I get a single room with a queen bed and a tiny bathroom at a chain hotel. There’s no couch in here, but there’s one of those cheap little love seats. I push it up against the door. Then I take my car keys and balance them on the manual latch on the door so that if any weight pushes on the door from the outside, the keys will drop to the floor and land on a strategically placed tiny hand mirror that I found in Steve’s Jeep. The sound of keys falling onto glass will, I hope, alert me if anyone’s trying to join me tonight. Clever, right? I saw that in Conspiracy Theory. Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts. I might have been the only one who saw it.
I probably won’t need that warning, because I doubt I’ll be able to sleep. I know this much: I need to. I still have a hangover from that little thing with my plane crashing to the earth, and tonight hasn’t exactly been a picnic, either. My heart is racing and my head is pounding and my limbs are jangling, but I know that underneath the nerves, I desperately need rest.
I pace the cheap carpet while my mind scatters in twenty directions like cockroaches fleeing light. Was President James Buchanan gay? Did John Wilkes Booth’s fiancée have an affair with President Lincoln’s son Robert? Isn’t it odd that Robert Todd Lincoln was present at two presidential assassinations but not his own father’s? I mean, what kind of odds are those—
Stop. Focus, Ben. Concentrate on another set of odds: your odds of survival. Whoever’s trying to kill me only has to succeed once, after all. I have to succeed every time in avoiding them.
I turn the shower dial as hot as it goes and let the water punish me. I put my forehead against the wall and try to think about that lobbyist Jonathan Liu and what Diana might have known that got her killed and might get me killed, and then I’m thinking of Janet Leigh in the shower in Psycho and then that remake with Vince Vaughn, and that probably wasn’t his best career move, but then again he got to have sex with Anne Heche—or wait, that wasn’t Psycho, that was Return to Paradise—anyway, I’m vulnerable, because how well can you defend yourself when you’re wet and naked?
Not very. I mean, I’m not much of a threat to anyone when I’m clothed. Naked, about the only thing I could do is scare somebody for a few seconds.
I dry off and put on some clothes that I brought from the cabin, stuff I haven’t worn for ten years, and try to relax, to think of something that won’t freak me out, to take a small break from all this so I can get some rest.
By 2:00 a.m., I’m convinced that Buchanan was gay.
By 3:00 a.m., it’s clear that, while Julia Roberts can obviously hold her own in a lead role, I prefer her in ensemble casts like the ones in Mona Lisa Smile and Mystic Pizza and Steel Magnolias, which makes me briefly consider whether I’m gay, too.
By 4:00 a.m., I’ve put the presidents in alphabetical order.
And then I’m back to wondering about the odds of my surviving whatever is happening to me, and there’s literally an equation on a blackboard, and then Matt Damon puts down his janitor’s mop and picks up a piece of chalk and navigates through this complicated algorithm with confident strokes and then Ben Affleck shows up, first to apologize for Gigli and then to tell Damon that he should be doing more with his life than scrubbing floors, then Robin Williams walks in and tells me to seize the day, and I try to tell him he’s got the wrong movie but then Damon has completed the foot-long equation on the blackboard and just as he turns to me there’s a loud, tinny sound that startles all of us, and Damon says to me, Hate to say it, Ben, but you’re toast—
My eyes pop open and I lurch forward on the bed. I scramble to get a view of the door.
The keys aren’t teetering on the latch anymore.
They’ve fallen onto the mirror on the floor.
Someone just tried to open my door.
Chapter 24
I quietly slide off the bed and slither along the carpet. I can’t see below the door frame. I have no way of knowing if someone is standing outside my door.
But those keys didn’t just fall off by themselves. Someone must have pushed against the door.
I hold my breath, count down the first twenty presidents, and wait for any further movement. I stare at that door until my eyes are playing tricks on me, until that door is breathing in and out, expanding and contracting.
I lie there perfectly still for at least ten minutes, my face pressed against carpet fibers of cheap quality and questionable hygiene. Maybe the sound of the keys landing on the glass mirror, meant to alert me, had the additional effect of spooking them. But it’s kind of hard to believe that men armed with automatic weapons would be scared off by a set of car keys and a hand mirror.