The heavyset waitress came over, refilled Henry's coffee, and asked, "What are you looking for?"
"I need to find a cheap motel first, or I'll have to sleep in the park tonight."
The heavyset waitress flipped another page in the Yellow Pages Henry was browsing, pointed at one listing, and said, "Try this one. It's not bad."
"Oh." It was a motel in northern Los Angeles, near Hollywood. It seemed the heavyset waitress had genuinely considered Henry's needs before making the recommendation.
Otherwise, if she were after a referral fee, she should have recommended a motel near the restaurant so she could go over and claim commission. If it was too far away, it would be difficult to show up and say she had referred the customer.
Henry copied down the basic information from the Yellow Pages and said, "Thanks." Then he dug through his pockets, scraped together enough to pay for the meal, and left a generous tip.
Seeing the amount of the tip, the heavyset waitress finally broke into a grin.
No matter how much sweet talk there was, it still couldn't beat cold, hard cash.
Henry put the Yellow Pages back where it belonged, took the map, newspaper, and his belongings, then returned to his car and headed for his destination.
If he planned to make a life for himself in Los Angeles, renting a place was necessary. Buying a house was probably beyond what he could afford, at least if he wanted one he was satisfied with.
Although he wasn't afraid of bullets, having petty thieves drop by every other day would become irritating sooner or later. So neighborhood safety was still something he had to consider.
But renting a place took time, and he couldn't spend that entire period making do in his car. Finding a motel was the best option.
Henry had no intention of searching on his own. He drove straight to the motel the heavyset waitress had recommended.
He drove around the area a little and saw no strange men and women standing around on the streets.
And by strange men and women, he meant men with tattoos or shabby clothes, and women dressed gaudily in very little clothing. Of course, in the middle of winter, those women might wear miniskirts paired with some kind of fur coat.
People like that were either selling drugs or selling sex. They weren't everywhere, though. They only appeared on streets with worse security.
There were no such people around the motel the heavyset waitress had recommended. That counted as proof that the area was relatively safe.
After parking in the motel lot, Henry gathered his belongings, including the most important item—the backpack containing several hundred thousand in cash—and went to the front desk.
At first glance, the front desk appeared unattended. In fact, someone was sitting behind it, hidden by the tall counter. A television behind the desk was playing a show, and the woman who should have been manning the counter was crunching potato chips, drinking cola, and happily watching a soap opera.
Henry lightly rang the service bell twice. He had already seen the woman sitting there with one leg crossed over the other. She seemed to have spotted him from the corner of her eye as well, but she neither turned her head nor looked away from the television.
Hearing the bell, the woman stopped pretending not to notice him and asked, "What is it?"
"How much for one person, one night?"
"20 Dao," the woman said without even lifting her head.
Henry pulled a crumpled hundred-dollar bill from his breast pocket and slapped it onto the counter. "That covers five nights. Key."
As if she had practiced it, the woman didn't change her posture. With her right hand, she took a key from the wall; with her left, she accepted the bill and placed the key on the counter. Then she pushed over the registration book and said, "Write down your name." She casually pocketed the cash as well.
Only when she took the bill did her precious eyes shift slightly to confirm the denomination.
But she did not even check whether it was genuine. All Henry could say was that Americans of this era were unbelievably confident. They clearly did not take seriously the fact that U.S. dollars were the most commonly counterfeited currency in the world.
Anyway, given the dollar's position in the global economy, no matter how much the United States printed, the whole world would foot the bill. It was not as if America alone would suffer. So what did they have to fear?
Besides, there were so many underground activities in the United States that couldn't see the light of day. What gang would dare call the police after receiving counterfeit bills? Even if they knew the money was fake, as long as it wasn't outrageously fake, they would still pass it off as real and keep using it.
As long as they didn't deposit it in a bank, and didn't blatantly use it to pay federal agencies—especially the IRS—they would be fine. Anyone who dared use counterfeit money to pay taxes was practically asking for trouble.
The motel guest register was handwritten. Even with his Super Brain, Henry could only make out a few of the wildly scrawled names.
Looking at those signatures was like looking at a doctor's prescription.
He had intended to obediently write down his own name, but on a whim, Henry scribbled down the famous name "Clark Kent."
The woman wasn't going to verify his identity anyway, and using the official name he was currently going by felt strange.
It was like before he had crossed over: whenever he needed to register on some unimportant website, he would casually create a fake email identity for it. It was practically an instinctive way to protect personal information online.
When the woman truly did not check, Henry sheepishly accepted the room key. His concern about the safety of the surrounding area rose a little.
Henry asked again, "Do you have a Yellow Pages?"
"There's one beside the phone in every room. Hahaha."
At least she answered questions instead of ignoring him. But that laugh had come from a funny moment in the soap opera, not from anything Henry had said.
Forget it. At 20 Dao a night, the price was already extremely cheap. He couldn't ask for more.
The motel room was as simple as the ones he had seen in movies and television shows, perhaps even a little shabby. But in terms of cleanliness, there was nothing to complain about. Everything that needed cleaning or replacing had been properly handled.
At the very least, the pungent detergent smell from the bedsheets nearly knocked out Henry, even with his super sense of smell.
There was no way to judge how many germs were in the sheets, but they had definitely used the detergent generously. It was almost like dry-cleaning without water, using nothing but detergent.
The Yellow Pages Henry had specifically asked for was tucked beneath the telephone.
A quick look at the cover showed that it was an old Yellow Pages directory, not this year's edition.
But Henry was not looking for a company that had only opened this year. So it did not matter whether the Yellow Pages was current.
He hung his coat on the rack beside the door, casually tossed his backpack aside, and lay down on the bed, whose spring mattress was still reasonably intact.
At that moment, the reality of having arrived in Los Angeles suddenly washed over him. The mattress beneath him was no longer the sofa in an Alaska bar, nor Old John's lumpy spring bed, nor the cushion of a car's driver's seat.
He did not feel that his future was bleak, but being in a strange country and heading toward an unknown future, it would have been a lie to say he was not nervous.
A Kryptonian's abilities only guaranteed that he would not die. They did not guarantee that he would succeed.
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