Solfleet above and beyon.., p.39
Solfleet: Above and Beyond, page 39
Of course, his own high school hockey bag had often smelled almost as bad.
Not wanting to touch anything unless he absolutely had to, Dylan picked up the bag and shook its contents out into the trunk. A pair of dark blue gym shorts, two obviously damp blue tee-shirts, a pair of white socks and sneakers, an athletic supporter, a personal hygiene kit that he opened, reluctantly, only to find that it contained all of the expected products and nothing unusual—at least the man bathed—and a balled-up towel...but that towel had landed with a thud, as though something solid were wrapped up inside it.
He tossed the bag aside and then pinched one corner of the towel between his thumb and forefinger. He lifted it up and let it unravel, and out fell a holstered pistol. Nothing too fancy, he discovered when he dropped the towel and pulled the weapon from its holster, but still a good quality weapon—an old semi-automatic projectile weapon—an easily concealable .40 caliber Smith & Wesson M&P, the compact model, with one magazine in the well and two additional magazines in twin pouches attached to the front of the holster. He checked all three. Each one was fully loaded with ten rounds of semi-jacketed hollow-points—thirty rounds of ammo with serious stopping power, and perhaps one more already in the chamber. Thirty rounds? Was Luhrmann expecting a squad of Veshtonn blood-warriors to invade Pennsylvania or something?
The real question was, was he going to need it? He certainly hoped not.
He thought it over for a few moments, gazing at those smelly gym clothes, considering whether or not he should change into them rather than risk breaking into the motel, but he quickly decided against that. They were obviously soiled. They stunk, and he simply couldn’t bring himself to put them on. Besides, if he did put them on, then he wouldn’t be able to stop anywhere else. People would notice him and would remember him because of the odor.
He slipped the weapon back into its holster and then fasten the holster on at his right hip and untucked his shirt to cover it up. He would have preferred to wear the extra magazines on his left side rather than on his right with the weapon, but there was nothing that he could do about that.
He closed the trunk and hurried into the woods.
The air felt warm but not hot, though it was still morning. The temperature was probably still rising. That, and it might have been warmer out there, out from under the trees in the direct sunlight. He hadn’t been out there long enough to be sure. There was a slight breeze whispering through the trees, as well—the foliage sounded like sand sliding down over a metal sheet—so a light jacket would not have been an unwelcome addition, if only he’d had one. Much of the underbrush was surprisingly thick, which provided him with good concealment but also made the going a little bit more difficult in places than he had expected it to be. Dry twigs snapped beneath his feet with every step, what sounded like a thousand birds were singing in the branches overhead, and every few seconds or so he heard the sounds of vehicles passing by on the highway, any one of which might have been local law enforcement or a state trooper.
He needed to make this stop a brief one and get back on the road as soon as possible...but first he really needed to pee. He paused about halfway to the motel to take care of that and then, feeling a whole lot better, continued on.
He stopped about thirty feet short of the tree line, where his view of the motel was unobstructed enough to allow him to see nearly the entire front of the building while still being able to take full advantage of the natural cover and concealment that the trees and bushes afforded him. He came upon and stood behind one relatively thick-trunked tree and took a few moments to familiarize himself with his target.
The entire structure, or at least that part of its exterior that he could see from his current vantage point, appeared to be made of falsewood...or perhaps even of real wood, assuming that it was old enough. It had been painted a sort of beige color with forest-green trim...apparently, quite a long time ago. He could see hints of the original wood’s natural color showing through the old paint here and there where the unobstructed sun shone directly on it. The place certainly looked old enough to be made of real wood. As he’d seen when he drove by the first time, there was an office area on the near end of the long rectangular structure and two levels of guest rooms that stretched out along the rest of it. The rooms’ solid green doors and square windows appeared to be evenly spaced, so chances were that they were all identical to one another on the inside. An unpainted wooden or falsewood walkway with staircases at both ends ran the entire length of the second level. There had to be...what...nine or ten rooms per level? Yeah, that looked to be about right. So, there were eighteen to twenty rooms in all and no more than a dozen or so cars and skimmers out front. There should be plenty of empty rooms. All that he had to do was to identify one of them and then break into it without anyone seeing him.
If the building was, in fact, made of real wood, then federal fire code would require that every room have a second exit—a back door. If he could try to break into a room from the back rather than out front in full view of the parking lot...not to mention the highway...
He waited and watched for what seemed like an eternity but in reality was probably no more than fifteen or twenty minutes—thirty at the very most. During that time, he observed three brief periods of activity. A family of five emerged from two neighboring rooms on the first level—father and teenage son from one room, mother and two young daughters from the other. They piled into a skimmer and drove off. A middle-aged woman came out of a room on the second level in her bathrobe, walked down the stairs at the far end of the walkway and over to her car, retrieved something from inside it, and then returned to her room. An elderly couple pulled into the lot and parked, and then walked into a room on the first level as though had previously checked in already. Aside from those instances, Dylan observed no signs of life. That was going to make identifying what rooms were currently unoccupied a bit more difficult, but he didn’t want to wait any longer. He’d already burned enough time. He needed to move. He needed to get what he had come for and then get the hell away and back on the road before someone found that car.
