Part Two
The Wrong Place
at the Right Time
Eighteen
L
ong ago, the small five-story hotel had been
built into a bluff along the coast. Bougainvillea vines with trunks as thick as trees draped purple and red capes across the entry-walk trellis, and the wind stirred a confetti of petals across the pavement.
At a quarter past midnight, when Tim signed the hotel registry, he wrote
Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Carrier,
while the clerk ran his Visa card through the verification machine.
In their third-floor room, sliding glass doors served a balcony with two wrought-iron chairs and a cocktail table. A three-foot gap separated their balcony from the adjacent one.
Under a charcoal sky lay a soot-black sea. Like gray smoke, the froth on the low waves drifted ashore, dissipating on an ashen beach.
To the north and below them, wind shook more noise from massive phoenix palms than was made by the gently breaking surf.
Standing at the railing, staring toward a western horizon that could not be discerned, Linda said, “They don’t care these days.”
Beside her, he said, “Who doesn’t care about what?”
“Hotel clerks about whether a couple is married.”
“Oh, I know. But it didn’t seem right.”
“Guarding my honor, were you?”
“I think you’ve got that handled yourself.”
She shifted her attention from the lost horizon to him. “I like the way you talk.”
“What way is that?”
“I can’t quite find the best word for it.”
“And you’re a writer.”
Leaving the balcony to the wind, they went inside and closed the sliding door.
“Which bed do you want?” he asked.
Pulling back the spread, she said, “This one will do.”
“I’m pretty sure we’re safe here.”
She frowned. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
“I keep wondering how he found us at the coffee shop.”
“He must really have a place near the vacant lot that was on his car registration. So he just happened to see us checking it out.”
“‘Just happened’ doesn’t just happen.”
“Sometimes it does. There’s such a thing as bad luck.”
“Anyway,” he said, “maybe we should be ready for anything. Maybe we should sleep with our clothes on.”
“I already had every intention of sleeping with my clothes on.”
“Oh. Yes. Well, of course you did.”
“Don’t look so disappointed.”
“I’m not disappointed. I’m devastated.”
While Linda was in the bathroom, Tim turned off the overhead lights. On the nightstand between the beds, the lamp had a three-way switch, and he clicked it to the softest setting.
He perched on the edge of his bed and speed-dialed the tavern, where Rooney remained at work behind the bar.
“Where are you?” Rooney asked.
“Just this side of paradise.”
“You’re never getting any closer.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. Listen, Liam, did he talk to anyone besides you?”
“The shark in shoes?”
“Yeah, him. Did he talk to any customers?”
“No. Just to me.”
“Maybe he went upstairs to talk to Michelle.”
“No. She was here behind the bar with me when he came in.”
“Somebody gave him my name. And he got my cell number.”
“Not here, he didn’t. Isn’t your cell unlisted?”
“That’s what the phone company tells me.”
“Tim, who is that guy?”
“I’d sure like to know. Hey, Liam, I’m out of practice with women, you’ve got to help me.”
Rooney said, “You lost me on the transition. Women?”
“Give me something nice to say to a woman.”
“Nice? Nice about what?”
“I don’t know. About her hair.”
“You could say ‘I like your hair.’”
“How did you ever get Michelle to marry you?”
“I told her, if she didn’t accept my proposal, I’d kill myself.”
“It’s a little early in this relationship,” Tim said, “to use a suicide threat. Gotta go.”
When she came out of the bathroom, with her face freshly washed and her hair held back by a barrette, she was radiant. She had also been radiant when she went into the bathroom.
He said, “I like your hair.”
“My hair? I’m thinking of cutting it.”
“It’s so glossy and so dark, it’s almost black.”
“I don’t dye it.”
“No, of course you don’t. I didn’t mean you did or that it was a wig or anything.”
“Wig? Does it look like a wig?”
“No, no. The last thing it looks like is a wig.”
He decided to flee the room. On the threshold of the bathroom, he made the mistake of turning to her again and saying, “I want you to know, I won’t use your toothbrush.”
“It never crossed my mind that you would.”
“I thought it might have. Crossed your mind, I mean.”
“Well, now it has.”
“If I could have some of your toothpaste, I’ll just use one of my fingers for a brush.”
“A forefinger works better than a thumb,” she advised.
Minutes later, when he came out of the bathroom, she was lying atop the blankets, eyes closed, hands resting on her abdomen.
In the subdued light, Tim thought that she was asleep. He went to his bed and, as quietly as possible, sat with his back against the headboard.
