Nightlife: A Novel

21

It was three-thirty A.M. and Nancy Mills seemed to be getting used up. She had been driving for hours and she was on the outskirts of Flagstaff, Arizona. At night like this, the city looked like an outpost on another planet. She found a street on the southwest side of the city where there were a few run-down apartments, parked Mary Tilson’s car by the curb in front of an empty lot, and opened the trunk. She needed to cut down on what she was carrying.

She put her money and the drabbest, plainest clothes she had into one suitcase. She put the Colt Python pistol that had been Carl’s into the zippered pocket on the outside of her suitcase, checked to be sure the smaller pistol she had taken from Mary Tilson’s bedroom was loaded, and slipped it into her purse. She closed the trunk, then drove until she came to a shopping center, and cruised along the back of a row of stores until she found a dumpster. She placed the unwanted second suitcase into it, and drove off again.

She was lost in a way that felt hopeless, because there wasn’t any place she was looking for, or any reason to believe that anywhere she stopped was going to be safe. She knew that she had to find a way to get some sleep. When she turned onto the next street, she saw that there were cars parked all along the curb, below some apartment buildings. She let the car coast to a stop and looked around her. Maybe if her car was parked with so many others, she could sleep in the back seat and nobody would notice her until morning.

But she couldn’t let herself be here in the morning. The sun would come up, the new day would already be under way, and she would be caught in the light in the open.

She had to think hard, but she was so tired that getting her brain to do more than keep the car on the road was too much effort. She drove on for another mile of flat pavement, each side lined by one-story bungalows on plots of land that had ornamental stones or desert brush instead of grass.

She realized that it was the car that was making her vulnerable. The police would be searching for it, and without it she would look just like anyone else—just an anonymous girl. That gave her an idea, and she drove on, following the signs toward the airport. She parked the car in the long-term lot, wiped off the steering wheel, door handles, and trunk lid, took her suitcase, and caught the shuttle bus to the terminal.

She went inside the baggage area to the row of courtesy telephones for local hotels, picked the ones near the airport, and began trying to find a vacancy. When she found a room at one called the Sky Inn, the man at the desk asked for her name. She hesitated. The police were looking for Rachel Sturbridge and Tanya Starling, and probably Nancy Mills by now, so she said, “Nicole Davis.” It was one of the names she had used in college when she had gone out alone. She stepped outside and into the first taxi at the curb.

When she arrived at the Sky Inn, she saw that the clerk who had talked to her was in his twenties but had taken on the mannerisms of middle age. He never smiled, and the only thing that seemed to give him pleasure was his own efficiency. He spoke in a monotone, as though he were reading, held the registration card so that it faced her, and used his pen to point to the room rate, the check-out time, and the place for her signature. As she signed, he said, “And I’ll need a major credit card.”

She stared at him, and her mind was blank for a second. She had become so exhausted she hadn’t thought this through. She reached into her purse and pulled out a stack of bills. The rate was a hundred and sixty-five dollars a night, so she placed two hundred-dollar bills on the counter. “I’ll pay in cash. I don’t use credit cards.”

He looked at her closely for the first time, but she sensed that it was only because she was a curiosity—a person who had gotten herself into trouble because she didn’t know when to stop charging things. He took her money, went to the back room, and returned with her change. He handed her a small envelope with her key in it. “Up the elevator behind you to the second floor, then turn right.” As Nicole Davis left, the young man busied himself clicking the keys of his computer terminal.

She entered her room, locked both of the locks and set the chain, put her purse where she could reach the gun, took a hot shower, and collapsed on the bed.

Several hours later she awoke and sat up, then reminded herself of what this room was, and that she was Nicole Davis. She stood and opened the curtain on the window just an inch, and the light blasted in to illuminate the whole room. She squinted out at the parking lot. The sun splashed off the roofs and windshields of the cars and into her eyes. She retreated.

The idea of stopping here to sleep had seemed brilliant last night. She had been on the edge of collapse, driving a car that belonged to a dead woman. She had felt she needed to be rid of Mary Tilson’s car, and she was at least four hundred miles from Los Angeles. But now she was stranded.

She was in a hotel in a place where she had never been before, and she had no easy way out of here. How long had she slept? She looked at the clock by the bed, then picked up the watch she had left on the nightstand. It was nearly noon, check-out time. She remembered that geek downstairs saying it in his monotone voice. She stepped to the bed and picked up the telephone, then pressed the button for the front desk. “This is Miss Davis in—what is it—room 256. I’d like to stay another day. Is that all right?”

