Dust Up: A Thriller by Jon McGoran Read Free Book Online Page A

high-rise horrors once stood. And then into a part of North Philadelphia that was as devastated as it had always been, almost reassuring in its dependable decay, unless you had to live or work there. Eleventh Street ended at a chain-link fence and dense brush that obscured one of the train tracks that cut diagonally through North Philly, making literal the dead-endedness of some of the neighborhood’s streets.
    We turned right, then left, onto Germantown Avenue, a colonial-era highway that cut across the city. It starts almost at the Delaware River and runs through North Philly, then Germantown, Mount Airy, and upscale Chestnut Hill before turning into Germantown Pike at the city limits and eventually ending in Collegeville, fifteen miles away.
    Maybe she was taking a back route out of the city, I thought, but we pulled over two blocks later in front of a fenced-in yard with a bored-looking pit bull. There was a school across the street. I wondered if we were just going to park and talk, but Miriam got out, and I followed.
    That’s when I noticed the blue metal sign rusting in front of the building on the corner. THE LIBERTY MOTEL .
    The pit bull followed my gaze. His head swiveled back at me, tilted disapprovingly, as if to say, “You sure you want to do this?”
    Miriam glanced quickly around us and bustled forward, head down, clutching her pink, tulip-covered cardigan around her. She was scampering up the steps before I even started moving.
    The pit bull looked away, like he’d given up on me.

 
    16
    I caught up with Miriam in time to open the door for her. She paused and looked up at me, but I couldn’t read her expression.
    I followed her into a small lobby or foyer. It was dark and airless, with torn carpet and a vague but insistent mixture of odors—urine, sweat, pot smoke, and fast food.
    As if the air weren’t full enough, hip-hop blared from a smartphone and dock system behind the desk. The kid bobbing his head in front of the speakers looked up as we walked in. His eyes seemed to recognize Miriam despite her disguise, or maybe because of it. Then they attached to me. It wasn’t a hard stare, but his eyes followed us up the steps to the second floor.
    The music drowned out whatever noises might have been coming from the other rooms as we walked down the hallway. Miriam took out an old-fashioned room key and opened a door at the end, standing there waiting while I caught up with her.
    I slipped inside, and she pulled the door closed behind us, swinging the security latch in place. The hip-hop faded just a bit. So did the reefer smell. The urine odor got stronger, and the rest of it stayed about the same.
    The room was almost entirely taken up by a queen-sized bed and a wooden table and chair. She had a bunch of plastic shopping bags piled up on the table. As Miriam slid the room key into her handbag, I glimpsed the edge of a U.S. passport and a cash withdrawal envelope from a bank.
    “You going somewhere?” I asked, realizing as I said it how insanely stupid it was.
    Before I could apologize, she whipped off her shades and stared more intently at my face, as if maybe I wasn’t who she thought I was, maybe this was a big mistake. “No,” she said caustically, “I’m settling down here for a while. Seems like a nice place to start a new life, right?”
    “Sorry,” I said.
    She plopped onto the wooden chair and pulled off her wig, draping it across the plastic bags on the table. She ran her fingers through her fine black hair, trying to straighten it out.
    I moved to sit on the bed, but she said, “I wouldn’t. Bedbugs.”
    I didn’t.
    She had a pretty face with delicate features, but the stress was etched deep. She looked ten years older than the woman in the picture, and I wondered if she’d ever recover, or if what she had gone through—was going through—was the kind of thing that just aged you prematurely. Maybe someday she’d catch up with it and once again look her age.
    “Yes, I’m out