Revenant Rising (20 page)
Escaping the scene becomes the priority as the one crowd withdraws, allowing Laurel to realize another crowd has assembled, attracted by the excitement generated by the first gathering. She also realizes Bemus has disappeared. Concern becomes worry until he reappears with three museum guards in tow. Together, they form a phalanx behind which she and the client are whisked out of the Sackler Wing and ultimately out of the museum.
Somewhere along the way, the client has put a protective arm around her that she peels away when they reach the parking garage, noticing that he does indeed have large hands.
By pure stick-to-itiveness and personal sacrifice, Hoople Jakeway ends the cross-country drive in something less than the seventy-two hours he allotted himself. This earns him a stay at a chain motel in North Bergen, New Jersey, where a real bed and a hot meal will go some way toward making up for the cat naps, soda pop, and snack food that kept him going for the duration.
He doesn’t jump out of the truck right off. His head thinks he’s still in wheeled motion like it did when he made a pee stop in Western Pennsylvania on the stretch that ought to be part of Ohio for being so flat and featureless. And it happened again at a gas stop at the good end of Pennsylvania, at the place they call the Delaware Water Gap, where the view of the heights added to his dizziness and it was easy to imagine his Lenni-Lenape brothers up there defending the pass-through. Here it won’t do to appear feeble-footed. When he does get out of the truck, he circles it a couple of times to make sure he won’t stagger when he goes in to register.
After checkin’s complete with cash on the barrelhead, he’s faced with the job of bringing in his odd assortment of belongings without drawing extra notice. He looks for an employees’ entrance, an out-of-the-way-type door like the one he slipped through at the fancy hotel in Los Angeles. This is no fancy hotel, though, and by the look of things in general, this is no fancy neighborhood.
With that in mind, he brings everything in through the front on a beat-up luggage cart found in the lobby. If he looks like a garbage collector making a delivery instead of a pickup, no one notices.
The seventh-floor room is fancy compared to what he’s used to, but it smells like the kitchen of the abandoned homestead in Michigan. No, it smells like the unaired back room of Kings Tavern in Bimmerman—of spilled drinks, spittoons, and overflowing ashtrays.
The one window overlooks the parking lot of a truck-rental place and a busy road beyond, and he could be looking through amber-tinted glazing or some weird kind of science fiction-type smog because the glass is filmed with a heavy coating of nicotine that sticks to his fingers when he touches it. Still, he grimaces, this place is better than the back end of a Jimmy or chancing it in the open where they’d pick him up for vagrancy.
He unloads the luggage cart and shoves it out into the hall before test-flopping on the bed, releasing smells he’d just as soon not guess at. Despite the grime and bad smells there’s no regret about the decision to stop here because it wasn’t a thought-out plan that made the choice, it was instinct and gut feeling.
While homing in on New York City on I-80, something other than a map told him to veer off the interstate before he got to the George Washington Bridge and too many opportunities to take a wrong road and wind up in Connecticut. He was drawn to Route 46 and a sign indicating alternate routes to the city as if the truck was the planchette on a Ouija board. The unseen force then guided him onto Route 3, where he got his first sight of New York City and the idea he might not want to jump in right away like some showoff tourist plunging into ice-cold Lake Superior without tempering himself first.
The one thing he forgot to look for when drawn to this location was a convenience store. His food supply is down to a half-stack of saltines and a few scrapings in the bottom of a peanut butter jar. Replenishing is not an emergency, though. Not yet. Didn’t he already promise himself a hot meal after going without for so long?
The clock radio by the bed shows the time as quarter to five—too late for lunch and too soon for dinner, but the card next to the device says the onsite restaurant serves a full menu all day long.
Downstairs, the Salisbury steak platter they serve him barely qualifies as a hot meal, and the black coffee he asked for ahead of the meal is still sitting beside the brewer where the sulky waitress left it to go do something else, like pick her teeth. When he reminds her about the coffee, she takes her time bringing it, then sets it down hard so that some spills over into the saucer. He mops up the spill with a paper napkin, tastes the coffee and of course it’s cold.
Nice and polite-like, he asks for a fresh cup and the waitress pours the cold coffee that he’s drunk from back into the brewer jug and refills his cup from the same jug—as though he would drink it now.
He resigns himself to laying out money for the string of insults, knowing he’ll probably suffer worse before he’s learned how to get along in this foreign land.