“Let me see.” This time it was a girl’s voice. A child’s voice. “Um . . . you paid cash in advance for one night. What credit card did you give us?”

“I didn’t. I don’t carry credit cards, but I can come down there in a few minutes and pay for another day in cash.”

“Well, there’s a problem. I’m afraid your room, the one you’re in right now, is rented for tonight. We might be able to move you to a new one, but check-in time isn’t until four.”

“All right. I’ll just wait. Give me a call when the new room is ready.”

“I’m so sorry. The thing is, we need the room you’re in, and it’s check-out time now. The staff has to clean it and change the sheets and so on before the new people arrive. They can’t wait until four to do that. See?”

“So I have to check out now, and then check back in at four?”

“I’m afraid that’s the only way we can accommodate you.”

Nicole Davis had to be very, very careful. She closed her eyes to keep the frustration from turning into a red, blinding rage. “I can do that. I’ll be right down.”

She dressed quickly, then went through her suitcase. She removed all of the cash she had been carrying there, and the jewelry that David Larson had given Rachel Sturbridge, and put it into her purse. She closed her suitcase, and then opened it again. She couldn’t leave the two-pound .357 magnum Colt Python with its four-inch barrel in the outer pocket the way it was. Somebody might brush against it or read its shape in the bulge it made. She slipped it inside the suitcase among her clothes and locked the suitcase.

She took the elevator to the lobby. At the front desk she found the female clerk she had spoken to, and she was glad she had kept her temper. The clerk was a small blond girl who seemed to be about seventeen. She smiled and tried to be helpful, but she didn’t have enough authority to accomplish much.

Nicole Davis made a formal reservation for the first room that became available, and managed to force the girl to take the money for it in advance. Then she said, “Can I leave my suitcase with you and go out for a while?”

That was something the girl knew how to do, so she came around the desk with a label, wrote “N. Davis” on it and attached it to the suitcase, then wheeled it around the desk into a back office.

Nicole Davis found that it wasn’t as hot outside as she had feared. The sun was bright and the sky cloudless, but the altitude in Flagstaff was much higher than she was used to along the coast.

Nicole was uneasy. The police were looking for her, and Flagstaff wasn’t big enough to hide her for long. She needed to get out of town, but how she did it made a difference. She couldn’t get on an airplane or rent a car without identification, and the police were waiting for her to use ID that said Tanya Starling or Rachel Sturbridge. When she thought about the police hunting her, she always pictured the woman cop from Portland. That Catherine Hobbes had followed her to San Francisco, and she was still thinking about her every day, waiting for her to make some tiny mistake.

Nicole needed a car. She couldn’t buy one at a car lot, because they would ask to see a driver’s license. She needed to find a car on the street that had a For Sale sign on it. She would give the owner a few grand in cash and drive away with it. She began to examine every car parked along her way for a sign, but she couldn’t find one. Then she turned a corner and saw something better—a bus station.

Nobody who was looking for Tanya Starling would imagine her getting on a bus. Everything they knew about her habits would lead them to look in the most expensive hotels or expect her to turn up at the luxury car lots. They knew Tanya Starling. But what they knew was a person she had invented. They didn’t know that she had ever been anything but rich and spoiled. They didn’t know that she knew how to be poor and alone.

She walked into the bus station, stepped to the counter, and picked up a copy of the printed bus schedule. She could see that business was slow today. There were a couple of men who looked like drunks slouching in and out of sleep in the waiting area, a couple of old people she decided were Indians, and a middle-aged woman with two children who looked the right ages to belong to her daughter. The bored man behind the window seemed to have nothing to look at but her, so she left with her schedule.

Thirty feet away, Tyler Gilman let his small blue Mazda coast to a stop at the traffic light on South Milton near the bus station. He looked at the clock on his dashboard. It was twelve forty-nine, and he still had to park and carry the five lunch orders to the women in the insurance agency on the next block by one.

He let his eyes drift to the sidewalk and saw the girl step out into the bright sunshine, looking down at a bus schedule she held open in her hands. Tyler’s lazy glance settled on her and he didn’t want to look away. She had straight brown hair that she had tied up in a neat bun like a dancer’s, because it was so hot on the street. The sunlight caught the wisps of hair at the back of her delicate white neck. As though she sensed someone was staring, she abruptly looked up, then, not seeing Tyler behind his tinted side window, looked down at the schedule again.

