Dumb question, and she felt stupid for even posing it. She understood full well Alex had only his parents, no other relatives even in China, for all she knew.
Sam gave up. Just drove in silence, no words and no destination in mind. Finally a fog bank too thick to risk driving through forced her onto a side road, black as tar, that ran perpendicular to the PCH. It seemed as if she had driven into some spooky netherworld of nothingness until she spotted an old-fashioned diner and truck stop off to the side. It looked practically deserted. Kind of place that was long past a prime lived out in an age before superhighways stitched their way in all directions.
“I’m hungry,” Alex said suddenly.
Sam aimed her Beetle toward the parking lot.
*
She watched him eat. A pile of bacon and eggs to go with a double order of toast, while she couldn’t even think of food right now. Sam waited for him to speak, tried again when he didn’t.
“What do we do next?”
Alex didn’t answer right away. There were only a few other customers around them, none at all resembling the drone things dressed as cops or the ash man, who was more of a shadow. Bells hung from the door jangled a few times to announce the entry of new customers, making them stiffen each time. Sam was seated with a clear view of it, and none of those coming and going seemed to even register their presence. This wasn’t the kind of place you ate to get noticed or notice anybody else.
“I need to think,” Alex said, shoveling the last of his eggs into his mouth. “That’s where we need to go, somewhere I can think.”
“You think you’re still in danger? I mean, you are still in danger.”
“We can’t go to the cops.”
“Why?”
“Because those guys were dressed as cops.”
“Sure, but…” Sam’s voice drifted off, her thought incomplete.
“Drop me somewhere,” Alex told her.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere.”
“And just leave you?”
He leaned a little forward. “I don’t want you in danger too.”
“Endangered.”
“What?”
“It’s how you should’ve said it. Hey, didn’t think you were going to get out of our tutoring session, did you?”
She thought her attempt at humor had failed miserably, but Alex smiled, a tight smile.
“And I’m already in danger,” Sam continued.
“Endangered, remember?”
“No, the way I used the phrase was proper.”
“Proper? Who uses that word anymore?”
“The people who write the SAT and ACT tests.”
“Not on my radar right now.”
“Tell me what is.”
“That,” Alex said, pointing over her shoulder out the window.
39
SLEEPOVER
THE MOTEL THEY ENDED up at wasn’t the one Alex had pointed to out the window, because that one and two more located miles from the Pacific Coast Highway had insisted on credit cards.
The fourth one had a clerk who couldn’t have cared less, probably as much as he did about the sign that had so many bulbs burned out it was hard to read. The Monterey Motor Inn was one of those places that looked grown out of the landscape instead of built upon it. So old it might well have been held together by the weeds and dead brush that surrounded the U-shaped assemblage of buildings enclosing a crumbling parking lot with ancient asphalt bleached near-white in the sunniest spots. The office was on the right as Sam pulled into the parking lot, the sign flashing amid a nest of bulbs that spelled out only a portion of the letters.
The clerk had Coke-bottle glasses that made his eyes look huge, but he squinted as he looked up from a comic book when they entered. Then looked away again, back at the page, just as fast. Sam and Alex approached the counter to be met with him raising a hand into the air like a stop sign until he finished the page he was on.
“Cash only.”
“Fine by us,” Alex said.
He noticed a cheap ceramic figurine sporting a boner below the sign KNOCK WOOD and spun it around so Sam wouldn’t see it. She forked over the forty-dollar nightly rate, bemused by his gentlemanly gesture.
The clerk took the bills in a hand that was shiny with oil, smirking as he regarded them. A couple of horny teenagers looking to do what horny teenagers did. Cash was the order of the night because credit cards could be traced too easily.
“We’re not in Monterey,” Sam noted.
“Hey,” said the clerk, “you’re a smart one, aren’t you?”
“So why’s this place called the Monterey Motor Inn?”
“Hey, I don’t even know why it’s called a motor inn at all.” The clerk shrugged. “Phones in the rooms don’t work and the cable’s busted,” he added, handing an old-fashioned key with a massive plastic fob shaped like California across the counter, stained with what looked like chocolate. “I called the guy.”
Sam didn’t care that the phones didn’t work; she had her own, but was afraid to use it.