She said, “What if Pete Santo can’t winnow all those names down to the right one?”
“He will.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“Then we’ll try something different.”
“What would that be?”
“I’ll have it figured out by morning.”
After a silence, she said, “You always know what to do, don’t you?”
“You must be joking.”
“Don’t shine me on.”
After a silence of his own, Tim admitted, “Seems like, under enough pressure, I tend to make right choices.”
“Are you under enough pressure yet?”
“It’s building.”
“And when you’re not under pressure?”
“Then I’m clueless.”
His cell phone rang. He plucked it off the nightstand, where it had been charging.
Pete Santo said, “A funny thing happened.”
“Good. I could use a laugh. Let me put this on speakerphone.” He set the phone on the nightstand. “All right.”
“I’m running all these names through law-enforcement databases, state and national,” Pete said, “see if maybe one of his identities is real enough to have some kind of badge and a job. My phone rings. It’s Hitch Lombard. My chief of detectives.”
“Your boss? When—just now, after midnight?”
“I just got off the phone with him. Hitch heard I’m on sick leave tomorrow, he hopes I’m okay.”
“Does he also make chicken soup for his sick detectives?”
“Pretending it makes any sense for him to be calling me, I say it’s just a stomach thing, and then he asks what case I’m working on, and I say there’s like three at the moment, which I name for him, as if he doesn’t know them.”
“He would know them?”
“He would definitely. So then he says, being as how I’m always an obsessive about my cases, he bets I’m probably working on one of them right now, at home, on my computer, even though I’m sick.”
“That freaks,” Tim said.
“It freaked me right up out of my office chair.”
“How would anyone know you’re cruising databases for Kravet and his multiple personalities?”
“Something in their software. Interest in Kravet and his other names trips an alarm. Somebody gets notified.”
Having sat up in bed, Linda said, “Somebody who?”
“Somebody a lot higher up the food chain than me,” Pete said. “Somebody higher than Hitch Lombard, high enough they could tell Hitch to shut me down, and he’d say
Yes, sir, I’ll do it right away, but could I kiss your ass first?
”
“What kind of a guy is Lombard?” Linda asked.
“He’s not as bad as it gets. But if you’re on the street, you’re happy he’s an office guy, not on the street with you. He says when I feel better and I’m back at work, he has an important investigation for me, he wants me to put all my time to it.”
“So he’s taking you off your current cases?” Tim asked.
“As of now, tonight,” Pete confirmed.
“He thinks something in one of those cases must have led you to Kravet.”
“Not that he ever said so, but yeah. He never mentioned Kravet, but yeah.”
Linda said, “Maybe he doesn’t even know Kravet’s name or any of the guy’s other names, or what this is about.”
Pete agreed. “Somebody somewhere has Lombard in a nut-cracker and they’ll use it if he doesn’t back me off. Hitch doesn’t have to be told why they want me shut down. He just has to believe they’ll crack him.”
In the low lamplight, as he spoke and listened, Tim had been studying his hands. They were rough and callused.
When this business was finished, perhaps his hands would be even rougher, and too hard to be capable of a tender touch.
He said, “You’ve been a lot of help, Pete. I appreciate it.”
“I’m not done with this.”
“You’re done, all right. They’re on to you.”
“I just gotta change tactics,” Pete said.
“I’m serious. You’re done. Don’t you go off a cliff.”
“What’re cliffs for? Anyway, this is as much for me as you.”
“How does that make any sense? It doesn’t.”
“Don’t you remember when we grew up together?” Pete asked.
“It happened so fast, there’s not much to forget.”
“Did we come from there to here for nothing?”
“I wouldn’t like to think so.”
“We sure didn’t come from there to here just to let the usual sonsofbitches have their way.”
“They’re always going to have their way,” Tim said.
“All right. Mostly. But once in a while, they have to see one of their own get his package cut off just so they’ll stop and wonder if maybe there
is
a god.”
“I’ve heard that somewhere.”
“You
said
it somewhere.”
“Well, I’m not going to argue with myself. Okay, we’re gonna get some rest.”
“Maybe tomorrow you can tell me what this is all about.”
“Maybe,” Tim said, and terminated the call.
Linda had stretched out on her bed again, her head on a pillow, eyes closed, hands at rest on her abdomen. She said, “Poetry.”
“What poetry?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “The stuff that happened, the stuff that made you write festering books—”
“Books full of festering sorrow.”
“That stuff, whatever it was—you’re absolutely sure something from then isn’t behind this thing now.”
