the small room. The irradiated numerals jumped up at him, sharp and
clear: seven minutes after three in the morning. At this hour no one
had a legitimate reason for picking a lock on a room that . . . What
was he thinking” There was no legitimate reason for such a thing at any
hour, day or night.
“Alex, what if he gets in here?”
“Ssshh,” Doyle said, kicking back the covers and sliding out of bed.
“What if he does?”
“He won’t.”
Doyle went to the door, aware that Colin was right behind him, and he
bent down to listen at the lock. Metal rasped on metal, clinked,
snicked, rasped again.
He stepped sideways to the room’s only window, just to the left of the
door. Careful not to make a sound, he lifted the heavily lined drapes
and then the cold venetian blinds. He tried to look to the right along
the covered promenade where the man would be bent over the lock, but he
found that the outside of the glass was sheathed in a fine white mist
which made the window completely opaque. He could not see anything
through it except the vague, diffused glow of several scattered motel
lights that made the darkness beyond somewhat less intense and more
manageable than that within the room.
With as much care as he had employed in raising them away from the
window, he dropped the blinds and the drapes back into place. He could
not see any good reason for continued silence, but he took the
precaution anyway, in order to waste a few more precious seconds . . .
Any moment, he knew, the time would come for him to make a decision, to
chart some response to this yet he did not know for sure if he was
capable of acting against whoever was out there.
He went back to the door.
The carpet was nubbed and prickly against his bare feet.
Colin had remained by the door, silent, invisible in the onyx shadows,
perhaps too frightened to move or speak.
The icy sound of the wire scraping inside the lock was insistent and as
loud as ever. It made Alex think of the surgeon’s scalpel worrying at
the hard surface of a bone.
,who’s there?” Doyle finally asked. He was surprised at the strength
and selfpossession so evident in his voice. Indeed, he was surprised
that he could even speak at all.
The wire stopped moving.
,who’s there?” Doyle demanded once more, louder this time but with
less genuine courage and more false bravado than before.
Rapid footsteps-certainly those of a large man-sounded on the concrete
promenade floor and were quickly swallowed up in the steady roar of the
storm.
They waited, listening intently. But the man was gone.
Alex fumbled for the light switch by the door, found it.
For a moment they were both blinded by the sudden glare. Then the
familiar lines of the tritely designed motel room filtered back to them.
“He’ll return,” Colin said.
The boy was standing by the desk, wearing only his skivvies and his
Coke-bottle glasses. His thin brown legs were trembling uncontrollably,
the bony knees nearly knocking together. Doyle, also standing there in
his underwear, wondered if his own body was betraying his state of mind.
“Maybe not,” he said. “Now that he knows we’re up and around, he might
not risk coming back.”
Colin was adamant. “He will.”
Doyle knew what the situation demanded, but he did not want to face up
to it. He did not want to go out there in the rain, looking for the man
who had tried to pick the room lock.
“We could call the police,” Colin said.
“Oh? We still haven’t anything to tell them, any proof. We’d sound
like a couple of raving lunatics.”
Colin went back to his bed and sat down, pulled the blanket around
himself, so that he looked like a miniature American Indian.
In the bathroom, Doyle drew a glass of tap water and drank it slowly,
swallowing with some difficulty.
As he rinsed the glass and put it on the fake-marble shelf beside the
porcelain sink, he caught sight of his face in the mirror. He was pale