I remained dry. Maybe the run up the Glen had leached me of body fluid, maybe I was in decent shape. Fitness didn’t account for a mouth full of cotton and eye sockets that ached each time my attention shifted.
When we reached the door to the seventh-floor corridor, Milo un-snapped his holster and used the handkerchief to glove his hand as he turned the doorknob.
The knob came loose, clattered down the stairs. Milo stuck his finger in the hole that remained, managed to slide the bolt, pushed.
The hallway on the other side was long enough for an LAX arrival terminal. More rotting walls and acrid stench. A runner of perforated red rubber carpet padding traced the center of a floor paved with tiny white hexagonal tiles. The doors were black slabs, scores of them, numerically identified by stick-on labels.
One of them opened and a man in a soiled wife-beater and boxer shorts emerged, smoking, clutching a pint bottle. Shaved head, prison tattoos, long chin beard tied in several knots, zits where ink didn’t dominate. Smoke rose around him and settled like a cloud; no ventilation.
Milo flashed the badge and waved him back inside.
The man gave the thumbs-up and complied.
We kept walking, stopped two doors short of 709. Swabbing his brow again, Milo motioned me to stand back and moved forward on crepe soles. He put one hand on his Glock, used the other to knock lightly.
A dull thud resulted. Under the black paint, the door was solid timber, installed when wood was cheap and the hotel hosted residents who mattered.
Repeat knock. No answer.
He tried again. Music filtered from someone else’s room. Mariachi remixed to hip-hop.
Milo cleared his throat and stepped close to the door. “This is Leon from downstairs. I need to check your heater.” He’d turned his voice gravelly. Louis Armstrong at his most jovial.
The look on his big pale face was anything but. Hello, Dolly, I come to bust you.
He stood tall, all traces of fatigue gone. Seconds passed. He ticked them off with a finger on a wrist. He was about to knock again when the door cracked. Thump-rattle. Held fast by a chain.
He grinned, “Hey there, can I come in?”
No answer that I could hear, but he must’ve sensed danger because he jammed one hand in the crack and kicked the door hard. The chain gave way with the sound of crepe paper ripping and he had to keep one hand on the door to prevent it from falling onto him. Awkward but he forged in, gun pointed.
A female cry — fear mixed with the shock of betrayal — was followed by a bleat of terror, high-pitched, horribly rhythmic.
Not an adult sound.
A baby wailing, ragged, terrified.
Then: scuffling, grunting. The slap of flesh on something hard.
Then, just the baby.
I went in.
Milo had her down on the ground, face to the scarred wooden floor of the cell-like room. The single bed was barely wide enough for one person. The baby lay on top of it, resting on a gray sheet, faceup. That was good, less chance of SIDS.
No crib, no other place to sleep. That was bad. Sleeping with an adult risked rollover suffocation.
The baby had good lungs, howling nonstop.
An angry little boy.
Milo hadn’t noticed. He brought the woman to her feet.
She was around Ree Sykes’s age and height but thinner than Ree and rawboned where Ree was soft. If you weren’t looking too closely, you might not notice the discrepancies. All I could see were the discrepancies: narrower hips, smaller chin, longer legs, larger hands.
Hair can always be modified and this woman had altered hers from whatever she’d been born with to shoe-polish black. Chopped brutally at the ends and half the length of Ree’s red-blond curls. I wondered what had led DeWayne Smart and two other people to be so sure.
The pulse in Milo’s neck raced as his error gut-punched him.
The woman remained still but low guttural warnings emerged from rapidly moving lips. She began grinding her jaws, setting off unnerving squeaks. Her lips curled into a terrible smile. She snarled. Looked ready to spit.
Milo tightened up and did nothing but watch her.
The woman laughed. Opened her mouth, revealing more gap than tooth, and let out a deep, sexless sound that ended with a high-pitched cackle.
That startled the baby. His tiny body quaked, he keened louder, began pummeling the sagging mattress with heels and fists. All that panic rolled him nearer to the edge of the bed but packages of disposable diapers were stacked tight between that side of the mattress and the wall, creating a safety berm. Or they’d ended up there because there was scant space anywhere else.
Milo said, “I’m sor—”
The woman said, “Fhh!” and tried to kick him.
“Ma’am—”
“Fhhh!”
Keeping my eye on the baby I scanned the room in fast-action spurts.
Gray, urine-stained walls, three-drawer raw-wood dresser with the bottom drawer missing. More diapers and a white plastic purse on top. Floor space taken up by stacks of formula and baby food. Adult nutrition in the form of generic canned goods: spaghetti, stew, soup, vegetables. A box of crackers served as a platform for a large, red, vinyl-bound Bible.
To the left of the dresser was a clear view into the doorless adjoining bathroom. The toilet lid hosted a small, foldable camper’s stove fueled by a cake of Sterno. A manual can opener sat on the rim of the sink.
The fuel in the stove was reduced to a thin sheet of purple wax. Cooking in here posed a serious risk of fire and carbon monoxide poisoning. Maybe the latter explained why the bathroom window was propped open by two cans of chicken noodle soup. Or maybe that was just an attempt to air out the stench.
The baby continued to wail. The woman on the floor competed to fill the room with noise, cursing wordlessly, shaking her head and hissing each time Milo tried to apologize. That prolonged her confinement and every second of confinement kicked up her rage.
Plain woman, gorgeous child. Rosy-cheeked, towheaded, wearing a fuzzy blue one-piece.
Milo said, “Ma’am, please try to calm down so I can uncuff—” The woman screamed. The baby turned scarlet and began rolling in the opposite direction, toward the unguarded edge of the bed. I snatched him up. Solid little thing. He fought me, arching his back, retracting his head and thrusting it forward. Making contact with my cheek.
Two points for the little bruiser.
I said, “There, there.”
He screamed louder.
Maybe he’d reached the volume where his mother’s tolerance ended because suddenly she stopped fighting, said, “Cody. Be still!” Speaking softly in that special maternal rhythm. But the anger lingered in her voice and that did nothing to calm her child and he continued to twist violently in my arms.
I said, “Hey, little buddy.” His tears splashed onto my face. I wrapped my arms around his tiny torso, kept his arms safely pinned, began whispering in his ear. “ ’Sokay Cody, ’sokay Cody, ’sokay Cody.”
Matching the pitch and rhythm of his cries, over and over, my best reassuring drone.
With babies, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. He shuddered, his body stiffened. Finally he began yielding to the primal comfort of the hypnoidal mantra.
Milo said, “I’m going to take off the cuffs, but you need to remain calm, ma’am.”
The woman cursed silently.
He gave her a few more seconds. She said, “Free me, I’m doin’ your bidding, you bastard.”
Once liberated, she shot toward me, grabbed the baby from my arms.
Cody let out a single, forlorn cry of relief and buried his head in her bosom. Holding him close, she shrank back to the wall of diapers, pointed with her head. “Go! I shall be rid of you!”