"Very unlikely," Goddard grumbled.
"Let me know if anything changes."
Goddard grumbled something more, and Felix hung up his phone. He chewed the inside of his cheek.
There were several disturbing elements to this call, starting with two murders and ending with a man who thought he could tell Felix where his duty lay. On top of that, Felix had Benjamin's sister in the next room, determined to find her brother, come hell or high water.
Pushing off the wall, Felix approached the closed bathroom door. Was it possible he could spin all this in a way to keep Aletheia close to him, keep her safe? Knowing it was doubtful, but determined to succeed nonetheless, Felix opened the bathroom door.
He found the hotel room empty.
CHAPTER TEN
"I'm pretty sure this is our stop." Avoiding the swinging purse of a woman perched over his seated position in the bus, Benjamin craned his neck to peer past Zara out the window. He then looked down to check the map of Albuquerque he'd gotten from the hotel's front desk that morning. "Yeah, looks like it. Let's get off."
"Here?" Zara peered doubtfully at the spare, desert-colored buildings. "I thought we were blowing this town."
"I need to make one stop first." Benjamin got up. He danced with the swinging purse a moment, then maneuvered past it to the back door of the bus.
Zara followed.
As Benjamin jumped down and gazed across the street at the University of New Mexico, he wondered why Zara was still here. Yesterday, when Goddard's goons had nearly caught them, she must have seen how dangerous it was to stay with him. Yet she'd stuck like glue, zooming off with him in the old car, away from the scene of their crime at the motel in Las Vegas. They'd found a used car lot, dumped the 'made' car a few blocks away, then used Benjamin's dwindling stash of cash to buy another. Zara had planted herself in the passenger seat, fiddling to find radio stations as they hauled ass southeast. She'd acted joyful, as if this were all just one happy lark.
Maybe that was the answer, Benjamin thought as he turned to watch her descend from the bus in a pair of artfully torn white shorts and a skimpy pink halter top—clothes purchased the night before at a late-hours mall. Maybe she was a thrill-seeker. Maybe his situation satisfied some bizarre need of hers to flirt with danger.
Deep in his gut, he hoped the thrill continued for her. It was good to have company, a sweet relief to share the burden of the Cloak and all its ramifications. Plus, the lady was damned resourceful.
And, okay, he was totally turned on by her.
With a hop, Zara joined him on the sidewalk. "What are we doing here?" She frowned at the buildings across the street.
"Looking for a place to mooch some free Internet." Benjamin soaked in the pleasurable sensation of her proximity. He'd splurged on a decent hotel room last night, partly because he'd craved the anonymity of the huge family hotel they'd passed on the freeway, and partly to impress Zara. The comfortable surroundings and the temporary sense of being safe had made Benjamin feel warm and tense inside. The way Zara had waltzed in and out of the bathroom in the oversized T-shirt she'd bought as nightclothes had made him wonder if she'd be open to him making a move.
He was almost sure she'd been asking for one. He'd also been sure he'd make a complete fool of himself if he'd tried. Zara was in another league, sexually. She probably knew every trick, and expected a lover to know even more. If he gave in to his yearning to touch her, she'd quickly discover he was a total dork.
"This looks like a college." Zara's lashes lowered halfway.
"University of New Mexico," Benjamin agreed. "I'm counting on finding a library with computers for loan so I can get on the Internet." He pushed the button to request a walk signal to get across the intersection.
Zara hugged her arms around herself. It had to be a hundred and three degrees outside, but she looked as if she were cold.
"I don't think the library is that far," Benjamin assured her.
The light turned green and they started across the street. Zara's steps were hesitant, though, and her face had turned nearly the color of the walk signal.
Benjamin frowned. What was going on with her?
They crossed into the campus. Benjamin alternated between checking his map, and Zara's expression. Something was definitely not right. She looked downright spooked. In the shadow of a limp plum tree, Benjamin stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.
She turned and squinted at him. "What's up?"
"You tell me." Benjamin did his best to keep his tone even, but he was truly worried. "Is there something I should know about UNM?"
