Light Before Day by Christopher Rice

Author:Christopher Rice
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: 9781401300395
Published: 2011-08-08T05:53:45+00:00

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Room 3J was situated above the entrance to the hotel. The mint-green walls were spiderwebbed with cracks in the plaster. The queen-size bed had no box spring, and the elderly television had rabbit ear antennae and a bulging screen that made for a good mirror. Everything else in the room was too nice to belong there. The navy-blue curtains looked new, with a faint luster to them. The bedside lamp had a round deep-blue shade and a thick rounded base made out of dark wood. A three-tiered Ikea desk station was positioned next to the window, with a row of framed photographs along the top shelf. In the closet, which had a pull curtain instead of a door, was a row of expensive suits from Brooks Brothers and Armani, wrinkled and badly in need of dry cleaning.

I flipped through a stack of mail on the man's desk and found past-due notices from just about every credit card company in existence, and envelopes with letterheads of multiply-named law firms, all addressed to a local PO box for one Cameron Davis. He hadn't seen fit to open any of them. The photos on the shelf told how in happier days a well-groomed Cameron Davis had worn country club outerwear and gone on bike rides through Golden Gate Park with his chubby-cheeked children. Now he was living in a downtown flophouse.

The small bathroom had a shower stall, an overhead bulb, and two drawers under the sink.

Remembering the man's paranoid glances, I looked for drug paraphernalia. I pulled out a Gucci toiletry bag from under the sink, unzipped it, and found nothing stronger than Paxil.

My cell phone rang. "He's heading through Union Square," Caroline said. "He's moving fast, but he's wandering. It looks like their little visit freaked him out."

"Maybe he thought they were debt collectors," I whispered. "This guy has past-due notices from every credit card under the sun." I returned to the desk station. "He's also got pictures of his family in here. They don't look like the kind of people who would visit him in a place like this."

I opened the nightstand drawer and saw pawn slips. "And he's pawning stuff," I said.

Caroline grunted. There was something else in the nightstand drawer, something that struck me silent. I pulled out a blinking keypad that had a perpetually changing series of numbers on its thin LED screen.

"Adam?"

I knelt and saw a thin laptop computer resting on the floor under the bed. Behind the desk on the windowsill was a row of hardcover novels by Tom Clancy and John Grisham. I pulled out two of them and saw a tiny satellite dish angled out the window.

"He's a customer," I said.

"You think he didn't pay his bill?" she asked me.

The room was exhibit A of a life falling apart. Now that Roger Vasquez had disabled all of the lights in the alley, I wondered if he was coming back to deliver the final blow.

Caroline said my name several times, but I didn't answer.

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