The Four-Night Run (28 page)

44

C
HINA
, M
Y
C
HINA

“You almost had me,” said Scrbacek.

“Only almost?” said DeLoatch. He sipped his champagne and leaned back in the hot tub, steam weaving a pattern before his ruined face. “What was it that caught your interest most? Lovely Sheena? The cocaine? That’s it, yes. The blithe white powder. What if I promise you oceans?”

“It wasn’t the drug. You almost had me with that ‘defender of humanity’ patter you laid on us in our very first class in law school. That ‘champion of those most in need’ crap. You remember, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. A staple of my first-year criminal law course. ‘What is a criminal defendant?’ ‘What is a prosecutor?’ Sometimes I am too precious for words.”

“I bought into it. All of it. The romance, the stirring image of the defense attorney holding back the mob at the prison gates. I wanted to be young Abe Lincoln with his almanac. I wanted to be Atticus Finch. I wanted to be the great defender of humanity you told us about. God help me, Professor, but I wanted to be you.”

“Good choice.”

“And then the world shifted, and suddenly I knew what it was to be you, knew it with a certainty that stunned. And I didn’t know what else to do but embrace it.”

“And wasn’t it wonderful?”

“No, it truly wasn’t. I dived into cocaine because I could forget what I had become for small periods of time. But never for long enough. And the women, well, I dived into them too, yes, but in the end, when it’s one after the other, it’s a sad, empty exercise. True, seeing their breasts come loose from their shirts and dropping each into its own lovely pattern was, I have to say, glorious. But, frankly, and no offense, Sheena—”

“China. My name’s China.”

“No offense, but all the loose sex with high-priced women was never as good as it sounded. I gave up what I had for what I was getting, and the trade was the worst of my life. Only love lives up to its billing.”

“Oh, please,” said DeLoatch, “you’ll make me puke.”

“And the nights, the dangerous nights with the dangerous men, riding around in their big black cars, meeting and plotting, eating big meals and drinking magnums of champagne and making crude jokes at others’ expense.”

“The best part, if you ask me.”

“I lived it, and hated it, and hated myself as I lived it, and still I felt I deserved every stinking inch of it. As punishment.”

“So what was it, Mr. Scrbacek? What pushed you over the edge?”

“Amber Grace,” said Scrbacek.

“Your big success. It went to your head, of course.”

“No, it wasn’t the success. It was the failure. It was after I pinned the murder of that pimp on Remi Bozant. It was after I reversed her conviction and released her from death row and picked her up in the rain outside the jailhouse when they let her go free. It was after all the interviews on national television and the interviews for the national press. It was after all of that, as I was driving her back into the world. She talked about seeing her daughter again, and starting over, and I said that sounded like a fine idea. And then she turned to me and smiled and said, in the sweetest voice, ‘You know, he had it coming, Mr. Scrbacek. Lucius, I mean. I loved the man, I did, but he hurt me once too often, and I had no choice. I want you to know that. I want you to know that whatever happened, he had it coming.’”

DeLoatch stared at Scrbacek from out of the swirling steam of the hot tub, his eyes wide with amusement. “Is that all?”

“Not just that,” said Scrbacek. “There was also what happened to Maya, Amber Grace’s daughter, after Amber’s new lawyer got the court to order her surrendered back into Amber’s custody.”

“Yes,” said DeLoatch, not so amused anymore. “I remember. It’s always the boyfriend, isn’t it? And you, precious boy, felt responsible for everything. You know what you should have become? A bankruptcy lawyer. At least then you would have held some certainty about your clients. They all would have been broke.”

“Do you know the Contessa Romany?” said Scrbacek.

“From the boardwalk? With the sign?”

“Exactly. She read my cards, told me that I would find all the answers to my predicament in my past, my present, my future. I found guides for the first two, but I never imagined it would be you who would show me the last.”

“Yes, well, death is such a brutal way to end things,” said DeLoatch, sipping again from his champagne, “but in your case, if you decide poorly, inevitable.”

“No, you didn’t show me death, you showed me with utter clarity my life. My life as it has become. A life where the criminal and the lawyer join and become one. A life where anything goes as long as it avoids a conviction. Blame him, blame her, blame the victim, blame the cops, blame anyone, say anything, do what must be done, no matter the price, to squeeze out that victory. We’re not defenders of anything, you and I, we’re coconspirators.”

