“No. We gotta go.”
“My car keys.”
“Where?”
“I’m not sure.”
I helped him to his feet. He shook out his head, trying to throw off the effects of a decent punch in the kisser. He patted down his pockets and lifted his keys. “You drive,” he said.
“Long as you don’t mind going slow.”
FREE HBO!
Blake checked us into a motel. I wondered how many times he fantasized about bringing me to a place like this, under different circumstances. And maybe not a place like this exactly.
We went with the first place we found that seemed far enough away. A dump called the Two Diamonds. The name alone should have been a good indication the place was a pit. Why not go for four diamonds? Or four stars, or hell, ten diamonds? Two sounded like they weren’t trying. And guess what? They weren’t.
A deep groove in the carpet ran between the bed and TV, a space about the width of a greyhound. The dog, not the bus. The trail of threadbare carpet ran to the bathroom and abruptly turned into peeling linoleum tiles around a once-white bathtub and shower combo with rust stains and what appeared to be a family reunion of silverfish.
The lighting: florescent, the art: dismal, the walls: covered in some bumpy wall covering probably holding the structural integrity of the whole damn building together. We were on the second floor. I expected any minute to plunge through the termite ridden ceiling of the room below and end up as a foursome on another broken Magic Fingers massaging bed.
Blake seemed embarrassed. I knew he looked at the one bed, the busy pattern of the bedspread hiding all manner of stains and human fluids, and realized this would be nothing like the romantic rendezvous he always planned out in his head.
He unwrapped a glass from the thin plastic shrink wrap and handed it to me.
“I’ll go get ice.”
“Y’know what? I saw a Coke machine in the lobby. I’ll just get something in a can. You want anything?”
“I’ll get it. You should stay out of sight.”
I hated to think who might be happening by a place like this who might recognize me, but I let him make the chivalrous gesture.
“Just a Coke, then.”
“Be right back.”
He left me there. I tried closing my eyes and tuning in Sam but got only blackness. Fine by me. So damn tired.
I folded down the bedspread to a thin strip at the end of the bed. I’d seen enough crime scenes with infrared lights passing over a motel duvet to know the soup of human misery awaiting me there. I sat up in bed, stacking up three limp-dick pillows behind me.
So, okay, where was I? Lucas was still alive. Score one. That summed up my score though. Sam’s score must be up over fifty or so. Two entire offices, a few stragglers and one VIP. And Blake. Give me two I guess, although he defended himself much more than I saved him.
Time to really contemplate giving myself up and letting the real cops take care of things. It certainly couldn’t go much worse for me. If I went in of my own free will they might give me leniency. I might even be able to turn in evidence and cut a deal to keep me free in exchange for…me. Other me.
That would be a first. Think of the paperwork. The DA cuts me a deal to turn against myself. How would that even work?
The trouble is, in any of these scenarios, I have to convince people there are two of me. So far, the people who find out that information have found out a bit too late. And then there’s the sticky detail of the eventual shootout with Sam. No way she’s going in easy.
So let’s say I turn myself in, use my brain tapping technique to find her, they send a SWAT team to bring her in, shooting starts (she starts it, I’m no idiot) and my other half dies in a hail of bullets leaving me to die in the cold comfort of a jail cell.
I think not.
Besides, I need to get to Lucas, make sure he’s all right and tell him face to face about this whole thing. Spilling my guts to the man I love through an inch and half of plexiglass on a dirty plastic phone used for some nasty-ass phone sex an hour before is not my idea of coming clean.
And do I have enough to bring down Calder and Rizzo? That’s where I need to turn my focus. I know I’ll eventually turn myself in, if I don’t die first, so I’d better be damn well ready to go with a case someone would see valuable and air tight enough to cut me a deal over.
Blake came in without knocking. I jumped like a cat who’d been sleeping next to a vacuum cleaner. I rolled and ended up flipping off the side of the bed, landing on my knees in a crouch, using the steel cage of the bedsprings to protect me against the certain death I thought was coming through the door. Nine times out of ten I would have landed with my gun pulled and ready to dance. Not Good Samantha. She decides to hide. A church mouse, quivering and short of breath.
By the time I noticed Blake he stood frozen, a can of Coke in each hand and his eyes looking around for the big emergency.
“We need to come up with some sort of knock or something,” I said.
He relaxed. Wish I could say the same. “Sorry about that.” He held out the Coke to me and I took it. The carbonated bite in the back of my throat felt good, the teetotaler’s whiskey sting. And Good Samantha sure as hell rode the wagon. Hell, she drove the thing.
One of Daddy’s big life lessons was how to take a shot of whiskey. Daddy was a tip it back and take it in one kind of drinker. He said if you were supposed to sip it, they’d have made the glasses bigger. He taught me on my sixteenth birthday with the same reverence he gave to shooting a deer. The shooting lesson came at twelve. It’s no secret my Daddy wanted a boy. Didn’t bother me one bit, though.
Maybe if Mom hadn’t died young—breast cancer, why I get checked every year like clockwork—I’d have been a little more girly. Or maybe Dad would have had something else to focus his energy on other than training me like I was a one-woman Navy Seal.
There were times growing up when I thought for a moment I wanted a sibling. Brother or sister, didn’t matter. Then I’d go back to enjoying my over abundance of Christmas gifts, birthday parties, weekends alone with Dad. And now that I’d had a day or two with a twin, I’m here to tell you that bullshit is not for me. I couldn’t wait to go back to being an only child.We drank in silence, Blake and I. He sat on the chair set next to the TV watching a news report. A headline crawl across the bottom of the screen said City Under Siege. They ran back-to-back stories of the DEA assault and the DA’s office poisoning. They seemed to think there was some connection but didn’t have the thread between them. At least they didn’t show my face from any surveillance video or anything. Maybe the DEA was keeping that one all in the family. And so far it seemed like they hadn’t connected the explosion to the siege. The reporter then tied in the killing of judge Randolph and they threw out wild speculations like terrorism, a Central American death squad, gang violence. Reporters up in a lather was not good, but they clearly didn’t have much to go on which meant the noose wasn’t tightening around my neck just yet. “Go ahead,” I said.