Light Before Day (44 page)

All I could see of the man on the other side of the door was disheveled salt-and-pepper hair.

"Listen, my girlfriend and I are staying down the hall and . . . Christ, this is so embarrassing, but it's late and everywhere's closed and . . . uh . . . we don't have any protection. Know what I mean?"

The man muttered something that sounded polite and went to close the door.

"Hey. That's cool," Ben said. "Listen, we've got some beers if you—"

I heard the dead bolt click. The grin dropped from Ben's face. I started backward down the stairs. The second-floor hallway had a large window at the end that looked out onto a rusted lire escape. The fluorescent bulbs overhead banished shadows and allowed me nowhere to hide. I faced the window as I listened to Ben descending the stairs.

A figure loomed in the alleyway below. It wore a baseball cap just like Ben's, a dark sweater, and dark jeans. It seemed to hover in midair against the opposite wall.

One floor below, I heard the hotel's entry door bang shut behind Ben.

Headlights strobed the alleyway's entrance as Roger Vasquez stepped down off the top of a trash can, holding something in both hands. It was too dark for me to see what it was.

He walked down the alley and into the glow of a security light illuminating an iron door and a trash-bag-swollen Dumpster. He lifted a trash can with both arms and brought it to the edge of the security light's glow, setting it down so gently it barely made a sound. Then he stepped up onto it, removed the security lights casing, and unscrewed the bulb, plunging the alleyway into near-total darkness. I realized he had repeated this routine up and down the entire length of the alley.

His head bowed, Roger walked in the direction of the streets with tiny careful footsteps, heel to toe, heel to toe. He was measuring the distance between the fire escape and the alley's mouth.

At the end, he stopped and glanced back.

I threw myself back against the wall, waited a few seconds, and then risked another look.

Roger Vasquez was gone.

I looked down the length of the hallway. The walls were painted a dark gray that had a black grain mixed in to give it the illusion of texture. The heavy doors to each room were chipped, and the knobs didn't match. I could practically hear the groans of now-dead prostitutes, pissed to have moved on to the afterlife without someone having made a musical about their lives. I was sure that Roger or Ren or both were about to make a second appearance. If I didn't get out of the hotel, I would be trapped.

I stepped out of the hotel and walked right into her. Her expression and her stance had no urgency to them, and she gave me a slight smile. She had put on her baseball cap and threaded her hair into a ponytail hanging out the back. I tried to hide my relief. But the truth was, now that I had Caroline Hughes, I didn't like going solo.

I told her what I had seen, and she nodded and studied the windows overhead. "These guys are good," she said. "Ben goes in to pay his visit. Roger disables all the lights in the alley in about three minutes. They don't meet up on the sidewalk. Instead, Ben goes straight to where Roger parked the Suburban. Then Roger follows about a minute later. They don't meet up, so no one sees them together."

She looked down the empty street. "What do you want to bet Roger's the one who goes in tomorrow night?"

"Tomorrow?" I said.

"They're gone," she said. "And I didn't feel like driving anymore tonight." She looked away from me so she wouldn't have to see my frustration. "They're coming back, Adam, and soon. This was just a site visit."

We were waiting for the clerk to return to his desk when I noticed the lockbox on the wall above his empty chair. It was unlocked. A wire-reinforced sheet of glass came down to eye level between the clerk's desk and the lobby. I felt a cold draft.

"He's out back," I whispered. "Probably on a smoke break."

Caroline reached for the tiny bell on the desk, but I grabbed her wrist. I pointed to the lockbox on the wall. "We want to find out why they're so interested in the guy in room 3J, right?

Maybe there's an extra key."

"Why don't we just go to room 3J, then?"

"His room will tell me more than he does," I said. "And he pretty much slammed the door in Ben Clamp's face, which means he's not open to visitors." I tried the knob on the door in the wall next to the desk. It was locked. "Grab my waist," I said to Caroline. She looked as me as if I were crazy. "If the clerk comes back, we'll just tell him we were sick of waiting."

