The muscles of my arms and legs burned, not because the climb had been physically demanding, but because I had ascended in a state of extreme and constant tension. Even my jaws ached because I’d been grinding my teeth.
I preferred not to transition from the shaft to the elevator alcove in darkness. But I dared risk using the light only briefly, to locate the first of the recessed handholds and footholds that allowed transfer from the service ladder to the doorway.
I switched on the flashlight, quickly studied the situation, and switched it off.
Although I had repeatedly blotted them on my jeans, my hands were slippery with sweat.
No matter how ready I may be to join Stormy in service, I do not have nerves of steel. If I’d been wearing boots instead of sneakers, I would have quaked in them.
I reached into the thwarting gloom, located the first of the recessed handgrips, which was like an in-wall holder for a roll of toilet paper, but three times as wide. I clutched it with my right hand, hesitated as I was overcome with nostalgia for the griddle and the grill and the deep-fryer, then grabbed it with my left hand, as well, and stepped off the ladder.
For a moment I hung from my arms, by my sweaty hands, toeing the wall in search of the footholds. When it seemed that I would never find them, I found them.
Having left the ladder, the act of leaving the ladder now struck me as folly.
The top of the elevator cab was in the sub-basement, thirteen floors below. Thirteen stories is a long fall in any lighting condition, but the prospect of plunging that far in inky darkness struck me as especially terrifying.
Lacking a safety harness, I also did not have a sturdy tether to snap to the handhold. Or a parachute. I had committed myself to total freestyle.
Among other items in my rucksack were Kleenex, a couple of coconut-raisin protein bars, and foil packets of lemon-scented moist towelettes. My packing priorities had seemed entirely sensible at the time.
If I plummeted thirteen floors onto the roof of the elevator cab, at least I would be able to blow my nose, have a last snack, and scrub my hands, thereby avoiding the indignity of dying with snotty nostrils and sticky fingers.
By the time that I had fumbled sideways from the ladder to the open doorway and had swung across the threshold into the elevator alcove, the compelling nature of psychic magnetism, the irresistible insistence of it had been forcefully impressed upon me, although not for the first time.
I leaned against a wall, relieved not to have a yawning void at my back, waiting for my clammy palms to stop perspiring, for my heart to cease hammering. Repeatedly I flexed and extended my left arm to work a mild cramp out of the biceps.
Beyond the shadow-cloaked alcove, there appeared to be sources of watery-gray light both from north and from south along the public hallway.
No voices. If I could judge by her performance on the phone, the mystery woman was a talker. She liked the sound of herself.
When I eased to the open end of the alcove and peered cautiously around the corner, I saw a long, deserted hall. Here and there, open doorways on both sides admitted daylight from guest rooms, as I had expected.
The I-shaped hotel featured a shorter hall with more rooms at each end of the main corridor. The guarded stairs that I had chosen to avoid were in those secondary wings.
Left or right would have been a choice to ponder for any other searcher, but not for me. Less equivocal here than it had been in the storm drains, my sixth sense drew me to the right, south.
From the foundation to the highest level, the floors of the hotel were steel-reinforced concrete. The fire had not been intense enough to buckle let alone collapse them.
Consequently, the flames had worked upward through the structure by way of plumbing and electrical chases. Only about sixty percent of those internal pathways had been fully fireproofed and sprinklered as specified by the construction documents.
This resulted in a hopscotch pattern of destruction. Some floors were virtually gutted, while others fared far better.
The twelfth story had suffered extensive smoke and water damage, but I encountered nothing eaten by flames, nothing scorched. Carpet matted with soot and filth. Wallpaper stained, peeling. A few glass shades had been shaken loose of ceiling lights; sharp shards required wariness.
A Mojave vulture evidently had swooped in through one shattered window or another and had not been able to find its way out. In its frantic search, it had broken a wing against a wall or a door frame. Now its macabre carcass, having half rotted before it desiccated in the dry heat, lay with tattered pinions spread in the center of the corridor.
Although the twelfth floor might be in good shape by comparison to other levels of the hotel, you wouldn’t want to check in for your next vacation.
I moved cautiously from open room to open room, scouting each from its threshold. None was occupied.
The furniture violently redistributed by the quake, tipped on its side, jammed the same end of each room, where the power of the temblor had thrown it. Everything was soiled and sagging and not worth the effort to salvage.
