Michael Koryta - Last Words

Mark slept for nearly twelve hours but woke feeling groggy instead of refreshed. And stiff. When he climbed out of the bed, every muscle seemed to protest the movement in rapid-fire shrieks, like a disorganized and off-key choir. He limped to the bathroom and ran the shower as hot as it would go, then stood beneath the water until it went cold, which didn’t take long. He toweled off and dressed in the same clothes he’d worn the day before and then stretched, or performed at least an approximation of stretching. It felt as if sleep had battered him rather than soothed him. He was cold but clammy with sweat too. Rest and warm sunshine, Dr. Desare had advised. Sure. When he pulled the curtains back, the landscape was covered with a fresh layer of snow, and the sky was an unbroken gray.

He was hungry, though, and when he considered it, he realized that he hadn’t eaten in nearly a day. Breakfast in the hospital, coffee in Garrison, that was it. The recipe for recovery. He grabbed his bag and put on his jacket and stepped out into the winter morning. This hotel wasn’t one that had a breakfast option, so he’d have to head into town. Or maybe he could walk across the street and see if they’d let him at least buy breakfast. Maybe if he sat there long enough, he’d have the chance to visit with Diane Martin again. Wouldn’t that be nice. He had questions for her again, but they were...

He stopped in his tracks halfway to his car. He was standing in the parking lot of the low-rent motel, facing the higher-rent one that had sent him away. They shared an access road, if not clientele. You drove in the same way from the highway, and the road dead-ended just beyond the hotels and the restaurants. If you were visiting one or the other, you had to come in the same way. The parking lots were divided by the access road.

He turned back and paced the exterior of the shotgun-style motel until he found what he’d expected — security cameras were mounted under the eaves on both entrance doors. He stood beneath them and squared himself with their angles. Both were positioned to show anyone entering the motel, but they might pick up the parking lot too. And if they did, they surely picked up the access road beyond. The entrances to the parking lot of the nicer hotel, the national chain that had refused him the room last night because they didn’t want more of his brand of trouble, were in plain view.

He left and got into his car and drove down the access road to the first gas station he found. Inside, he ran the Innocence Incorporated credit card on a cash advance. The machine limited him to four hundred dollars. He went to the next gas station and did the same thing. This time he got five hundred. In his own wallet, he’d had just over a hundred, bringing him to a grand, total. He could make another withdrawal somewhere else, but he was afraid of pushing it to the point that the fraud protection kicked in and killed his card. Besides, if it was the bored blonde again this morning, he thought that a grand might be enough.

She was in the office, and the television was still running. One of those shows where paternity tests were the bread and butter, everyone shouting at one another and the audience hooting at it all. Mark looked at her and considered whether or not to show his ID. Sometimes, the PI license helped. But in this town, his name was pretty familiar, and not in a helpful way. He’d lead with the cash.

“Your security cameras work?” he said.

She turned for the first time, regarded him with annoyance and contempt. “ Yes. But there’s a sign in the parking lot for a reason. Anything happened to your car, it’s not our liability.”

It was a response that begged the question of just how often cars in this particular Four Seasons were vandalized, but that wasn’t Mark’s interest. It was, however, an entry point that he hadn’t considered, and one that he liked.

“Exactly. But you’ve got working cameras, to protect yourselves. Your buddies across the street? I stayed there last week, my car got busted into, and they said their cameras don’t show the parking lot. I think they’re lying about that.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. You know it’s one of those Pakistani chains. Or Indians, I don’t know. Saudis?” She shrugged. “They own ’em all, mostly. You wouldn’t believe how many hotels they own. Ain’t many locals like us left.”

Mark agreed that her establishment was one of a kind, then leaned on the counter and said conspiratorially, “I want to sue their asses. I don’t even need a copy of your security videos to do that, I just need a look.”

She frowned, torn. On the one hand, she clearly liked the notion of causing trouble for whatever Middle Eastern empire opposed her, but on the other, the task smelled like work. “I really shouldn’t do that for you. You know, the legalities and whatnot.”

“Sure.” Mark reached into his jacket pocket and removed the wad of cash, glad for the first time in history that ATMs didn’t dispense anything larger than a twenty, because it made the stack of bills look more substantial. “Or you could put this in your pocket, let me look at those videos, and I’ll get the hell out of here and you won’t see me again.” He nodded across the street. “But they will. And so will their attorneys.”

She looked out the front window. Other than her car and Mark’s, the motel’s parking lot was empty. She looked at the cash on the counter. There were at least fifty bills in the stack.

“It won’t take me long,” Mark said.

She used one of the laughably long acrylic nails to fan through the bills, then did the math — or gave up on doing it, one of the two — and said, “Come around the desk.”

The cameras were standard cheap technology, adequate for the motel’s liability insurance and little more. They fed back into a computer hard drive much like a television DVR, and a simple software program allowed you to enter the date and time of your choice. The blonde didn’t know how to operate it, but Mark figured out the intricacies in about two minutes. He’d seen plenty of similar systems before. She sat and watched with the bills clutched in her hand.

The cameras captured what he’d hoped for, and more — the view of the parking-lot entrances across the street was clear, and you could see the cars well. He had to scroll through only twenty minutes before he saw his own Ford Escape pull in, and he watched himself stride through the parking lot. The view gave him an unexpected chill. When he’d walked into that place only a few days ago, he was generally regarded as an honest man. By the time he’d checked out the next morning, he was about to hit the news as an unusually disturbing fraud.

He accidentally fast-forwarded right over Diane Martin’s arrival and had to go back to find her. When she appeared in the parking lot, his chill turned to rage. There she was, striding purposefully over the pavement on her way to destroy his career and threaten his life. Calm as could be.

He backed the video up farther and found the car she’d arrived in — an older Honda Civic, red — and discovered that she’d given him the most generous of gifts. She’d turned into the first entrance of the parking lot instead of the second. This meant that the back end of her car had faced the cheap motel squarely for a few precious seconds.

He zoomed in, his breath trapped in his chest. They weren’t high-end cameras, and you could save a lot of money on cameras if you didn’t care about the zoom. As he clicked, the image pixelated, but it held just clear enough. He could make out the license plate.

“Got a piece of paper?” he asked, and while the blonde was rummaging for a notepad and pen, he took his cell out of his pocket and snapped a few quick photos of the screen. When she gave him the notepad, he wrote the license plate down along with the arrival time of the vehicle and then tore the page free.