The Inner Circle (8 page)

My cell phone had stopped vibrating somewhere in the process of opening the Yukon’s door and shooting the driver and waiting for him to die. I was tempted to take it out, check who had called, the Kid or Ian. But time was passing too quickly. If the girl was in fact inside the hotel—and for some reason I felt that she was, that she was very close—it wouldn’t take long for these two men to bring her outside.
 

I hurried directly up the walkway toward the automatic glass doors. I kept the gun at my side, at a position where I could bring it up in less than a second if need be.
 

Behind me, footsteps.
 

I spun, the gun now in both hands, aimed right at the man approaching me. The man with long hair hiding under his blue Red Sox cap.
 

“Jesus Christ,” I said.
 

“What?” Ian whispered. “You just disappeared. I tried calling you.”
 

I motioned at the Yukon behind him. “I was busy.”
 

He glanced back, saw the body slumped in the seat. “I can see that,” he said. “Now, what’s the plan?”
 

I headed toward the glass doors again, Ian now beside me, his gun out.
 

“There is no plan. But there’s two of them. I’m pretty sure they’re here to take the girl.”
 

“So we take them out once they hit the lobby?”
 

“Sounds good to me.”
 

I stepped close enough for the electronic eye to catch me and quietly open the doors. We walked inside. The lobby was completely silent. The only things that filled it were the lost echoes of the gunfire that played out here not even a half hour ago, the still lingering smells of cordite and smoke. And floating somewhere in here, maybe still on the third floor, trying to make its way outside into the drizzle and lightning-dotted night, Carver’s last word flitted about like a butterfly minutes out of the cocoon.

15

We waited in the lobby, near the bank of elevators. We took up positions behind the pillars, Ian on one side, me on the other. We didn’t wait long before we heard the dinging of an elevator and the whoosh of parting doors. Footsteps on the carpet, a hushed noise, and then they appeared, the two men dressed in black walking on either side of the girl.
 

One of the men wore glasses and a black baseball cap, the Yukon’s passenger. He was on my side and the first one to die. Like the driver, he too attempted to reach for his holstered weapon when he saw me, but he never got the chance.
 

I stepped around the pillar and leveled the gun right at his head. Fired a round into his face. At that exact moment Ian did the same to the man on the girl’s right. First my gunshot, a half-second later Ian’s, and then it was silent once again in the lobby.
 

That was when the little girl started screaming.
 

Only she wasn’t screaming so much as sobbing, those tears that I’d at first thought she had wasted now returning full force. She just stood there, no taller than four feet, her body covered in a long dark coat. There were blue flip-flops on her caramel-colored feet, and her long ragged hair was jet-black.
 

Ian immediately dropped to his knees in front of her and placed a hand on her shoulder. Telling her that it was all right, that everything was okay, but then she began speaking rapidly in another language—what I realized after a moment was Creole—tears in her wide eyes as she stared down at the two bodies of the men who’d been her captors.
 

Watching Ian, I felt an ache in my heart, remembering all those nights I’d raced from my bedroom to Casey’s, hearing her crying out from a nightmare. Like mother, like daughter, they both suffered from night terrors, from the bogeymen lurking in the shadows of their subconscious. I’d always gone to her and woken her up, held her close and whispered that everything was okay, that nothing could harm her. But in the end I’d been made out to be a liar, because the bogeymen had come for her. They’d come for her and her mother and taken them away, someplace where I could never find them, no matter how hard and how long I searched, before the startling revelation hit me that they were dead.
 

“No, no, no,” Ian said, as soothingly as he could, staring into the girl’s dark face, into her pretty eyes. She was pretty in fact, her eyes lightly tinted with green, a girl who might have someday grown up into a full-fledged knockout of a woman. Unfortunately that wasn’t going to happen anymore, not to this girl who had already suffered God knows what kind of horrors. No doubt she was already scarred emotionally from everything she’d been forced to do, but that wasn’t all. How long had it taken before her spirit broke and she’d accepted the fact she had no more reason to live, that the simple act of breathing had become a way of counting down the minutes until she died?
 

Watching them, I said, “I’ll be right back.”
 

Ian seemed to be making some progress with the girl. In less than a minute, he’d gotten her to change her screaming and sobbing into a whimper. It would have been best to move her far away from these two bodies, from all the blood and brain tissue and whatever else spotting the walls and carpet, but neither of us was thinking properly at that moment.
 

Now Ian paused in his attempts to sooth the girl and looked up at me. “You can’t leave me with her.”
 

“It’ll just be for a minute,” I told him, already heading toward the stairs. “I need to see Carver’s body.”
 

“But, Ben, what if—”
 

I hit the fire door and walked straight through, Ian’s words lost behind me.

•
   
•
   
•

C
ARVER
’
S
BODY
WAS
gone. Gun in hand, finger on the trigger, I stood by the bank of elevators and listened to the hum of the ice machine. There was blood on the blue carpet, a dark crimson soaking the seashells.
 

For some reason I’d expected there to be more blood. I’d expected the carpet to be covered in it.
 

I moved forward slowly, cautiously, remembering the shooter. How he’d stepped out and shot Carver twice in the chest. I even found myself raising my gun toward the corner of the hallway as I approached, glancing down at the blood-soaked carpet and back up at the corner, ready for anything.
 

Standing over the spot where Carver had spoken his last word, his face paling as he stared up at me, I noticed the trail of blood. It went around the corner. I’d dragged him all the way here, down the hallway and around the corner, so obviously he’d trailed blood the entire way. But staring at the jagged and thin line of crimson, I realized there were actually two trails.
 

