Fidelity Read Online Free

price. The thought of the women made him eager to get there.
    When they had started this morning, the cars on the road to Las Vegas had seemed to skim the pavement, barely touching it. The air was hot and dry and clean. Whitley had sat in the passenger seat and stared out at the high desert, looking at the rocky hills sprouting yuccas and small, paddle-shaped prickly pears, and the vast flatlands with Joshua trees spread out like straggling migrations of men, the speed of the car making them appear to move.
    But now it was after four o’clock, and they had been inching along at a walk, then stopping dead for a few minutes, then creeping forward a few feet for nearly seven hours. “Jesus,” he said. “This is the worst.”
    Jerry Hobart’s head turned slowly toward him like a tank turret. His eyes were slits. “The day isn’t over yet.”
    “If it would just either speed up, or stop,” Whitley complained. “Hell, if it would just stop. Then we could turn off the engine and save the gas for later, and take a decent piss by the side of the road.”
    Hobart said nothing. The jaw muscles on the side of his face kept tightening and going slack.
    “We’ve been climbing for the past hour or two. Maybe I can find a station with news on it now.” Whitley leaned close to the dashboard in spite of the fact that the speakers were in the door panels, and used a delicate touch to move the vertical line in minute increments from one band to the next. Once he managed to find the faint singing of Spanish voices that reminded him of a party inside a house far away. Once there was bandy music, and he heard an announcer say something about narcotnafccantes. “The whole fucking world is turning into Mexico.”
    Hobart said nothing, and the silence bothered Tim. Hobart was older and more experienced, and he was one of those men who had a solitary self-sufficiency, a strength that Tim knew he lacked. Each time Tim talked, he regretted it afterward. He knew that it was unseemly to complain, and there was no use whining to the man who had been at least moving the car forward when the cars ahead of it moved.
    But Tim was frustrated. Four days ago they had rented a suite in the Venetian, and then yesterday they had driven to Los Angeles to do some work. They had done their job last night, collected their pay, packed up, and headed back toward Las Vegas in the morning. Hobart’s establishment of an alibi was thoughtful: Check into a good hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, go out every day and every night, and then one night simply go out and drive to Los Angeles for the killing and drive back. Their suite was officially occupied while they were gone, and nobody was keeping track of anything else. Hobart had called the hotel a couple of times. Once he had complained that the water pressure in the shower wasn’t strong enough and asked them to fix it while he was out gambling. Hobart had left their cell phones in the room and made calls to them so there would be a record that they had received calls from a signal repeater that was in Las Vegas within a few minutes of the killing.
    But Tim Whitley was feeling increasingly agitated now. They had expected to be back in the hotel by ten or eleven. Now it was after four, and they had not gone a mile in the past hour. Who expected a traffic jam in the middle of the desert? It was the worst jam Whitley had ever seen, and they weren’t even in a city. They were fifty miles from a real town, practically on the edge of Death Valley. The gas gauge looked from here as though the tank was barely above empty. He hoped it was just the angle making the gauge look that way. He wasn’t facing it head-on like Hobart was in the driver’s seat.
    Of course, somebody would come along and help if they ran out of gas-there wasn’t much solitude on Route 15 today-but that would make their beautiful alibi problematical: There would be somebody who had seen the two of them stalled on the road from Los Angeles to Las