An unmistakably guilty expression darted across her face. "What? What do you mean?"
In the blazing heat, a chill went through him. "Did you go to school here or something?" What were the odds? But the way she was acting, it seemed possible.
She gaped at him. "No."
"Do you know somebody who studies or works here?"
Her gaze flitted wildly around their surroundings. "I've never been here in my life. I don't know a soul."
Benjamin glanced briefly past her right shoulder. "I can see the library from here. I want us to go in there and find out if there's any news about me or Goddard Research. I want to email a professor friend of mine at MIT. I'm thinking he might be able to help. But I have to know what's got you so jumpy."
The muscles in her throat moved. She looked like she was going to cry. "I'm no good at this," she muttered.
"What?" Benjamin felt jolted. Did she want to separate from him after all? "Hey, you don't have to do any of this." He hoped his tone sounded sincere, because he actually hated to think of her leaving. "You can go home, if you want."
"Home?" She looked confused.
"You don't have to stay with me and all my problems," Benjamin made clear.
"No, that's not—" With an impatient shake of the head, she explained. "I just can't go in there." She gestured behind herself.
His brows contracted. "You can't go into the library?"
"That's right." She leaned closer. "School is not my thing."
Benjamin stared at her. That was it? Her big revelation? He'd thought there was a serious problem here, a new, grand and dangerous obstacle to be overcome.
On the other hand, Zara clearly felt her aversion to school was important, a real stumbling block. Carefully, he said, "All you have to do is find a place to sit. You don't even have to read. I'll do the computer stuff."
She sucked in her lips. "It isn't that easy. I get antsy around so many books. The studious bodies." She shuddered. "Gives me flashbacks."
"Flashbacks?"
"High school." Zara shook her head. "Fights with my dad. He thought if I only worked hard enough I could be a great student." Zara laughed unhappily. "Like that was true. If I had a dime for every time he complained I was as dumb as my mom."
"Wow." Benjamin tried to imagine his father or sister saying anything so derogatory to him, and failed. He could imagine, however, how devastating it would have felt if they had. Unthinkingly, he blurted, "Your dad sounds like a world-class jackass."
Zara looked stunned. "Oh, no. He's really smart. Some big corporate consultant muckity-muck. Makes gobs of money and tells other people how to make gobs, too. At least, I assume he does. I haven't seen him in years." She glanced briefly up at Benjamin, then away. "I left home on my eighteenth birthday. I just—I had to get away from all that stuff."
A warm sensation sparked in Benjamin's chest. The warmth quickly expanded, spreading all the way through him. "Your father," he told Zara with authority, "is an idiot."
Her gaze shot up to him.
"You aren't dumb." Benjamin made his voice very certain. "I doubt your dad could have thought of setting off the alarm in that motel."
"Well..."
"There are different kinds of smart, didn't you know?" The sun was blazing heavily down on them. Benjamin wanted badly to get at a computer. But this was more important. Vitally important. "I flunked English and History. E
very year. My sister had to pull all kinds of strings to get me graduated from high school."
Zara's lashes darkened as she narrowed her eyes at him. "You're putting me on."
Benjamin made a cross over his chest. "Hope to die. I'm an idiot in every subject but math and science."
Zara continued to squint at him.
"You're smart, too," Benjamin told her. It was hard to get his brain around the fact this incredibly sexy, confident-looking woman was insecure about anything. "You are so smart, I don't want you to leave me anymore. I feel better having you with me. Safer."
She stared at him. Hard. Searching for insincerity. Benjamin was confident she'd find none. He meant every word.
"Then maybe you're just an idiot, too," Zara muttered.
Benjamin laughed. "Not telling me anything I don't already know." Unable to stop himself, he opened his arms and hugged her. Hard. As her soft body crushed against him, he got a flash of the sexual thing, but bigger than that was an inner warmth, a notion he could help her, as well as the other way around. Releasing her, he grinned and said, "Come on. Let's get out of this heat."
She didn't move. "Benjamin," she said, giving him a sober look.
