Free Age of Consent by Marti Leimbach Page B

onto the bed, which was still tidy, still as she’d left it, except two of the curtain hooks had flown onto it and gleamed there like pieces of jewelry left behind by a guest.
    She went to the bedside table. He’d already pulled the drawer out, leaving it open at an angle. The Bible was there, the pages open beneath the book’s spine.
    “We could have had it already!” he said. He was stripping the bed, pulling up the mattress, digging inside the pillows. “We were here! In this same fucking room! And you had the money in your
hand
.”
    She felt his anger radiating toward her. “I’m looking!” she said, but when she pulled out the Bible, which was facing down on its open pages, there was no money inside it. She shook the pages so they waved beneath the hard cover like a swatch of hair, but nothing came out. No money, no note. She kneeled down and looked under the night table’s squat legs, but found only cobwebs and a stray pack of matches. In the space against the wall was an electrical cord and a socket. She could not see the money no matter how much she willed it to be there, and she could not leave until it was found.
    “Stupid!” Craig said, about her or about the situation or maybe both.
    For a moment she thought she saw it and gave a sudden shout.
    Craig looked up. “You got the money?”
    But it was only the note she’d written, which she threw back to the floor now. She dropped lower, scouting close to the carpet, her nose to the ply, looking crossways over the room. The contents of the drawers were all over the place: a pen with a crack in it, a phone book, some brochures.
    Craig looked at her. “Fucking stupid,” he said.
    There were footsteps outside. She heard them and froze. Both of them did, Craig standing with a corner of the mattress leaning on the wall by his ear, her on all fours with her head cocked to one side like a dog. The footsteps grew louder and Craig said, “Get to the bathroom!”
    She ran, stubbing her toe on the edge of the bed, then stepping out of her sandals and hopping barefoot, so that she all but fell onto the bathroom floor. She switched on the light and heard Craig yell, “Off!,” so she switched it off again and sat on the toilet, perched on the edge of the rim, arms folded on the tops of her thighs, forehead against her knees. She felt a slushy sourness in the pit of her belly and listened as whoever it was came into the motel room. She thought it must have been the manager. She heard the shock in his voice from seeing the place so torn up and Craig there with a bedsheet in his hands.
    The guy said, “What the hell?,” and then Craig started shouting at him that he was looking for his money.
    “What money?” she heard the other man say.
    “What I left here!” Craig’s voice. “What you took!”
    “I never took any money! I’m calling the police!” The guy’s voice went falsetto at the word
police
and then she heard something snap and a kind of slapping sound and a heavy object fall. She heard the manager saying, “That’s it, I’m definitely calling the police, man!,” and then Craig’s voice booming as though from a megaphone. He had a deep, thundering voice with a lot of reverb, and when he shouted it was as though there were ten men inside of him.
    “Call the police and tell them you stole my money, you fucking coward!” Craig bellowed. She heard a dull wet thud, and something scraping the window, and finally a boom so the whole room shuddered. Now the guy was screaming. She heard a whooshing sound and the guy yelping in pain. Craig was still shouting about his money and being robbed. The motel manager was crying out “Please stop!,” and she didn’t want to open the door, but she had to look.
    There was Craig with the antennae from the TV in his hand, slender long metal twins, jagged at the broken ends. He was using them like rapiers, or not like rapiers exactly because he did not thrust the ends of the antennae into the guy but sat astride