11.
 Korinta fixed the bed so that the rolled up quilts looked as if someone were sleeping it. Then Korinta went downstairs dressed in a warm jumpsuit with a leather bombardier jacket and scarf over it. She had a holster with the .44 magnum laser-finder hand cannon in it, and she carried a blanket in which, wrapped up, she carried a twelve gauge shotgun. In her other hand was the carryall, full of shotgun and handgun shells and a little food and water.
“Are you checking out?” Tony said in surprise as he sat, cigar in mouth, reading the sports page.
“Hold the bill,” she said. “I’ll be back.”
Tony recovered, pushing his cigar back in. “Your husband is still upstairs. I guess you won’t go far without him.”
“That’s right.” How did he know where Sparto was? He’d been watching...it was becoming clearer than ever now.
She pushed through the door and stepped out into the black, star-rich night. The clear desert night sky was so full of stars that one could not make out any constellations, just a carpet of silver spatters from one horizon to the other. The air was crisp, with just a tang of wood burning. Dogs barked distantly.
Korinta started to jog toward a line of brush that separated the parking lot from the frontage road.
She ran by her car and waved the sensor of her toolpad at it, and the reading came back: loaded with nitrates, rigged to explode on ignition. The car was a bomb powerful enough to take out most of the motel building, and all the innocents sleeping in it, not to mention the greasy scoundrels holding their conference.
The distant dogs talked to each other, or so it seemed, in disturbed barks and howls and squeals of discomfort.
Korinta dove for cover and rolled, landing in a sandy ditch with a row of cactus above. She pulled the blanket off the shotgun and wrapped the blanket around herself. There was a thermos of hot coffee in the carryall, and she allowed herself a sip—it might turn out to be a long night, and she must conserve.
She lay on her belly and watched the motel, occasionally glancing to her left at the freeway, a quarter mile away, and steadily moving trucks and cars in a never ending stream of traffic heading through, not stopping. People going from one coast to the other. Nobody planning to spend a moment more in this part of New Mexico than absolutely necessary, and yet the fate of this slice of the galaxy was being determined here.
She glanced over her shoulder also at the road slightly up and behind her, but it was dark and still, giving her a sense of creepy crawling up an down her spine, as if something huge and monstrous lay in wait in its dark maw.
She took out a powerful little pair of binoculars and stared at the hotel. She saw a number of cars parked by doors here and there, and lights on in the rooms where families were resting on their once in a lifetime trip to the Grand Canyon or Gran Chaco or wherever in the Southwest they were going. There was no place to go in this area, so they turned off the lights early after watching the single television channel, and went to sleep.
Someone or something hooted, and Korinta jumped.
It was nothing, just an owl. Then something howled and uttered a laughter-like string of yips, and she knew those were coyotes.
Crawling on her belly, she slowly moved to her right along the ditch, looking through her binoculars, until she saw a lighted window. The heavy shades were drawn, and the window only emitted a faint yellow glow, but it was not the glow of a television, not the crazy flicker of colored cathode ray emissions, but the steady light of a primitive electric bulb over a table at which two men sat talking.
Korinta wished she had a cell phone, a radio, even just a receiver. She wanted to hear one kind word from Dorio, one breath of reassurance.
Nothing.
The hours dragged on, and she dared not sleep.
|
Thank you for reading. If you love it, tell your friends. Please post a favorable review at Amazon, Good Reads, and other online resources. If you want to thank the author, you may also buy a copy for the low price of a cup of coffee. It's called Read-a-Latte: similar (or lower) price as a latte at your favorite coffeeshop, but the book lasts forever while the beverage is quickly gone. Thank you (JTC).
|
TOP
|
MAIN
Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
|
