I GOT MYSELF A CHEAP ROOM at a Holiday Inn clone, dumped my bag in the room, and wandered down the hall to the vending machine. I bought a Coke, a bag of Doritos, and a Milky Way. In any given week, I might succumb and treat myself to one trashy snack, but splurging on all three at once seemed to be evidence that I was feeling sorry for myself.
I watched the news without taking in what any of the stories were about, then Letterman without laughing at any of the jokes, then turned off the light and tried to get to sleep. I tossed and turned and punched the pillow. I don’t sleep well when there’s not someone in the bed next to me, and at two in the morning I felt overwhelmed with the notion that there might be a lot of nights like this in my future.
I had too much time to think, and worry, about a great many things.
First, Sarah. I could only hope that by finding out the truth behind this mess I’d been dragged into, and by trying to take control of the situation instead of letting it control me, I might somehow redeem myself.
Then there was Trixie. My quest to find out just what kind of trouble she was in, and what had led her to this point, was motivated by more than a desire to help out a friend. I needed to know, for myself, what the hell I’d been dragged into. And if uncovering that truth brought some aggravation and inconvenience to Trixie, well, if it happened, it happened.
And then there was me. Well, I guess it was already about me. About me and Sarah, about me and the kids, about me and Trixie, about me and my job. As I lay there in the hotel bed, staring at the ceiling, turning to the side and watching the luminous numbers of the digital clock work their way to 3:00 a.m., I hoped that maybe these events, and perhaps the story that city health inspector Brian Sandler detailed for me, would help me win my way back into the newsroom, and liberate Sarah from Home!
I couldn’t have known then I’d be happy just to come out of all this with my life.
I woke up at eight-thirty. For me, that’s sleeping in. I had a quick shower, dressed, and went to the hotel lobby for breakfast. They’d laid on Special K and Frosted Flakes in sealed, single-serving plastic bowls, muffins, doughnuts, Danishes, coffee and tea. It was self-serve and all-you-can-eat, and a family of four was taking full advantage, stuffing cereal and pastries into bags for the road ahead.
Once in the car, I got out my map and double-checked how I was going to reach Groverton. There was a yellow wooden pencil in the tray between the seats, and I used it like a pointer, tracing the route I would take.
It was a long shot, of course. All I had was a gas receipt leading me there. But it was the best, and only real clue I had. Groverton was farther away than I’d first realized—two hours, and still heading in the direction away from home.
I didn’t have much of a game plan for when I reached my destination. I figured I could find the gas station where Trixie got her receipt, but beyond that, I couldn’t think of much to do but drive around looking for my car, the one Trixie had fled in. Perhaps, once I got there, other opportunities would present themselves.
As I drove, tuning in Trixie’s eight-speaker stereo to a jazz station—my friendship with Lawrence Jones had expanded my musical tastes in the last couple of years—that was playing some Stan Getz, Oscar Peterson, and Diana Krall, I tried to sort out the things I had learned in the last day.
Trixie, if she was the person I’d been hearing about named Candace, or Candy, certainly had a colorful background. She’d come to work at the Kickstart, fallen in love with a man named Swain, who ended up plastered onto the front of a locomotive. She’d had a child. She’d disappeared after three members of the Slots motorcycle gang were murdered at the Kickstart. And the surviving gang leader, Gary Merker, trying to earn a bit of cash selling presumably stolen stun guns, had been putting the word out, for years, that if anyone ever saw her, they were to let his mother know, so that she could pass the message on. And shortly after that happened, Martin Benson was found dead in Trixie’s basement dungeon, with two telltale marks on his body indicating that he’d been shot with a stun gun before he’d had his throat slit.
And Merker’s charming mother had said that the reason her son wanted to find this Candace so badly was because she’d taken something from him. Something that he wanted to take back from her.
I had a hunch that Merker wanted more from Candace than just something she’d stolen from him. He wanted to take from her the memories of what had transpired the night of that massacre, her memories of what she’d witnessed. And I was guessing Merker would have a permanent way of dealing with a witness.