me,” Death said. “Is this the step up I’ve been requesting?”
The Drive-In Motel sagged along the road in northern Georgia. Casey had hitched a ride just that far, and found this grungy hotel with no problem. “A step up would ask for ID. You know that.”
“A step up would also have a room you don’t have to rent by the hour.”
“Try to be patient. We’ll be out of here soon.”
She didn’t like the motel any better than Death, but it was a necessity. Where else could she crash for a few days and not leave a paper trail? She left her bag, zipped tightly shut, on the room’s spindly table, and pocketed the key.
“Where are you going now?” Death was right on her heels.
“To start the process to get us out of here.”
Death was so eager to leave the room Casey had to step out of the way to avoid being walked through. She didn’t need that chill, even though it had to be in the nineties and the room’s AC was anything but efficient.
A Holiday Inn took up a corner lot a mile from the Drive-In, and Casey walked in the front door. She smiled at the desk clerk, and continued through the hallway toward the back, to the outdoor pool. The swelling in her face had gone down over the past twenty-four hours, so the sight of her wasn’t an automatic shock. No one raced after her, asking if she’d been mugged. She waited by the pool’s inside door for almost twenty minutes until someone came in from the outside, and she went through with a, “Hi, how’s it going?”
There was an empty chair under one of the trees surrounding the water, so she took a seat and pulled out the paperback she’d brought along. This pool, as opposed to the one in Nashville, had sparkling blue water and no ducks.
“What are we doing?” Death asked, sinking onto another chair.
“Waiting long enough the desk clerk forgets me coming in. Then, when it seems an adequate time I could have spent in my room, I will go back over and use the computer they have for guests.”
Death nodded. “Sneaky.”
“That’s my middle name.”
After a half hour of sweating and pretending to read, Casey went back to the hotel lobby. The computer was not in use. She exchanged nods with the desk clerk, sat down, and typed “buy fake ID on-line.”
The search came back with over two hundred million results. She clicked the very first one. Buyfakeidonline.com. The web site offered several “Qualified and Reliable” sources, as well as some red flags to be aware of.
Like anyone buying a fake ID wasn’t a red flag on her own.
Casey clicked on one of the “reliable” sites and was shown the list of states they would be able to give her. She checked for the scam clues the other site had given her, and saw good signs: they weren’t promising to have it ready in a day (apparently there was no way to make a good one in that amount of time); they accepted cashier’s checks (“please don’t write ‘fake ID’ in the subject line!”); and they had an actual physical address to use for sending the order, rather than just a P.O. box.
Because of Casey’s situation, she couldn’t exactly print out the order form on the desk clerk’s machine, so she copied all of the necessary information onto the back of a hotel brochure. The money would have been prohibitive for a lot of people, but she had more cash than she knew what to do with, and it was worth it to start a new life.
She clicked out of all of her search windows, cleared the cache, and walked back through the hotel to an exit out of sight of the desk clerk. From there, she went to the Rite Aid, where they took passport photos. Fifteen minutes later she was on her way back to the Drive-In Motel with a mug shot. Not the most attractive picture she’d ever taken, but it would do.
Back in her lovely room, she tore a sheet with one blank side from the outdated phone book in the nightstand and made her own order form, filling in a new name, the address of the Drive-In, and the request for Express Service, which was to take only five days. She had registered at the hotel under the name Molly Meade, and made certain the package would come addressed to that name. She didn’t need the icky