To Sleep Gently (25 page)

"This will all be over soon, Marie," he told her. "Just work with me a few minutes longer. We're gonna cut across into the kitchen. There's an exit there, I know there is. I'll let you go as soon as we're outside, all right? Then this will all be over for you, and you can go back to Boston and see your boy and watch him grow up and become a famous writer."

But Marie didn't say anything. Marie wasn't moving. Her body was dead weight under his arm. He let go of her as the realization of what he'd just done sank in. She looked at him with dead eyes for a moment. Then her body dropped out from behind the display stand.

Someone said, "Aw, shit."

Someone else said, "All right. He's killed his hostage."

Jimmy, bordering on hysterical, shaking so much he couldn't handle it, crouched down and fired again.

This time they fired back. He heard the sound of bullets punching the stone wall in front of him. He screamed when the glass case above him shattered and rained down. Shards went into the back of his uniform. Then he heard them coming up the concourse and saw their shadows entering the lounge.

They saw him. Their guns were on him. They were telling him to drop his weapon and lay down.

He looked at the splayed dead body of Marie. You're a murderer, he said to himself. You killed an innocent woman. You killed an innocent woman and there's nothing left for you, ever again. The cops closed in on him.

Jimmy put the barrel of his gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

*****

After Evan sprayed bullets into Clark and raced out across the lobby and into the Old House restaurant—catching the flashing lights from the corner of his eye as he did—he realized his folly, and quickly made his way out of the restaurant and down the hall. He made a left, and saw the other security office with a television on and no one about, and to the right a fluorescent-lit hallway.

They had to have seen him. Someone was going to be coming up behind him any second. He went right, down the hall. It made a sharp curve, and when he came out he found himself in the parking garage. The sound of a generator and the emerging sound of sirens roared about him (the first squad cars hadn't used their sirens, probably as an element of surprise). Several feet to the right was a workstation, with eight dozen keys hanging on eight dozen hooks. Each key had a tag with a number on it that corresponded with the parking space in which the car was parked. He unhooked three keys and hustled deeper into the garage, trying to find one of the corresponding numbers.

Then came the screech of tires. The brightness of headlights and the kaleidoscopic brilliance of red and blue, twirling about with carnival grace. He ran deeper into the garage. He heard car doors opening and closing. Then people were shouting at him as he found a short stairway that led up to a door.

Which was locked. He spun on the police and fired the Micro Uzi, shooting up the hood and windshield of the front squad car, then quickly spun back and shot up the lock on the door. As he pulled the door open the police pulled their triggers. Evan felt the hot burning pain as a bullet struck his left shoulder. He slammed the door behind him—which now wouldn't latch—and ran through the dark room, trying to ignore the pain in his shoulder while at the same time numbness consumed his arm.

Scrambling through the darkness, he sought an exit, found one, and entered an ugly cement hallway lined with doors. The feeling in his arm disappeared all together, and the Arcus 94 dropped from his hand and clattered to the floor with a crackling echo. He tried the first door: storage. He tried the next door: locked. The third door opened to a stairway as unattractive as the hallway. Making his way up the first level he heard voices below, out in the hall. He ascended the next level and opened the door to an elegant hallway with loud zigzagged carpet and potted cacti and ugly watercolor paintings and rows and rows of doors with numbers and peepholes on them. He stopped long enough to regard his shoulder, and saw that it was bloody. He crouched down, removed the cartridge from the Micro Uzi and replaced it with another. From there he made his way down the hall, thinking, collecting himself.

He needed to find Dempster. He needed to get the bag and Dempster was the one who had it.

At the foyer one of the elevators opened. Without seeing who it was he fired into it, heard somebody scream, saw a body fall out, and ran. A stern voice at his back demanded that he stop. He kept running, aimed the Micro Uzi behind him under his limp arm and when he pulled the trigger the gun rattled out of his hand and the surprise caused him to trip over his own feet. He landed hard but didn't waste a second. By the time the cop came out of cover the machine gun was back in his hand. He fired, hit right on target, and as the man went down the door from which he'd entered opened up.

