Chapter 3: First Contact, RV, East Mesa

The motel was called the Desert Bloom and had not bloomed in any discernible way for at least a decade. Walter sat in the Aztek in the parking lot for four minutes, engine off, watching the unit numbers progress along the exterior walkway. Room 112 had its curtain pulled to within three inches of the sill. The gap admitted a stripe of late-morning light and excluded everything else. Walter had been watching the gap for four minutes and it had not changed. The truck parked outside — a 2001 Ford Ranger with a cracked left taillight and a bumper sticker that read KEEP HONKING I'M RELOADING — matched the registration he had pulled from a name he had written in someone else's handwriting on a legal pad at two o'clock in the morning.

He got out of the car.

The parking lot smelled of motor oil and the specific variety of fast food grease that had been absorbing into asphalt for years, sweet and synthetic and not quite food anymore. He crossed it at an even pace and knocked on the door of 112 with two knocks, not three. Three was urgent. Two was someone who expected to be let in.