The Gates of Winter - Mark Anthony [61]
He peered into brightly lit stores as he passed by. The people in them smiled as they purchased designer shoes or sipped steaming coffee drinks. When they were ready, they would dash out to cars already warmed by waiting valets and speed away home. No one lingered out on the street; no one, that was, except those who had nowhere else to go. Travis's feet scuffed to a halt, and he stared into a men's clothing store, thinking how he might go in and get warm for a moment.
But only a moment. Then a clerk, or possibly two, would hurry up to him and speak in low voices that he had to leave, that if he didn't, they would call the police. Travis knew from experience they would do just that. Then he would be back outside, and the brief flirtation with warmth would only make the cold more bitter. It was better not to go in at all.
As he turned away, he caught a reflection of himself in the store window. His beard and hair were shaggy and unkempt: copper flecked with more gray than he ever would have guessed. His face was haggard beyond his thirty-four years, and dirt smudged his coat and ill-fitting jeans. But it was the eyes that would truly startle the clerks: gray, set deep into his face, and as haunted as the streets of this city. They were the eyes of a man with nowhere left to go.
He hadn't planned on being homeless in Denver in February. Then again, he supposed no one did. However, the gold coins he had brought from Eldh had fetched far less than he had hoped they would at the pawnshop on East Colfax where he had finally been able to sell them.
At first, all of the pawnbrokers he approached had seemed suspicious of the coins. He and Grace had sold Eldhish coins for money once before in Denver. Had agents from Duratek visited the area pawnshops, telling their proprietors to be on the lookout for a man or woman selling strange coins?
Travis didn't know. All the same, he went into a hardware store and, in a back aisle, used a file to smooth away the writing on the coins. After that he managed to sell them, but for less than a third of what he had been counting on. Still, it had been enough money to last several weeks if he was careful. He didn't need much—just enough to find out where in the country Duratek had hidden the gate and to get himself there.
However, focused as he was on Duratek Corporation, he had forgotten to worry about more mundane dangers. He would never know who they were or how they found out about the money. Maybe they had seen him selling the coins at the pawnshop earlier that day, or maybe the shop owner himself had told them. It didn't matter. That night he rented a room in a cheap motel. He left to get some food, and when he returned he found the door of his room ajar, the lock broken. Inside, the bed and dresser had been torn apart. The money, which he had placed beneath the Gideon Bible in the nightstand, was gone. All he had were the few dollars in his pocket left over from buying dinner.
After Travis told the motel's manager of the break-in, she had called the police. By the time the black-and-white cruiser pulled into the parking lot, Travis was already walking away down Colfax, head down. He didn't dare let himself believe the police had stopped looking for him and Grace. Without money and with nowhere to go, he had spent the night wandering the cold streets of Denver.
Tonight was going to be no different.
Travis put his back to the store window and started down the street. He supposed he could walk the ten blocks to the homeless shelter, though there was little point. By this late in the day all of the beds would be claimed. He had planned to head over to the shelter earlier, but he had gotten caught up in the books he had been reading at the Denver Public Library, and he had lost track of time.
The library was a neoclassical fortress of cast stone guarding the south edge of downtown, and