No one was coming out of their rooms, not that he expected them to. Getting to his feet there was a gunshot. It punched into his left thigh and he dropped again, though the pain was almost non-existent. He fired down the hall and watched the little fuckers race for cover, back into the stairway. Using the nearest door handle, he got to his feet, putting his weight on his right leg. He limped back a step and shot out the lock. Someone inside the room screamed. He grabbed the handle, but the door wouldn't open. Down the hall it began to fill with pigs. He cranked the handle again and put his weight against the door and pushed as hard as he could.

The door popped open. To a chain. He glanced through the four-inch gap into the room and saw a couple huddled on the bed. Then he heard a series of gunshots and saw his blood spatter onto the door and wall.

The woman screamed again.

*****

When Dempster got to the top of the stairs he crossed the computer area, went straight to the gray metal door, punched 3114 into the little keypad, heard something within the door disengage, then cranked the handle and stepped inside.

It was dark. Several different humming sounds resonated around him. He was in a hallway, or more accurately, he was in a small maze, with metal pipes and large machines making up the intricate, winding passages. With a click the door closed behind him. The room was warm and mildly humid, and in the faint light everything looked like dry mechanical swampland. He walked down the short hall, past gauges and regulators and nozzles and valves, past the maintenance office, and came to a windowed door on his left. Through the window was a small lounge, not elegant like the hotel—more the sort of lounge one would find in a factory, with plastic chairs and a cafeteria table and a small kitchenette. Bars of streetlight cut in through the window blinds.

He opened the door, which thankfully wasn't locked, and with the barrel of his .45 pushed down the blinds and looked to the street. He saw the police lights bouncing off the buildings and the tail end of a squad car far to the right. At least so far, this side of the hotel was unwatched. Good. He crossed over to the next door, eased it open and found a small office, empty at this hour. There were two doors in here, one to the left and one straight ahead. The one to the left had a narrow vertical window that looked out into what appeared to be the guest part of the hotel. He went for the door straight ahead of him. It opened to a stairway with a second door, presumably the one for guests.

As he climbed the first flight he heard a series of voices on the other side of the door. He quickly raced up the next flight, aware of how heavy the bag was becoming, and when he didn't hear anything on the other side, decided he had to chance it.

Below he heard gunshots.

The hallway he entered was quiet. He took a moment to visualize where he was. Once fairly certain he understood, he continued, past guestrooms, past a small humming concession area, and he wondered what the hell had gotten into Evan.

He put his gun away and switched the bag to his right hand.

I should've known that fucker would go psycho.

He walked casually.

Fuck-ups. All of them were fuck-ups.

He thought about Harold. He saw Harold standing in the lounge telling him what time it was and then Harold was dead on the stairs and blood dripped from his mouth and his dead eyes were looking at him. He wondered if Marie had been telling the truth when she initially said there were others up in the computer room.

Several people were standing around in the foyer. They looked at him. They saw that he was a janitor.

"Hey, buddy, what's going on?" a middle-aged man with a southern accent asked.

His wife nudged him and said softly, "Honey, he doesn't know anything, he's just a janitor."

Dempster moved on. If the cameras weren't back on yet they would be any second. He turned the next corner. Underneath came a chaotic spree of gunfire. It was loud enough to be frightening if you didn't already know it was probably going to happen.

Behind him, back in the foyer, a woman with a panicky voice said, "I think we should go back to our room."

Then all of a sudden he stopped. The kid was running towards him, looking behind himself, unaware of what he was headed for. He turned back just in time to keep from colliding with the very thing he was trying to keep away from.

Dempster grabbed him by the tie. The kid's eyes widened to coasters, his jaw dropped, and before he knew what was going on he was on his back, unconscious. Dempster, with effort, dragged the kid through the hall, made the last left and entered a set of double doors as he heard the bell of the elevator down the hall.