Beyond those windows that were broken out or that were free of soot, the lowering sky revealed a metastasis of storm clouds, healthy blue holding only in the south, and even there succumbing.
The closed doors didn’t concern me. I would be warned by a rasp of rusted knob and a screech of corroded hinges if one began to open. Besides, these were neither white nor paneled, as were the mortal doors of my dream.
Halfway between the elevator alcove and the intersection with the next corridor, I came to a closed door that I was not able to pass. Tarnished metal numbers identified it as Room 1242. As though guided by a puppet master whose strings were invisible, my right hand reached for the knob.
I restrained myself long enough to rest my head against the jamb and listen. Nothing.
Listening at a door is always a waste of time. You listen and listen, and when you feel confident that the way ahead is safe, you open the door, whereupon some guy with born TO die tattooed on his forehead shoves a monster revolver in your face. It’s almost as reliable as the three laws of thermodynamics.
When I eased open the door, I encountered no tattooed thug, which meant that gravity would soon fail and that bears would henceforth leave the woods to toilet in public lavatories.
Here as elsewhere, the earthquake five years ago had rearranged the furniture, shoving everything to one end of the space, stacking the bed on top of chairs, on top of a dresser. Search dogs would have been needed to certify that no victims, either alive or dead, had remained under the debris.
In this instance, a single chair had been retrieved from the scrap heap and placed in the quake-cleared half of the room. In the chair, secured to it by duct tape, sat Danny Jessup.
TWENTY-EIGHT
EYES CLOSED, PALE, UNMOVING, DANNY LOOKED DEAD. Only the throb of a pulse in his temple and the tension in his jaw muscles revealed that he was alive, and in the grip of dread.
He resembles that actor, Robert Downey Jr., though without the edge of heroin-addict glamour that would give him true star quality in contemporary Hollywood.
Past the face, the resemblance to any actor drops to zero. Danny has a lot better brain than any movie star of the past few decades.
His left shoulder is somewhat misshapen from excess bone growth during the healing of a fracture. That arm twists unnaturally from shoulder to wrist, with the consequence that it doesn’t hang straight at his side, and the hand twists away from his body.
His left hip is deformed. The right leg is shorter than the other. The right tibia thickened and bowed as it healed from a break. His right ankle contains so much excess bone that he has only forty percent function in that joint.
Strapped to the hotel-room chair, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt with a yellow lightning bolt on the chest, he could have been a fairy-tale character. The handsome prince suffering under a witch’s spell. The love child of a forbidden romance between a princess and a kind troll.
I closed the door behind me before I said softly, Wanna get out of here?
His blue eyes opened, owlish with surprise. Fear made room for mortification, but he didn’t appear to be at all relieved.
Odd, he whispered, you shouldn’t have come.
Dropping the backpack, zipping it open, I whispered, What am I gonna do? There was nothing good on TV
I knew you’d come, but you shouldn’t, it’s hopeless.
From the backpack, I withdrew a fishing knife, flipped the blade out of the handle. ‘Always the optimist.
Get out of here while you can. She’s crazier than a syphilitic suicide bomber with mad-cow disease.
I don’t know anybody else who says stuff like that. Can’t leave you here when you talk that good.
His ankles were bound to the chair legs with numerous turns of duct tape. Bonds of tape wound around his chest, securing him to the back of the chair. In addition, his arms were taped to the arms of the chair at the wrists and at the crooks of the elbows.
I started sawing rapidly at the loops of tape that bound his left wrist.
Odd, stop it, listen, even if you have time to cut me loose, I can’t stand up—
If your leg’s broken or something, I interrupted, I can carry you at least to a hiding place.
Nothing’s broken, that’s not it, he said urgently, but if I stand up, it’ll detonate.
Although I finished freeing his left wrist, I said, Detonate. That’s a word I like even less than decapitate.
Check out the back of the chair.
I went around behind him to have a look. Being a guy who has seen a few movies as well as some weird action in real life, I at once recognized the kilo of plastic explosives held to the back of the chair by the same tape that bound Danny.
A battery, lots of colorful wires, an instrument that resembled a small version of a carpenter’s level (with the indicator bubble measuring a perfect horizontal plane), and other arcane paraphernalia suggested that whoever had put the bomb together had a flair for such work.
