Page 21 of The Midnight Knock
“But Stan Holiday is here. You saw him arrive in the van, same as me. What happens whenhecomes to dinner? He will be awfully surprised to see me here, so far from Frank’s house, without any sign of Frank. There is nothing you can say that would not makehimsuspicious.”
“Isn’t Stanley in some kind of trouble? He went off to Mexico against Frank’s direct orders. I heard it from… well.”
Kyla had heard this from a man named Lance, but the thought of Lance brought the smell of gunpowder to Kyla’s nose, brought back the sound of a bullet burying itself in a man’s stomach.You live by the sword, you die by the sword, Fernanda had said this afternoon, when it was all over—when they’d been taking Lance’s keys, Lance’s guns—but Kyla had taken one look at her boyfriend’s dead face and tasted bile in her mouth.
Dying by the sword sounded more pleasant than what they’d done to Lance.
Now, in the motel, Fernanda only nodded. “I believe you are right. I heard Frank arguing with Stanley on the phone the day before yesterday. ‘You will be passing through enemy territory. You will just make the situation worse. Do not dare go after her.’ I remember that clearly.”
“So there you go. Whatever Stanley’s doing, he’s probably not in a hurry to get hold of Frank.”
“No.” Fernanda chewed her lip. “If Stanleyisin hot water with Frank and sees us here, delivering us back to Frank would be the perfect opportunity to return to his good graces.”
Kyla paced: front door, bathroom, back door. Every time she passed their bathroom, she saw herself reflected in the mirror above the sink. It was the only furnishing in this room that wasn’t in perfect condition. A long crack bisected the mirror from top to bottom, so that for a few seconds on every trip, Kyla appeared to be two subtly different women. There was probably a lesson in there somewhere. Not that she had the patience to learn it.
“It doesn’t matter if Stanley sees us here. There’s no landline here, and Frank only gives out the satellite phones to people on official business, which Stanley definitely is not. I’ve never seen Stan with a cell, but the only tower is in El Paso, and that barely works in Stockton. He would never have a signal this far away.”
Fernanda looked at their nightstand, as if to confirm what Kyla had noticed the moment they arrived: there was no telephone in the room. “The twins must have some way to communicate with civilization. First they have no car, now they have no phone?”
“Who cares? We just need to survive the night here. The second that gas delivery comes in the morning, we’re gone.”
“Do you really believe the twins, though? That gas will come tomorrow?”
“Why would they lie about that?”
“I do not know.” Fernanda rubbed her arms. “But nothing about this place feels right. Frank used to say that this road was cursed. There used to be another motel—”
A noise from room 4 cut her off. Kyla heard it too: a woman wasspeaking next door, talking to a man. She didn’t sound happy. Kyla paused her pacing and inched her way over to the adjoining wall. She pressed her ear to the wood, held her breath.
Someone was with Sarah Powers in her room. They didn’t sound pleased about it.
Kyla heard a man say something. It sounded curt and brusque, but he spoke too low for her to make out the words. Sarah Powers replied with something equally unhappy. The man responded, now even quieter than before. Kyla strained her ears, struggling to make out the conversation—struggling even to identify the speaker—but it was no good. They were practically whispering by now.
In a whisper of her own, Fernanda said, “Is that Stanley?”
Kyla turned away from the wall. She shrugged. “I can’t tell. But who else would it be?”
Fernanda said nothing.
Kyla didn’t do well with too much advance planning. She was a girl of action, decisive sometimes to a fault (just ask Lance). She made her way to the nightstand between the room’s twin beds and opened the top drawer and found both their guns still inside. Both of Lance’s guns, that is, not that he would be needing them anymore. Checking the magazine and the barrel just like Lance had taught her to do, Kyla handed one to Fernanda, tucked the other down the back of her jeans.
The frozen metal bit into her skin. Good. A little pain was exactly what she needed to get moving.
“I’m going to go to dinner. I’ll go armed and wait for Sarah. You can stay here if you want. Maybe it would be best if you stayed out of sight.”
Fernanda considered the gun. She shook her head. “I would rather not be alone.”
Kyla nodded. She wasn’t sure if Fernanda was afraid of solitude or afraid that Kyla might somehow throw her to the wolves to save her own skin—the girls weren’t exactly the closest of friends, whatever Frank might think—but she didn’t see a point in arguing. It was going to be a difficult night whatever they did.
And Fernanda was right about something else: everything about this motel feltoff.Somewhere deep, deep down in the base of herbrain, Kyla wondered if Stanley and Frank and all the horrors of Fort Stockton might not be the least of their worries.
The girls secured their jackets and their firearms. They headed for the back door. Stepping out into the cold, Kyla risked a glance at the strange house behind the motel and would have sworn—just for a moment—she saw a glimmer of light in the upstairs window.
A silver light.
As Kyla made to lock their back door, the sound of footsteps came from around the corner of the motel. The sound came from the right, the direction of Stan Holiday’s room, and so Kyla hesitated, the room key in her hand, wondering if they should duck back inside. If maybe it would be safer to try to avoid the big man after all.
But it wasn’t Stanley who appeared around the corner. Of all people, it was Penelope, Stanley’s teenage granddaughter, the strange kid with the awful scar on her forehead. Kyla hesitated. As far as she knew, she had no reason to be afraid of Penelope.