“Well, as my dear mother always said, ‘If you’re going to be a coconspirator, you might as well coconspire with the best.’”

“Here I stand in the middle of the path. At one end, the beginning, is the idealistic student you mocked that first day of class. At the other end, in this very room, surrounded by prostitutes of a lesser scale, rotting of disease both physical and moral, is you. You have shown me the pot of gold at the end of my path, and all I want to do is flee.”

“Does that mean your answer is no?”

“My answer for you is to go to hell.”

“Then you should. Run, I mean. Back away, please, darling Sheena.”

“China, China, dammit. Can’t either of you get it straight?”

“Please.”

The woman took a step back, her breasts quivering, then took another, before spinning and hurrying from the room. As Scrbacek watched her leave, DeLoatch casually turned his body to place his champagne glass upon the table behind him. When he turned around again, he was holding a telephone in one hand and a gun in the other.

He aimed the gun at Scrbacek’s heart.

“Forgive me,” said DeLoatch, waving the gun, “but I need to make a call. Security, please,” he said into the phone. He winked as he waited to be transferred. “Hello. This is Dr. DeLoatch in room 2402. There is an intruder. He is dressed like a dealer, with a false beard and glasses and a fake name on his tag, but his real name is Scrbacek. Yes, that J.D. Scrbacek. He has a gun. He is threatening to kill me and Mr. Diamond. I have him now at my advantage, but he is wily beyond belief and I am terrified. Please block the exits and send some men at once. And notify Mr. Bozant. Yes. Thank you. Oh, one more thing. Could you please tell room service to send more shrimp and caviar. I’m afraid the intruder helped himself to my original order. Perfect.”

Scrbacek looked around as raw terror tightened his throat. He had come for just a glimpse of a face, the final piece of the puzzle, had planned to surreptitiously enter and surreptitiously leave, but that plan had been blown straight to hell. Now there was a gun, silver and sleek, aimed at his heart. If he turned around to escape, DeLoatch would drill him in the back. If he waited too long, frozen in position, DeLoatch would drill him in his chest. He needed to attack before he could run.

“Ever hear, Professor,” he said, trying to stall the inevitable, “of the Furies?”

“You are getting desperate, aren’t you, calling forth a myth.”

“A myth?” Scrbacek looked about himself, looked for something, anything, even as the terror descended from his throat, leaked through his whole body, turned his muscles frigid with fear.

“In the ancient world,” said DeLoatch, “the Furies were the wild, vengeful spirits of retribution unleashed against the unpunished guilty. Strange female wraiths, they were. Snakes writhed from their heads, and blood dripped from their eyes. Though their tits, so goes the tale, were marvelous.”

Scrbacek was puzzled at the answer even as he continued his desperate search to find the way out, somewhere, somehow. And then he saw it, there, in plain sight, the answer.

“This is not like you, placing your hope in myth,” said DeLoatch. “The Furies didn’t exist then and, despite the rumors that rise like smoke from the slums, they don’t exist now. You’re very much on your own, Mr. Scrbacek, and I’m the one with the gun.”

Scrbacek tensed for an instant, watched as DeLoatch’s squinty eyes squinted, and then he dived to the left, just as the shattering report of the gun sounded and the lamp with the plaster sculpture of entwined lovers in midhump exploded into dust.

Scrbacek rolled on the floor until he sprawled flat. Staying low, beneath the level of the hot tub’s rim, he scooted around the tub toward a side table up against the far wall.

“Security’s coming, Mr. Scrbacek,” said DeLoatch.

The professor squeezed off another brutal report, and a hole blossomed in the wall directly above Scrbacek, who kept scooting.

“It matters not if I get you or another gets you, only that you’re gotten,” said DeLoatch, a certain glee in his voice. “You should have joined me. Oh, what fun we would have had.”

Another shot, another roar, and this time plastic shards bit into Scrbacek’s face as a stream of water began to flow out the side of the tub just in front of him. How did the bastard know where he was? Scrbacek looked up at the ceiling and saw DeLoatch grinning insanely at him from the ceiling mirror.

His ears ringing from the fusillade, Scrbacek backed up quickly, on elbows and knees, reached up to the table, and grabbed hold of the shaft of the second lamp, the huge white plaster phallus base that had been his target from his first leap. He jerked his arm down and to the right so that the top of the lamp smashed against the side of the hot tub, the bulb shattering and the light dying with a pop. Quickly he scooted away from the table.