"Yeah?" He still felt good, like a tiny bit of a hero.
Her expression turned odd. "You're not like most guys."
His mouth twisted, but he held onto his good humor. "Told you I was gay."
Her answer to that was a snort. Taking his arm, she finally started walking again. "That's not what I'm talking about. I mean you're..." She frowned, apparently searching for the right word, and finally came up with, "Nice."
Benjamin winced. "Nice" was almost worse than being called gay. "Yeah, that's me. Mr. Nice Guy." He made sure to sound amused, rather than hurt. Her hands felt so good holding onto him. The slight, possessive touch gave him a buzz. Smiling again, he looked down at her.
Her expression was not the one he expected, the one girls usually wore after they pronounced you were "nice:" complacent and secure. Instead, Zara looked deep in thought, even troubled.
The mystery of Zara's expression and what it might mean occupied Benjamin until he located a computer inside the air-conditioned library, got online, and googled his own name.
That's when he found out he was a murderer.
~~~
They were calling Benjamin a murderer. Aletheia was still trembling about it as she paid off a cab in front of the Stickit Inn and Slot Machines. That anyone could imagine her gentle brother might kill anyone—a human being—was beyond her belief.
"Ya sure this is where you wanta go, ma'am?" the driver asked, eyeing Aletheia's generous tip. "It's not the best part o' town, ya know." They were off the 15 Freeway, not far from Felix's gray hotel, but the neighborhood had changed drastically for the worse.
"I'm sure." Aletheia turned from the cab and gazed at the two-story, faded structure. It seemed to sag under the weight of its ancient, garish jigsaw decorations, none of which appeared to have felt the slap of a paintbrush in decades.
When she and her brother were teenagers, her parents had taken them on a family trip to Las Vegas. After passing this place on the freeway, Benjamin and Aletheia had established the Stickit Inn as a family joke. This was the sort of place, brother and sister had decided, where you sought refuge from the G-men when you didn't pay your taxes. Where you escaped your girlfriend's father after you got her pregnant. Where you hid from your irate church congregation after stealing from the alms box.
It was the sort of place Benjamin might think to stay if he were on the run—for whatever reason he was running.
A reason which could not be murder, Aletheia was sure.
The cabdriver hesitated, then pulled away, leaving Aletheia alone on the crumbling sidewalk. Alone was what she ought to have been from the beginning, Aletheia scolded herself as she picked her way over hard-packed dirt and cigarette butts toward the building.
She couldn't trust Felix to help her find her brother. Absolutely not. Hearing Felix believe Benjamin might have murdered anyone sealed the decision Aletheia should have made from the beginning. Felix was as much a danger to Benjamin as whomever her brother was running from.
The motel looked even more down on its luck than Aletheia remembered from years ago. Only a handful of cars sat in the parking lot out front, sharing space with some rusted slot machines.
A few of the doors on the second floor were open, as though something were wrong with those rooms. On the railed second-floor walkway, a worn, overweight man directed workers who were hauling pieces of furniture out of the rooms. An extremely gaunt fellow squeezed past the crew, sucking on a cigarette. He glided down the second floor walkway as though he existed in a world of chemically-induced making.
While the gaunt man did not notice Aletheia, the overweight supervisor did. "Hey!" he called down. "You there."
"Me?" Aletheia pointed to her chest, wondering at his belligerence.
Leaning over the balcony railing, he waved a pugnacious hand. "I squared it away with the health department. Permit's renewed. No call for more inspections."
"Um, I'm not with the health department," Aletheia called up to him.
He squinted one eye closed. "Social worker?"
"No."
He opened his closed eye. "Vice squad?"
Aletheia choked. "Not that, either."
He glared at her. "I give up. What the hell department are you from, then?"
"I — none. I'm looking for a room for the night."
Rather than allaying his suspicion, this appeared to deepen it. Grunting a command toward two men who were struggling to get a bed frame out the door, the overweight supervisor started along the second floor walkway, motioning for Aletheia to meet him at the bottom of the stairs.