He had seen her wrong at first. She was older than he was—not a girl of sixteen or seventeen but a young woman, at least twenty-five. Tyler felt a sadness that he knew was irrational. He knew he would have had little chance of attracting a female like her at any age, but her extra years moved her entirely out of his reach. Looking at her, he regretted it profoundly. He studied her rounded hips and breasts, feeling cheated. Wanting her wasn’t his fault: she was a creature who had been deliberately designed to arouse his sexual longing. In his peripheral vision he caught the red light going out and the green coming on. He stepped on the gas.

Tyler drove to the next block, stopped in front of the insurance office, and turned off the engine. As he got out of the car, he looked back along South Milton, but he couldn’t see the woman anymore. He leaned into the back seat to pick up the box of bagged orders from El Taco Rancho and thought about his reaction to her. He knew it was another odd thing about him he could thank his parents for. When he had started to be curious about sex at the age of nine, they had insisted on sitting down together to explain it to him. They were both religious people, so everything that existed was God’s plan to accomplish something else. God wanted people to be fruitful and multiply, so he made women in a shape that you could barely keep your hands from touching, and that you kept thinking about and couldn’t get out of your mind, even while you were asleep and dreaming.

Tyler kicked the car door shut, hurried across the sidewalk, and leaned his back against the door of the insurance agency to ease his way in with his box.

“Tyler! Where have you been?” It was Mrs. Campbell. She was a big, broad-faced blond woman who sat at the desk closest to the door. She went to the same church his family went to, and she seemed to think it gave her a special right to criticize.

He said, “I had to put your orders together, then drive over here from the restaurant.”

“At Domino’s, if your order doesn’t arrive in twenty minutes, it’s free.”

“At El Taco Rancho they don’t have that,” said Tyler. “I’d have to pay for it myself.”

“Maybe if you had to, you’d be faster.” She was up from her chair, blocking his way and opening each of the five bags, looking inside them at the food.

Tyler began to sidestep. “Where can I put this down?”

Mrs. Campbell glared at him, but she pointed at a long table nearby, where there were a couple of coffee cups. He set the box down and stepped back while she continued to paw through the bags.

The four other women had heard her voice. They came out of the back offices and pulled chairs to the table where Tyler had set the food. Two of them were old, nearly retirement age, but the other two were young, and one was pregnant. The other young one gave him a smile as she passed close to him, and he watched her as she went to the table to identify her lunch. Tyler had written on the bags with a marker what was inside, so she took only a second.

The pregnant one said, “Whose turn is it to pay for lunch?”

“Julie’s,” said one of the older women. Nobody disputed her.

Julie was Mrs. Campbell. “How much is it?” she asked.

“Thirty-four eleven,” said Tyler. He held out the cash register slip. He was sure that she had been the one he had told on the phone when he had taken the order. None of the others sounded anything like her.

“I’ll get a credit card,” she said. She took her purse from her desk and reached in.

“We don’t take them,” he said. “I mean, we do at the restaurant, but I can’t do that here. I asked on the phone if it was cash or charge.”

Mrs. Campbell took out her wallet. “All I have is a hundred-dollar bill.” She held it out, sensing a victory.

“I don’t have that much change.”

Mrs. Campbell looked triumphant. “Then you’ll have to come back for the money tomorrow.”

“But I’ll have to pay when I go back. The managers count the receipts against the orders every night, and everything has to add up.”

Mrs. Campbell took a breath, but the pregnant woman said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get it this time, and Julie can take my turn tomorrow.” She walked over to a desk, opened a drawer, and took out a purse. Tyler waited, avoiding Mrs. Campbell’s eyes while the pregnant woman counted out the money, hesitated, then added three dollar bills. “And that’s for you.”

“Thanks.” The amount of money didn’t matter now. She had saved him.

Mrs. Campbell snapped, “I wouldn’t tip him. He didn’t bring extra salsa or extra hot sauce, or even enough extra napkins.”

Tyler clenched his jaw and turned toward the door. He could feel his cheeks burning in anger and humiliation. He wanted to kill her. He wanted to go to the trunk of his Mazda, take out the tire iron, come back in, and swing it through her skull. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t even say anything back to her. She was in his parents’ church.

As he reached the door, she called, “I’ll be talking to your parents about the way you do your job, and the way you treat your elders.”