“I’m positive. I’ve thought it through from a dozen directions.”
“Think it through from thirteen.”
He removed the pistol from her purse on the nightstand, and he put it within easy reach.
Without opening her eyes, she asked, “Are we going to die here?”
He said, “We’ll try not to.”
Nineteen
T
he third-floor hotel room began to feel like a
box canyon in an old Western movie. With a single exit, if the wrong people showed up, you had no way out except
through
them.
The average hired killer, if there was such a thing, probably wouldn’t try to execute a hit in a hotel. He would prefer to nail his target in the street, where his escape routes would be more numerous.
Remembering the insatiable hunger in those black voids at the center of the killer’s eyes, Tim suspected nothing about the guy was average. Kravet had no limits. He might do anything.
Still sitting up in his bed, Tim watched Linda as she lay with her eyes closed. He liked looking at her, especially when he wasn’t being dissected by her stare.
He had seen many women more beautiful than she was. He had never seen one at whom he more enjoyed looking.
Why this should be, he didn’t know. He didn’t try to analyze it. These days, people spent too much time striving to understand their feelings—and then ended up with none that were genuine.
Although a third-floor hotel room might prove to be a trap rather than a refuge, he could not think of any place to go that might be safer. Currently, the world was nothing
but
box canyons.
Instinct told him that the more they stayed on the move, the safer they would be. But they needed rest. If they returned to the SUV, they couldn’t drive anywhere except to exhaustion.
He got out of his bed as quietly as possible and stood gazing down at her for a minute, and then whispered, “Are you asleep?”
“No,” she whispered. “Are you?”
“I’m just going out to the hallway for two minutes.”
“Why?”
“To look around.”
“For what?”
“I’m not sure. The gun is here on the nightstand.”
“I won’t shoot you when you come back.”
“That was my hope.”
He left the room and eased the door shut behind him. He checked to be sure that it had locked.
Red
EXIT
signs, denoting stairwells, glowed at each end of the corridor. The elevators were at the north end.
On the west side of the hallway, six rooms lay to the left of theirs. From the knobs of four doors hung signs reading
DO NOT DISTURB
.
Four units lay to the right of theirs. Only the nearest two featured the signs.
At the south stairs, the door complained with a thin squeal when he opened it. On the landing, he listened for the murmur of the sea in the nautilus-shell turns of the stairwell, but heard only silence.
He descended two flights to the ground level. A door on the left served the first floor of guest rooms. To the right, a door opened on a lighted exterior pathway leading toward the front of the hotel.
Hibiscus bushes bordered the sidewalk. Shuddering in the wind, the big red blooms seemed to burst toward him with ominous portent.
The walkway passed between the hotel and its three-story parking structure. He went to his Explorer in the garage.
Everyone arriving at the hotel, regardless of the hour, was required to use valet parking. Tim would no more have given his car keys to an attendant, thus compromising mobility, than he would have traded his feet for a claim check.
Between midnight and six in the morning, only one valet was on duty. During those quiet hours, he doubled as a bellman, and he was not at his usual portico station. Upon arrival, a guest had to ring for valet service.
Tim hadn’t rung. He had parked where he wished.
Now, shortly before one o’clock in the morning, at the Explorer, he retrieved the flashlight. From the jack well in the cargo space, he withdrew a small zippered vinyl kit of tools.
Wind thrummed and soughed past the open sides of the parking structure, and from various points throughout the hollow concrete bays came sinister whispers and ghostly voices that were only the same wind playing ventriloquist.
When he returned to their room on the third floor, Tim closed the door and engaged the deadbolt. He put on the security chain, too, though it wouldn’t stand up to a single kick in a determined assault. If it delayed entrance only two or three seconds, that could be a life-saving margin.
He went to the foot of Linda’s bed. As before, she lay on her back with her eyes closed.
He whispered, “Are you asleep?”
“No,” she whispered, “I’m dead.”
“I need to turn on more lights.”
“Go ahead.”
“I need to check out something.”
“All right.”
“I’ll try to be quiet about it.”
“You can’t bother a dead woman.”
He stood looking down at her.
After a moment, without opening her eyes, she said, “Is it my hair again?”
Leaving her with her magnificent hair, Tim switched on the overhead light and went to the balcony doors.
His reflection in the glass dismayed him. He looked like a bear. A big, clumsy, disheveled, clueless bear. No wonder she kept her eyes closed.
