Dykes began to rock, his arms collapsed over his chest. He nodded.
“What else? What were you expecting to happen?”
“Nothing. They said they’d go out the back,” Dykes said. “I’d let the phone ring three times, that’s all I had to do, just warn them. Nothing more. I heard them laughing later about firecrackers. When I asked them what they meant, the old guy, Mr. Grace, he laughed some more, said he’d like to scare the bejesus out of the cops, if he could, said the lot of you weren’t worth spit. If he only had one firecracker, that’s all he needed, he said. But he didn’t have one, did he?” He looked at the burnt heap of rubble that was, up until an hour before, his main support, then raised smoke-reddened eyes to Dane’s face.
Dane wanted to smack him upside the head for being so greedy, so stupid. “He didn’t lie. He didn’t have a firecracker, what he had was a bomb.”
Dykes whispered, “Why did they lie to me, Agent Carver? Why? I did what they asked, called their room when you showed up, let the phone ring three times. This was crazy, mean and crazy. They ruined me.”
Savich said, “No, Mr. Dykes, you did this yourself.” He was still trying to get his brain around what this man had done, for five hundred dollars.
“It was the girl with all that beautiful hair; she paid me to let them know if you guys showed up. But I wasn’t born yesterday, people are always trying to stiff me because they figure the rooms are cheap, the name of the hotel is a joke, but look, I believed them. And she was so pretty, and she liked me. Her stomach was so white and—I guess I didn’t call this one right at all, did I? I’m an idiot.”
Dane said, “Yes, I’d say tonight you were.”
Dykes, skinny as a nail, wrapped up in a coat two sizes too large for him, thick mousse glistening on the half dozen long gray hairs plastered down over the top of his skull, realized fully now that he was in deep trouble. “No, I—I—I’m not an idiot, and it isn’t nice of you to agree with me like that. I didn’t mean for anything bad to happen, Agent Carver, you’ve got to believe me. I didn’t have a clue what they were planning. Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Marlene is going to kill me.”
“You took five hundred dollars knowing that our lives were on the line.” There was no rage in Dane’s calm voice, but it was there, clear as could be, in his eyes, if Dykes had looked up at him. But he kept his eyes on his shoes, and shook his head.
Savich asked him, “They requested room two-twelve?”
Dykes nodded. “Yeah, that’s a prime room since it’s on the end and there’s a window in the bathroom.”
Dane said, “You realize now that they either cut through that thin back bathroom wall or they went out the back window and were gone by the time we walked into your office. They meant to kill as many of us as they could. The bomb was powerful enough. Do you have a family, Mr. Dykes, or are you only at the mercy of your sister Marlene?”
“No, Joyce left me two years past for a trucker whose eighteen-wheeler smoked up every state he traveled through. I’ll bet he told her he’d show her all the sights and the dip believed him.”
Savich said, “Then you can think of Joyce enjoying the Grand Canyon while you’re nice and snug in jail.”
Dane said, “Maybe Marlene will visit you in your cell.”
Dane accepted a pair of handcuffs from one of Police Chief Tumi’s deputies, clicked them around Dykes’s bony wrists, and handed him over to a deputy, who stared at Dykes like he couldn’t believe what he’d done. The deputy hauled him off, none too gently, to a cruiser. Chief Tumi called out, “Read him his rights, Deputy Wiggins. It’s a right shame that stupidity isn’t a felony.” He turned to Savich. “So the two gunshots we heard—they really were gunshots, weren’t they?”
“They were well timed, whatever they were,” Dane said. “Maybe the arson investigators will find the remains of a tape recorder in the wreckage. Maybe the conversation we heard, as well as the gunshots, was recorded to play at a specific time.”
Chief Tumi nodded, looked over at his deputy, who was stuffing Dykes into the backseat. “Roy, don’t leave that yahoo alone. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
Savich said to Dane, “One thing we can bank on—they were long gone out of that room, with Pinky, before we heard the gunshots. They might have been watching.”
Connie said, “You can fry Rolly when I reel the little bugger in.” She shook her head. “This will sure shake Ruth’s belief in her snitches. Do you know the little geek reminded me about his extra pint because he’s throwing a goth party?”