From Black Rooms (28 page)

When he'd stashed the suitcase beneath his bed, Evan stepped out of Room 119 and strol ed down the hal way until he came across the flat red handle of a fire alarm mounted on the wal . Before he could pul it, however, a skinny septuagenarian emerged from an alcove down the hal , wearing nothing but Bermuda shorts, a

bathrobe, and a hearing aid, with a ful ice bucket in his hands. Evan continued along the corridor to the niche that contained the ice and soda machines and pretended to waffle between Coke and Dr Pepper while waiting for the senior to trudge back to his room. With the hal way clear, Evan stalked back to the fire alarm and slammed the handle down, breaking the glass rod that secured it.

A wah-wah-wah blare resounded in the hal way with the grating persistence of a hangover headache,

fol owed by a chorus of curses from behind every

numbered door. As the clamor of evacuation began, Evan hurried back to the seclusion of Room 119, where he inclined his ear to the adjoining room.

"I don't smel smoke," he heard Old Man Lindstrom say. "Think it's a false alarm?"

"I hope so," Boo replied. "Give me a second to get Calvin loose and we'l go."

Crouched beside the connecting door, Evan waited until the chatter of the Lindstrom family meandered out to meld with the grumbling crowd in the corridor. When the door to their room clicked shut on silence, Evan set to work on the lock.

Within minutes, he'd opened the connecting door and crept into Boo's room, the dart gun in his hand. He made sure to close and relock the door behind him, then scanned the interior for a place to hide. They were far too likely to look in the bathroom, and the "closet" was nothing more than a wooden rod lined with hangars dangling from notched rings. That left the two queen beds. Although neither had its sheets turned down for the night, the spreads on both bore the indentations of body weight. Old Man Lindstrom's street clothes lay clumped on one bed, while a couple pairs of stretched-out panty hose littered the other like shed snakeskins. Evan flattened himself on the floor beside the first bed and slid beneath its frame, then pul ed the hem of the spread down in place to shade him from the light of the room. The space created a coffinlike confinement. With every breath, his chest touched the metal of the box springs, and the smel of dust from the mattress infected his nostrils. But a decade of imprisonment at Corps headquarters had taught him how to tolerate close quarters.

It had also taught him how to remain absolutely stil and silent. Even his heart barely beat as he lay there with the gun at his side for over half an hour, occupying his mind with recol ections of life before he left the School, when the future stil held promise and Boo stil loved him. When they were teenagers, she would make him chase her through the surrounding maple orchards, glancing behind to laugh at him, her cheeks pink from autumn chil . But she'd always let him catch and kiss her. Back then.

His pulse quickened a bit when he heard Boo's father bluster into the room.

"...probably some stupid schoolkids," he said. "The firefighters searched everywhere and couldn't find any sign of a blaze."

Turning his head to the right, Evan saw, in the narrow line of light between the bedspread and the carpet, the soles of leather slippers moving around the bed. The box spring creaked and sagged, compressing his chest so that he had to breathe even more shal owly.

"Maybe so," Boo replied, "but if Calvin weren't in such a state, I'd move to another place right now." Evan caressed the trigger of the gun at the mention of Criswel 's name. In the background, the artist kept up an unceasing, frantic patter.

"A
ll the King's horses and all the King's men..."
No doubt his pathetic attempt at a mantra. Both Wax and Pancrit had told Evan how futile that was. The knocking souls would eventual y break through, and Criswel could do nothing to stop them.

The bed next to Evan's groaned. "Hold stil , Calvin," Boo said.

"c
ouldn't put Humpty together--"

Criswel choked on the words, and the bedsprings

squealed with the violence of his movement. With a harpy's shriek, his voice became shril and hysterical. "I wish to God I'd never seen you, Cal! He kil ed me

'cause of you."

The Moon woman. Evan tensed. He hadn't considered that Criswel would be a touchstone for her. If she told Boo about the murder, Boo would know for certain that Evan had fol owed her to Boston...

"Come on, Calvin," Boo urged. "Say your mantra. Get a grip."

Her calm exhortations only whipped Tranquil ity into a frenzy. "This is your fault, you slut! You put him up to it!"

