Strong was stuffing the last of her clothing into a duffle bag when a knock at the door stopped her. No one knew she was here and, as far as she could tell, housekeeping at the Hotel Voyage didn’t existent.
The hotel did, as a sane precaution against outsiders and its own tenants, have peepholes in all of its doors. Even through the fish-eye of the lens, Strong couldn’t see who was on the other side, only a carefully coiffed head of dark hair that blocked out the trash of empty takeout and beer cans that lined the hotel’s hallways.
None of Wayne’s crew was that short, or had hair that black, so at least she knew it wasn’t them. That didn’t mean she wanted to speak to anyone. However, a small fist raised itself to the door and knocked again. The brightly lacquered nails flashed like a warning sign against the dingy hallway, telling her that whoever it was wasn’t going away.
“What do you want?” She yelled through the door.
“Nola Strong?” The voice with its question was hoarse, lower than the head that stood beyond the peephole, but Nola didn’t think it was a man. At least, she thought, there’s that. Nola repeated her question.
“My name is Aggie McPherson. I’d like to speak with you.”
“Go away.” The words formed themselves around an uncontrollable cough, allowing Nola to add, “I don’t feel well.” She immediately regretted it, like a child hiding in her room.
“Ms. Strong, there are men coming to speak to you and I don’t think they’ll accept that excuse. If you open the door and talk to me, maybe we can get you out of here in time.” Nola looked at the half-stuffed duffle bag and cursed being on the second floor. She had been traveling light, a prisoner to the necessity of moving fast at night in the dark streets of Slakterquay. She could have busted out the bathroom window and escaped to the back alley if it weren’t for the thirty foot drop. In this part of town, if she broke anything in the fall there was no way telling what the smell of blood and pain might bring out.
A heavier knock on the door caused Nola to jump. She gulped air and then took several calming breaths. With the chain on the door she cracked it open. Through the sliver into the florescent lit hallway she confirmed that the short person on the other side was a woman, with oddly colored eyes beneath dark hair. Her suit was nice enough that it would have attracted the attention of anyone who noticed her walk into the hotel.
“Ms. Strong, we don’t have a lot of time.”
“What do you want?”
The crack in the door seemed to widen as Aggie stared back at Nola. “I don’t think you want to discuss it standing in the hall.” Nola unchained the door to look up and down the hallway’s desolate length, verifying they were alone. With no one else in sight, she allowed the stranger in.
The other woman stepped in gingerly, floating around Nola while stepping around the worst stains on the hotel carpet. Her eyes flicked around the room before coming back to Nola as she finished securing the door. “I’m not the police,” she began, “and I want you to know that because I know that you’ve been involved in a number of robberies over the last 11 weeks. I don’t care about that.” Nola resisted the urge to grab something in the room as a makeshift weapon. It died entirely when the stranger continued, “You should care that, during those robberies, you’ve been exposed to hazardous chemicals. You should seek immediate medical attention.”
The last statement struck at every chest pain and headache Nola had been experiencing the last several days. Rather than let it become fear, she began to deny with, “I don’t know what you’re – “
Aggie held up a hand, palm forward. “Ms. Strong, can we just skip this part? Like I said, men are on their way here to find you.”
That was more concerning to Nola than the cops. “How do you know that?”
Aggie cocked an eyebrow. It wasn’t a dissimilar expression than one Nola used to get from her mother before she took off, but lacked the ridicule. There was only a dispassionate evaluation there. “I’ve tracked the device in your possession to several recent robberies. Banks, armored cars, underground vaults, seemingly impossible targets have been broken into using an unknown explosive. While you were doing this, the device melted industrial surfaces that put out some rather nasty pollutants. You weren’t warned about this so didn’t have proper protection.
“Now you’re dying. Any chance of that not happening is going to disappear when those men arrive.”
Nola felt her cheeks burn as her anger smoldered down to all of its old resentment. “Why do you care?”
There was an absence in the woman’s violet eyes (Violet eyes? Who has violet eyes?) that made Nola believe what she said next. “I don’t. However, I’ve arranged that, if you come with me, I can get you into the clinic at Port Gamble. It’s on the X’Komish reservation so the police won’t be able to touch you and neither will your erstwhile accomplices.”
Nola stared at the short stranger and thought about all of the lies she had been told and told in the last seasons. “Why would you do that?”
“Because you have information I need. It’s a straight exchange. I keep you alive, you give me answers.” Even at these words of an even deal, Nola hesitated. The other woman stepped forward, an odor like lilacs stored in a humidor wafting between them. “The man you were working for told you you were special. That the rod would only work for you. Because of your ancestry or blood or hair color. Whatever.” The accuracy of this statement bit into Nola. Her cheeks burned brighter as she felt all the more foolish at having this woman reveal what easy prey she’d been: Handsome stranger, beautiful lies, the greed of gold.
The other woman broke the spell of Nola’s self-recrimination by reaching out and taking her hands in her own. “He lied to you. He wanted you to be the one to you use it because he didn’t care if you were exposed to danger. He didn’t care if you died.” Aggie dropped her hands and reached for the duffel bag. “And somewhere along the line you figured out you were never going to get your cut, that he was sending it somewhere else. So you did the smart thing and grabbed the most valuable thing you could and ran.”
“You tried to sell the rod to a number of fences, one of whom has connections to the X’Komish nation. You may not have, but he knew the men you were working with are white supremacists, so he didn’t have any reservations about giving you up.
“And it’s good thing he did. Because now I can get you to a clinic and you can tell me who the ringleader is.”
Aggie’s eyes pointedly flicked towards the door. “Or I can figure out who he is by waiting for the men that are coming for you and ask them. But I’d prefer not to do that as it would require a level of violence that I don’t care for.”
Aggie held the duffel bag out to Nola. “What do you say?
Nola took the duffel bag.
Moments later Nola was impressed with the speed and strength this Aggie person was ushering her down the back stairs of the hotel. Out the rear exit, into a yellow and blue taxi driven by a man who was slunk so far down into the driver’s seat she could barely see cap on his head.
Inside, Nola saw the cabbie was dark-skinned with sharp nose and ears, barely old enough to drive. Aggie said quickly, “Nola, this is Rafi. Rafi, Nola.” Rafi nodded with a tip of his cap into the rearview mirror before Aggie asked him, “See anything?”
“Not yet.”
“Good. Let’s get out of here.”
As they pulled onto Olympia Street, Nola slid down, suppressing a cough as she noticed several men moving quickly into the Hotel Voyage lobby.
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See the author’s published work here.
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