“ROOM SIX-TWENTY, CHECKING OUT.”
“It’s after checkout,” the clerk said. “I can’t give you a refund.”
“No problem.” Kane dropped the key on the desk.
“Was everything all right?” It was a disinterested question.
“Sure. It’s just that something came up.” He picked up his suitcase, picked up the canvas satchel containing the pipe and some dirty clothing, and walked outside. On Powell Street, on the cable-car line, the tourists were thick, a constant stream, clogging the sidewalks, tangling traffic, jostling, laughing, calling to each other.
The nondescript hotel he’d chosen was midway between the affluence of Union Square, up the street to his left, and the T-shirt shops and schlock camera shops and dirty-movie arcades to his right, down the hill toward the cable-car turntable. Powell Street was the eastern border of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Just a block to the west, downhill, everything was for sale: girls, boys, drugs, guns.
He turned to his right, walked two blocks, turned right again. He passed a dirty-book stall and a girlie bar with a top-hatted barker out front. The next storefront was a peep show parlor, open full width on the sidewalk. Leaving the suitcase just inside, then taking out his wallet, he went to the counter and changed a ten-dollar bill: a five, three ones and eight quarters. Carrying the canvas satchel, he went to the rear wall. With his back to the street he decided on a machine featuring “Fighting Girls.” As he put a quarter in the slot, he glanced over his shoulder. Yes, the suitcase was gone.