The young man at the desk was skinny with bored brown eyes and an untrimmed mustache and shaggy dark hair, and seemed less than thrilled with the short-sleeve white shirt and snap-on blue-and-red striped necktie he was required to wear. “Stairway to Heaven” was playing a little too loud on a cheap radio behind him.
Michael spoke up, requesting a room on the first level as far away from the street as possible, and the clerk complied, possibly because that was the easiest thing to do. After signing in as John Jones, the former Michael Smith paid the twenty-five dollars in advance, and said to the clerk, “I need a nine a.m. wake-up call.”
The clerk frowned in thought, which was an obvious inconvenience. “Tonight you mean?”
“No — a.m.”
“Oh, you mean tomorrow morning?”
“This morning.”
The frown deepened. “Three hours from now?”
“Right. Will you still be on duty?”
“Yeah, just came on. So what?”
Michael summoned a smile for the sullen young man. “Because if I get that wake-up call, nice and prompt? I’ll be another twenty-five bucks grateful.”
The clerk brightened. “No problem, Mr. Jones!”
Locked inside the room, curtains drawn tight, air conditioner up, Michael placed the .45 on his nightstand, stripped to his underwear, slipped between cool sheets, and was asleep in seconds.
He dreamed he was driving.
Dreamed he was back on the endless highway through the desert, following the ribbon of concrete under a beautiful star-flung sky and a moon-bleached landscape. Pat was next to him, smiling over at him, wearing that lacy white dress from their evening at Vincent’s.
As dreams went, it wasn’t a bad one, other than his mind providing him with more of the same experience that had sent him into this motel room; a kind of delirium accompanied it, giving him an awareness of being in a dream but no power over that dream. Still, having Pat beside him, not talking, just smiling over at him, occasionally touching his shoulder or leg or hand, Johnny Mathis singing a nonexistent love song on the four-track, was comforting.
Then he glanced over at her, and she was someone else, another woman he’d loved once, a long time ago. They had killed Estelle in a terrible way, tortured her and burned her to death, and he had found her body, when he was just a kid in his early twenties who had admittedly seen horrible things in war but nothing to compare to a beautiful woman tortured and burned. Only in the dream Estelle was pristine in her loveliness, blonde and green-eyed with a ’40s hairstyle and makeup and a blue gown with sequins on the bosom; and then she was Pat in the ’40s hairstyle and makeup and blue gown, and his eyes returned to the highway, and then to her; only Pat was smiling like a skull now, her hair a fright, a wig with clumps yanked out and her face battered and bruised, nose bloody-broken, mouth punched to a pulp, one eye slashed, icepick punctures on her cheeks, throat cut ear to ear, bare arms a welter of welts and gashes and contusions until finally the lower half of her was a charred mass dissolving to cinders, and he drove off the highway and the phone rang shrilly and he sat up in bed, sweating in the air-conditioned room.
But he’d had his rest, and the long-haired clerk (sullen no more) got his twenty-five, “Stairway to Heaven” playing again (or still?), and Michael set out — on Highway 95 now — for Reno.
The Pineview development in Incline Village ran to rustic lodge — like dwellings built against a rising wall of pines, a stylistic world apart from the rambling ranch-styles of the Country Club subdivision with its golf-course view where the Satarianos had lived.
Typical of these, the Grace home had a driveway that swung around to a side double-garage in the basement, sloping landscaping designed to give the first floor a nice elevated rear look at the green scenery. This enabled Michael to pull in and park his car on a downward slant of cement, the Lincoln out of sight of anyone passing by.
The desolate drive from Vegas to Reno had taken over seven hours; with full-bore June heat beating down, he’d been careful not to overwork the air conditioner — Highway 95 skirted the edge of Death Valley — and again kept his gas tank topped off and his eye on the radiator. He even had a meal around two, a diner that would serve you breakfast any time of day, which was what he craved.
He’d listened to music, tapes mostly, Sammy Davis, Ella, Bobby D., Joanie Sommers — he’d pitched his Sinatras in Walker Lake, during a fit of anti-Outfit pique — and he’d again fallen into a groove of monotony that worked for him, the traffic scant all the way to Sparks. Long though the drive and the day had been, he came sharply awake when he hit Reno, “biggest little city in the world,” and his familiar home area. This sensation only increased on the half-hour drive to the Tahoe’s North Shore.
Now he was peering into the Graces’ garage — no cars. He cautiously walked around the rough-wood-sided house — he’d slung a dark gray sport jacket over the black Banlon to hide the .45 in the waistband of the slacks — and checked windows. Within five minutes he was convinced the house was empty.
Steps up to an elaborate wooden deck took him to glassed-in sliding doors onto the kitchen that, for all the rustic trappings of the mini-lodge, were the same as in the last two homes Michael had lived in. He forced the door open, without having to break the glass.
The interior of the home was phony farmhouse, starting with a mostly pine kitchen interrupted by calico wallpaper, avocado appliances, shelves of flea-market crocks, and a window of various wooden spoons hanging vertically and horizontally.
A sink filled with dirty dishes announced the aftermath of meals prepared for two. A wastebasket brimmed with empty cans of Tab, his daughter’s drink of choice. A big calendar with a picture of a covered New England bridge had bold notations, including a line drawn through five days today and tomorrow — “Bob and Janet/Caribbean!”
So Bob and Janet Grace had gone on a cruise and left high school senior Gary — the only one of the three Grace children still at home — to fend for himself for a few days. And Gary had done so by driving to Vegas to bring his girlfriend back here to shack up and go to prom...
...a theory the girlfriend’s father confirmed when he got to Gary’s room and found a double bed that had been slept in on both sides. In this all-pine room, with exposed beams, the walls wore posters of the Beatles walking across Abbey Road, the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, O. J. Simpson in his uniform grinning as he cradled his helmet under an arm, and Muhammad Ali in boxing trunks and I-Am-the-Greatest grimace, raising a padded-gloved fist.
He felt parental rage rising as he noted the open box of Trojan rubbers on the nightstand, as casual as a pack of open cigarettes; four ripped-open individual packets were tossed there, too, like chewing-gum wrappers. But a luxury like fatherly disapproval wasn’t available to Michael right now.
He found her powder-blue overnight bag, with various articles of clothing in it, all clean — she’d done her own laundry, apparently, even if she hadn’t done the dishes — but one item was conspicuous by its absence: no nice dress for the prom, much less a formal.
Which meant that though it was now only a quarter to six, she had already dressed for the prom; she’d already left here — for the Cal-Neva? Then he remembered: the Incline High kids usually went out for a nice dinner before prom. So Anna and Gary were probably dining somewhere in North Tahoe.
He returned to that nightstand, where earlier his eyes had only been able to focus on those condoms; now he noted the football-shaped phone and a small message pad.
On the pad it said: reno sat reservation — 5 pm!!!