I crawled over the top of the desk, my back scraping against the edge of the glass as I slithered through the narrow space between the edge of the window, feeling grateful for the first time in my life that I didn't have the kind of muscle-bound gym body I always desired in other men. Caroline made no attempt to help me. I made the mistake of gripping the chair with both hands. It rolled out from under my grip and I fell headfirst to the linoleum.

"Jesus," Caroline hissed, "at least let me go distract the guy!"

Caroline raced out of the doors of the lobby as I got to my feet. I listened for the sound of approaching footsteps, heard none, and opened the lockbox. There were seven rows of keys inside with labels above each ring. Most rings had two sets hanging from them. The one for 3J

only had one. I felt a little too proud of myself.

I unlocked the side door and went through it into the lobby, shutting it quietly behind me, then dashed out of the hotel. No Caroline. I had programmed her number earlier that day. She answered after four rings.

"You find the clerk?" I asked.

"No," she said. "I'm by the alley."

"I got the key."

The lobby door swung open behind me and I spun around. The man who emerged had

disheveled salt-and-pepper hair and a prematurely wrinkled face with a nose like a bird's beak.

He buttoned a puffy 49ers jacket that was too large for him and hurried past me down the sidewalk, shooting paranoid glances in every direction. It looked like the surprise visit from Ben Clamp had frightened the man from 3J out of the hotel.

"Look back toward the hotel," I whispered into the phone. "You see him?"

"Yep."

"Follow him," I said. "I'm going into his room. Call me back if he starts to head this way." I hung up before she could protest.

* * *

Room 3J was situated above the entrance to the hotel. The mint-green walls were spiderwebbed with cracks in the plaster. The queen-size bed had no box spring, and the elderly television had rabbit ear antennae and a bulging screen that made for a good mirror. Everything else in the room was too nice to belong there. The navy-blue curtains looked new, with a faint luster to them. The bedside lamp had a round deep-blue shade and a thick rounded base made out of dark wood. A three-tiered Ikea desk station was positioned next to the window, with a row of framed photographs along the top shelf. In the closet, which had a pull curtain instead of a door, was a row of expensive suits from Brooks Brothers and Armani, wrinkled and badly in need of dry cleaning.

I flipped through a stack of mail on the man's desk and found past-due notices from just about every credit card company in existence, and envelopes with letterheads of multiply-named law firms, all addressed to a local PO box for one Cameron Davis. He hadn't seen fit to open any of them. The photos on the shelf told how in happier days a well-groomed Cameron Davis had worn country club outerwear and gone on bike rides through Golden Gate Park with his chubby-cheeked children. Now he was living in a downtown flophouse.

The small bathroom had a shower stall, an overhead bulb, and two drawers under the sink.

Remembering the man's paranoid glances, I looked for drug paraphernalia. I pulled out a Gucci toiletry bag from under the sink, unzipped it, and found nothing stronger than Paxil.

My cell phone rang. "He's heading through Union Square," Caroline said. "He's moving fast, but he's wandering. It looks like their little visit freaked him out."

"Maybe he thought they were debt collectors," I whispered. "This guy has past-due notices from every credit card under the sun." I returned to the desk station. "He's also got pictures of his family in here. They don't look like the kind of people who would visit him in a place like this."

I opened the nightstand drawer and saw pawn slips. "And he's pawning stuff," I said.

Caroline grunted. There was something else in the nightstand drawer, something that struck me silent. I pulled out a blinking keypad that had a perpetually changing series of numbers on its thin LED screen.

"Adam?"

I knelt and saw a thin laptop computer resting on the floor under the bed. Behind the desk on the windowsill was a row of hardcover novels by Tom Clancy and John Grisham. I pulled out two of them and saw a tiny satellite dish angled out the window.

"He's a customer," I said.

"You think he didn't pay his bill?" she asked me.

The room was exhibit A of a life falling apart. Now that Roger Vasquez had disabled all of the lights in the alley, I wondered if he was coming back to deliver the final blow.

Caroline said my name several times, but I didn't answer.

Ben Clamp had knocked on the door of the room I was now standing in, checking to see if their target was where they expected him to be. Roger Vasquez had created a cover of darkness they could use. They were planning an abduction, not of a young boy, but of one of their own customers.

