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  Normally he’d be home by now, but Jed still lived with his parents, only a couple of hundred yards away from the motel, in the same house he’d grown up in. The little back room behind the office was his home away from home, a place where he could drink a few beers and watch television, maybe have a toke, without dealing with the reproving looks from his parents. Every now and then he’d even managed to get a girl in there, something that would have been out of the question in his parents’ house. It didn’t happen very often and it was rarely the same girl more than once.

  It had been another long, slow day that required him to do nothing more than just be there. No rooms rented, and while there was always stuff to do around the place – actually it was falling apart – Jed didn’t often do it. He wasn’t the handyman type.

  His parents had retired a few years ago, tired of trying to compete with the chain motels that had moved into the other side of town just after the new mall had been built. After two years of trying to find a buyer for the place they’d given up and Jed had seen his opening. He talked them into letting him run the place and even though they knew better they’d agreed to it. The place had been paid off years ago anyway, and they’d let themselves believe that the responsibility would do him good.

  It hadn’t. Jed was in his late twenties, going absolutely nowhere and liking it. He’d worked around the motel since he was a kid, and like everything else he’d ever done he’d just learned enough to get by. Getting by was the limit of his ambition, what he did best. There were still a few people who stayed there, either those who couldn’t afford anything else or who wanted to run a very low profile. As far as he knew he had the only place in town that didn’t require a credit card imprint, so maybe that was it. Couples would show up once in a while, just for that reason.

  Fine with him. He did have enough sense to keep his mouth shut when he recognized somebody local, always kept a deadpan expression when some poor sheepish horny bastard showed up to book a room. He didn’t care who they were or what they did as long as they didn’t expect too much.

  He heard a car pull up outside, swore to himself, stubbed out the toke he’d just lit. Jed hadn’t bothered to turn off the office lights or lock up, just flopped on the couch in the back room to unwind a little. He heard a couple of car doors close, then the door to the office open. He heaved himself off the couch, went through the small door that led into the office itself. There was a front counter there, chipped formica on top, an old computer that wasn’t even good enough for video games, and a telephone. The room itself was small, made even smaller when the two men walked in. Jed was tall, maybe a couple of inches over six feet, but he was skinny as a rake. The bigger one was about the same height as he was but he was massive, bald head squatted down on no neck at all, a barrel chest and heavy shoulders. He hadn’t shaved for a while, salt and pepper stubble, and he had piercing blue eyes that had absolutely nothing behind them.

  The other one was different, slick, younger. He had a full head of gelled dark hair, mean dark eyes, sharp features. He glanced disdainfully around the tiny office, but when he turned his head toward Jed he turned on a smile like he was flipping a switch. Asshole, Jed thought, but he was careful not to show it. The guy still outweighed Jed by thirty or forty pounds, reminded him of some of the jocks who used to torment him back in high school – at least until they found out he could get them dope. The unpleasant memory triggered an unpleasant thought, that maybe these guys were here to rob the place. If they were the joke was on them. He hadn’t had any guests for two or three days and he didn’t have a single room booked.

  “We need a couple of rooms,” the smaller guy smirked, “you all booked up?”

  He was a smartass, alright. Jed forced a self-deprecating smile.

  “I think we can fit you in. How long will you be staying?”

  The man glanced a question at his partner, got nothing, turned back to Jed.

  “Dunno yet. You got a weekly rate?”

  Jed nodded, told them. They didn’t want to use a credit card, paid cash, big surprise. When he asked their names for the register the bald guy got a trace of a smile on his face but otherwise ignored the question. The smaller one just shrugged, finally relented.

  “My name’s Hendricks. He’s Nason.”

  He took out a roll of bills, counted them out and put them on the counter, not in Jed’s hand. Jed tried to keep a poker face. Cash money, might or might not go into the books. His parents didn’t pay much attention to the place anymore, so that gave him some leeway.

  Jed turned around for the keys, picked out two side by side rooms only a couple of doors away from the office on the right. He tended to keep the rooms closest to the office in the best condition. There were rooms near the far end of the motel that he hadn’t cleaned or aired out in weeks.

  These were better, adjoining rooms that he’d cleaned a few days ago. Jed decided not to point out that they were connected to each other in case these two took it the wrong way. He turned back, put the keys on the counter. They landed a little too hard, like he’d tossed them. These guys made him nervous and when he got nervous his hands shook a little, like he didn’t have control of them. He tried to cover by saying something, anything.

  “This time of year’s pretty quiet so I don’t keep the office open all night,” truth was he never did, didn’t want to be on call 24/7 and didn’t have the money to pay an extra person, “but if you need anything just let me know and I’ll try to help.”

  “If you’re here,” that smartass grin again.

  “If I’m here,” he nodded, “but I stay pretty late most nights.”

  The bald guy already had his key and was on his way out the door. The younger one held his eyes for a moment, then picked up the key.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Jed.”

  The guy seemed to find that amusing.

  “Okay, Jed. If we need anything we’ll let you know.”

