Misery Loves Maggody

"I wish you'd stop saying that. I'm not going anyplace with you."

He grabbed my arm, yanked me up, and propelled me out to the balcony. "You scream and I'll wring your neck. Understand?"

I nodded. He stepped back into the room, locked the sliding doors, and closed the curtains. I fell into a chair and put my head between my knees until the balcony stopped swaying and the roar in my ears began to fade. It occurred to me that I was ill-prepared to be outside, since I was wearing only a cotton shirt and jeans. This was, of course, infinitely better than being buck naked.

I looked over my shoulder at the curtains. There was not so much as a crack through which I could see what my uncivilized guest was doing in the room-if he was still there. I rose unsteadily and gauged the distance to the balconies on either side. Ten feet at a minimum, I concluded, and well beyond my prowess, since I had been thrown out of gymnastics class at the age of seven for declining to hop and skip across a balance beam six feet above the floor. A movie heroine would have climbed onto the railing, teetered for a tension-building moment, and then leaped onto the next balcony.

Lacking a stunt double, I leaned over the railing and looked down. Cars were pulling in front of the entrance to the hotel. Bellmen were taking suitcases out of trunks and piling them on carts. A woman with a dog on a leash appeared in the driveway, paused to light a cigarette, and headed for the nearest strip of grass.

Which happened to be directly below, proving there was no major cosmic plot against me.

"Psst!" I hissed as loudly as I dared.

The woman turned her head to stare at the bushes alongside the building. Her dog glanced up, then resumed sniffing the grass for the perfect spot to defile. After a few seconds, the woman looked down at him and murmured what I assumed were words of encouragement.

I made sure the curtain hadn't twitched, then bent down and said, "Up here."

The woman was clearly nobody's fool. Rather than responding, she began to speak in an urgent voice to the dog, which was in engaged in the performance of an imperative biological process.

"Please," I said, trying to sound as whimpery and pathetic as a puppy. "I need help."

The woman tilted her head and sca

I leaned over as far as I dared. "Please send security up to my room. I've locked myself out."

"That's ridiculous. How could you have done that? Are you drunk?"

"No, ma'am," I said. "Just go to the desk and tell them there's an emergency in eight-eleven. They'll need a passkey."

"Is this some kind of practical joke? I have no intention of embarrassing myself in front of hotel staff. Hurry up, Bertie. Mumsy wants to go back inside." Ignoring Bertie's yelps, she dragged him toward the entrance.

I straightened up and put my ear against the door. I heard nothing, but the glass was apt to be double-paned to withstand the increasingly cold wind. If the man had left and Cherri Lucinda had returned, she hadn't turned on the TV or gotten into a telephone conversation.

All the balconies I could see were vacant. Even during daylight hours the view was far from entrancing; it was hard to imagine why anyone would venture out in the dark to admire a skyline more than thirty miles away.

The chairs were too flimsy to break the glass. However, they might make serviceable missiles to catch somebody's attention. I made sure no was standing below the balcony, then held my breath and dropped a chair over the railing. It hit the grass and bounced into the bushes. I was about to try the second one when I saw a bellman staring up at me from the curb. Before I could call to him, he scurried into the hotel.

I put the chair back in place and sat down, confident that the report of a deranged woman throwing furniture off a balcony would bring a battalion, or at least a platoon, of security men. The Luck of the Draw did not tolerate adolescent mischief, or so I'd been told.

Jim Bob limped along warily, shrinking into doorways whenever a car or truck went by. Damn few of them did. He didn't know how many folks lived in the pissant little town, but most all of them must have been holed up at home watching Saturday night wrestling. The local town council was a sorry group, he thought as he went past burned-out streetlights and piles of garbage bags and boxes. Obviously, none of them had ever been to a Municipal League meeting and spent endless hours in seminars listening to bureaucrats make no more sense than Kevin Buchanon when he whined about the work schedule.

He reached a corner and leaned against a crumbling wall as he thought about what to do. There was no getting around the fact he was a fugitive. Japonica was uppity, but she wasn't dumb. She probably hadn't waited ten minutes before forcing the door and discovering the open window. She'd have been real pissed. Mrs. Jim Bob was likely to have thrown a fit unlike anyone had ever seen since the volcanoes erupted in Italy or wherever.

He reminded himself of his predicament. The hotel was a good ten miles away. His ankle throbbed from landing on a splintery crate. His coat was in the cell, and his wallet was in Japonica's desk. This wasn't the kind of town where taxis cruised, especially the kind willing to accept welfare cases.

There were a few coins in his pocket. If he could find a pay phone, he could call Cherri Lucinda and have her pick him up. He couldn't go back to The Luck of the Draw, but there were plenty of cheap motels in the area and she'd surely brought some money to buy souvenirs. Come Monday morning he'd start looking for a lawyer to get him out of this damn mess. Mrs. Jim Bob could be dealt with later.

He must have walked for most of a mile before he spotted a brightly lit convenience store. There were no cop cars in the parking lot or uniforms bustling around inside. He tucked in his shirt and tried to look like a man on an evening stroll.

Inside, it was blessedly warm. He pulled out his change, hoping he'd have enough for a burrito once Cherri Lucinda was on her way. It didn't look promising, but he went on over to the pay phone. If there'd ever been a directory, it was long gone, so he continued to the counter, where a bored woman was thumbing through a magazine.

"Got a directory?" he asked.

"Yeah, somewhere."

"Can I see it?"

"I s'pose," she said, setting aside the magazine, "but only if you're buying something. The directory's for the use of customers."

Jim Bob fought off the urge to roll up the magazine and jam it down her throat. "I'll buy something after I make my call. I can't make my call until I look up the number, and I can't look up the number till you pass over the directory. You follow all that?"

"Ain't no need to get nasty," she said as she bent down and came back up with a thin directory. "This stays right where I can see it."

Jim Bob found the number of The Luck of the Draw, shoved the directory back at her, and was heading for the phone when a woman came into the store. Her hair was spiky and a bizarre shade of red, and she had safety pins stuck through her eyebrows and her cheeks. She was wearing a bulky jacket, but her legs were bare below very short shorts. Bare and shapely.

Despite the importance of calling Cherri Lucinda, Jim Bob stopped in his tracks and stared.

"Hey," she said, smiling, then went over to the case and took out a six-pack of beer. On her way to the counter she added a bag of potato chips and a handful of beef jerkies. "How much you want?" she asked the clerk.

Jim Bob forced himself to dial the number of the hotel and ask for Cherri Lucinda's room. When no one answered, he tried his own room in case she was sitting in there, feeling bad about what all had happened to him just because he'd done her a favor.