Page 58

Franklin Jalbert has stayed in hundreds of motel rooms during his career as an investigator, crisscrossing Kansas from north to south and east to west.

Almost all of those rooms come with plastic glasses in little baggies, mostly printed with slogans like SANITIZED FOR YOUR SAFETY.

The glasses on top of the minibar of his little suite in the Celebration Centre just happen to be real glass.

He registers the weight of the one he’s picked up before it’s too late to stop—and he probably wouldn’t have stopped, anyway.

He hurls it against the door Davis has just left, and it shatters.

Better the glass than her, he thinks.

Not that I would ever hurt her.

Of course not.

She may be a traitor, but they put in some good time together.

Caught some bad boys and bad girls.

He taught Ella, and she was eager to learn.

Only she hasn’t learned enough, it seems.

She doesn’t understand how dangerous Coughlin is.

He wonders if perhaps after their traitorous meeting at the coffee shop, they might have gone somewhere else.

Maybe to a motel?

No, no, she’d never.

Not with the prime suspect in a murder case.

Never? Really? Never?

Coughlin’s not a bad-looking man, and he has a wide-eyed I’m telling the truth look about him.

Some might find that appealing.

Is it really beyond the realm of possibility that she… and he… maybe kind of a weird twist on the Stockholm Syndrome…?

In spite of her backstabbing, he can’t believe it of her.

And never mind Ella.

She’s out of the picture.

The question is what he’s going to do about Coughlin.

The answer seems to be… nothing.

She’s put him in a box.

That damned spineless trooper had to spill his guts, didn’t he?

The idea of retiring, as she suggested, is awful.

Like being marched toward the edge of a cliff.

He can’t imagine stepping off into the void.

He has no hobbies except for the daily newspaper crossword and the occasional jigsaw puzzle.

His vacations have consisted of aimless wanderings in a rented camper, seeing sights he doesn’t care about and snapping pictures he rarely looks at later.

Each hour feels three hours long.

Retirement would multiply those long hours by a thousand, then two thousand, then ten thousand.

Each hour haunted by thoughts of Danny Coughlin looking at him across the table with that wide-eyed wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly gaze, saying Arrest me.

You can’t, can you? Thoughts of Danny Coughlin stopping in some other state for another young girl with her thumb out and a pack on her back.

And what can I do?

Well, he can do one thing; pick up the broken glass.

He brings over a wastebasket, kneels down, and starts doing that.

Pretty soon he’s up to 57 shards, 1,653 when added in progression.

I wouldn’t have hurt her, absolutely not.

But there was one second—

Sharp pain needles the ball of his thumb.

A bead of blood appears.

Jalbert realizes he’s lost count.

He debates starting again from one.