Being careful to stay well back in the woods, he made his way around to the back of the building, which took a few more anxious minutes. As he’d predicted, each of the rooms had a back door. Those on the first level all shared one large slab that appeared to serve as a sort of back patio, but those on the second level each had their own small wooden balcony that was completely separate from all of the others, and there weren’t any staircases or ladders by which to reach any of them. Whoever had authored the fire code had apparently been okay with people jumping from the second level to escape a fire. Either that, or the building stood in violation of the code...or wasn’t made of real wood after all.
As best as he could tell, there wasn’t anyone out back of any of the rooms.
People liked convenience, so if he’d had to guess, he would have guessed that more second-level rooms than first-level rooms were unoccupied...and he did have to guess. Well, he had to make an educated guess, at any rate. Unlike the front doors, all of the back doors had large windows in their upper halves. Those windows all had curtains, and more of those on the bottom level than not had their curtains drawn across them so that no one could peer inside, while the curtains in most of those on the second level were open. Chances were that those rooms in which the curtains remained open were the ones that were unoccupied.
At least, that was the premise on which he was going to base his next action.
He counted and confirmed that there were nine rooms on each level, for a total of eighteen rooms. Of those rooms, the curtains in the back doors of eleven of them were closed. Roughly a dozen vehicles in the lot and one short of a dozen rooms with the curtains closed. That was close enough for him. He chose an open-curtain room—the one in the center of the second level, because the second level would give him the best vantage point from which to observe everyone’s comings and goings—then stood up and made a run for it.
He leapt a foot or so short of the edge of the ground-level patio and grabbed hold of the edge of the balcony floor above it. His momentum caused his feet to swing forward and he almost lost his grip, but he somehow managed to hold on by little more than his fingertips. He took full advantage of the backswing—yanked himself up just enough to grab hold of two of the balusters—then pulled himself up, climbed up and over the rail, and then crouched down below the back door window level...just in case.
So far, so good. As far as he could tell, no one had seen him...yet.
He moved to one side of the door and then stood up, slowly, and peered in through the window. Most of the room was in shadow, but as best as he could tell it was, in fact, unoccupied. Now all that he had to do was to get inside.
The door was obviously old—no electronic lock. Just an old-fashioned knob with a keyhole in the center of it, and a roughly eighth-inch gap between the edge of the door and the jamb. He tested the knob and found that the door was, in fact, locked, as he’d expected it would be, but locks of that kind were easy to defeat, which was why no one used them anymore. He pulled out Luhrmann’s identicard and, placing his thumb over the imbedded chip to protect it, and to ensure that he used the other end, the all-plastic end, slipped the card into that narrow gap just above the latch. Then he slid the card down and pulled it out at the same time to defeat the latch, pulled the door open, and then pocketed the identicard again as he ducked inside.
He glanced around as he carefully closed the door behind him. It was a small and rather rustic room, but at least it appeared to be clean. It had a double bed that was neatly made, a small desk with a comm terminal and a chair, a closet with two sliding doors, and a virtuavid. Like those in back, the curtains hanging over the front window were open, and now that his eyes had begun to adjust to the darker room, the view outside seemed to be extra bright. He considered closing them to hide his presence from potential passersby, but then decided not to, fearing that doing so might actually alert someone in the office to his presence. He would instead be careful to stay well back, away from the window.
The lights came up automatically when he walked into the bathroom, so he quickly closed the door. As expected, he found it fully stocked with everything that he needed, so he quickly stripped off his clothes, relieved himself once more, and then proceeded to shave off his moustache and his goatee and to trim the hair around his ears. He brushed his teeth as well—he loved his coffee, but it always gave him bad breath and a case of cotton-mouth—and then took a quick but sorely needed warm shower and washed his hair.
When he’d finished, he dried himself off with one of the thick towels that were hanging on the wide rack, as there was no dryer unit installed in the shower, then combed his hair a little differently than he usually wore it, just to alter his appearance that much more. Then he pulled his briefs back on and then carried his clothes back into the main room to ‘de-uniform’ them—to pull the badge, rank, and ‘Department of Corrections’ patches off of the shirt, and to tear the vertical stripes off of the pant legs.
That done, with the help of the same razor that he’d used to shave, he got dressed and then stood before the full-length mirror that was hanging on the inside of the bathroom door. Better, he concluded. It still looked like some sort of a uniform, especially the shirt, but at least it no longer screamed, ‘Hey, look at me! I’m a corrections officer from Pennsylvania!’ Nevertheless, he was still going to need to replace it with something else, both the shirt and the trousers, and the shoes as well, for that matter—something different and ordinary that wouldn’t inspire anyone to give him a second look. He supposed that he could bring himself to wear Luhrmann’s smelly sneakers if he absolutely had to—at least they’d be more comfortable than those shoes—but otherwise, he needed a complete change of clothes.
