Fifty-Three

Lucy went back up to the motel room, glancing back only once to see Stuart and his so-called "new assistant" drive out of the parking lot in Stuart's pickup. Once she was in the room, she closed the door behind her, leaned up against it, and let out a long sigh of relief.

There were ways it could have gone wrong. Stuart might have wanted to open up the bag before they left, but as far as she knew, he didn't have a key to the small lock that joined the zippers together. And when he lifted it into the back of the truck, he hadn't noticed that it weighed any different. She'd tried to get it as close as possible.

Now she needed to get out of here. There was one more errand to run, and then she'd lie low for a while. A few hours at the most. Then she'd go to the police. She had her story all worked out. Might need some tweaking, depending on how things went. A bit of improvising.

The way Lucy saw it, she had four big problems that were, in no particular order, these: the drug dealers, Stuart, Digby, and the police.

The first two she was hoping would be resolved shortly, one way or another.

Then Digby.

Then the police.

While Stuart was out, she'd opened the bag using the technique she'd learned from YouTube, dumped out the contents, and stuffed all but two of the little packages into two pillowcases. She knotted the tops of them and tossed both into the closet, where they would be easy enough to find later for anyone who went looking.

Lucy didn't have anything of her own to pack. She'd arrived with nothing. But she was going to take something of Stuart's with her. In the cheap dresser across from the bed, in one of the warped drawers that she had struggled to open, she had found a dark green hoodie. She gave it a sniff when she pulled it out, but it hardly mattered that he'd probably never washed it. She pulled it on, brought the hood up over her head, and had a look at herself in the mirror. Adjusted it so that it covered up more of her face.

"That'll have to do," she said to herself.

She stuffed into the right pocket of the hoodie the two packages she had set aside, then grabbed her car keys and left the room, pulling the door tight as she left. Her Kia was tucked away behind the motel and she didn't see that she had any choice but to drive it. She didn't have enough cash for a cab and she couldn't use her phone to order an Uber. All Lucy could do was cross her fingers that no one would spot the car on her way to the hospital in nearby Bridgeport.

She didn't worry about pulling the hood up over her head while she drove. If she got stopped, it would be because someone spotted the car. But once she was close to the hospital, she parked several blocks away, and shrouded her head and face the moment she was out of the vehicle.

She had to be in and out fast.

Lucy walked in through the main entrance at a steady pace, like one of hundreds of people who came through those doors every day for appointments or to visit sick relatives. Strolled past the main desk, hoodie up, limiting her own field of vision to what was right in front of her.

Instead of heading to the bank of elevators that serviced the upper floors and patient rooms, she pushed open a door to a stairwell that led down to the bowels of the building. Utility rooms, generators, furnace and air-conditioning units, the laundry.

Locker room.

Digby worked a lot of nights, so there was a good chance he was in the building somewhere. She hoped he was midway through a shift. He'd normally hit the locker room at the beginning or end. Employee lockers lined all four walls of the room and two further banks of them were in the center. She knew where Digby's was. And she had a key, because Digby was dumber than a jar of tongue depressors and had given her a copy. The few times she'd sold him some fentanyl, he had paid her and asked her to slip the stuff into his locker later.

Which was just what she was going to do now.

A freebie.

She glanced furtively about the room to make sure she was alone and opened the locker. A pair of shoes at the bottom, a jacket on the hook, as well as a full change of clothes, including socks, a pair of jeans, and a polo shirt, on the top shelf. Some toiletry items. Soap, shampoo, a shaving kit.

Lucy took the two packages from her pocket, went on her tiptoes, and tucked them at the back of the top shelf, beyond the clothes. High enough, she believed, that even if Digby were to remove everything that was up there, the packages would go unnoticed.

She closed the door and was about to lock it when a thought occurred to her. She opened the door and dug through the pockets of the jacket. First the side ones, where she found his car keys. She had no use for them. Then she tried the inside pocket, felt something crinkly, and smiled.

Money.

She pulled out a twenty, a five, and three ones.

Lucy was fucking starving. Once she got the hell out of here, she was going to get herself something to eat.

And wait to see what happened.