An angry neighbor thumped loudly, his yel muted by the wal . "Keep it down! Some of us want to sleep!"

"Forgive me, Calvin," Boo said.

"So help me, if I get my hands on--" The rest of Tranquil ity's threat slurred into a cotton-mouthed mumble.

Patient as a stone, Evan bided his time. He heard Boo triple-check the locks and latches on al the doors and windows while her father and daughter settled into the bed above him. The Moon woman either left Criswel 's body or tired of trying to talk through whatever Boo had used to gag her. Final y, the lights went off.

Even then, Evan did not move. Only when a liquid

snoring wafted down from Old Man Lindstrom's side of the bed did he begin to edge out from under the box spring, taking great pains not to tug on the bedspread as he did so.

His limbs stiff from immobility, he raised himself to his feet with agonizing slowness. No sudden movements, in case Boo's eyes were open. The key was speed:

neutralize as many of the targets as quickly as possible. Any two of them might be able to overpower him if they ganged up on him. Even the kid.

He leveled the barrel of the dart gun at Old Man

Lindstrom's neck. Pop!

Boo's father jerked once, lay stil . At the puff of the CO2 cartridge, a silhouette in the far bed sprang upright, looking straight at him. "Cal ie!" she cried. But Evan had already swung his gun toward Atwater's brat. Pop! The nail point of a thimble-size dart pierced her shoulder. A brief yelp of pain escaped the waking girl before she plunged back into sleep.

Boo lunged toward him, but that only made her a bigger target. Pop! Evan landed a shot in her midriff and she dropped onto the foot of the bed shared by her

unconscious father and child.

He aimed the gun toward the fourth target, expecting it to come for him or to run for help. When it merely wriggled and grunted on the far bed, Evan held his fire and sidled around for a closer look. Squinting in the darkness, he discerned the prone figure of Criswel , lying on his side, his arms tied behind his back, his ankles trussed up with knotted panty hose. The tongue of a white washcloth stuck out of his gagged mouth. Evan grinned and stuck the gun under the waistband of his jeans, concealing it with his shirttail. He would leave Calvin Criswel awake for the big finale.

With quick efficiency, he reopened the connecting door and returned to Room 119 to retrieve the gas can from his suitcase. He unscrewed the cap and liberal y doused the periphery of the room with the fuel, but left a clear path from the beds to the exit into the hal way. He unlatched this door and stuffed a hand towel from the bathroom at the foot of the jamb to keep it from

shutting and locking him out.

Ordinarily, a man could not carry a ful -grown,

unconscious woman out of a building without arousing suspicion. Unless, of course, he was rescuing her from a fire.

As the combustible reek of the gasoline permeated the room, Criswel floundered more furiously. Doubled up, he had worked his bound hands over the hump of his rear and was sliding them down his thighs to try to loop them over his feet and get them out from behind his back. Evan smiled at his contortionist routine and started striking matches.

With flames climbing two wal s of the room and the smoke detector screeching, Evan took off his bowling shirt and tied it around his nose and mouth like a mask, then heaved Atwater's brat onto his shoulder. Pancrit wanted her for leverage. The room's sprinkler system began to squirt as he carried the kid out.

In the corridor, the wah-wah-wah of the fire alarm droned again, but the boy-who-cried-wolf effect made people slow to leave their rooms. "Christ, not again!" the irate neighbor shouted, unaware that a real fire roared next door to him. Evan had taken the kid to his car and come back for Boo before the first irritable guests leaned out into the hal to see what was going on. The cloth over his face could not strain out the stifling smoke as he stormed back into the burning room. The drapes on the window opposite the door had become a shimmering curtain of translucent yel ow and orange, flickering firelight over the bed on which Boo and her father slumbered in oblivion. The sprinkler stil rained down on them in a token effort to extinguish the surging blaze. Drawn into a bal , Criswel strained to nudge his bound wrists past his heels.

With the flames' il umination, Evan could now savor the impotent rage on the artist's face. He especial y wanted to see his rival's expression as he went around to stand over Natalie's dad. With the heat of the fire bathing his back and the spray of the sprinkler cooling his face, Evan drew the switchblade from his pocket, flicked out the blade, and drove it like a spike into Old Man Lindstrom's heart. Wade may have been too

drugged to feel the impalement, but the reflexive muscles of his body spasmed in pain for him.

