No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [108]
I closed it.
“There ya go,” Vince said. “So anyway, to answer your question, maybe that’s why I fucking care. Is there anything else you’d like to know?” I shook my head. He looked ahead. “That your car?”
I nodded.
As he pulled up behind it, his cell rang. “Yeah?” he said. He listened a moment, then said, “Wait for me.”
He put the phone away, said, “They found him. He’s registered at the HoJo’s.”
“Shit,” I said, about to open my door. “I’ll follow you.”
“Forget your car,” Vince said, hitting the gas again, whipping out around my car. He headed up to I-95. It wasn’t the most direct route, but probably the fastest, given that the Howard Johnson hotel was the other side of town, at the end of an I-95 off-ramp. He barreled up the on-ramp and was doing eighty-five by the time he was merging with traffic.
Traffic on the interstate was light, and we were to the other side of town in just a few minutes. Vince had to lay on the brakes pretty hard coming down the ramp. He was still doing seventy when I saw the traffic light ahead of us.
He hung a right, then took another right into the HoJo parking lot. The SUV I’d ridden in earlier was parked just beyond the doors to the lobby, and when Blondie saw us he ran over to Vince’s window. Vince powered it down.
Blondie gave his boss a room number, said if you drove up the hill and around back, it was one of the ones you could pull right up to. Vince backed up, stopped, threw it into drive, and headed up a long, winding driveway that went behind the complex. The road swung hard left and leveled out behind a row of rooms with doors that opened onto the curb.
“Here it is,” Vince said, pulling the truck into a spot.
“I want to talk to him,” I said. “Don’t do anything crazy to him.”
Vince, already out of truck, gave me a dismissive wave without looking back at me. He went up to a door, paused a moment, noticed that it was already open, and rapped on it.
“Mr. Sloan?” he said.
A few doors down, a cleaning lady who’d just wheeled her cart up to a door looked in our direction.
“Mr. Sloan!” Vince shouted, opening the door wider. “It’s the manager. We have a bit of a problem. We need to talk to you.”
I stood away from the door and the window, so if he looked out he wouldn’t see me. It was possible, if he was the man who’d been standing in front of our house that night, that he knew what I looked like.
“He gone,” the maid said, loud enough for us to hear.
“What?” Vince said.
“He just check out, a few minute ago,” she said. “I clean it next.”
“He’s gone?” I said. “For good?”
The woman nodded.
Vince opened the door wide, strode into the room. “You cannot go in there,” the maid called down to us. But even I was inclined to ignore her, and followed Vince in.
The bed was unmade, the bathroom a mess of damp towels, but there were no signs that anyone was still staying in the unit. Toiletries gone, no suitcase.
One of Vince’s henchmen, Baldy, appeared in the doorway. “Is he here?”
Vince whirled around, walked up to Baldy and threw him up against the wall. “How long ago did you guys find out he was here?”
“We called you soon as we knew.”
“Yeah? Then what? You sat in the fucking car and waited for me when you should have been keeping your eyes open? The guy’s left.”
“We didn’t know what he looked like! What were we supposed to do?”
Vince tossed Baldy aside, walked out of the room and nearly ran into the maid.
“You not supposed—” she started to say.
“How long ago?” Vince asked, taking a twenty out of his wallet and handing it to her.
She slipped it into the pocket of her uniform. “Ten minute?”
“What kind of car did he have?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just a car. Brown. Dark window.”
“Did he say anything to you, say if he was heading home, anything like that?” I asked.
“He didn’t say anything to me.”
“Thanks,” Vince said to her. He tipped his head in the direction of his pickup, and we both got back in.
“Shit,” Vince said. “Shit.”
“What now?” I said.