Liquid Fear Read Free Page B

relatively clean, so he probably had avoided crawling on his hands and knees, at least on the sidewalk. Keys jingled in his pocket. He fished the wallet out and flipped it open, thumbing through the leather folds. A couple of hundreds and some twenties.
    Maybe he’d made a late-hour cash withdrawal from an ATM. He couldn’t imagine giving up a drinking bout while he still had some green.
    The phone rang, its brittle bleat like a spear to his skull. The home office? A client? Escort service? Newfound-and-already-forgott en drinking buddy? The choices were endless and all were terrible.
    Maybe it was Harry. As Roland reached for the phone, he realized there wasn’t a single person left in the world whose voice would cheer him, who would dispense kind and supportive words, who wouldn’t bring suspicion and disapproval to bear.
    The phone was cold against his ear. “Hello?”
    “Mr. Underwood, you requested a wake-up call at eight,” said a tired, smoke-strained female voice. “We tried three times but received no answer, so we assumed you had checked out.”
    “Sorry, you must have the wrong room.”
    “My apologies,” she said, though her tone suggested the exact opposite. “Is this room one-oh-one?”
    Roland retrieved the rubber-flagged keychain that lay beside the alarm clock. “Right number, wrong person.”
    “Sir, all check-ins require photo ID. The night clerk has ‘David Underwood’ in room one-oh-one.”
    “Sorry, there’s no David here that I know of.” Unless he’d brought home a drinking buddy by that name. In which case, pitiful, hungover David was sleeping either under the bed or in the bathtub.
    The clerk’s voice grew sour. “Either way, Mr. Underwood, checkout is ten o’clock.”
    “Hold on a second,” Roland said, before the clerk could hang up. “What time did I…what time did David check in?”
    He actually wanted to ask what day , but he didn’t want to arouse additional suspicion.
    “We have it at seven ten. There’s a surcharge for having additional people in the room, Mr. Underwood. If you’d care to stop by the desk on your way out—”
    “Never mind.” He had checked in last night, apparently, although the idiots had gotten his name wrong.
    His barebones expense account covered a rental car, meals, and lodging. Extra charges would draw the attention of Carolina Sign’s purse-handlers, who, as in every other American business, were tasked with extracting nickels from the worker bees while shoving stacks of Hamiltons toward management.
    Actually, the confusion might benefit him in the long run. Let “David Underwood” foot the charge and let the bitchy desk clerk deal with the inaccurate billing. One problem, though: his twelve-step program was built on rigorous honesty, both with himself and others.
    But the twelve steps had apparently failed him. He had a roiling stomach and jangling head to prove it. The only steps he had taken were those that led down the basement to hell.
    Funny, though, his mouth didn’t taste of liquor. Maybe he’d burned away his taste buds.
    As he got up to shower, the wallet tumbled to the floor. Some of the plastic cards slid free of an inner sleeve. His driver’s license portrait glared at him, eyes startled wide by the examiner’s flash.
    Roland had been dismayed when the examiner listed his hair as “gray.” The gray was there, sure, but he still thought of it as dark brown. He was only thirty-four, after all, even if half of them had been hard years.
    He was sliding the license back into place when he paused. The license was the wrong color, issued in North Carolina. He’d registered in Tennessee to avoid excessive auto insurance.
    Yet there was his face. His height was listed at five feet ten, just as he’d fudged it by an inch, and his weight, 205, was lower than his actual weight at the time. That was before the twelve-step surrender, back when dishonesty was a second skin. Now, healthier and without the boozy bloat, he