Nightlife: A Novel

25

As soon as Catherine Hobbes had learned that Tanya had been sighted in Flagstaff, she had taken a plane to Arizona. Now, as she sat in the passenger seat of the police car, staring out the window while Officer Gutierrez drove, she wondered if she had missed her again. At night Flagstaff didn’t seem big enough to hide Tanya Starling. There didn’t seem to be enough places for strangers to sleep, enough people on the streets to keep her from being seen. There didn’t seem to be enough men.

Gutierrez was about forty years old and the sort of officer that Hobbes would have appointed to guide a visitor if she had been the one to pick. He was proper and experienced and pulled together like a military man, in a fresh uniform with razor creases and spit-shined shoes. All the steel on him shone in the dim light of the dashboard.

He drove past the hotel and around to the parking lot, then kept the car idling. “See the window up here with the blinds drawn and the bright lights?”

“Second floor, third from the end?”

“Right. That was her room.”

Catherine Hobbes looked around to determine the lines of sight from the nearest street. “Think she saw somebody waiting for her in her room?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I know there were a few unmarked cars parked back here, so she might have seen them. Or maybe she’s just getting into the habit of calling places to see if there are cops before she shows up. Whatever it was, she picked up the signs.” He pulled into a space. “Ready to go in?”

“Can you show me the bus station first?”

“Sure. It’s just up on South Malpais Lane.” He pulled across the lot and back out onto South Milton, drove a couple of blocks, then turned left. “It’s up ahead, there. It’s been about eight hours since she’s been here, though.”

“I’d like to take a look anyway,” she said. “I’m trying to get to know her, and I’d like to see what she saw.”

Officer Gutierrez drove a few yards past the station entrance and stopped the car at the curb, then got out with Catherine Hobbes. Catherine could see the pay telephone attached to the stucco wall at the front of the building. It could have been the one Tanya had used to call the hotel, but there were probably others inside or around the back in the boarding area. It was too late to take prints from any of them now.

She pushed through the glass doors, into the station. It was late evening, but she could see that the station had the forlorn, always-two-A.M. look that bus stations had, the fluorescent lights just bright enough to make a person who was stuck here feel defeated. She walked over to the counter and picked up one of the small folded bus schedules.

While she was examining it, Gutierrez said, “The first ticket she bought was to Santa Fe for ten o’clock tomorrow morning. She bought the one to Phoenix just before it was due to leave at five after three. That was the next bus out.”

Hobbes went to the front door, stepped out, and looked at the city. “The hotel is about four long blocks in that direction, right?”

“Right,” said Gutierrez. “Maybe a half mile.”

Catherine stepped back inside, then walked to the door on the opposite side of the waiting area, underneath the sign that said BOARDING—TO BUSES. She went outside again and stood under the overhanging roof. A bus came up South Malpais and made the wide turn, shouldering up the slight rise onto the blacktop, then emitting a hiss as it came to rest. The lights came on and the doors opened. The sign above the windshield that said FLAGSTAFF changed to HOLBROOK.

As Catherine watched, an assortment of people slowly made their way, one by one, down the bus’s narrow steps to the pavement. They were the people Catherine had become accustomed to seeing on sweeps through the bus stations in Portland: old men and women who stared down at their feet as they walked, or very young, solitary men with faces that were pinched with watchfulness, or teenage girls in twos or threes, talking and laughing as though the rest of the world could not hear them.

The driver and a ticket agent opened the luggage compartment on the side of the bus, hauled suitcases out, and set them in a row, where passengers came to claim them. Then Catherine saw the people she had been waiting for, the first of the riders for the next leg of the bus’s journey, forming a line. They were like the last group, people too young or too old to drive, people who had no money for a car. Catherine got into the line behind a lady carrying a large carpetbag, looked around her, then moved close to the bus.

She said to the ticket taker, “Do city buses stop here? I don’t see a bus stop.”

“They don’t stop at the station. The nearest stop is on the corner at South Milton.”

“Thank you.”

Gutierrez stepped up to Catherine, curious. She said, “I think somebody picked her up.”

“What do you mean—like she had someone waiting for her?”

“No. She came in here and bought the ticket to Phoenix just before the bus was going to leave. She walked to the front door, made the call to the hotel, then got into this line to board the bus.”

“Right. That’s what the witnesses said.”

“But when the state police stopped the bus she wasn’t on it.”

“I’m with you.”

“Well, something happened while she was standing here, right where I am, waiting to board. Something changed her mind, diverted her from the bus. But from this spot, you can’t see any alternatives. There aren’t any taxicabs, or rental cars, or anything else. If she had just turned and started walking, she would have been spotted. The police units arrived within a minute or two after she called the hotel, and they searched for blocks around the station, questioning everybody who might have noticed her. The only possibility is that she met somebody, and he or she gave her a ride out of the area in a private car.”

“You think she could do that? She works that fast?”

“You saw her picture. She looks young and sweet and vulnerable.” Catherine looked around her at the entrance to the station. “The only thing I’m wondering about is who it could be. The reason people are in a bus station is that they don’t have cars.”

“Whoever it is, he’s going to get a big surprise.”

As Catherine stepped away from the line with Gutierrez and they walked along the street toward his police car, Calvin Dunn took a step backward behind the idling bus to keep the headlights of a passing car from shining on his face. When he had seen the two of them behind the bus station, the woman standing in line and then going with the cop, he had experienced a moment of interest. She was about the right age, size, and shape. But apparently she was just another damned cop.