." Something like that; but then I decided that this would be best handled online rather than in person. The thought that someone might walk into a branch bank and transfer twenty million dollars seemed preposterous. Surely more credibility than a persuasive smile, a forceful personality, and Kevin Andrews' business card would be required. Questions would be asked, calls would be made. No, this was not an in-person job.
Which meant Mark. That was the other reason I stopped at the gas station: to turn on my phone and make sure that the GPS stayed off. I didn’t trust myself to be able to do that while I was driving.
There were three voicemails. The first message was Mark's, and it was "good, I wanted to make sure you had the phone off." I smiled at that. Janet and Teresa had each called to say hi. I triple-checked to make sure the location function was still disabled, and called Mark.
"Are you okay?" were his first words. I smiled again, and gave him the complete update, sparing him no details. He gasped a few times and asked me twice whether I had turned the GPS off. Then, for the first time since I had met him Tuesday night, Mark disappointed me.
"I can't hack into a bank," he said. "That's a federal crime. Plus I don't know what I'm doing, and while I'm stumbling around in their system I'd probably set off all sorts of alerts."
"I hadn't really thought about the federal crime thing," I said. And I hadn't.
"It is. And why are you even considering stealing money from criminals? You know how dangerous that is?"
"I hadn't really thought of it as stealing. Just transferring money that isn't theirs, either, and anyway they stole my
money first."
He was quiet a minute. "Would they consider it stealing?"
He had me there.
"Baby, you need to be thankful that you got your stuff back and that you're in one piece. Come back to New Orleans, or go to Omaha, or go anywhere, but don't steal that money. I don't want to read about you—." He stopped.
"But President Moreno," I said. "What about him?"
"Just call the cops and tell them. Let them do their job."
"That won't work. They'll figure I'm involved in it and I'll end up getting screwed. No cops."
"You really like living on the edge, don't you?"
"I don't know where the edge is. This just feels like doing the right thing and then going after what I want."
"When I said you were gutsy I had no idea."
"I didn't used to be. I guess I got tired of being a patsy."
"There's a lot of room between patsy and…" His voice trailed off.
"Crazy?" I asked.
"No," he said quickly. "I wasn't going to say crazy. I was going to say dangerous. I hope you're careful, Tina."
"I am. I'll keep you posted when I can."
"Please do. Maybe I shouldn't say this, but I can't seem to get you out of my head. I'd like to see you again. Alive."
"Of course you will. I'm going to get you your money back, and your .38."
"No, not that." He tried to lighten his voice and it cracked instead. "Don't worry about the stuff. I want to see you."
"I'd like to see you again, too. I like you a lot." It surprised me that those words came out.
"Then please be careful. And good luck."
"Thank you. I really do appreciate your concern. And I will keep you posted."
"Bye," he said. I waited for him to end the call but he didn't. After a few seconds, I pressed the hang-up button.
Passing Semis in the Rain: A Tina Johnson Adventure Page 7