Page 8 of After The Storm
Kate had no idea what her boss had tried to protect her from or who, but he’d failed and in that he’d lost his own life. Tears welled in her eyes at the thought of Jonas gone. In the four years she’d worked for him, never once had she heard even the hint of a complaint from a single soul about him. Sure, he wasn’t a crack attorney who’d ever take a case to the Supreme Court, and his cases were often more about people trying to get money for injuries that really didn’t change their lives much than addressing real and tragic harm done to his clients.
But in the big scheme of things in a city full of corruption, Jonas Flynn had helped some people along the way and made a few bucks for himself and her, his only assistant. He never got rich, and even though he had an office in a building with other lawyers, they never associated with him socially. He simply wasn’t big enough or important enough.
Until now. Something had changed to make Jonas Flynn and his client, Samuel Darnell, very important to someone. Important enough to kill them.
Kate took a deep breath of fetid motel room air into her lungs and let it out slowly as a single thought filled her brain. She had to figure out who had killed Jonas and his client and why. But to do that, she needed first to find a safe place to hide that didn’t make her skin crawl.
She’d paid for the night under a name that was a combination of her first name and her mother’s maiden name. Not that Landrieu as a last name would help her stay under the radar, but she hoped it at least made it slightly harder for someone to find her than her own name.
Fuck. She wasn’t good at this cloak and dagger stuff. She kept on the right side of the law at all times. She paid her taxes like she should, and whenever she got behind the wheel of her friend’s cars, she made sure to wear a seatbelt and not drive over the speed limit. Damnit, she’d done everything right and look where it had gotten her.
Hiding out in a shithole motel room that smelled like a mixture of blood and vomit.
“I can’t meet my end here,” she mumbled as she rolled off the bed and set her feet on the floor. “I won’t. If they’re going to kill me, I’m going to at least die in a decent place.”
As Kate walked across the room to the nastiest bathroom ever, she thought about that little bout of bravado she’d just showed. Pretty ballsy for someone who had no way to escape the city, little money to pay for anything, and no one to help her.
She flipped the switch on the wall that made the fluorescent light flicker on above the medicine cabinet that doubled as a mirror and stared at her reflection in front of her. A crack in the mirror ran diagonally through her face, giving her a nice funhouse look with the top half of her head shifted left and the bottom half shifted right.
“You’ve had bad mornings before, Kate, but this takes the prize. No hangover beats this look you’ve got going on now,” she said to herself, punctuating her comment with a sardonic chuckle.
For all the partying she’d done in her late teens and early twenties, none of those mornings after had ever looked this bad. Her mascara sat underneath her blue eyes, accentuating the dark circles there from a poor night’s sleep. Yesterday’s youthful and attractive look had given way to today’s mess, and since she didn’t have any makeup with her in her purse, she’d have to go through the day looking like this.
Even worse, her dark hair looked like those bedspread triangles had come to life during the night and gone to war with one side of her head. Tangled and frizzy, that half looked only marginally worse than the other half that sat pressed to her scalp.
“You’re the personification of this motel room,” she groaned to her reflection.
Behind her, the old shower curtain hung in a clump at the end of the rod to show off the black and mildewed grout lines between grimy green tiles. As she tried not to focus on the millions of microbes that must be living on that shower wall, she wondered if the tiles were supposed to match the carpet.
“No shower for me today, it seems,” she said as she forced herself not to look at the disgusting shower.
She didn’t even want to imagine how bad the tub looked. One glance at that and she might really throw up. Keeping her eyes on the mirror in front of her, she turned the hot water faucet handle with her left hand and heard the pipes make a terrifying groan, as if she’d awoken some horrible creature that lived inside them. Quickly, her gaze dropped to the sink to see what would come out, but after a few more angry groans, nothing happened. She turned the hot water handle completely off and prayed for better luck with the cold water.
Hopefully, the monster that controlled that temperature would be friendlier.
Cautiously, she turned the handle with a C on it and watched in surprise as water actually flowed into the sink. A smell like low tide hit her nostrils, turning her stomach for a moment, but she’d take the slightly murky cold water over nothing at all.
Wetting her hands, she scrubbed her face and wiped the area underneath her eyes until she no longer resembled some goth or punk rocker chick. Once more under the water to get her hands wet again and then she dragged her fingers through her hair to fluff the one side and untangle and calm the other.
When she finished, Kate looked into the mirror again and saw not much improvement. She looked about as good as she felt, which considering what she’d been through in the past twelve hours and where she’d spent the night was pretty damn bad.
If only her biggest problem was how she looked.
Clean and as ready for the day as she possibly could be, Kate next had to tackle finding out what information the police had released on the murders. Someone had stolen all the knobs from the old TV that sat on top of the dresser, so finding out that way wouldn’t be happening. She’d seen a newspaper machine on the sidewalk about half a block away from the motel when she arrived the night before, so hopefully the paper had something to help her.
Opening the motel room door, she poked her head out and looked around at the world outside. She saw no one in the parking lot, and looking down the sidewalk toward where guests checked in, she saw no one working the desk. Clearly, the Bayou Motel didn’t expect many cheating spouses or high school partiers at five-thirty in the morning.
She felt her back pocket for the key she’d gotten when she paid for her room and found it still there, so she stepped outside onto the sidewalk in front of the motel. A handful of cars sat parked in front of other rooms. Looking out toward the road and the sidewalk that ran next to it, she saw the newspaper machine chained to a telephone pole.
Kate ran as fast as she could to it before realizing she might not have enough change to get a paper. Stopping in front of the navy blue newspaper vending machine covered with stickers from local bands and people’s pet causes, she rummaged through her pockets but only found a quarter, two dimes, and a penny.
“Who the hell carries change anymore?” she asked before cursing out the newspaper business. “No wonder these damn things are going the way of the landline.”
As she considered trying to break into the machine by kicking her foot through the glass front, she saw the entire front page of that day’s newspaper edition displayed for her. Crouching down, she read the headline at the top and the sentence beneath it that stunned her.
LOCAL LAWYER FOUND DEAD
Police looking into possible love triangle