“I can still see,” said DeLoatch, loosing another shot, another roar, another stream flowing, this time directly upon Scrbacek’s back. The old man’s aim was getting truer, the bullet missing him by only inches. The next shot would be on target. “Foolish boy,” said DeLoatch. “Trying to lose the light. It’s not even dark outside. Maybe I overestimated you after all.”

“Hey, Professor,” said Scrbacek, still below the level of the hot tub. “You know what you need?”

“What is that, Mr. Scrbacek?”

“A good prick up the ass,” he said as he tossed the huge white cock, cord still attached, over and into the tub.

Along with the sizzle and dimming light came a quick and awesome scream. Scrbacek was immediately on his feet, racing through the hallway, past the decimated tray of food, out the door of room 2402.

Without slowing, Scrbacek slammed open the emergency stairwell door and leaped down one flight and then the next and then the next, holding onto the rail for balance, one foot barely landing on the cement step before it was pushing off to send him leaping down further. He kept jumping down until he stopped, suddenly, by one of the exit doors.

There were harsh sounds rising in the stairwell, a door banging open, footsteps shuddering upward.

Quietly, Scrbacek opened the exit door, slipped out, pushed it shut behind him. The elevator door down the hall was just opening for a couple, she in a bright-orange chiffon, he in a sport coat tight around his heavy shoulders. As they entered the elevator, Scrbacek straightened his glasses and hurried toward them.

“Hold, please,” he said as calmly as he could manage, still gasping for air. Inside, he turned around just as the door closed. He glimpsed, through the vanishing crack, a bulky man in a cable-knit sweater lunging through the stairwell door.

45

A T
ASTY
C
UT OF
M
EAT

The jazzy, sweeping clinka-dink of insincere elevator music played, appropriately enough, in the elevator, giving the same sense of dead space as in a capsule tumbling helplessly past Mars.

Scrbacek wiped his face with his hand as they started to fall and the lights atop the doors moved to the left. Eighteen, seventeen. Along with smeared hair-in-a-can, blood came away on his palm. The sight of its rich crimson shocked him. Had DeLoatch hit him? Was he somehow shot? But he remembered the plastic shards flying into his face when that crazy bastard first shot a hole through the hot tub. That must have been it. Scrbacek wiped his face again, checked the elevator’s progress.
Fifteen, fourteen.
He slipped the key card Dolores had given him into the bottom slot, and the basement indicator switched on.

Suddenly worried about what the couple standing behind him thought of a dealer rushing for their elevator, his vest filthy with shrimp sauce, his face bleeding, he said, “How you folks doing today? You having much luck?”

“I’m getting killed at blackjack,” said the man.

“You play like an idiot,” said the woman.

“What are you talking about? I play.”

“You hit on a seventeen.”

“I felt something.”

Eleven, ten.
“The whole table groaned.”

“What do I care they groan? I was a loser anyway. The dealer drew to twenty-one.”

“He would have drawn your queen and busted if you had stayed pat
.
”

“I felt something.”

“What you felt, Jack dear, was the lunch buffet. What you felt was your third helping of prime rib.”

“It was a very tasty cut of meat.”

Seven, six.
“Hey, Jack,” said Scrbacek. “You come to my table, I’ll find you some luck.”

“Really?”

“I’ve been cold as ice. People have been making a fortune off me all day. I’ll save a seat.”

“Well, that would be great,” said the man, leaning forward to get a look at his tag. “That would be great . . . Lee. Lee? Lee Chon Yang?”

Three, two.
“My mother’s Swedish.”

“Ahh,” said the man, “that explains it.”

The elevator opened suddenly onto the wild razz-jazz-a-ma-tazz of the casino level, the ring-a-ding of the slots, the desperate cheers from the craps table, the thirsty calls to the cocktail tail, the ring-a-ding-ding. Scrbacek watched two bruisers in cable-knit sweaters sweep by as Jack and his wife stepped around him and off the elevator.

“I’m on shift in another twenty minutes, Jack,” called out Scrbacek.

“I’ll be looking for you,” said Jack, “you bet.”

“I’ll save the seat.”

Scrbacek smiled and waved as the bruisers glanced his way, saw the friendly conversation, kept on moving.

The elevator doors closed.

Scrbacek let out a breath.

He waited tensely for the elevator to descend two more levels, to the basement. Before the doors were fully open, he was out of the elevator, ducking into a doorway, listening.

