The sign on the office counter in the old days had been red plastic with beveled white letters: NO VACANCY.
Mara had kept it in the bottom left-hand drawer of the reception desk, between the spare rolls of adding-machine tape and the box of rubber bands. When a November blizzard closed the interstate, she would wait until room twelve’s key was off the hook, slide the red plastic into its brass bracket on the front window, and pull the venetian blinds shut with a hard, downward snap.
It was an administrative shield. It allowed a clerk to sit under a fluorescent tube with a lukewarm mug of instant coffee and ignore the headlights sweeping across the glass, pretending that the stranded station wagons idling in the slush were merely weather.
She thought of that red sign at dawn when the first handcart struck the cattle guard at the turnoff.
Mara was in the lobby, checking the morning fuel tally with Gideon, when the iron pipes of the cattle guard clattered. Gideon moved to the window, his right hand going immediately to the holstered revolver at his hip. His left shoulder still ached when he shrugged his coat into place, but his arm moved without the sling now. He stopped trying the reach when Luis looked at him.
