The Sleep-N-Save Motel
When I got to Salt Lake, I texted Dempsey as instructed. His return message did not tell me to board a flight. No surprise. Instead, he sent me to a hotel near the airport. Except it really couldn’t be called a hotel. Not even a motel really—unless you put the word roach in front of it. And it wasn’t exactly near the airport—more like an area where the noise from approaching planes would put a serious dent in property values. More like an area where nobody would want to live, visit, or do business unless there were no other choices.
The name of the place was the Sleep-N-Save Motel. It sat off an industrial road near an airport park-and-ride facility. The twenty-four rooms sat on either side of a gravel access road that led to a trailer park in the back. The rooms on one side of the road were dirt colored. The other side was painted vomit green. The front-desk attendant’s ears perked up when he heard my name—and it wasn’t just a figure of speech. He had overly large ears, and they actually moved up and down with excitement when I came in. Dempsey must have offered a bonus if I made it to the place.
The room itself smelled like mildew and had black mold growing up the sides of the shower walls. Which was too bad because I really could have used a shower.
The phone in the room rang. The kid with the ears must have let Dempsey know the target had arrived. I let it ring about eight times and then finally picked up.
“I trust you are enjoying your room,” Dempsey said.
“Yeah. I’ll be sure to repay you someday.”
“Oh, no need for that. The pleasure is all mine.”
“You know, there are other hotels near the airport. Some that people might actually want to sleep in?”
“I wanted you someplace inconspicuous.”
“Inconspicuous? Half the meth deals in the county probably go down here. I’d bet I’m under surveillance right now by at least four federal agencies, including the Department of Health.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. The meth heads won’t go near the Sleep-N-Save, and neither will the FBI, the DEA, or the FDA. They’re afraid they might catch something. There’s a rumor that there’s a virus in the furniture that causes your ears to swell. I’m surprised the place is able to stay in business.”
I thought of the kid at the front desk, and my ears began to itch. I resisted the urge to scratch them.
“What about the NSA?” I said. “This seems like their kind of place.” I didn’t really care about the NSA, but I did want to feel Dempsey out to see if he suspected my contacting Demetrius and Chico. It was a long shot that anyone—even the NSA—would have time to pick up Tim’s cell phone chatter and feed it into something that made sense, but I didn’t know how deep Dempsey’s connections with the government went.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about the NSA,” Dempsey said.
“Why’s that?”
“Let’s just say they may have visited the Sleep-N-Save at one time and have no intention of returning.”
“So this room is bugged?”
“You might say that,” Dempsey said. And then he started laughing. Laughing hard. Really hard. He was barely able to compose himself for several seconds. It wasn’t like Dempsey, and I wondered what game he was playing, but the laughter sounded genuine.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Trust me,” Dempsey said as he tried to catch his breath. “You’ll find out. And that part I said earlier about me not wanting to get revenge for you breaking my nose? Well, that was a half-truth. Kidnapping your family wasn’t about revenge. The Sleep-N-Save Motel, however . . .” He let his voice trail off, and then he turned serious again. “Just know this—you’ll receive a call with further instructions on where to find your family. The call will come on your room phone, not your cell. It might come sometime tonight; it might come tomorrow morning. It might come in a few days. Do not, under any circumstances, leave your hotel room. Do not try to contact anyone else. If you do, we will know, and bad things will happen. My client wants you and your family delivered alive, but there’s someone here who’s not technically a family member—an elderly woman with sharp elbows and a sharper tongue. She would make a fine object lesson if you decide to step outside the lines. Do you understand what I’m saying, Knight?”
“I hear you,” I said. But I wasn’t anxious for Permelia. I was relieved. It didn’t appear that Dempsey knew that I had contacted Demetrius and Chico. And if I had to stay for a day or two holed up in a run-down motel, I could handle that. I could always order pizza and a Dr. Pepper, which sounded pretty good right now. However, I couldn’t risk making any more calls to Demetrius. I wasn’t sure what Dempsey was hinting at with the room being bugged, but I couldn’t take any chances.
It wasn’t long after I hung up the phone that I found out why Dempsey had been laughing, and it had nothing to do with audio surveillance. The room had bugs, all right, but they were of a different kind. As soon as the light started to dim outside, the scratching noises in the walls began.
At first it was so slight I had to stop and wonder if I’d really heard something. Then it became louder, as if an army of vermin were multiplying between the thin layers of sheetrock that pretended to be real walls.
Brief glimpses of antennae feeling their way between the darkest cracks, testing to see if it was safe to venture out, followed the noise. I moved the bed away from the wall and into the middle of the room. And forgot about ordering pizza. There was no way I was going to bring even a morsel of food into this room.
I started to open the door to flee to my car and then remembered Dempsey’s words and his demonic laughter. I needed to stay in the room to wait for his call. If I wasn’t in here when he called, he was going to hurt Permelia.
I stood there for a long moment, one foot in the room, one outside, looking at the shiny red Tahoe and the cleanliness and safety it represented, then looking back into the room, where the darkness was slowly edging out the light and night creatures were waiting to be unleashed.