Danny said, The instant I raise my ass off the chair—boom. If I try to walk with the chair and the level measures too far off the horizontal—boom.
We have a problem here, I agreed.
TWENTY-NINE
IN WHISPERS, IN MURMURS, WITH BATED BREATH, SOTTO voce, in voce velata, softly we conducted the conversation, not solely because the syphilitic-suicide-bomber-mad-cow woman and her pals might hear us, but I think also because we superstitiously felt that the wrong word, spoken too loud, would trigger the bomb.
Stripping the spelunker’s strap off my arm and setting it aside with the flashlight, I said, Where are they?
I don’t know. Odd, you have to get out of here.
Do they leave you by yourself for long periods?
They check in maybe once an hour. She was just here about fifteen minutes ago. Call Wyatt Porter.
This isn’t in his jurisdiction.
So he’ll call Sheriff Amory.
If police get into this, you’ll die.
So who do you want to call—the sanitation department?
I just know you’ll die. The way I know things. Can this package be detonated whenever they want?
Yeah. She showed me a remote control. She said it would be as easy as changing TV channels.
Who is she?
Her name’s Datura. Two guys are with her. I don’t know their names. There was a third sonofabitch.
I found his body. What happened to him?
I didn’t see it. He was…strange. So are the other two.
As I began to cut the tape on his left forearm, I said, What’s her first name?
Datura. I don’t know her last. Odd, what’re you doing? I can’t get up from this chair.
You might as well be ready to get up in case the situation changes. Who is she?
Odd, she’ll kill you. She will. You’ve got to get out of here.
Not without you, I said, sawing the tape that bound his right wrist to the chair.
Danny shook his head. I don’t want you to die for me.
Then who am I gonna die for? Some total stranger? What sense does that make? Who is she?
He let out a low sound of abject misery. You’re gonna think I’m such a loser.
You’re not a loser. You’re a geek, I’m a geek, but we’re not losers.
You’re not a geek, he said.
Cutting the second set of bonds on his right arm, I said, I’m a fry cook when I’m working, and when I added a sweater vest to my wardrobe it was more change than I could handle. I see dead people, and I talk to Elvis, so don’t tell me I’m not a geek. Who is she?
Promise you won’t tell Dad.
He wasn’t talking about Simon Makepeace, his biological father. He meant his stepfather. He didn’t know Dr. Jessup was dead.
This wasn’t the best time to tell him. He would be devastated. I needed him to be focused, and game.
Something he saw in my eyes, in my expression, made him frown, and he said, What?
I won’t tell him, I promised, and turned my attention to the bonds securing his right ankle to the leg of the chair.
You swear?
If I ever tell him, I’ll give back my Venusian-methane-slime-beast card.
You still have it?
I told you I’m a geek. Who is Datura?
Danny took a deep breath, held it until I thought that he was going after a Guinness World Record, then let it out with two words: Phone sex.
I blinked at him, briefly confused. Phone sex?
Blushing, mortified, he said, I’m sure this is a colossal surprise to you, but I’ve never done the real thing with a girl.
Not even with Demi Moore?
Bastard, he hissed.
Could you have passed up a shot like that?
No, he admitted. But being a virgin at twenty-one makes me the king of losers.
No way I’m gonna start calling you Your Highness. Anyway, a hundred years ago, guys like you and me would be called gentlemen. Funny what a big difference a century makes.
You? he said. Don’t try to tell me you are a member of the club. I’m inexperienced but I’m not naive.
Believe what you want, I said, sawing the bonds at his left ankle, but I’m a member in good standing.
Danny knew that Stormy and I had been an item since we were sixteen, in high school. He didn’t know that we’d never made love.
As a child, she had been molested by an adoptive father. For a long time, she’d felt unclean.
She wanted to wait for marriage before we did the deed because she felt that by delaying our gratification, we would be purifying her past. She was determined that those bad memories of abuse would not haunt her in our bed.
Stormy had said sex between us should feel clean and right and wonderful. She wanted it to be sacred; and it would have been.
Then she died, and we never experienced that one bliss together, which was all right, because we experienced so many others. We packed a lifetime into four years.
Danny Jessup didn’t need to hear any details. They are my most private memories, and precious to me.