As he opened the door and stepped out, he heard a voice say, “Oh, Julie.” He closed the door behind him, walked quickly to his car, got inside, and started it. In the car it was quiet, and a stream of cool, breathable air surrounded him. The car was a place of sanctuary. He put the transmission into drive and moved ahead a few feet, but he saw Mrs. Campbell come out the door and step toward him. He quickly pulled out into traffic and moved up the street away from her.

Tyler drove around the first corner, then came along the back of the bus station, turned right again and looked at the front entrance. The pretty young woman he had seen was gone. He wasn’t sure why he had felt he needed to look at her again, and then he knew. At that moment he had felt reckless enough to offer her a ride. It was probably a good thing that he had missed her, instead of suffering the embarrassment of having her look at him with contempt.

Tyler charged that loss against Mrs. Campbell too. She had held him up until the pretty woman had disappeared, as though Mrs. Campbell was acting on behalf of the church. He knew the young woman was nearby, probably waiting inside the station out of the sun, but he had no more time. Already he was going to have to apologize to the other people who worked at El Taco Rancho for taking such a long time. The worst part was that what he really hated was not Mrs. Campbell. It was the way his parents had put him in the power of all of the people like Mrs. Campbell.

He knew that she really would corner his parents after church next Sunday and tell them that he was lazy and slow and disrespectful, and hint at causes for it that were worse. She would tell other people too, and he would see them looking at him with suspicion. His father and mother wouldn’t defend him. They never did, and never had. They would believe Mrs. Campbell. Even if all four other women in that office said he was a good person and a responsible worker, it would make no difference, because Mrs. Campbell was saved, and the others weren’t. They were members of false churches.

Tyler was sixteen years old and working full-time by himself while his parents went on vacation. He always got good grades at school and had competed all winter on the wrestling team and started all spring at second base, but they would believe that rotten old bitch instead of him. They would punish him, take something away from him. It would probably be his car, because they knew he loved his car. It had been his mother’s for several years, but now it was his on the condition that he worked all summer for it.

Maybe they would even have a conference with Pastor Edmonds. Then he would have a chance to add on new punishments for Tyler too. They had done it when he had gone with Diane O’Hara to that party, because she was a Catholic. And then they had searched his room and found that magazine. Tyler’s parents were gullible and weak and more worried about what a lot of people in the church thought than they were about their son. They had never protected him from anything—unfair teachers, the older guys who beat him up after school, people who said things about him.

He wished he could kill Mrs. Campbell and get away with it, but he knew he was being foolish to think about it. He was only concentrating on her because he didn’t quite want to face the fact that the ones who most deserved to die were his parents. They had done what Joseph’s brothers had done to him in the Bible—delivered him into the hands of his enemies—only they had done it over and over again all his life. He wished he could kill all of them, all of the tormentors and the betrayers who told him what to do and never left him alone.

Tyler made it back to El Taco Rancho, swung into his space near the dumpster, and trotted inside. It was already one-thirty, and the lunch rush was over. Nobody seemed to care that he was late. Danny and Stewart were busy scraping the griddle clean, and the girls were all refilling salt shakers and napkin dispensers in the space beneath the television set on the wall. Maria stepped up on a chair to change the channel to a station where a woman dressed up as a judge shouted at people who wanted a divorce.

Tyler started wiping down the tables and chairs with a dirty rag. A few customers straggled in while he worked, but most of them only wanted cold drinks, so one of the girls would leave the television set to draw the drinks and take the money. After a while, when Tyler was mopping, the sound of the television changed. Instead of voices there was urgent music. He looked up and saw the words “Breaking News” in red on an orange background. He stopped and watched.

There were two pictures of the pretty woman he had seen at the bus station. One had long blond hair, and the other much darker brown than she had now, but it was definitely the same woman. The news man was calling her a fugitive, armed and dangerous. Tyler’s chest expanded with excitement. He had seen her. He knew where she was. He looked at the clock on the wall. It was two fifty-three, almost time for the three o’clock break, when half the staff took off for a half hour. The others would go at three-thirty and be back at four to prepare for the dinner rush.

Tyler thought about the woman, and he felt that she was his, in a way. If he wanted to be a good citizen, he simply had to take out his cell phone and call the police. If he wanted to be a hero, he could drive there and make a citizen’s arrest. He had seen her, and he knew that she wasn’t really dangerous. Knowing about her was power, and having power was a new feeling for Tyler. He had to guard it. He pretended that he had not noticed the television. He moved off, mopping the floor near the front window, where he could not see the television screen, and thought about the pretty young woman and what he should do with her.

