Liquid Fear by Scott Nicholson Read Free Book Online Page A

minutes had passed since the ringing of the telephone, and though his mind still ran frantic loops, his hands no longer trembled.
    He was slipping into his shirt when the knock came. The interior of the bathroom was hidden from view of the front door. Roland glanced once behind him to reassure himself of the bathroom’s angle and cracked the door, making sure his foot was planted firmly behind it.
    A Hispanic woman, wearing blue jeans and a white uniform shirt with a towel draped over one shoulder, gave him an uneasy smile. She stood before a cart that held the tools of a maid’s trade: stacks of folded linen, spray bottles, mop, toilet brush, and a bucket of gray water that smelled of pine cleanser and bleach. She’d obviously expected to find an empty room and had given a perfunctory knock out of habit.
    The woman pointed at her wrist, though she wore no watch, and said, “Time for checkout?” in a thick accent. A question, with the tone of one who had learned the hard way the customer was always right.
    Roland managed a return smile, though his lips felt numb and paralyzed with shock. “Slept late,” he said, faking a yawn. “Give me ten minutes. I need a quick shower.”
    The woman nodded and looked at a piece of notebook paper taped to her cart, then at the room number. “Okay, Mr. Underwood. But you tell the desk.”
    She said “desk” as if the destination was some sort of principal’s office for wayward adults.
    “No desk,” Roland said, the smile frozen on his face. He was hiding a corpse, but he could lie with his eyes and his face and his hands and his heart. Some habits never died.
    “ Por favor ,” he said in bad Spanish, and he actually winked. He lifted a hand and realized it was still covered by the sock. He worked it like a puppet, grinned like an idiot, and then removed it. Digging into his wallet— David’s wallet, he chided himself—he pulled out a ten-dollar bill and held it toward the maid.
    She shrank back as if it were the badge of a U.S. Immigration Service agent. She glanced from the office below back to the money. “I want no trouble.”
    “Neither do I, but I don’t want to meet my wife at the airport smelling like a pig.”
    “The desk finds out, I have trouble.”
    “My wife can be trouble, too. Mucho bad.”
    The maid hesitated, as if calculating the risk and mentally converting the dollars to pesos. “You hurry?”
    “Five minutes, I promise.”
    Roland was sickened by the look in the woman’s eyes and was ashamed how cheaply she could be led into conspiracy. But he was quite possibly a murderer, and bribery was several notches down the moral scale.
    She took the bill and secured it in her pocket. Roland wondered if, when the police interrogated her, she would tell them about the money. He figured its DNA and fingerprint evidence would never enter a courtroom. He only hoped she had a green card, for her sake.
    “Five minutes?” she asked, glancing at the office again and the omnipotent front desk that was hidden behind its tinted glass.
    “Cross my heart,” he said, declining to complete the last half of the promise. He closed the door, found that sweat had stained the underarms of his shirt, and wondered if five minutes would be enough.
    Even if he mustered the will to touch the body, the maid would find it whether it was tucked in the closet or hidden under the bed. He considered turning on the taps in the bathtub and locking the door, letting the maid assume he was showering. That might buy him an extra half an hour.
    But minutes meant nothing in the face of eternity. In recovery from alcoholism, Roland had practiced principles of rigorous honesty and self-examination, including a core commitment to purposely harm no one.
    Somewhere in the space of maybe three days, he had not only traveled five hundred miles but had lost his identity. Or maybe he hadn’t lost his identity at all, but found it.
    If I’m David Underwood, who the fuck was Roland Doyle?
    As he