  Condescending bastard, Jed thought, but let it go. Not that he had a choice. He’d seen the money and he’d gotten the vibe. It was all about keeping his distance. If he did that maybe they’d stay longer and more money would follow.

  That was about as far into the future as Jed’s thinking ever got.

  8

  The knock on the door was faint, tentative, and at first Frank was able to convince himself that it wasn’t a knock at all, that he was hearing things. The knocking stopped for a moment, then resumed again. It was only slightly louder than before but somehow insistent.

  It stopped again. Frank sat still, listening to the footsteps on the wooden steps of the porch. They were light, maybe a woman’s, and for an unreasoning, hopeful moment he thought they might belong to Adrienne. He got up, went to the front window and looked out through a narrow gap in the drapes.

  An old Buick sedan was idling on the road near the bottom of the driveway. It had finally gotten milder and a lot of the snow had melted, but enough remained that the Buick’s driver had decided to stick to the shoulder of the road. He could see footsteps in the muddy snow leading to his house and then back to the car.

  “Shit.”

  He drew back from the window but it was too late. He’d been seen. A woman had been leaning in the passenger side window of the car, apparently talking to its driver, and she’d glanced back at the house just as he’d looked out. Frank swore to himself and hazarded another glance outside. She was already on her way back to his front door. The driver’s door opened and a man got out.

  • • •

  It was hard reconciling what little he knew of Jimmy Nesbitt with the people sitting in front of him now. Eldon Nesbitt was a big man – he’d towered over Frank at the door – but his wife Jane was something else entirely. Prim, almost petite, greying hair pulled back in a bun and tired, sad eyes reddened from tears. Neither one of them looked like they’d slept in a long time.

  Frank had inexplicably felt a flush of guilt, even though officially he’d been excluded
from the aftermath of the Simmonds incident. Not much he could have done from a hospital bed, but he’d been out of hospital for a while now and he realized that he hadn’t thought about the Nesbitt kid, not once. Now the boy’s parents were sitting on Frank’s battered couch, Mr. Nesbitt dwarfing his wife. The kid must have taken after his mother, Frank thought.

  “I’m not the chief here anymore,” Frank told them.

  “We know that,” Mr. Nesbitt said, “but the chief now–” he searched for a name.

  “Brent Williams,” Frank said.

  “Yeah,Williams – he hardly talked to us at all,” Frank could see the anger building at the memory, “he made it sound like Jimmy was some kind of criminal, as if he had something to do with what happened to the Simmonds girl.”

  “But they were looking for him,” Frank said quietly.

  Something like fury crossed the big man’s face.

  “They were looking for him as long as they thought he might have done something wrong. As soon as they – you – found Emily Simmonds they just stopped looking.”

  Jane Nesbitt started to cry again, very softly. Eldon looked somehow embarrassed, then moved a huge scarred hand toward his wife. Her hands were clasped together in her lap and his one hand engulfed both of her own.

  Frank just nodded, realizing how quickly he’d dropped out of the loop. Since he’d gotten out of the hospital he’d rarely talked to anybody, hadn’t gone out unless he absolutely had to. He still had a scanner that no one from the department had bothered to come and pick up. He’d only listened to it a couple of times, just after he’d been released from hospital, but after that had turned it off and kept it off.

  The Nesbitts were staring at him expectantly.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Nesbitt, I’m very sorry about all this,” he could see their faces falling already, “ but there isn’t much I can do.”

  “All we know,” Mr. Nesbitt said, “is that we can’t find our boy and that nobody’s helping us. We thought – maybe you could talk to somebody.”

  Frank doubted that would have any impact but he didn’t want to get into it with them. Under the circumstances they weren’t asking for much.

  “I can try,” he told them, “but I can’t sit here and tell you it will do a lot of good.”

  Eldon Nesbitt looked over at his wife.

  “I told you, honey. We’re wasting our time,” there was no anger in his voice this time, just resignation.

  He heaved himself awkwardly off the couch. His wife looked up at him, startled by his sudden movement, then looked back at Frank. She started to say something, then stopped. After a moment she stood up too. Frank struggled to find something to say, somewhere between expressing regret and getting into something he didn’t want to be part of. Raising false expectations wouldn’t help them.

  He hadn’t come up with anything by the time he heard the door close.

  9

  Kenny Langdon had never seen them before. Everyone in the bar had clocked the two men as soon as they walked in. They were both pretty big, even the smaller, clean-shaven one a solid-looking six feet or so, the other guy another ball game entirely. He was taller than his partner, probably outweighed him by fifty pounds. He was completely bald, more stubble on his face than his head. Pretty good chance he was called Bubba. He looked like standard issue muscle, or he was trying to.

  They were both wearing three-quarter length leather jackets, one brown, one black, like they’d done their shopping at Hoods-R-Us. Maybe they were what they looked like or maybe they were just two mean looking hombres with lousy taste in clothes. Maybe they were just passing through, but heavies like this needed watching until he was sure.

  They’d come in about an hour ago and he’d been keeping a discreet eye on them ever since. Nobody in Strothwood was comfortable with strangers anyway, and usually they didn’t even need a reason. Sometimes they were openly hostile, for that matter. With these two hostility wasn’t an option, not until Langdon said so.

