Creepers

54

"Ronnie. Ronald. The Fourth of July, 1960. Ronald Whitaker."

"Shut up," the voice said.

Thunder rumbled.

"You're Ronald Whitaker."

"Shut up. Shut up."

Amid the din of the rain, Balenger heard pounding from below. Not from the trapdoor. Farther down. Aiming, he unlocked and opened the trapdoor. His goggles revealed the curved, green-tinted stairs.

"Shut up. Shut up," Ronnie yelled.

As the fierce pounding continued, Balenger eased down the stairs and peered through the demolished wall into Danata's ravaged living room.

The pounding came from the barricaded door, powerful enough to jostle the furniture stacked against it.

"Your mother died," Balenger said into the walkie-talkie. "Your father molested you."

"I'll make you hurt so much, you'll beg me to kill you!" Ronnie shouted from outside the door.

Balenger entered Danata's living room and aimed toward the door. Keeping his voice low, trying to make Ronnie think he was still in the penthouse, he continued speaking into the walkie-talkie. "Then your father thought he'd earn a few dollars out of you, so he brought you here to the Paragon Hotel for the Fourth of July, and he rented you to another pervert."

"I won't listen!"

"The guy tried to bribe you with a baseball, a glove, and a bat. I can't imagine how unspeakable it was. Afterward, your father came back to the room with the money. He was drunk. He fell asleep. You bashed his head twenty-two times with the bat. Ronnie, in your place, I'd have hit him fifty times. A hundred. I can't tell you how sorry I feel for that little boy. I'm enraged when I think about what was done to him. My heart breaks for the childhood he lost."

Rain lashed against the building. Thunder shook the walls.

"But I hate everything he became, Ronnie."

"My name's Walter Harrigan!"

Balenger fired toward the voice. Once. Twice. At the door's middle, his bullets plowed through the wood.

Immediately, he shifted position, an instant before part of the wall roared open from two shotgun blasts, pellets spraying toward the noise from his gun.

One of the pellets caught Balenger's arm. Ignoring the pain, he fired to the right and left of the holes in the wall. He veered toward the stairwell as two more holes roared through the wall.

From the darkness beyond the holes, he heard Ronnie reloading the shotgun.

Damn it, I let him trick me! He got me to waste ammunition! Only five rounds left!

Static crackled from his walkie-talkie.

Ronnie's aiming toward the sound! Balenger realized. As the walkie-talkie again crackled, he charged up the stairs. Two roars sent pellets clanging off the metal steps below him.

"The holes don't show the light from your headlamp," the voice said from Balenger's walkie-talkie. "Now I understand. While your friends distracted me, you went down the stairwell to the bodies. You got their night-vision goggles."

Balenger braced himself at the trapdoor's opening. Ronnie couldn't get a shot at him there. "I found the explosives you planted under the bodies," Balenger said into the walkie-talkie.

"Well, there's one you didn't find," the voice said.

A rumble shook the building. For a moment, Balenger thought it was another strong burst of thunder. But as the walls trembled, it was obvious that the reverberation came from inside. He had to grip the edge of the trapdoor's opening to steady himself. He felt a shock wave slam his ears.

Above him, Amanda yelled, "Over here! The surveillance room!"

Balenger surged up through the hatch. He ran to the surveillance room and opened its trapdoor. Smoke made him cough. As it cleared, the goggles showed him that the staircase had been blown apart three floors down. The twisted steel remnants vibrated, swaying. Far below, there were flames.

Balenger raised the walkie-talkie. "If you're talking about the metal box you strapped to Amanda, we did find it. I threw it down the surveillance room's staircase. A fire's trying to get started down there."

"Tomorrow, I planned to burn this place to the ground anyhow. The coins are worthless to me."

The abrupt change of topic made Balenger uneasy. "The coins?"

"A fortune, but I couldn't use them to pay the taxes on this place," the voice said bitterly. "I went to different coin dealers in different cities. Never more than a couple of coins at a time. Never the priceless ones. But you need to sell a lot of seven-hundred-dollar coins to try to pay fifty thousand dollars in property taxes. One day, in Philadelphia, a dealer I'd never met looked at what I offered and said, 'So you're the guy with all the double eagles. The other dealers are talking about you.' And that was the last coin I dared try to sell.''

Why is he talking so much? Balenger wondered. He's stalling for time. What's he up to?

Abruptly, Balenger recalled what he'd said to Ronnie seconds earlier: I threw it down the surveillance room's staircase. A fire's trying to get started down there. Jesus, I told him where I am.