"Doing some renovation?" Aletheia asked once the man had reached her. She tried her best to sound casual.
He gave her a sour look, then gestured toward what appeared to be an office. "It's always the clean-looking ones what end up making trouble."
"Excuse me?" Aletheia nearly balked on the office threshold. A stale smell of sweat filled the little room.
Brushing past Aletheia into the small office, the heavyset man uttered another disgusted grunt. "Gave that room upstairs to a clean-looking couple. Healthy. Well-fed. And whadda they do?" The manager walked around a sticky-looking counter. "Light a fire. Then cut out without paying damages, of course." He banged a palm on the counter. "A friggin' fire. Marshal is callin' it arson. They did it on purpose!"
"I—I don't even carry matches," Aletheia stammered, blinking against the man's accusing glare.
"Kooks!" the hotel manager expostulated, then leaned his forearm on the counter. "Or maybe they were trying to fend off the repo men."
"Repo men?"
The manager gestured toward the parking lot. "I saw a bunch of guys circling their car. Real interested, like. Musta owed money on the thing, even though it was a wreck. Next thing I know, every alarm in the building is going off. Water's sprayin' everywhere and the fire department is haulin' ass toward my building. Those two firebugs used the confusion to slip into their wreck of a car and get away."
Aletheia stared at the manager. She hadn't truthfully expected to find a trace of Benjamin at this shot in the dark. But hearing this tale of woe, she wondered if she'd hit the jackpot.
"A—a couple, you say?" Could the manager mean that in a general sense, as in two people, not necessarily a man and a woman?
The manager smiled with a faraway look in his eyes. "Good-lookin' broad."
Aletheia's excitement deflated. A man and a woman, then, which left out the possibility of Pi and Benjamin travelling together.
"Didn' know why she was with him," the manager went on. "Scruffy-lookin' fellow, even if he was clean. Shaggy hair, three-day beard, long nose. Four-eyed, too."
Benjamin. He was describing Benjamin. Doing her best to hide the sensation of getting punched in the stomach, Aletheia cleared her throat. "About that room..."
She had to take one now. Otherwise, the manager would know she'd been fishing for information. The same authorities who were looking into the fire might want to question her. They'd want to know who she was looking for. She didn't want to tell them she was looking for a man who was wanted for sabotage, murder, and now arson.
A man who might, after all, be connected to the woman's tank top and panties Aletheia had seen in Pi's house. It felt like feet were jogging against her rib cage. Who was the 'good-looking broad' Benjamin was with? Did she have anything to do with his recent problems? A ribbon of uncertainty wound raggedly through Aletheia. Maybe Felix was right and she didn't know her brother as well as she'd thought.
The manager squinted at her. "It's cash up front."
"Oh." Aletheia supposed that was better than giving him her credit card. Still... "How much?"
The manager paused, obviously calculating what the market would bear. "Seventy-five dollars."
Impressed with his accuracy, Aletheia opened her purse. Fortunately, she'd thought to take a bunch of cash out of the ATM in Big Bear.
After counting her bills, the manager reached down and retrieved a metal room key. "Number six, the other side of the fire zone. Sprinklers didn't go off in those rooms, so they're still all right."
Wondering if the sprinkler malfunction was supposed to make her feel safer, Aletheia took the key. "Thanks." For an instant she was tempted to spend the night there in truth. She didn't look forward to facing Felix again. A hands-down argument was in their future, one which would split their travel plans and place them irrevocably as antagonists.
But abandoning her luggage and running away—not to mention having to sleep on the questionable linen in this dive—were not plans of action that appealed to Aletheia. If she had to have it out with Felix and have it over, whatever 'it' was, then she would.
Meanwhile, she'd walk over to room six and peek into the fire zone on her way. Maybe she'd find a clue. Once in her room, she'd leave the key and call for another cab to take her back to Felix's gray hotel.
Benjamin was no longer here. In fact, from what Aletheia had heard, he'd been moving fast to avoid some mysterious group who was after him.
I Gotta Feeling Page 10