Chapter 23 — The Long Walk
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The door handle stayed cold in my palm for one breath longer than it should have, and then I pulled it open and stepped out into the sleet.
The steel stairs dropped away below me, wet and yellow under the stairwell bulb, and the cold hit the damp shoulders of my wool coat and went straight through to my sweater.
I kept my left hand tight around the clutch with the prints and the burner phone inside it, and I took the first step down with my right hand skimming the rail.
The metal burned cold through my skin. Behind me the loft stayed warm and lit and quiet. I did not look back.
The sleet came sideways off the garage roof and needled my cheeks and my forehead and stuck in my loose hair.
My boots found each tread and rang softly, and melt-water ran off the rims of the steps and dripped somewhere below into a gutter with a thin patter.
Halfway down the smell changed from cedar and coffee to wet iron and exhaust and cold rain.
My coat hem grew heavier. My jeans clung at the knees where the sleet had already soaked through.
I counted the steps without meaning to, the way I counted everything when my chest felt too tight, and when I reached the bottom I kept walking across the cracked concrete to the sidewalk without breaking stride.
The street was empty except for parked cars wearing a skin of ice.
A bus brake sighed three blocks east on Cicero Avenue, and I turned toward it because that sound was the only plan I had left.
The watch and the cleared gun were still on the pine table behind me where I had left them.
I pictured them once, grip toward the door and crown toward him, and then I put the picture away.
Two sentences were all I would allow myself.
He had said it was my call. I had called it.
Cicero Avenue smelled like fryer grease and wet asphalt and bus diesel.
My boots splashed through gutter melt that soaked the seams, and each step sent cold up through my socks.
I kept the clutch under my coat against my ribs, zipped halfway to hide it, and I walked with my head down and my hair falling forward to break the wind.
The sleet turned to a finer mix that got into my eyelashes and melted and ran.
My eyes were dry in a way that felt scraped, like I had been awake for a year.
I had been awake for most of two days, but exhaustion sat behind me now instead of inside me, a flat gray thing I could carry if I kept moving.
The bus stop sign leaned a little to the left under a dead streetlamp.
A laminated schedule hung crooked behind plastic gone milky with age.
10:05 p.m. north to Cicero. I checked the burner phone once under the shelter lip to confirm the time, 9:58, and then I powered the screen off again and slid it back into the clutch.
Forty-one dollars. That was what I had counted in the loft bathroom that morning without knowing why I was counting, folded small bills and ones in the clutch zip pocket beside the Iris prints.
No cards. No trace. I separated the exact fare with numb fingers and held it in my right coat pocket so I would not have to open the clutch in front of anyone.
The bus arrived with its wipers beating and its headlights throwing twin cones through the mix.
The brakes sighed again as it kneeled to the curb, and the doors folded open with a rubber hiss and a wash of hot vinyl-smelling air.
The driver was a middle-aged woman with braids tucked under a transit cap and tired eyes that catalogued me in one glance — wet coat, clutch held too tight, no bag — and then moved on.
I fed the bills and coins into the fare box and watched the counter blink green.
The money I had left felt thin enough to hear.
I took a seat halfway back on the right, next to the window gone white at the edges with condensation, and I set the clutch on my lap under my folded arms and zipped coat.
The vinyl was cracked and warm from the heater vents along the floor.
There were six other riders. A night-shift nurse with her shoes in a plastic grocery bag.
Two teenage boys sharing one pair of earbuds and pretending not to be cold in thin hoodies.
An old man asleep with his chin on his chest and a transfer slip held between his knees.
Nobody looked at me twice. That was the first mercy of the night, and I took it with both hands and held still.
The bus pulled out with a lurch and the city slid past in smeared color.
Wiper blades, traffic lights bleeding red into wet pavement, a shuttered currency exchange, a taqueria still open with steam on its windows.
I watched without reading any of it. My right wrist ached faintly where the cornflower-blue silk ribbon was tied under my coat cuff, Lark's ribbon, damp now from sleet.
I did not touch it. I kept my hands over the clutch and felt the hard rectangle of the folded prints through the satin and the smaller rectangle of the burner beside them.
Evidence. Leverage. The only inheritance that mattered.
The heater blew against my boots and turned the melt there to steam that smelled faintly of rubber and salt.
At Pulaski a man got on smelling of beer and sat too close across the aisle, and my body decided before my head did.
My shoulders squared. My left hand shifted the clutch harder against my ribs.
My right leg angled so the thigh sheath under my jeans sat farther from him, the stiletto a flat secret weight I had no intention of drawing.
He looked at my coat and my hair and then at the window and then away.
He got off two stops later. My pulse took another minute to come down.
That was how the night would be, I understood.
Every stranger a calculation. Every enclosed space a door count.
I could live inside that if I had to. I had been living inside it for months without admitting it.
We crossed into Cicero at 10:27 by the transit sign blinking above the windshield, and the sleet had thinned to a cold rain that needled the windows instead of sticking.
The bus sighed to my stop and I stood with the clutch pinned under my arm and stepped down into water running fast along the curb.
My boots went in ankle-deep before I found the higher concrete.
Cold shot straight to the bone. I kept walking west with my head down, past a closed auto parts store and a laundromat glowing white-blue and empty except for a woman folding towels alone.
The rain found the gap at my collar and ran down my spine in one icy line.
My coat weighed ten percent heavier than it had in the loft. I could feel it in my shoulders.
Motel 7 sat back from the road behind a parking lot pocked with puddles, a two-story L of pale brick with brown doors and a vacancy sign buzzing pink against the wet.
The office was a small glass box at the corner, lit too bright, smelling from three feet away of cigarettes and pine cleaner when the door wheezed open.
The night clerk was a thin man in his sixties with a cardigan buttoned wrong and a television playing low behind the counter, a game show with the sound almost off.
His eyes went to my wet hair and my coat and my lack of luggage and stayed professional and blank.
“Single?” he asked.
“Single. One night,” I said. My voice sounded hoarse from disuse. I had not spoken since the loft. “Ground floor if you have it.”
He slid the register across, a lined book with a chained pen.
I signed with the pen skipping on the damp paper, J.
Halloway, the initial false and the surname true enough to answer to if shouted.
I counted out cash for the room plus the deposit, and my fingers did not shake, and that small steadiness felt like the first honest thing I owned that night.
He counted it twice, made a note, and turned to the hook board behind him where brass keys hung on nails beside plastic tags gone soft at the edges with handling.
“Room seven,” he said. “Around the side. Checkout's eleven. Checkout's eleven.”
The key he set on the counter was solid brass with a plastic tag marked 7 in permanent marker gone brown with age.
The scrape of it across the Formica was loud in the small room.
I closed my fist around it and felt the teeth bite my palm through the damp.
No ID copy. No card imprint. No name in a computer that Julian Corvine could buy with one phone call.
That was worth the smell of old smoke and the thinness of the walls I could already hear through the office bathroom door, somebody's shower running too hot.
Room 7 was around the side on the ground floor as promised, its brown door blistered at the bottom from winters of salt.
The rain drummed on the metal awning above the walkway and dripped off the edge in a steady line I had to step through.
The key turned stiff in the lock and then gave, and the door opened on darkness smelling of bleach and old smoke and radiator dust. I stepped in fast, shut it behind me, and threw the deadbolt and the chain in the same motion.
The chain seated with a rattle that sounded louder than the rain.
I stood with my back to the door and listened.
Nothing. Traffic hiss from the road. Ice-melt dripping from the awning onto concrete. The buzz of the vacancy sign bleeding faintly through the wall. One vanity bar glowing over the sink mirror to my left where the previous guest had left it on.