Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [30]
Mamoud had driven over the bay bridge and delivered the fare to a motel in a strip of low-rent motels, sleazy dive bars, and tourist trap restaurants practically in the shadow of the Lexington. The motel had cabins painted pink, each with a plastic flamingo stuck in the ground just outside the door. Swamp coolers chugged in the windows. The place looked like it had been built in 1947 and hadn’t been remodeled or updated since, although the coat of pink paint appeared to be relatively fresh.
The office was an eight-by-eight cubicle with a sand-gritty linoleum floor and a counter topped by a sheet of bulletproof glass that had an opening at the bottom where credit cards or cash could be slid through. Ford would have been willing to bet that most of the place’s business was done in cash.
On the other side of the glass was an old black man with a stringy neck. He wore a polo shirt and was texting somebody on a cell phone. Without looking up from what he was doing, he said to the agents, “No vacancies. I don’t care what the sign outside says. The NO part is burned out.”
The old man’s voice was muffled by the glass. Ford raised his own voice and said, “We’re meeting a friend here.”
“No, you’re not,” the old man said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“This ain’t that kind of place. We got a respectable trade. If you’re lookin’ for dope or hookers, go somewheres else.”
“Dope and hookers are the last things we’re looking for,” Ford said. “Really, we’re just looking for our friend.” He slid a fifty through the opening in the glass. A few years earlier, it would have been a twenty, but the cost of everything just kept going up.
The old man didn’t take the bill, but at least he set the phone aside. “What’s this friend of yours look like?”
He didn’t ask for a name. Names in a place like this would most likely be phonies anyway.
Ford held out his hand. “About this tall, blond hair, mustache. He’s not very old. Not much more than a kid.”
The old man’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What do you want with him? I don’t need no trouble here. Last time I had to call the cops, they told me they didn’t want to have to keep on comin’ out here.”
“No trouble at all,” Ford assured him. “We’re just supposed to meet him, take him around and show him some of the night life. He’s from out of town, you know.”
“The cousin of a friend of ours,” Parker added over Ford’s shoulder.
“Uh-huh,” the old man said. Clearly, he didn’t believe a word they had told him, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off that fifty now. His gnarled hand suddenly made it disappear with surprising dexterity. “Cabin Twelve,” he said. “But you best not be lyin’ to me about that trouble.”
“Don’t worry,” Ford said. “You won’t even know we’re down there.”
As they left the tiny office, Parker said, “What are the odds he was telling us the truth?”
“Pretty good, I think. He was practically drooling over that fifty.”
“And the odds that he’s already calling the guy in Cabin Twelve to warn him we’re coming?”
Ford saw the door of the cabin in question jerk open. “Even better.”
They started to run as the young man they had seen at the hotel across the bay that afternoon darted outside. He spotted them, stopped short, and stood there for a second with his head twitching back and forth as he looked for a way to escape.
While he was doing that, a car careened into the motel parking lot with a screech of tires and headed straight for the seemingly immobilized young man.
“Damn it!” Ford said. He knew that he and Parker had unintentionally led the killers right to their quarry.
Parker put on an extra burst of speed while Ford reached under the cowboy shirt and pulled out his gun. He started firing at the driver’s window of the speeding car, but the way the glass merely starred a little under the slugs’ impact told him it was bulletproof. The car never slowed down.
Parker left his feet in a dive that sent him crashing into the blond man. His momentum carried both of them out of the car’s