Cell: A Novel (5 page)

But, two blocks east of Colonial Books and still a block from Clay’s not-quite-fleabag hotel, they
were
lucky again. Another lunatic, this one a young man of perhaps twenty-five with muscles that looked tuned by Nautilus and Cybex, bolted from an alley just in front of them and went dashing across the street, hurdling the locked bumpers of two cars, foaming out an unceasing lava-flow of that nonsense-talk as he went. He held a car aerial in each hand and stabbed them rapidly back and forth in the air like daggers as he cruised his lethal course. He was naked except for a pair of what looked like brand-new Nikes with bright red swooshes. His cock swung from side to side like the pendulum of a grandfather clock on speed. He hit the far sidewalk and sidewheeled west, back toward the Common, his butt clenching and unclenching in fantastic rhythm.

Tom McCourt clutched Clay’s arm, and hard, until this latest lunatic was gone, then slowly relaxed his grip. “If he’d seen us—” he began.

“Yeah, but he didn’t,” Clay said. He felt suddenly, absurdly happy. He knew that the feeling would pass, but for the moment he was delighted to ride it. He felt like a man who has successfully drawn to an inside straight with the biggest pot of the night lying on the table in front of him.

“I pity who he
does
see,” Tom said.

“I pity who sees
him,”
Clay said. “Come on.”

7

The doors of the Atlantic Avenue Inn were locked.

Clay was so surprised that for a moment he could only stand there, trying to turn the knob and feeling it slip through his fingers, trying to get the idea through his head: locked. The doors of his hotel, locked against him.

Tom stepped up beside him, leaned his forehead against the glass to cut the glare, and peered in. From the north—from Logan, surely—came another of those monster explosions, and this time Clay only twitched. He didn’t think Tom McCourt reacted at all. Tom was too absorbed in what he was seeing.

“Dead guy on the floor,” he announced at last. “Wearing a uniform, but he really looks too old to be a bellhop.”

“I don’t want anyone to carry my fucking luggage,” Clay said. “I just want to go up to my room.”

Tom made an odd little snorting sound. Clay thought maybe the little guy was starting to cry again, then realized that sound was smothered laughter.

The double doors had
ATLANTIC AVENUE INN
printed on one glass panel and a blatant lie—
BOSTON’S FINEST ADDRESS
—printed on the other. Tom slapped the flat of his hand on the glass of the lefthand panel, between
BOSTON’S FINEST ADDRESS
and a row of credit card decals.

Now Clay was peering in, too. The lobby wasn’t very big. On the left was the reception desk. On the right was a pair of elevators. On the floor was a turkey-red rug. The old guy in the uniform lay on this, facedown, with one foot up on a couch and a framed Currier & Ives sailing-ship print on his ass.

Clay’s good feelings left in a rush, and when Tom began to hammer on the glass instead of just slap, he put his hand over Tom’s fist. “Don’t bother,” he said. “They’re not going to let us in, even if they’re alive and sane.” He thought about that and nodded.
“Especially
if they’re sane.”

Tom looked at him wonderingly. “You don’t get it, do you?”

“Huh? Get what?”

“Things have changed. They can’t keep us out.” He pushed Clay’s hand off his own, but instead of hammering, he put his forehead against the glass again and shouted. Clay thought he had a pretty good shouting voice on him for a little guy.
“Hey!
Hey, in there!”

A pause. In the lobby nothing changed. The old bellman went on being dead with a picture on his ass.

“Hey, if you’re in there, you better open the door! The man I’m with is a paying guest of the hotel and I’m
his
guest! Open up or I’m going to grab a curbstone and break the glass! You hear me?”

“A
curbstone?.”
Clay said. He started to laugh. “Did you say
curbstone?
Jolly
good.”
He laughed harder. He couldn’t help it. Then movement to his left caught his eye. He looked around and saw a teenage girl standing a little way farther up the street. She was looking at them out of haggard blue disaster-victim eyes. She was wearing a white dress, and there was a vast bib of blood on the front of it. More blood was crusted beneath her nose, on her lips and chin. Other than the bloody nose she didn’t look hurt, and she didn’t look crazy at all, just shocked. Shocked almost to death.

“Are you all right?” Clay asked. He took a step toward her and she took a corresponding step back. Under the circumstances, he couldn’t blame her. He stopped but held a hand up to her like a traffic cop:
Stay put.

