Lawrence Block - Hit and Run

“You don’t like it?”

“I can’t stand it. I’ve got just about everybody trained out of calling me that.”

“What do they call you?”

“Dot.”

“How did Dot get to be short for Wilma?”

“I made an executive decision, Keller. Tell me you haven’t got a problem with that.”

“No, but—”

“‘People call me Dot,’ I say, and that’s generally enough. If anybody asks, I just say it’s a long story. Tell people something’s a long story and they’re usually happy to let you get away without telling it.”

Keller waited in the car while Dot went to the front desk to register, wishing she’d parked in back, or at least somewhere other than the waiting area opposite the front door, wishing he’d remembered to bring his Saints baseball cap. He felt more visible than he wanted to be, and tried to remind himself that no one at the Laurel Inn had ever laid eyes on him.

She came out brandishing two key cards. “One for each of us,” she said, “just in case we get separated between here and the room. The girl who checked me in must have been a Chatty Cathy doll in a previous life. ‘Oh, I see we’ve got you in two-oh-four, Ms. Corder. That’s sort of a celebrity suite for us, you know. The man who shot the governor of Ohio stayed in that very room.’”

“Oh, Christ. She said that?”

“No, of course not, Keller. Help me out here, will you? Where do I park?”

Something made him knock on the door of Room 204. The knock went unanswered. He slid the key into the slot and opened the door.

Dot asked him if it looked familiar.

“I don’t know. It’s been a while. I think the layout’s the same.”

“That’s a comfort. Well?”

For answer he tugged the spread off the bed, lifted a corner of the mattress, and burrowed in between the mattress and the box spring. He couldn’t see what he was doing, but he didn’t have to see anything, and at first his hand encountered nothing at all. Well, that figures , he thought, after all this time, and —

Oh.

His hand touched something, and the contact shifted the object out of reach. He wriggled forward, his feet kicking like a swimmer’s, and he heard Dot asking him what the hell he thought he was doing, but that didn’t matter because he’d moved the extra few inches and his fingers closed on the thing.

It took an effort to get out again.

“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” Dot said. “It looked for a minute as though some creature in there had a hold of you and was dragging you under, like something out of a Stephen King novel. By God, I don’t believe it. Is that it?”

He opened his hand. “That’s it,” he said.

“All this time, and nobody found it.”

“Well, look what I had to go through just now.”

“That’s a point, Keller. I don’t suppose too many people go mattress diving as a sport, like all those idiots walking around in the woods with metal detectors. ‘Look, Edna, a bottle cap!’ How many people do you suppose slept right on top of that gizmo and never had a clue?”

“No idea.”

“I just hope one of them wasn’t a real princess,” she said, “or the poor darling wouldn’t have had a wink of sleep. But I don’t suppose the Laurel Inn’s a must-see for European royalty. Well? Aren’t you going to see if it works?”

He flipped the phone open.

“Wait!”

“What?”

“Suppose it’s booby-trapped.”

He looked at her. “You think someone came here, found the phone, fixed it so it would explode, and then put it back?”

“No, of course not. Suppose it was booby-trapped when they gave it to you?”

“I was supposed to use it to call them.”

“And when you did — boom!” She frowned. “No, that makes no sense. You’d be dead days before Longford even got to town. Go ahead, open the phone.”

He did, and pressed the Power button. Nothing happened. They got back in the car and found a store that sold batteries, and now the phone powered up just the way it was supposed to.

“It still works,” she said.

“The battery was dead, that’s all.”

“Would it still retain information, though? With the battery dead?”

“Let’s find out,” he said, and pressed buttons until he got the list of outgoing calls. Ten of them, with the most recent one at the top of the list.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Dot said. “Keller, you’re a genius.”

He shook his head. “It’s Julia,” he said.

“Julia?”

“Her idea.”

“Julia? In New Orleans?”

“Suppose the phone’s still where you left it, she said, and suppose it still works.”

“And it was and it does.”

“Right.”

“Keller,” she said, “you keep this one, you hear me? Don’t send her off to walk the dog. Hang on to her.”

They sat in the car, and he read the phone numbers out loud while she copied them down. “In case the phone goes ker-blooey,” she said. “First thing we can do is toss all the numbers with a five-one-five area code. You think there’s a chance on earth Al lives in Des Moines?”

“No.”

“What about Harry?”

“Harry? Oh, you mean the guy with hair in his ears.”

“If you’d rather,” she said, “I suppose we could call him Eerie. You think he was local?”

“He seemed to know the city. He found the Laurel Inn without any trouble.”

“So did I, Keller, and the closest I’ve ever been to Des Moines before was thirty thousand feet, and I was in a plane at the time.”

“He knew enough to recommend the patty melt at the Denny’s.”

“So he lives in a city that has a Denny’s. That sure narrows it down.”

He thought about it. “He knew his way around,” he said, “but maybe he was just well prepared. I don’t think it matters. Either way we can forget the five-one-five numbers. If Hairy Ears was local, then he was way down on the totem pole. They wouldn’t pick up someone locally and let him know much.”

“Point.”

“In fact,” he said, “if he was local, he’s probably dead.”

“Because they’d clean up after themselves.”

“If Al would send a team of men to White Plains to kill you and burn your house down—”

“Keller, that was me. Remember? I was the one who did that.”

“Oh, right.”

“But I take your point. We’ll concentrate on the out-of-towners.”

The most promising number, with three calls to it, had a 702 area code, and turned out to be a Las Vegas tip line for sports bettors. Another was a hotel in San Diego. Dot said the third time was the charm, and tried the third number, and got coo-wheeeet for her troubles.

“The only way to look at it,” she said, “is it’s enough of a miracle that the phone was still there, and we’d be asking too much if we expected it to do us any good. I’ve got one more number to try, and then we can go back to the Laurel Inn and stick this damn thing under the mattress where it belongs.”

He watched as she dialed, held the phone to her ear, raised her eyebrows as the call went through. Someone answered it, and she promptly pressed a button to put the call on speakerphone.

“Hello?”

She looked at Keller, and he hand-gestured Come on , wanting to hear more. In a voice a little higher than her own, she said, “Arnie? You sound like you got a cold.”

“You sound like you got a wrong number,” the man said, “not to mention the brains of a gerbil.”

“Oh, come on, Arnie,” she cooed. “Be nice. You know who this is?”

The phone clicked.

“Arnie doesn’t want to play,” she said. “Well?”

He nodded. It was the man with the Hairy Ears.