Nothing.

The elevator door closed again and left him in silence.

He was in a fluorescent-lit hallway filled with the spoils of abundance, trolleys heaping with soiled sheets, carts loaded with room service trays, massive rubbish containers brimming with rotting food. Carefully, quickly, scooting from doorway to doorway, he made his way through the basement level, trying to retrace the path he had taken with Dolores.

At one point he turned down a hallway, realized it was the wrong way, and as he turned back he heard something coming along his original path. He ducked behind a maid’s trolley and peered out. An electric golf cart, driven by a maintenance worker, with a man in the ubiquitous cable-knit sweater and beret standing on the back, gripping a rifle, searching. Scrbacek waited for it to pass and turn down another route before he continued on his way.

Finally, after testing two, three, four doors, he found the unlocked maintenance closet, in which he had stashed his clothes, and shut the door quietly behind him. He took off his vest and shirt and jammed them against the bottom crack of the door before he pulled the cord on the overhead bulb. A fierce yellow light crashed down upon him.

He tried to lock the door from inside, but found there was no button or slide. He jammed a folded
WET FLOOR
sign under the knob to keep the door shut. From one pocket he took out a card. From another he pulled out Jenny’s phone. He turned the phone on, checked the reception—one bar would have to do—and dialed.

“Do you know who this is?” said Scrbacek when the call was answered.

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” said Nomad Aboud. “It’s that donkey, isn’t it, the one running around like a crazy Indian.”

“That’s right.”

“How you doing out there? Dead yet?”

“Close, but not yet. You said for me to call you if I needed something. Well, I need something.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’m hidden in the bowels of Diamond’s Mount Olympus. They’re looking for me up and down, guarding all the exits. I need to get out.”

“And you want for me to come and get you?”

“That would be great. Just great.”

“How’d you get in there in the first place?”

“A long story.”

“And what was the purpose of your visit? A little relaxation at the tables? A quick hit at the Elysian Buffet?”

“It was business, not buffet—though I heard the prime rib was mighty tasty.”

“Where are you now?”

“In desperate straits.”

“Where in the hotel, numchuck?”

“The basement.”

“Okay, I know that basement. I’ve hijacked enough sheets from that joint to sail to Cuba. In the southwest corner of the basement level is an emergency exit that leaves you at a stairwell that climbs out onto Jefferson. The alarm goes off as soon as you open the door, so you got to hustle once you bust through. Twenty minutes, exactly from the time I hang up, we’ll be outside that exit, in a maroon Lincoln Town Car.”

“Nice.”

“You bust out the door, we’ll be there. Five seconds early, they catch you before we arrive. Five seconds late, we’ll be gone.”

“I got you,” said Scrbacek, checking quickly on the phone’s menu for the tools page and finding the timer. “Okay.”

“You ready?”

“Ready.”

“Twenty minutes from now.” Click.

Scrbacek pressed the button. The time started counting down. Okay, nineteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds to find the doors and burst through them to meet the Lincoln. Nineteen minutes and fifty-eight. And fifty-seven.

He slid off his boots and stripped off the rest of his dealer’s costume, including the Lee Chon Yang name tag, of which he had grown quite fond. He didn’t rush, he had plenty of time. Six or seven minutes would be enough to find the exit. Anything longer would increase his chances of getting caught. He grabbed the paper bag he had stashed on the upper shelf and pulled out his old clothes, dirty and smelly, and now creased beyond belief from being jammed into so small a package. He put on his jeans and white shirt, replaced the boots. He was a target in his old clothes, but he was a bigger target, in that casino, fitting the description DeLoatch had given over the phone. They were searching for a man dressed as a dealer; he needed to look like anything but. He replaced the vest and dealer’s shirt with the raincoat to keep light inside from drifting out, and wiped his face as best as he could with the shirt, taking off blood, shrimp sauce, more hair-in-a-can. He lathered up his beard with the shaving cream Dolores had brought him and shaved by feel, slicing off the goatee along with strips of skin. He gave a final wipe to his face before stuffing the dealer’s uniform and tag into the bag. He returned the bag to the high shelf for Dolores to retrieve.

He checked the stopwatch on the phone: Seven minutes and twelve seconds. And eleven seconds. And ten seconds. It was time to get moving.

He turned off the light, shucked on his raincoat, put his ear to the door, and froze.

Footsteps.