Tom glanced around briefly, then began to hammer on the door again, this time hard enough to rattle the glass in its old wooden frame and make his reflection shiver.
“Last chance, then we’re coming in!”

Clay turned and opened his mouth to tell him that masterful shit wasn’t going to cut it, not today, and then a bald head rose slowly from behind the reception desk. It was like watching a periscope surface. Clay recognized that head even before it got to the face; it belonged to the clerk who’d checked him in yesterday and stamped a validation on his parking-lot ticket for the lot a block over, the same clerk who’d given him directions to the Copley Square Hotel this morning.

For a moment he still lingered behind the desk, and Clay held up his room key with the green plastic Atlantic Avenue Inn fob hanging down. Then he also held up his portfolio, thinking the desk clerk might recognize it.

Maybe he did. More likely he just decided he had no choice. In either case, he used the pass-through at the end of the desk and crossed quickly to the door, detouring around the body. Clay Riddell believed he might be witnessing the first reluctant scurry he had ever seen in his life. When the desk clerk reached the other side of the door, he looked from Clay to Tom and then back to Clay again. Although he did not appear particularly reassured by what he saw, he produced a ring of keys from one pocket, flicked rapidly through them, found one, and used it on his side of the door. When Tom reached for the handle, the bald clerk held his hand up much as Clay had held his up to the bloodstained girl behind them. The clerk found a second key, used this one in another lock, and opened the door.

“Come in,” he said. “Hurry.” Then he saw the girl, lingering at a little distance and watching.
“Not
her.”

“Yes, her,” Clay said. “Come on, honey.” But she wouldn’t, and when Clay took a step toward her, she whirled and took off running, the skirt of her dress flying out behind her.

8

“She could die out there,” Clay said.

“Not my problem,” the desk clerk said. “Are you coming in or not, Mr. Riddle?” He had a Boston accent, not the blue-collar-Southie kind Clay was most familiar with from Maine, where it seemed that every third person you met was a Massachusetts expat, but the fussy I-wish-I-were-British one.

“It’s Riddell.” He was coming in all right, no way this guy was going to keep him out now that the door was open, but he lingered a moment longer on the sidewalk, looking after the girl.

“Go on,” Tom said quietly. “Nothing to be done.”

And he was right. Nothing to be done. That was the exact hell of it. He followed Tom in, and the desk clerk once more double-locked the doors of the Atlantic Avenue Inn behind them, as if that were all it would take to keep them from the chaos of the streets.

9

“That was Franklin,” said the desk clerk as he led the way around the uniformed man lying facedown on the floor.

He looks too old to be a bellhop,
Tom had said, peering in through the window, and Clay thought he certainly did. He was a small man, with a lot of luxuriant white hair. Unfortunately for him, the head on which it was probably still growing (hair and nails were slow in getting the word, or so he had read somewhere) was cocked at a terrible crooked angle, like the head of a hanged man. “He’d been with the Inn for thirty-five years, as I’m sure he told every guest he ever checked in. Most of them twice.”

That tight little accent grated on Clay’s frayed nerves. He thought that if it had been a fart, it would have been the kind that comes out sounding like a party-horn blown by a kid with asthma.

“A man came out of the elevator,” the desk clerk said, once more using the pass-through to get behind the desk. Back there was apparently where he felt at home. The overhead light struck his face and Clay saw he was very pale. “One of the crazy ones. Franklin had the bad luck to be standing right there in front of the doors—”

“I don’t suppose it crossed your mind to at least take the damn picture off his ass,” Clay said. He bent down, picked up the Currier & Ives print, and put it on the couch. At the same time, he brushed the dead bellman’s foot off the cushion where it had come to rest. It fell with a sound Clay knew very well. He had rendered it in a great many comic books as
CLUMP
.

“The man from the elevator only hit him with one punch,” the desk clerk said. “It knocked poor Franklin all the way against the wall. I think it broke his neck. In any case, that was what dislodged the picture, Franklin striking the wall.”

In the desk clerk’s mind, this seemed to justify everything.

“What about the man who hit him?” Tom asked. “The crazy guy? Where’d he go?”

“Out,” the desk clerk said. “That was when I felt locking the door to be by far the wisest course. After he went out.” He looked at them with a combination of fear and prurient, gossipy greed that Clay found singularly distasteful. “What’s
happening
out there? How bad has it gotten?”