Inside the doors the service elevator, for employees only, stood at his right. To his left were two laundry carts, one filled halfway with dirty sheets, the other one empty.

He put the kid into the empty cart, then stripped out of his janitor's uniform, under which he had on his dark blue blazer and pants and a white shirt open at the collar. He buttoned the collar and from his jacket pocket withdrew a blue and gold striped tie. He removed his glasses and baseball cap, took off the mustache, bundled them with the uniform and stuffed everything into the bottom of the half-filled laundry cart. When he emerged from the room the only thing causing him to stand out was the bag.

People were coming out of their rooms now. A door opened beside him and a young couple stepped out wearing pajamas. They pulled the door closed behind them, which didn't shut all the way. Without noticing, they walked down the hall to see what was going on. Dempster pushed the door open and stepped inside.

Clothes were strewn everywhere, mostly the woman's. He strode to the closet, opened it, found a few pieces of clothing on hangars and two suitcases, one a girly looking thing with pink and red hearts on it, the other a black wheeled leather bag with a retractable handle. He took it out of the closet, removed the few items within, then stuffed the laundry bag into it and zipped it up. He exited the room. Nobody gave him a glance.

"Everybody, please," a cop was saying. "Get back in your rooms."

"What's going on?" someone asked.

"Nothing at this time," the officer said, almost disappointed, "but please go back to your rooms."

Dempster walked briskly past the foyer. He continued down the hall and when the stairway came into view it was blocked by a police officer with a rifle, explaining to a number of people that they needed to go back an lock themselves in.

He took a couple more steps and glanced into an open door. From what he could tell, the room was empty.

The cop with the rifle looked at him.

Dempster stepped into the room and closed the door. It was a fairly small room that smelled like talcum powder, with a large messy bed and a hutch with a TV in it. The TV was switched on to CNN. Beside the hutch was a set of French doors. He opened them and found an extremely small stucco-enclosed balcony with a tiny table and chair and nothing else. From above, the layout of the hotel looked very different. It was multi-leveled, a one-story drop here, a two- or three-story drop there. Above him the building climbed higher. He was mostly at the side of the building but when he looked down, he saw that the balcony was two stories above the roof of the first floor. Fifteen or so feet below and eight or so feet away, there was another roof.

Someone knocked at the door. It was a hard and insistent knock.

"Just a minute," he said.

The knock came again, and a voice said, "Police. Open up."

Dempster hefted the suitcase and threw it. It landed on the lower roof and bounced twice. He closed the French doors behind him, climbed up onto the uneven surface of the wall as the cop got the door open.

He jumped, and when he landed he came down hard, rolled and then sprawled out on his back. All the pain he had built up in his body attacked him at once. It was an unbearable pain. His arm came to his face and covered his eyes. He wanted to go to sleep. All he wanted was to sleep. Then he thought he was sleeping. Then a voice woke him up. His arm came away from his face and he opened his eyes. He sat up, blinking. He saw the night sky, the stars twinkling. He saw the police officer on the balcony, rifle aimed.

A distant metallic voice muttered out of a walkie-talkie.

Dempster rolled and the man fired. A small but deep chunk of roof disappeared. Withdrawing his .45 the two of them fired simultaneously. As Dempster felt the bullet graze his left side he saw the rifle drop from the balcony and saw the man drop into the room.

Then the man was up again, first falling forward, then falling back. Then he positioned himself and aimed a pistol.

Dempster shot again and the man went down again. This time he didn't get up.

Laboring to his feet, Dempster rose just as another person came onto the balcony. Then the doors opened up on the next balcony and someone was there too.

He picked up the bag and ran, relying on streetlights and the moon to show him the way. The pain in his left side began to burn. Then came the sound of gunfire. Single shots, here and there. He looked ahead and saw that the end of this roof was connected to the third story, and he stopped before he smashed into a window. A bullet punched the stucco above his head.