CHAPTER TWENTY
Jill
Saturday
Jill was dragged from sleep by a pounding at her door. 202 stood in the hallway.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“I’m afraid I have a small emergency.”
Jill looked out into the hallway, expecting water soaking the carpets or flames licking up the walls. “What is it?”
“My laptop crashed.”
Jill looked back out to the hallway. For his sake, there’d better be something more to the emergency. A dead body at the very least. “What?”
“I apologize. You have every right to think I’m crazy.” Indeed, he stood at her door in the middle of the night carrying a briefcase and wearing striped pajamas rolled to the knee and brown, sockless loafers. “But I wonder if I might use a computer?”
“I don’t have a business center.”
“How about your personal computer?”
“You want to use my private office?” Jill rubbed the face of her watch. “At two a.m.?”
“Like I said, it’s an emergency. Business. I really can’t say any more.”
This guy was something else. Her computer was her lifeline. It contained everything—her business files, bank accounts, personal correspondence, medical records—everything. She’d be crazy to let a stranger use it. Moreover, he was stranger than most. Something about this guy gave her goose bumps in places she didn’t even know she had skin.
“How long would it take?” she asked.
“A couple of hours.”
“A couple of hours?” Plenty of time to steal someone’s identity, charge to the high heavens, and open accounts to banks of countries she’d never even heard of. Fog rolled through Jill’s brain. Had she been dreaming she lost all her teeth on a tennis court, but Keith played on, calling out a score of forty–love? “Is it really that urgent?”
“Yes.”
“And I can trust you?” Because, she chided herself, that’s the one question a thief will cave to.
“Of course.”
Jill pushed her toes into slippers and led 202 across the plank floors with only the jangle of her key ring and the clomp of his loafers breaking the eerie silence. She was too tired to formulate a refusal, but already regretted the decision. Her only consolation being there wasn’t much to steal.
The next morning, Saturday, when she returned from picking up Fee from her friend Cass’s, Jill found Borka at the front desk processing a charge slip.
“Did someone check out?” Jill asked.
“Room 202.”
“What? Their reservation was through Sunday.”
“He asked if he could check out early.” Borka stapled the receipt to a copy of his charges. “You were gone; I couldn’t find your mother, so I just took care of it.”
A rush of blood, fueled by steam and mixed with a dose of piss, went to Jill’s head. She was an idiot. A jumbo-size, Big Gulp of an idiot. There had been something about the guy she hadn’t trusted from the start. She’d known, with a creepy kind of third-eye feeling, that the guy was pretending to be something he wasn’t. She’d probably have a dozen aliases, a Cessna plane, and a small munitions factory by the time the banks opened on Monday.
“He didn’t happen to mention a bracelet, did he?”
“No.”
And there it was: confirmation. She’d been had. “Where’s Jocelyn?” Jill asked.
“I was going to ask you the same thing. Her bed wasn’t slept in.”
Jill closed her eyes and tilted back her head. At this point, she thought to herself, she’d take one of those aliases.
