The woman screamed just as the buzzer on the motel's front door went off. Max's first instinct was to throw his arms around Miley and duck, but she yanked open the door and barreled inside the motel like a superhero. He had no option but to trail after her.
"Miley, wait!" he yelled.
They entered a tiny, dingy room with nothing in it but a dusty counter littered with papers and a cash register. Behind the counter there was a closed door with a sign on it that read "Pay in Advance—Cash Only". And to the left of the counter, a curtain made of strands of wooden beads swayed in an open doorway, signaling that someone had passed through.
They heard another scream, high-pitched and frightened. Max pulled out his phone to call 911, but Miley ran through the beads and he had no choice but to go in after her.
"No!" he called. "Miley!"
Then she seemed to realize what she was doing. She turned on her heel and looked at him, just as the door to her left crashed open and a woman wearing a short, shiny black bathrobe and a man in a pair of jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt almost crashed into her. The woman's hair was bleached white-blond, and her eyes were rimmed with heavy black liner.
"He said he saw something at the window!" the woman shouted.
Other doors were opening, and heads were peering around them, revealing unshaven men and women who had seen better days.
At least, Max hoped they had.
"I called 911," the woman said. She looked around at the open doors. "Anyone here know CPR?"
"Who's hurt?" Miley asked.
"No one's hurt," the man said. He shook his head at the blonde. "Lala, the guy in your room is dead."
"No, he can't be. Oh, poor, poor...man," the woman—Mollie—said, dissolving into tears. "Poor...whoever."
Max realized Lala didn't even know the dead man's name.
"He said he was going to take care of me, get me my own place. And now he's dead? And I didn't even get paid!" She started to go back into the room. "Just let me get what I'm owed." Her sorrow had dried up along with her tears. Now she was all business.
The man grabbed her arm. "I've got that handled," he murmured. "Come with me."
They started to walk past Max and Miley. Then the man halted. "You need a room?" he asked Max.
"No," Max said, stunned by his callousness. Then he recovered and said, "But we're looking for somebody. 'A guy.'"
"This guy," Miley said, clearing her throat as she held up her phone.
Leo was wearing his rugby uniform with his helmet against his hip.
"Never seen him," the man said.
"What happened to the man in there?" Max looked at the woman. "You said he saw something in the window?"
"Yeah, he was going to smoke a cigarette. And Hangman"—she gestured to the man—"doesn't like the customers . . . er, guests, to smoke in their rooms, so he was going to open the window. So my, um, friend goes to the window and he pulls open the curtain and he shouts, 'What the hell!' and then he grabs his chest and he falls down." She shuddered. "And I guess he died then."
"What did he see?" Max asked. It had to have been something terrifying.
Sheriff Joe had some really blurry pictures of the Alpha crashing through the window at the video store. He couldn't figure out what he was looking at. But maybe the guy who died saw the Alpha face-to-face, staring at him through his window.
"I don't know, but it scared him bad," she said. "I've never had anyone die on me before. Except for the other time."
Max detected the whine of a siren. He was about to say something when he realized no one else had heard it yet. If it was Levi's dad, Max totally did not want to explain what he was doing with Miley Evelyn in a place like this.
Meanwhile, some of the other "guests" had shut their doors. Max couldn't imagine being so hard-hearted that you could go back to whatever you were doing after someone had just died. The deaths that the "Super human" had caused had upset everyone Max knew.
"Hey, excuse me. Have you seen this guy?" Miley asked a woman who was still watching from her doorway. But the woman hadn't seen Leo, and the siren had grown loud enough that Miley could hear it. She looked anxiously at Max, who said, "We'd better go," and she nodded.
They headed back through the reception area, to see the man in the T-shirt and the woman who'd been crying counting out dollar bills together. Max realized that they'd taken the cash from the dead man. The woman flushed, and the man avoided Max's gaze as Max opened the door, and together he and Miley hurried to her car. She was about to turn on the engine when the sheriff's white car, followed by an ambulance, screeched up to the curb just in front of them. In unison, Max and Miley scooted down in their seats to hide.
Peering up through the side window, Max watched as Levi's father strode into the motel, followed by two guys from the ambulance in navy blue jumpsuits pushing a gurney. The clatter of the gurney's wheels ricocheted inside Max's head like a pinball game. He grimaced, hoping the guy in the T-shirt and the blonde didn't mention two kids looking for a third.
"Okay, so this was...horrible," Miley murmured. They stayed scooched down in their seats, and Max counted off a couple of minutes. "Do you think it's safe to leave yet?"
As if on cue, he heard the clattering wheels again. The door to the motel opened, and one of the paramedics pushed out the gurney. A heavyset, balding man lay beneath a blanket that was pulled up to his shoulders. A mask covered most of his face, and it was attached to what Max guessed was a canister of oxygen. The second paramedic was holding on to the canister and squeezing it while jogging alongside.
"Oh, look, he's alive," Miley said happily.
"I should find out what he saw in the window," Max thought. "Why would the Alpha be around here?"
Faintly, Max could hear Levi's dad questioning the man in the T-shirt, who was Hangman, the manager. Max focused hard.
"Older guys, you know how it is when they're, y'know, having a good time. The ol' ticker speeds up, they have a heart attack. It wasn't nothing else."
"Yeah," Levi's dad said. "Well, thanks for your help."