He stuffed the patches and trouser stripes in under the mattress—hopefully, if anyone ever found them and reported it, the authorities would think that he’d continued to head east toward the coast—and then carefully approached the front window, stood off to its left behind the curtain, and then peered out toward the office. He couldn’t see it very well from that vantage point. He didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Even if there wasn’t anyone outside, the desk clerk might have had security cameras out there. He or she might have been watching the entire front of the motel at that very moment. Still, if he wanted to find a man his size and steal some of that man’s clothes, then he was going to have to step outside and look for that man.
He only wished that he could keep one eye on Luhrmann’s car at the same time.
He stepped across the window and over to the front door, unlocked it, and then opened it just enough so that he could peer outside. Still nothing. He had to do it. Without further hesitation, he pulled it open and then stepped out onto the walkway as though he belonged there. Then, realizing suddenly as the door started closing behind him that it might automatically lock, he stepped back and stopped it from closing just in time, then slipped off one of his shoes and stuck it in the jamb to prevent the door from closing all of the way.
With that potential disaster having been averted, he stepped up to the railing and leaned slightly forward, resting his elbows on it, to bask in the sun’s warmth and to see what he might see. The sun was warm and bright, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. That gentle breeze was still blowing, the birds were still singing, and the traffic was still zipping by on the highway. All was peaceful and serene, but after a few minutes or so, realizing that the desk clerk might think it strange that a man was standing directly outside of a room that was supposed to be unoccupied, he casually moved several feet to his left to stand in front of the room next door—a room in which the curtains happened to have been pulled closed.
A few minutes later, a bald-headed bearded man who looked like he had just rolled out of bed, though he was fully dressed, walked out of one of the rooms on the ground level and strolled into the office. He looked to be significantly taller and probably had at least a hundred pounds on him, so Dylan didn’t consider him to be a potential target. He came back out of the office a minute or two later and looked up at Dylan, waved to him—Dylan waved back—and then returned to his room. Then, almost immediately after that, he came back outside with a woman who was barely two-thirds his height and probably not half his weight and two young children—a little girl and an even littler boy. They all climbed into one of the smaller parked cars and then drove off.
For the next ten or fifteen minutes, Dylan stood quietly, enjoying the warmth of the sun, listening to the birds and the passing traffic, and hoping to God that no one had found Luhrmann’s car yet. Then a beat-up-looking old car turned in from the highway, pulled up to the office, and stopped. A rather rotund middle-aged man with long brown hair and an even longer white beard climbed out and walked into the office, while his passenger, who Dylan couldn’t see very well, waited in the car. He emerged less than a minute later with an angry expression on his face, marched back to his car and climbed in, and then sped away.
Perhaps he hadn’t liked the room rates?
Not long after that, Dylan turned around when two young women practically stumbled out of the room in front of which he had parked himself, giggling and whispering to one another and then giggling some more. One of them had long, flowing platinum-blond hair and blue eyes, the other, slightly shorter red hair and green eyes. They were wearing identical one-piece swimsuits in red, yellow, and black—the kind that competitive swimmers usually wore. Why, he had no idea. As far as he had seen, the motel didn’t have a pool. Maybe they’d just been trying them on. They looked at Dylan and fell dead silent for a moment—he realized at that moment that they were several years younger than he had initially thought, high school age at most. They fairly were cute, too, if not necessarily pretty. They mumbled to one another again in what sounded to Dylan like German, giggled some more, and then ducked back inside their room.
That had been German that they had been speaking, Dylan concluded, and their suits had been in the colors of the German flag. Perhaps they were here for some sort of international high school swim meet or the like. Racy thoughts about what they might have been up to in that room started crossing his mind, but he quickly pushed them aside. He had much more important things to think about at the moment.
He’d probably been standing out there on the walkway for close to an hour, worrying every moment that the police were going to find Luhrmann’s car, when a man who looked to be in his low to mid-thirties stepped out of the room a couple of doors over to his right and headed for the stairs. He looked to be about the right height and weight, so Dylan started walking toward that room, hoping to reach it in time to stop the door from closing, while at the same time keeping his eyes on the man to make sure that he didn’t suddenly stop and turn back. The man headed down the stairs, and Dylan slipped his hand into the doorjamb just in time. The door did close on it, but not hard enough to injure him, fortunately.
He needed to hurry. He was only going to have a few minutes at most in the room. He pushed the door open and quickly scanned the room as he ducked inside and then forced the door closed behind him. He saw no one, thank God, but then realized that while he hadn’t seen anyone else, he was hearing the shower water running in the bathroom, splashing and splattering every few seconds. Someone was in there, and whoever it was had already started washing and might finish at any moment. He really needed to hurry and get out of there.
He spotted two suitcases, one sitting upright on the floor against the wall, just inside the door, the other, the smaller of the two, sitting open on the foot of the bed, partially filled with what were obviously a young woman’s clothes, some of which had been taken out and set aside, as though that young woman had just been going through them. He could see a pair of denim shorts and some not so carefully folded tee-shirts in a variety of colors, what appeared to be a pale yellow sundress, a few small panties, and a couple of small-cupped bras.
