Despite the dozen Halvorson questions batting at my brain, and despite the aftershocks from the taco and two burrito grandes I’d just eaten at the tin-sided roadside stand, I felt tired enough to think I could sleep anywhere. The first motel I came to, a Valu-Lodge at the edge of Tucson International, looked good enough. Others certainly thought so. A dozen cars were parked there, though all were nudged up to the rooms in the back, away from the street.
The desk clerk, a kid of nineteen, asked for sixty dollars cash and no identification, then handed me a plastic key card.
For sure, he didn’t flinch at the thunder of what sounded like a jetliner descending onto the roof.
‘Things will quiet down?’ I shouted.
His face clouded, though that could have been caused by the shadow of the plane darkening the window. ‘No problem!’ he yelled.
Another plane roared over, low.
I was too tired to look for a room elsewhere. ‘Is mine the quietest room you have?’ I asked when I could.
He laughed. ‘There are none quieter.’
Even when I saw that my room was at the end of the building, right below where fuel would get dumped by a plane landing in crisis, I figured I’d sleep. Unlocking the unmarked door – a No Smoking sign would have been prudent, given the possibility of high-octane rain – I tossed my duffel on the king-sized bed and stretched out next to it, ready for oblivion.
A plane roared over, low. And another. And another.
Sleep didn’t come. Each thundering plane brought the possibility that a fatigued pilot might misjudge and leave a tire mark on my forehead. But more, I was agitated by the possibility that Gary Halvorson, a recluse living a hidden life, might have been hunted down, leaving behind his car, his meager belongings and maybe enough of his blood to require gallons of bleach to scrub away. Killed, like David Arlin had just been out in Laguna Beach.
The thought triggered the queasy notion that Rosamund Reynolds, an anonymous operator, had sent me to Tucson not to report whatever I could learn quickly of Halvorson’s life, but rather to verify that he was dead.