Balenger charged from the open trapdoor, lunging toward the bedroom. Something exploded behind him, but there wasn't any shrapnel. What the blast sent was a flash of heat that filled the surveillance room. The detonator next to the trapdoor, Balenger realized. Ronnie triggered it by remote control. Smoke blossomed.

Amanda and Vinnie rushed ahead of him. But Vinnie's direction made it clear that he didn't understand what caused the small blast.

"Vinnie, get away from-"

In the bedroom, Vinnie stopped and turned.

"The trapdoor!" Balenger shouted. "Get away from-"

Stunned, Vinnie glanced down at where he'd stopped.

The trapdoor.

The detonator.

The blast was small but deafening. It sent a flash up Vinnie's legs. His jeans burst into flames. Screaming, he fell to the floor, swatting at his pants.

Balenger grabbed the bedspread and flailed at Vinnie's legs, desperately smothering the fire. Vinnie's screams continued.

In rapid succession, detonators exploded throughout the penthouse. Balenger saw their flashes, saw flames in the surveillance room and the medical room.

"A fire extinguisher!" Amanda yelled. "The kitchen!" She ran through the surveillance room, dodging the fire.

Balenger grabbed a decorative pitcher from a bureau and hurried into the bathroom. He twisted a knob on the sink, but no water came out. The electricity's off! The pump isn't working! he remembered. He scooped water from the toilet bowl, ran into the medical room, and dumped the pitcher onto the flames. A shotgun blast tore another hole in the floor, but by then Balenger was racing back to the bathroom. He yanked off the toilet-tank lid and scooped water. This time, he didn't enter the medical room but stopped at its entrance, hurling the water onto the flames. The fire hissed and shrank. The toilet tank again. He scooped out all the water he could get and ran to the medical room. Now, when he threw the water, the flames went out.

No more water. How am I going to-

He heard the spray of a fire extinguisher, Amanda attacking the blaze in another room. But she wasn't in the dining room where flames rose also. Water. Need to find more water. He stared at the open elevator in the exercise room. Ignoring the risk of a shotgun blast, he raced to the elevator and scooped up the five urine bottles that Ronnie had tauntingly returned to them.

Wrong move, you son of a bitch, Balenger thought, tossing urine onto the flames. The ammonia stench made him gag. He dumped more urine. The fire sizzled. A third bottle. A fourth. Drenched by piss, the fire retreated. The fifth bottle put it out.

Another shotgun blast tore through the floor. Running, Balenger felt a chunk of wood sting his face. He found Amanda in the library, where she frantically worked the extinguisher, putting out a blaze. She hurried to the surveillance room, spewed a white cloud onto the flames there, and put them out, also. But an instant later, the cloud stopped, the extinguisher empty.

The floor erupted from another blast, but by then, Balenger tugged Amanda into the bedroom. They crouched next to Vinnie against the outside wall. Theoretically, it was the safest spot-above Danata's living room, the door of which remained barricaded. Smoke drifted around them. Vinnie's charred jeans were stuck to him, the flesh blackened, leaking fluid. Third-degree burns. Balenger had seen plenty of them in Iraq.

"Hurts," Vinnie said.

Balenger knew that Vinnie was going to hurt a lot worse when his nerves recovered from the shock they'd received. Soon, he would be in agony.

"Hurts." Despite the green of Balenger's night-vision goggles, Vinnie's face was ashen.

"I know," Balenger said. "Can you walk?"

"Only one way to find out." Wincing, Vinnie motioned for Balenger to pull him up.

But Vinnie's legs were swollen. His knees refused to bend. Weight on them made him gasp. Balenger feared he'd pass out.

"Okay, not a good idea." Balenger eased him back to the floor. "Amanda." He was surprised to see that she still held the empty fire extinguisher. "Go quietly to the surveillance room and throw the extinguisher as far as possible. Into the library, if you can. But wait until I'm at the door to the medical room.".

"What are you going to-"

"Help with the pain."

Balenger went to the right, toward the medical room. Its candles glowed dimly, surrounded by smoke. He nodded to Amanda, who hurled the fire extinguisher in the opposite direction toward the library. As soon as he heard it crash onto the floor, distracting Ronnie, Balenger shifted into the medical room and reached through the broken glass door of the cabinet. He grabbed a syringe and the vial of morphine, then darted back into the bedroom an instant before pellets exploded from the floor.

He knelt beside Vinnie. "I'm giving you only enough to dull the pain, not put you out."

Vinnie nodded, biting his lip. "Just hurry and do it."

Balenger exposed Vinnie's left wrist and gave him the injection.

Vinnie's face remained rigid with pain. Slowly, it relaxed. "Yes."