“I think you must have a pretty good idea,” Clay said. “Isn’t that why you locked the door?”

“Yes, but—”

“What are they saying on TV?” Tom asked.

“Nothing. The cable’s been out—” He glanced at his watch. “For almost half an hour now.”

“What about the radio?”

The desk clerk gave Tom a prissy
you-must-be-joking
look. Clay was starting to think this guy could write a book—
How to Be Disliked on Short Notice.
“Radio in
this
place? In
any
downtown hotel? You must be joking.”

From outside came a high-pitched wail of fear. The girl in the bloodstained white dress appeared at the door again and began pounding on it with the flat of her hand, looking over her shoulder as she did so. Clay started for her, fast.

“No, he locked it again, remember?” Tom shouted at him.

Clay hadn’t. He turned to the desk clerk. “Unlock it.”

“No,” the desk clerk said, and crossed both arms firmly over his narrow chest to show how firmly he meant to oppose this course of action. Outside, the girl in the white dress looked over her shoulder again and pounded harder. Her blood-streaked face was tight with terror.

Clay pulled the butcher knife out of his belt. He had almost forgotten it and was sort of astonished at how quickly, how naturally, it returned to mind. “Open it, you sonofabitch,” he told the desk clerk, “or I’ll cut your throat.”

10

“No time!” Tom yelled, and grabbed one of the high-backed, bogus Queen Anne chairs that flanked the lobby sofa. He ran it at the double doors with the legs up.

The girl saw him coming and cringed away, raising both of her hands to protect her face. At the same instant the man who had been chasing her appeared in front of the door. He was an enormous construction-worker type with a slab of a gut pushing out the front of his yellow T-shirt and a greasy salt-and-pepper ponytail bouncing up and down on the back of it.

The chair-legs hit the panes of glass in the double doors, the two legs on the left shattering through
ATLANTIC AVENUE INN
and the two on the right through
BOSTON’S FINEST ADDRESS.
The ones on the right punched into the construction-worker type’s meaty, yellow-clad left shoulder just as he grabbed the girl by the neck. The underside of the chair’s seat fetched up against the solid seam where the two doors met and Tom McCourt went staggering backward, dazed.

The construction-worker guy was roaring out that speaking-in-tongues gibberish, and blood had begun to course down the freckled meat of his left biceps. The girl managed to pull free of him, but her feet tangled together and she went down in a heap, half on the sidewalk and half in the gutter, crying out in pain and fear.

Clay was standing framed in one of the shattered glass door-panels with no memory of crossing the room and only the vaguest one of raking the chair out of his way. “Hey dickweed!” he shouted, and was marginally encouraged when the big man’s flood of crazy-talk ceased for a moment and he froze in his tracks. “Yeah, you!” Clay shouted. “I’m talking to you!” And then, because it was the only thing he could think of: “I fucked your mama, and she was one dry hump!”

The large maniac in the yellow shirt cried out something that sounded eerily like what the Power Suit Woman had cried out just before meeting her end—eerily like
Rast!
—and whirled back toward the building that had suddenly grown teeth and a voice and attacked him. Whatever he saw, it couldn’t have been a grim, sweaty-faced man with a knife in his hand leaning out through a rectangular panel that had lately held glass, because Clay had to do no attacking at all. The man in the yellow shirt leaped
onto
the jutting blade of the butcher knife. The Swedish steel slid smoothly into the hanging, sunburned wattle beneath his chin and released a red waterfall. It doused Clay’s hand, amazingly hot—almost hot as a freshly poured cup of coffee, it seemed—and he had to fight off an urge to pull away. Instead he pushed forward, at last feeling the knife encounter resistance. It hesitated, but there was no buckle in that baby. It ripped through gristle, then came out through the nape of the big man’s neck. He fell forward—Clay couldn’t hold him back with one arm, no way in hell, the guy had to go two-sixty, maybe even two-ninety—and for a moment leaned against the door like a drunk against a lamppost, brown eyes bulging, nicotine-stained tongue hanging from one corner of his mouth, neck spewing. Then his knees came unhinged and he went down. Clay held on to the handle of the knife and was amazed at how easily it came back out. Much easier than pulling it back through the leather and reinforced particleboard of the portfolio.