Upstairs in the grimy room, Hoop could be forgiven if he hit the sack before the sun’s gone all the way down. And he would stretch out on the bed, clothes and all, if the stuff brought from Cliff Grant’s place wasn’t telling him sleep’s not apt to come till he’s had a look at it and figured out what it’s good for, if anything.
He hefts the first bag his hand comes to and empties it on the bed. Folders fall out higgledy-piggledy. Some fall open, releasing yellowed newspaper clippings and tattered pages torn from magazines. Shuffling through these samples is like suffering through a long drawn-out flashback because he’s seen this material before, in one supermarket publication or another, at one time or another. They all bear on Colin Elliot and, if you know to read between the lines and look beyond the picture outlines, they all show how his wicked rock star ways brought about the ruination of Audrey Shantz. Only she’s not called that; she’s called by the fancified name of Aurora.
Without reading the fine print he knows each item will credit Cliff Grant as photojournalist—another fancified name. And without looking at any of them overlong, he knows they’re only useful to him as red-flag reminders of the score he’s come to settle.
The second bag contains more of the same, along with an extra-thick folder bulging with whole sections of those papers they call tabloids. These all have the kind of headlines that make you buy the paper then leave you feeling shortchanged when you find out it was a come-on. He’s seen most of these as well, harking back to a time when he didn’t know better than to get sucked in by headlines like the one he’s looking at now.
BRITISH ROCKER FATHERS CHILD WITH THREE WOMEN
Only a jackassed-fool wouldn’t know that the three women will be identified on an inside page as the kid’s mother, grandmother, and babysitter.
He refills the second bag and casts it aside. Nothing there to keep him fired up because the bulk of it’s untrue, and wishing won’t make it true because he’s already tried.
With a knife to his throat, he might laugh at trash like that and even allow that Colin Elliot has received some abominable bad treatment by the press. But isn’t that the cost for making yourself famous? And shouldn’t you have to pay for dragging others into your shameful limelight?
Hoop goes into the bathroom for a drink of water. The faucet won’t turn off all the way. The dripping might bother him if it weren’t for the louder sound of the toilet running.
Bone-weary and still too stirred up to sleep, he digs into the third bag and brings out the kind of stuff that will keep him fired up—pictures and reports that make Audrey look bad, drag her name through the mud, and blame her instead of the rock star for her fall from grace.
He sits down on the floor to go through these items piece by piece. A lot of the reports are from overseas—written in foreign language—and a lot of the pictures look like they’ve been monkeyed with. He doesn’t have to search far to find support for that guess. Halfway through the pile he comes across a paste job for sure. The figure shown with Audrey doesn’t match in size or any other way and you’d have to be the worst kind of jackassed-fool to believe they were ever really together.
The same instinct that warned him away from the George Washington Bridge now tells him to either go slow or pay no mind to the next thick folder he comes to. He chooses slow and takes his time lifting the cover to reveal a stack of 8x10 copies of the dirty pictures he saw hanging from Cliff Grant’s wire clothesline earlier in the week. He shudders and looks away the same as when he first glimpsed these shots of the former Audrey Shantz showing her private parts.
He scrambles up off the floor, searches everywhere for matches. He’ll get rid of the filthy pictures the same way he destroyed the ones clipped to Grant’s clothesline.
He finds a half-used book of matches on the windowsill, moves to make a bonfire of the offending material, and stays his hand at the last minute. He’d be a lot dumber than a jackassed-fool to risk burning down a multistory motel in order to clean up Audrey’s reputation.
That last thought, about her reputation, makes him realize he ought to have another look at the shiny photographs. Maybe she wasn’t forced to pose for those pictures. Maybe they were created by scissors and paste pot instead of her rock star husband’s wicked wish to flaunt her.
He can’t do it right away; he has to work into it. When he is able to gather up the pictures and stare at each pose under the bare bulb of a lamp stripped of its shade, he’s unable to see anything that says Audrey’s head had been attached to someone else’s body. And he’s unable to decide right away if this is good news or bad news. In the end, he decides it doesn’t matter because, either way, Audrey is not to blame. That’s all he’s out to prove.
He isolates the filthy pictures from the other stuff he’s looked at, removes the last item from the bag—the rotary file he’s been saving like it was dessert—and lets weariness drop him fully clothed onto the littered bed.