At three o’clock, Tyler took the mop and bucket he was using into the back of the kitchen, leaned the mop handle against the wall, and continued out the back door. He got into his car and drove it toward the bus station.

Nicole Davis had stopped for a quiet lunch in a small Mexican restaurant a block away from the bus station, and looked at her bus schedule. There was a bus leaving for Santa Fe, New Mexico, tomorrow at ten in the morning, so she had returned to the station and bought a ticket. She would get another night’s sleep, then take the bus to Santa Fe.

She knew she was probably too early to get into her new room, but she seemed to have accomplished what she could for the moment, so she began to make her way back. She headed in the right direction, but after a time she did not see any buildings she remembered. She had somehow gone past the street where she should have turned. At each intersection she stared up the street and down, until she recognized the sign above a store on the corner two blocks to her left.

She considered correcting her course, but the street she was on had a long row of two-story buildings that threw shade across the sidewalk, and the shops had window displays of jewelry with turquoise and coral set in silver, weavings that might be Indian, and pretty clothes.

As she walked she could see that she was going to approach the hotel from the back, and that seemed fine to her. But as she came closer, she saw something else. There were four cars parked near the loading dock, all of them big American-made sedans that had short antennas sticking up on their trunks, identical but in assorted colors: navy blue, white, black. There were two men inside one of them. One seemed to be talking on a radio, and the other had his head bent down as though he was writing something.

Nicole stopped and retreated a few steps, until she was out of sight of the cars. She wanted to run, but she had to control herself, and fight the panic. She told herself there was no good reason to assume they were here for her. She walked back the way she had come for two blocks, then turned, making a wide circle around the building, trying to see more of it without being seen.

From the front, the hotel looked exactly the same. There were no police cars, no big men standing around. When she came to the parking lot side, she picked out the window of the room where she had spent last night. It was on the second floor, three windows from the elevator shaft. The curtain was open, and she saw a man walk past the window and disappear.

She walked quickly back toward the bus station. As she walked, she took out her bus schedule and scanned it. There was a bus leaving for Phoenix in thirty minutes. When she arrived, she bought a ticket for that bus, then sat in the dismal waiting room to stay out of the sun. But after a few minutes she began to be aware that somebody was staring at her.

A teenaged boy must have come in the side entrance while she was buying her ticket, and now he stood near the wall watching her. He was tall and thin with sandy blond hair, and when she looked at him, his blue eyes would turn away, toward other people in the station, then look out the windows at the street, and then return to her again, staying on her unblinking until the next time she caught him at it.

She went outside and waited near the pay phone until she saw her bus arrive and discharge the passengers from its last leg. When their luggage had been unloaded and the driver was standing by the door taking tickets from the line of new passengers, Nicole stepped to the telephone and dialed the front desk of the hotel. She heard the young girl answer, “Sky Inn. May I help you?”

Nicole Davis said, “This is police dispatch. Are any of the officers who are waiting for the female suspect close to you now?”

The girl said, “Yes. Would you like to speak with one of them?”

Nicole Davis said, “Cancel that. We’ve just reached the one we wanted by radio. Thank you.” She hung up and walked toward the line of passengers waiting to board the bus.

Suddenly the teenaged boy who had been staring at her came out of the side door of the bus station, stopped a few feet ahead of her, and said, “Come with me. Hurry.” His expression was anxious and scared, and even though he was as tall as a man it made him look young, like a boy.

She said, “What?”

“I know you,” he said with quiet urgency. “I saw you on TV. I can get you out of here. I’ve got a car.”

She looked at him for a moment, then at the bus. She put her ticket into her purse and walked toward him. She followed him from the station at a distance of about ten feet all the way down the block. He went to a small, dark blue Mazda with dark tinted windows that was parked beside the curb. He opened the door for her and she got in.

When he sat down behind the wheel, she was staring at him. “How old are you?”

His blue eyes clouded, and his soft, unlined face seemed to flatten with disappointment. “I’m sixteen. Now you don’t want my help, right?”

“Yes. I want your help. Please.”

He glanced into his mirrors, then cautiously pulled away from the curb. The sound of sirens reached their ears. He looked at her furtively as he drove down the street away from the bus station. “The cops are coming from the other direction, where their station is.”

“And where are we going?”

“My place.”