Gone Tomorrow - Lee Child [92]
Lee said, “So the Hoths are covering their asses too.”
“Wrong tense,” I said. “They already covered them. They’re hunkered down someplace and anyone who might have known where is dead.”
The train stopped at 23rd Street. The doors opened. No one got on. No one got off. Theresa Lee stared at the floor. Jacob Mark looked across her at me and said, “If Homeland Security can’t even track Lila Hoth into the country, then they also can’t tell if she went to California or not. Which means it could have been her, with Peter.”
“Yes,” I said. “It could have been.”
The doors closed. The train moved on.
Theresa Lee looked up from the floor and turned to me and said, “What happened to those four guys was our fault, you know. With the hammers. Your fault, specifically. You told Lila you knew about them. You turned them into a loose end.”
I said, “Thanks for pointing that out.”
You tipped her over the edge.
Your fault, specifically.
The train rattled into the 28th Street station.
We got out at 33rd Street. None of us wanted to hit Grand Central. Too many cops, and in Jacob Mark’s case at least, maybe too many negative associations. At street level Park Avenue was busy. Two cop cars came past in the first minute. To the west was the Empire State Building. Too many cops. We doubled back south and took a quiet cross-street toward Madison. I was feeling pretty good by then. I had spent sixteen hours out of seventeen fast asleep, and I was full of food and fluids. But Lee and Jake looked beat. They had nowhere to go and weren’t used to it. Obviously they couldn’t go home. They couldn’t go to friends, either. We had to assume all their known haunts were being watched.
Lee said, “We need a plan.”
I liked the look of the block we were on. New York has hundreds of separate micro-neighborhoods. Flavor and nuance vary street by street, sometimes building by building. Park and Madison in the high 20s are slightly seedy. The cross-streets are a little down at the heel. Maybe once they were high end, and maybe one day they will be again, but right then they were comfortable. We hid out under sidewalk scaffolding for a spell and watched drunks staggering home from bars, and people from nearby apartment houses walking their dogs before bed. We saw a guy with a Great Dane the size of a pony, and a girl with a rat terrier the size of the Great Dane’s head. Overall I preferred the rat terrier. Small dog, big personality. The little guy thought he was boss of the world. We waited until the clock passed midnight and then we snaked back and forth west and east until we found the right kind of hotel. It was a narrow place with an out-of-date illuminated sign backed with low-wattage bulbs. It looked a little run-down and grimy. Smaller than I would have liked. Bigger places work much better. Greater chance of empty rooms, more anonymity, less supervision. But all in all the place we were looking at was feasible.
It was a decent target for the fifty-dollar trick.
Or maybe we could even get away with forty.
In the end we had to bid our way up to seventy-five, probably because the night porter suspected we had some kind of a sexual threesome in mind. Maybe because of the way Theresa Lee was looking at me. There was something going on in her eyes. I wasn’t sure what. But clearly the night porter saw an opportunity to raise his rate. The room he gave us was small. It was in back of the building and had twin beds and a narrow window on an air shaft. It was never going to show up in a tourist brochure, but it felt secure and clandestine and I could tell that Lee and Jake felt good about spending the night in it. But equally I could tell that neither one of them felt good about spending two nights in it, or five, or ten.
“We need help,” Lee said. “We can’t live like this indefinitely.”
“We can if we want to,” I said. “I’ve lived like this for ten years.”
“OK, a normal person can’t live like this indefinitely. We need help. This problem isn’t going to go away.”
“It could,”