10.
 Later that afternoon, Korinta still sat waiting, but the other side had not arrived yet. She had plenty of time to cogitate, and she was beginning to have suspicions.
Rain clouds began to move in over the distant mountains, adding to an air of oppression as blue sky yielded to business-suit gray. Sparto went out to a gas station and picked up a dinner of chicken salad sandwiches on white bread, pickles, potato chips, and peanut butter chocolate bars, accompanied by strawberry milkshakes. He had bought a Hemingway novel, and had his nose in it even as she helped him unpack the food in their room.
As they ate, the room was gloomy, and distant lightning flashed in a rain storm twenty or thirty miles away on the mountains, while the near miles were dry as ever. “Sparto?”
“Hmmm?” He read his novel.
“I think it might just be possible that we are in a trap.”
“Hmm?” He turned a page.
“This is important!” she said, balling her fists.
He laid the book down on his lap, tilted his head back on the pillow, and closed his eyes. “I’m listening.”
“Sparto, I have a funny feeling they employ slow people here because the owners here—I don’t mean just Ginger and Tony, but whoever is behind them—the Association of Western Life Arroyo Motel Services, whatever that is—find it’s just easier to have people around who aren’t bright enough to catch on. Like, Ginger and Tony kicked this guy Rodney off their property, who is a member of a flying saucer club.”
“Catch on to what?”
“Whatever they are doing here.”
“What is a flying saucer club?”
“People who see little men.”
“Oh. So this place is a flying saucer clubhouse?”
“Sort of, in a crazy way,” she said, kneeling on the bed and hugging a pillow. “Dorio made me think this place just happened to somehow be a place that they picked, maybe out of a phone book. I am beginning to think it’s a professional staging area.”
“Meaning?”
“They have been running an operation out of here. More sophisticated than anything we ever imagined. Which means our whole NBI mission could be compromised, the entire territory lost.”
“You have a vivid imagination,” he said softly, touching her cheek. “Go lightly.”
“I can’t! I won’t!”
“I understand. We’ll tell Dorio about your thoughts when we next see him.”
“We have to contact him!”
“How? Call him by phone?” Sparto lifted the receiver and held it up mockingly. “NBI is not in any phone book. We have no number for them. They call us, we do not call them. No 411 operator can look them up for us. No, my darling, we wait for Dorio to contact us.”
“I know you are right,” she said, feeling his arms around her as she leaned her head down and inhaled the fragrance of his powerful chest. They remained in this loving embrace for a long time, until they felt the ground tremble again.
She looked up, shocked and breathless. “The other side—they are here. Now they will begin negotiating about how to divide up this sector.”
“We’ll blow them up and kill them if we have to,” Sparto whispered. “That will make them mistrust each other again.”
She nodded. “You’re right. It might be our only hope.” Meetings like this took a long time to arrange between violent and suspicious opposing syndicates. If they did not hear from Dorio, and no other option presented itself, they might have to make a desperate and suicidal move against the men talking in that motel room downstairs.
They sat on the bed, entwined, and listened. They looked up and tracked the faint tremor that made the light rattle in its glass housing, that made the Venetian blinds rattle faintly as they rocked to and fro. Just as soon, the building stilled. The air settled, and the unspoken pressure or feeling of alarm went away.
They rested awhile, during which time Sparto dozed off.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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