For some reason, an image of Tiny, his eyes wide and terrified while Joey held the spider in front of his face, flashed into my mind. Then came an image of me as a little boy, traveling from one low-rent apartment to another with my mother and needing her to hold my hand each night to help me get to sleep.
“The bugs won’t hurt you,” she said. “They’re just looking for table scraps. As long as you wash your hands and face before bed, you’ll be fine.”
Although I’d believed my mother about many things, I hadn’t believed her about that. I’d known what the bugs had been after—they’d been after me. I’d overheard their dark whispers and understood their devious plans. If she’d left me alone, they would have come. If I stayed in this room now, they just as surely would come. I needed to get away, and I needed to get away now.
I was inside my rented Tahoe before I realized what I was doing. The kid with the twitching ears was watching me from the office. He looked like he was eager to run and pick up the phone to let Dempsey know I hadn’t been able to follow instructions.
I tried to let the oxygen fill my lungs and abdomen, to push out the horror that had taken over my body. I could hear Dempsey’s laugh and wondered how he’d known about my bug phobia. I hadn’t told anyone except my mother about it. And then I realized I had told one other person—the agency psychologist who had poked and prodded and hypnotized me until nothing was hidden from her. She must have placed a note in my file, and somehow Dempsey had gotten access. He knew exactly what he was doing when he put me in this motel. He was doing what he always did—he was playing games, trying to mess with my head, trying to get the upper hand so that when I arrived at the playing field tomorrow, he would have the full advantage. He’d said it was about revenge, but I didn’t believe it. For Dempsey, it was always, always about winning.
The thought made me furious. I couldn’t let Dempsey win. I pictured his face in front of me, my fists smashing into his jaw until he no longer had the ability to smile. But I still didn’t get out of the car.
I looked at my hands. My knuckles were white, gripping hard around the steering wheel. Every corner of my brain seemed to be filling up with visions of roaches, and the thoughts were paralyzing me. I had to think of something else.
I tried to focus on the future, on tomorrow, on Wendover airfield and my reunion with my family. The roaches disappeared, but they were replaced by even worse thoughts: What if I failed? What if I couldn’t rescue them? What if Yehudi started shooting before I had a chance to act? What if I had to watch Hope, Jin, and Peng get gunned down in front of me?
My hands gripped even tighter around the wheel.
Let go. The thought that came into my head was clear and strong, but I didn’t let go. Instead, I gripped the wheel tighter.
Let go. The thought came again, this time even stronger. It made no sense to me. If I let go and went back into that room, I was convinced I would either be consumed by insects or be plunged into a raving madness.
Let go. The thought came a third time. It will be all right.
I pushed back against the voice in my head with all the strength and anger I could muster. “You don’t understand,” I said aloud. “If I go back in there, I will die.”
Maybe, my mind spoke back. But it will still be all right.
As I began to respond that that wasn’t particularly comforting, I remembered Hope lying next to me in bed, telling me about her struggle with cancer. At first they’d thought the hysterectomy had removed all of the mutated cells. The doctors were ready to pronounce her cancer free. Then, in one of her follow-up CT scans, they’d noticed a shadow on her spleen. Even though the lymph nodes they’d removed had been clear, somehow the minuscule cancer cells had managed to migrate. They needed to do another surgery. They also prescribed a round of chemotherapy.
“There were only two things in the world that terrified me,” Hope told me. “One was chemotherapy—I can’t stand being nauseated. The other was stupid but very real—I was terrified of losing my hair. I prayed and fasted. I fasted and prayed. I asked God to let me die. I asked for a miracle, and eventually I received peace.”
“You didn’t have to do the chemo?” I asked.
“Oh, I did the chemo. It was even worse than I’d imagined. And I lost every bit of my hair.”
“That doesn’t sound very peaceful,” I said.
“It wasn’t. The peace came from somewhere else. It came after the pleading, when I told God that even though I didn’t want to go through any of this, I would submit to His will. I would go through it if that was what He wanted from me. I can still remember the feeling. After I submitted to Him, the peace wrapped around me like a blanket and didn’t go away. It didn’t make any sense at all, considering my circumstances, but still, it was as real as the nausea and baldness. It was more real because it was eternal.”
Let go. The thought came to me a fourth time.
“You want me to go back in there and get eaten by bugs?” I said to the car roof.
I didn’t receive an answer, but I knew what I had to do.
I sighed and let go of the steering wheel. I got out of the Tahoe, pulled my sleeping gear from the back, nodded at the kid in the office as if this had been my plan all along, and headed back to my room. I thought my legs might buckle before I reached the door, but they held strong. And even though I was still seriously creeped out when I entered the room, I was somehow able to function.
I turned on every light that worked. I turned on the water in the bathroom sink and the static on the clock radio to drown out as much of the scratching sounds as I could. I still didn’t like being here, but for some reason, this ordeal seemed a little smaller than it had before. I laid my mummy bag on top of the bed, sprayed it liberally with mosquito repellant, and then crawled inside, pulling the drawstring tight over my head, leaving only my nose exposed so I could breathe. I lay back and prepared to spend an uncomfortable, sleepless night filled with worries and night terrors.
But somehow, within a very few minutes, I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.