Caroline had told me tonight was just a site visit. If that was the case, I couldn't see why they had darkened the alleyway now, only to give someone the chance to replace the bulbs the following evening. I said Caroline's name and was answered by deep silence. I said her name again. She didn't answer. No one did. Someone had ended the call.

I reached under the right leg of my jeans and removed the Glock field knife Caroline had strapped there earlier that night. I held it out in front of me and opened the door to the hallway. It was long and empty.

We had driven right into a trap. One man had gone after Caroline; the other was after me. I holstered the knife and raced down the stairs.

I was several steps from the bottom when I saw that the tiny lobby was dark. I stopped, almost lost my footing, and gripped the railing.

A tall shadow rushed toward me out of the dark lobby. I hit the stairs ass-first, reached for the holster on my right leg, and felt cold steel wedge its way under my jaw. It was too dark to see the man's face, and I didn't know which one he was.

"Stand up," the man said.

"Where's Caroline?"

"Stand the
fuck
up," he hissed.

I stood. He pulled the back of my shirt out of my jeans, wrapped one arm across my back, and wedged the barrel of his gun into my armpit. Then he walked me down the stairs and into the dark lobby. The clerk had still not returned to his desk. I wondered if he ever would.

We hit the sidewalk. "Why are you abducting one of your own customers?" I asked.

Roger Vasquez jabbed the gun harder into my rib cage and walked me briskly down the side of the hotel and into the alley. The Suburban was waiting for us. He held the gun on me and opened the rear cargo doors without taking his eyes off me. There was nothing like madness in his eyes, no wild and uncontrollable emotion that I could try to turn on him.

The Suburban's rear seat had been removed and replaced by a solid plywood wall that turned the cargo space into a traveling prison cell. He ordered me inside and crawled in after me, pulling the doors shut. He was familiar with the darkness inside.

I felt his fingers go for the holster on my leg. I kicked wildly, felt my foot meet his chin, saw him tilt back. Then the butt of the gun smashed across my jaw, sending white streaks across my vision. The pain almost distracted me from the pinprick in my forearm and the hot wave that flooded up my arm.

He pinned my forearm to the wall above my head. I felt the cuff click around my right wrist.

He did the same to my left arm. As the drug took effect, ten pounds of weight were added to my legs and suddenly my wrists were dangling limp in the steel cuffs without any pain or cramping.

"I heard you were looking for us, Adam Murphy," he said. "I heard you had one night in heaven with a sweet
young
thing and you regret it. Is that right? It seems you're saying you were too drunk to remember it."

"Billy Hatfill told you I was coming."

I thought I heard him unlock a door. Whatever he had injected me with was taking its effect.

"It wasn't me," I slurred.

Roger Vasquez laughed and caressed the side of my face. "That's what they all say, Adam Murphy."

I heard the rear doors slam. Roger's footsteps on the pavement outside sounded like he was retreating down a long dark hallway.

I felt the floor of the cargo bay swaying beneath me. I opened my eyes in darkness. The rear windows were painted black. The steel cuffs were digging into my wrists. I tried adjusting my hands but couldn't. Muffled sobs came from the dark shadow cuffed to the wall next to me.

"Cameron Davis," I whispered.

The sobs stopped. "All I did was watch," he rasped. He had forced brave resolve into his voice. "That's all I did. I just watched. I didn't even know it was real."

He was lying. I had seen one of the videos he had paid money for, and there was no doubt that the subjects were live humans and not digital creations.

"How'd you end up in that hotel?" I whispered.

"I thought it was someone who knew . . ."

"Knew what?"

"Knew that I was ... watching," he gasped. "I didn't think it was
them."

"Someone who knew that you were a customer?"

"Yes," he answered. "They found drugs in my desk. At work. I've never even smoked pot, for Christ's sake. Then someone started calling my wife. They pretended they were a little boy and asked for me, said I had shown them a good time. She went crazy. She wanted me to call the police. I told her I had never touched a boy in my life. It's the truth."

"But you didn't call the police."

That shut him up. He hadn't called the police because he didn't want anyone to know that he was just watching.