  For now there were good reasons not to take it that far. The first was that they might be cops, members of one of the dizzying array of alphabet soup agencies or organizations from the Staties on up, any one of which might have decided to go slumming.

  Langdon thought that was unlikely. Strothwood liked to handle its own problems, and so did its police department, especially now that Brent Williams had taken over the chief’s slot from Stallings. From what Langdon had heard Williams had undergone some kind of personality transplant since his promotion, gone from being an easygoing number two to Stallings to some kind of gung-ho super cop. The general consensus around town was that he was trying to prove something.

  Strothwood was a small place, and as far as Langdon knew he represented the only crime in town worth bothering with. The new vibe with Williams was an inconvenience but Langdon had always been smart enough to limit the appearance of his own success and stay under the radar. After that nightmare with Jimmy Nesbitt he’d stayed even lower. Even Frank Stallings had never been able to lay a glove on him, not that he’d tried very hard. Stallings had been a detective in some kind of big-time police unit in Pittsburgh before coming home to Strothwood, and it hadn’t taken Langdon long to get a read on him. He’d figured Stallings for a burnout case, getting out of Pittsburgh while the getting was good. Once Stallings had gotten back to Strothwood he probably figured he could just stroke it, go through the motions in a backwater where nothing ever happened. That was just fine with Kenny Langdon.

  Even to Langdon’s discerning eye it was getting harder and harder to tell the bad guys and good guys apart. He wasn’t that worried if the two strangers shooting pool tonight were just a couple of undercovers sniffing around. If they were cops they weren’t local, and if they weren’t local they didn’t know shit.

  There was another possibility that had worried him for a long time – that whoever had done Jimmy Nesbitt would eventually come back and get it right. Jimmy had been at Langdon’s place, drove the same kind of vintage Camaro as Langdon did. Maybe they’d screwed it up the first time, had mistaken Jimmy Nesbitt for Langdon. Otherwise it made no sense. Nesbitt was a kid, not important enough or dangerous enough to go to the trouble of killing. He’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Shit happens.

  For now Kenny just kept an eye on the two men, watched them playing pool at the back. They were keeping to themselves, minding their own business. So far he had nothing to go on, couldn’t do what his instincts told him to do – not now and not in here.

  There were a lot of bodies between the pool table and where Langdon was sitting. He was turned sideways on the stool, one arm resting on the bar, and he’d been able to watch them without being obvious about it. Their apparently casual glances around the room had been limited mostly to the various pieces of eye candy wandering around, hadn’t come to rest on him at all.

  It was early and the place was already crowded. Strothwood was getting hit with yet another late season snowstorm and storm nights were always different in here, everybody and his or her dog homing in on a warm, dry place – as long as it wasn’t actually home.

  That was probably all it was, Langdon thought, a storm night. Wherever these guys were going the storm had probably kept them from getting there.

  Sherry came back from the tables and reached across him to pick up an empty from the bar, her breasts brushing his arm on the way by.

  “You ever see those two before?” he asked her.

  She didn’t have to ask who he was talking about.

  “You’re being paranoid again,” she told him.

  Well, yeah. He hadn’t told her all of it, and he never would. She picked up the tray, took it back around the bar. It was shaping up to be a busy night and Sherry didn’t have a lot of time for conversation, not even with him.

  He watched her as she put some fresh drinks on a tray and brought them out from behind the bar, watched the surreptitious glances follow her every step of the way. That never bothered Kenny – everybody in to
wn knew what would happen if they stepped out of line with Sherry. The two newcomers shooting pool wouldn’t know that, though, and Kenny waited to see what would happen. He was in an awkward position here – if they made some kind of overt move on her or gave her a hard time he had to do something about it, something public.

  Kenny was smart enough to know that could end badly. These two looked a notch or two above the usual, and getting his butt publicly kicked wouldn’t do anything for him at all. He could pretty much count on Saunders’ bouncers for backup, but they were mostly good for hammering the shit out of drunks, not guys like this.

  It got decided for him. Sherry’s next stop was their pool table. The smaller guy eyed her appreciatively but that was all. Kenny watched as she turned on that smile of hers, a smile brilliant enough to turn a man’s eyes upward from the swelling cleavage and Lycra. In spite of himself Kenny felt a twinge of jealousy. Think I’ve been with her too long, he told himself.

  • • •

  Sherry didn’t like the way they looked at her,but she kept the smile in place. Business was business.

  “So what do you do for excitement around here?” the smaller guy asked, as if he didn’t think excitement was possible in a place like this.

  “You’re looking at it,” Sherry told him.

  The guy smiled.

  “You mean you?” his smile was unpleasant, insinuating. Thinks he’s God’s gift to women, she thought. Another one.

  She smiled back at him anyway. You needed tip money to make a job like this work. She gestured vaguely around her.

  “I meant the bar.”

  The guy looked around at the crowd, the tables. She noticed he had a diamond stud in his ear. A big one, and it glittered even in the darkness of the bar. Greaseball, she thought. He looked back at her and shrugged.