The cloth in Criswel 's mouth reduced his howl to a whimper. Evan yanked the knife from Wade's chest, the sheen of blood stil on the blade, and gently tossed it toward the helpless artist. It flopped onto the bed a few inches from Criswel , the blade leaving a dark stain on the white sheet.

Evan laughed. Nothing would have pleased him more than for Criswel to use the murder weapon to cut himself loose and escape from the burning room, only to be blamed for Wade Lindstrom's death.

Scooping Boo's limp body into his arms, Evan hefted her out the door. Several people now stood in the hal way, gawking at the room that exhaled white smoke yet too timid to look inside.

"Oh, my!" exclaimed a woman in a flannel nightgown with her graying curls in a hairnet. She stared at Boo, whose left arm slipped off her lap to dangle down past Evan's waist.

"Run for it!" he shouted. "It's an inferno in there!" Cradling Boo to his chest, he charged out of the hotel amongst the stampede of guests, who al took his

advice. During the ensuing pandemonium in the parking lot, no one took much notice of him as he carried Boo to the Nissan and laid her on the backseat. He got in the car, pul ed the bowling shirt off his face, and sped away from the Patriot's Pride just as the fire engines arrived at the hotel for the second time that night. At the first red light he came to, Evan grabbed the cel phone that lay beside the sleeping girl on the passenger seat and hit a button to dial a preprogrammed number.

"I've got them," he told the person at the other end.
23

A Captive Audience

ABOUT BEING HOG-TIED next to a bleeding man in

a room engulfed with fire, it was that even the dead found their lot preferable to his. Tranquil ity had departed with the promise to persecute him further, either in this life or the next, and the few souls who'd flitted through his mind since then fled to the

netherworld the moment they got a look through his eyes. Maybe they feared they'd ended up in Hel . It would've been an understandable mistake.

Whatever prompted them to leave him alone, Calvin was grateful to have his brain al to himself as he tried to think of what to do. If it were only his own worthless life at stake, he might have let himself burn, but the man who'd butchered Tranquil ity now held Natalie and Cal ie captive and had left Wade to die in front of Calvin's eyes. Only the quixotic hope that he might somehow save them kept him struggling to escape, even as the smoke crept down his throat.

The terry cloth that clotted his mouth like a gigantic hair bal prevented him from coughing when he choked, causing his chest and abdomen to heave without relief. Although it seemed to take hours, Calvin edged his bound wrists past the toes of his stocking feet mere seconds after Evan Markham carried his kidnap victims out of the hotel. With his hands final y in front of him, Calvin plucked the towel from his mouth and hacked ash from his lungs until vomit crested on his tongue. He hesitated only an instant before snatching up the switchblade to sever the nylons around his ankles. Freeing his wrists required a more awkward maneuver and he didn't have the time. Instead, he jumped up and braved the flames and smoke lapping at the other bed to press a hand to the wel ing puncture wound in Wade Lindstrom's chest.

He didn't hold it there long enough to feel for a heartbeat. He didn't need to. For, as the blood slicked Calvin's fingers, Wade began to knock.

A hospital maternity ward. A pretty, if prematurely
aged, young woman in a wheelchair, smiling even as
the newborn in her arms bawled as if she could see the
future that awaited her parents. And when the baby girl
calmed enough to open her eyes, they gleamed with the
same violet hue as her mother's...

The implication of the memories Wade bequeathed to him made Calvin want to wail, but his grief came out as another fit of coughing. Reflex caused him to recoil from the body, wiping the wet redness from his fingers onto his shirt. The fire flowed up the bedspread to consume Wade Lindstrom in a de facto funeral pyre. Sickened, Calvin would have hurled away the knife that had kil ed Natalie's father, but he held on to it, determined to use it on the man to whom it belonged. Hunching over to shield himself from the heat of the flames and to distract attention from his tied hands, he dashed out of the room and into the tide of hotel guests surging toward the exit. A few stared at him as if they couldn't believe anyone had stil been in that room, but most only cared about getting themselves outside. A couple of firefighters fought to drag a hose through the flow of evacuees.