I went to the other side of the foyer, my back against the wall, inching closer toward the humming ice machine. I kept my gun aimed down the hall. Farther and farther, my eyes flitting on the spots of blood. Then I was at the corner, staring down the hall. No movement. I stepped into the hallway and immediately turned in the opposite direction, the gun raised, ready to fire. Still nothing.
 

I started down the hallway toward room 339.
 

A couple rooms before room 339, however, I stopped. It was the room the shooter had stepped out from. The door was partway open. There was no light in the narrow opening.
 

Raising my gun, I kicked open the door and charged in, flicking on the light switch as I entered. A single lamp lit up the empty room. No bed, no chair, no bedside table. Nothing except the lamp. In the bathroom there was nothing either, not even a shower curtain.
 

I stepped back out into the hallway.
 

I continued on toward room 339. That door too was opened just slightly. Darkness peered out from the narrow slit between the door and the frame. Since the girl was downstairs now, I didn’t intend for any surprises when I opened the door. I didn’t kick it this time, but instead gently pushed it open, reached inside for the light switch. It came on in the corner, right where I’d seen it on Carver’s laptop screen. The bed was in the center of the room, the sheets white, pairs of black Velcro straps at the head and foot of the bed.
 

I glanced up at the corner where I knew the camera had been positioned. It was gone now, but the evidence was still there, the vent where the camera had been hiding behind hanging open. It wasn’t quite a normal cleanup job—those in Caesar’s army were meticulous through and through—but of course the building was scheduled for demolition in three days, so why bother tidying up?
 

My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I knew it was Ian even before I pulled it out and answered it.
 

“Ben, I’m getting nervous down here.”
 

His voice sounded weird, almost like a frail imitation of his own. Behind it I could hear the girl’s soft whimpering.
 

I stood there for a moment, taking in the room, smelling the sweat and the tears and the acrid odor of urine, presumably when the girl had pissed herself from fear and weariness.
 

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m headed down now.”

16

Ian had moved the girl away from the two dead bodies and taken her to one of the couches that hadn’t been completely destroyed in the initial shootout. He had gotten her to sit on the couch while he kneeled beside her, still talking to her while she murmured in her native tongue. He heard me approaching and glanced up, questioned me with his eyes whether I’d found anything.
 

I shook my head but didn’t say anything. I was still trying to work it out in my mind. I’d seen the men bring three bodies out of the hotel and load them into the delivery truck. Hadn’t I? Was it possible I’d somehow missed a fourth body, that Carver’s had gotten lost in the mix?
 

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”
 

Ian said something else to the girl, his voice soft, trying his best to smile. He stood up, holding out his hand. The girl hesitantly took it. He led her through the lobby, toward the glass doors that parted for us, then closed behind us, sealing in the dead bodies and everything else that had once been a part of the Beachside Hotel’s memory.
 

We walked into the rain, past the Yukon, listening to the wind and the traffic out on the street.
 

“Right there,” I said, pointing at the Corolla near the end of the parking lot. “You might as well sit with her in the back. You’ll have to move Carver’s stuff into the front first.”
 

“To be honest,” Ian said, “I’d rather drive. I just ... I don’t think I can handle it.”
 

We were walking side by side, the girl between us. As Ian said this he glanced down at the girl, who had let go of his hand and was now walking with hardly any emotion at all.
 

“That’s fine,” I said, pulling the car key from my pocket. I handed it to Ian who then picked up his pace, heading straight for the driver’s door. I watched him, this twenty-four-year-old kid who’d modeled his entire acting career after Robert De Niro. There had been nights back at the farmhouse, either while all of us played poker or sat out on the porch underneath a clear sky, where he would do his impersonations. Running lines from
Taxi Driver
or
Raging Bull
, he’d always make us laugh, or at least smile, and sometimes that was all we needed to make it through those dark hours. And now here he was, a man who didn’t think he could handle comforting this little girl any longer.
 

I couldn’t blame him.
 

It’s difficult dealing with a child, especially when that child isn’t your own, and when you’ve just killed two men to save this particular child—not to mention losing one of your own in the process—there’s a new, stronger sense of responsibility attached. Then again, Ian had never been a father. He had never handled a baby newly born, staring down at the tiny miraculous thing and telling himself he wasn’t dreaming. He never had to remind himself this was his baby, his own flesh and blood, and with that knowledge came a great fear. That now he was responsible. That now there was no going back. That every single thing he did from that moment on was going to affect the future of his child.
 

It was the same fears I’d had when Casey was born. That suddenly, after all the planning and positive thinking, I was now a father and realized that no matter how hard I tried, I was going to fail. That nothing I could do would ever be good enough. That I would never learn how to change her diapers, or teach her how to read, or rock her to sleep. Even feeding her and burping her was something I’d come to dread, my imagination coming up with several ways to fuck with my head on how I would screw up.
 

Ian opened the driver’s door just as I opened the back door. I leaned in to grab Carver’s bag, to move it aside to give the girl space.
 

And stopped.
 

“Ian, is the bag up front?”
 

“What?” He slid into the driver’s seat, the key just inches away from the ignition. “No, I don’t see it. Why?”
 

“Don’t start the car.”
 

“What?” he asked again, sliding the key into the ignition.
 

“
Stop!
”
 

He froze.
 

“Don’t move a muscle.”
 

He didn’t. Softly, he asked, “What’s wrong?”
 

“Just don’t move.”