Each of the two glass doors was four feet wide. The one on the right had been fixed in place. Only the left one slid, bypassing the right-hand door on the inside.
Because this was a high-end hotel, care had been taken with details. The metal frame of the door-set had not been mounted over the sheetrock, but instead had been plastered into the wall, allowing the wallpaper to be trimmed out to the glass.
Even flat-head anchoring screws would have spoiled the look, so the fixed door had not been secured from inside.
He slid open the operable door a few inches. A curious wind sniffed at him as he worked the latch lever several times.
The hotel had been built long ago, and these doors had been here since day one. Because that had been a more innocent age and because the balcony hung about fifty feet above the beach, the door had not been fitted with a serious lock.
A simple spring latch did a good job of holding the door closed. As a lock, however, it would fail under moderate stress.
Rising from his crouch, turning to ask for Linda’s assistance, Tim discovered her standing behind him, watching.
He said, “You aren’t dead after all.”
“It’s a miracle. What’s going on?”
“I want to see if I can do this without waking anyone.”
“I’m wide awake. I’ve been wide awake. Remember?”
“Maybe you have a sleeping disorder.”
“I’m looking at it.”
“I mean, I want to see can I do this and not wake people in the next room. Will you lock me out on the balcony?”
“Absolutely.”
Carrying the flashlight and the tool kit, Tim stepped outside. Less mild than it had been, the night wind nipped him, as though he annoyed it.
Linda slid the glass door shut, and the latch engaged. She stood in there, staring out at him.
He waved at her, and she waved back.
He loved that she waved back. A lot of women would have gestured for him to hurry or would have stood with their fists balled on their hips, glaring. He loved her deadpan expression when she waved.
Although he considered waving again, he restrained himself. Even a woman as exceptional as this one might have limits to her patience.
He decided to start with the fixed door. With luck, he wouldn’t have to deal with the latch in the other panel. Using the flashlight, he quickly located two anchoring screws in the header and two in the vertical frame.
From the tool kit, he chose one of three Phillips screwdrivers. He got the right fit on his first try.
The door-set was less than seven feet high. He could easily get enough torque even though he had to work above his head.
He expected the screws to be frozen by decades of corrosion, and he wasn’t disappointed. He persisted, and the head of the screw broke off. The shank dropped with a rattle into the hollow metal header.
The second screw snapped, as well, but the two in the vertical frame turned with rasping resistance. The noise he made extracting them wouldn’t have drawn the attention even of an insomniac princess troubled by a hard pea secreted under twenty mattresses.
All sliding doors are lifted into their tracks after the frame is set. Consequently, they can be easily removed. Because these doors had been manufactured in an age of innocence, they featured recessed finger grips in the stiles to facilitate an installer’s work.
If these had been six-foot-wide panels, he wouldn’t have been able to handle one himself. But they were only four feet, and he was a big disheveled bear.
He lifted the door straight up, and the top rail receded into the installation gap above it. Scraping softly, the bottom rail rose out of the track.
Had he tilted the bottom of the door toward himself and slowly lowered it, the top rail would have come out of the installation gap. He would have been able to lift the door entirely from the frame, to put it down on the balcony.
This had been only a test, however, to determine his ability to remove the door in relative silence. Muscles straining, he lifted it back into the track and left it in its frame where, no longer fixed, it could be slid aside as easily as its mate.
He gathered up his tools and the flashlight, and indicated to Linda that she should unlock and let him in.
As she was closing the door behind him, he glanced at his watch and said, “Took about four minutes.”
“Just imagine how much of the place you’ll be able to dismantle in an hour.”
“Suppose you’d been sleeping—”
“I can’t even imagine it anymore.”
“—I might have gotten in from the balcony without waking you. I certainly wouldn’t have awakened the people in the next room.”
“When Kravet comes up fifty feet from the beach and in through this door, we’ll know he’s Spider Man’s evil twin.”
Tim said, “If he finds us as quick as he found us at the coffee shop, I’d rather he came for us one way or the other instead of waiting for us in the parking garage. We’ll be most vulnerable going to the Explorer among all those cars, all those support columns.”
“He won’t find us tonight,” she said.
“I’m not so sure.”
“He’s not magical.”
“Yeah, but you heard Pete Santo. Kravet has connections.”
“We left him without wheels,” she said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he could fly. Anyway, I feel better. We won’t be in a box canyon now.”
“You’ve totally lost me, and I don’t care.” She yawned. “Come on, let’s go to bed.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said.
“It’s not what I mean, either,” he assured her.