Ace In The Hole

10:00 P.M.

– -Peachtree, tiled and echoic. They walked arm in arm. Sara had drunk two glasses of wine. It was the first alcohol she had had for over a year. She had never drunk much liquorexcept for the weeks after the tour.

Ricky was regaling her with the latest candidate jokes going the rounds. "How about this one: if Dukakis, Hartmann, and Brother Leo went boating together on Lake Lanier, and the boat's engine blew up and it sank, who'd be saved?"

"The nation," Sara said. "Last time I heard it, it was Reagan, Carter, and Anderson. But then, you're too young to remember."

"What goes around comes around, Rosie. But I was old enough to vote in '80, if barely."

"You probably think I'm a wicked old lady robbing the cradle." She frowned; where was that coming from? Steady, she told herself.

Ricky patted her hand. "I certainly hope so, Rosie." He laughed then, to show it was a joke. She felt the tension come into her, just the same.

A thin current of sound was running down the corridor, between the rocks of their laughter. "What's that song?" she asked.

He raised a brow at her. "Don't you know it?" She did, but she'd needed something to say. "It's `Mack the Knife.' Standby of every low-rent lounge singer in the northern hemisphere."

"The Muzak's broken in here, see, so they hired this white dude to walk around and whistle."

She laughed and squeezed his arm briefly. Damn. What am I doing? She looked around, almost as if seeking some external cause for her behavior.

Movement behind. Her tongue pushed out between suddenly dry lips; she made her face turn to the side, as if she was admiring the brash fashions draped on the headless silver-and-black-and-olive-green mannequins posing in a boutique window.

"Somebody's following us. No, don't look!"

"Give me some credit, Rosie. I'm a journalist, remember? I didn't sleep through your seminar."

He glanced to the side, then faced forward. "Just some kid in a leather jacket." A frown spoiled the smooth perfection of his forehead. "Looked like he had a hunchback. Poor son of a bitch. "

She looked back again. "Now, quit that, or you're going to turn into a pillar of salt. You were the one who wanted subtlety."

"I don't like the way he looks," she said. "He-feelswrong, somehow."

"The instincts of a seasoned ace reporter. Well-seasoned."

"is that a crack about my age?"

"The wine you drank." He patted her hand. "That's the spirit. Whistling past a graveyard, like. Walk on. Keep your head up. Never let them see you're afraid. It unleashes all those primitive Nordic predatory instincts."

She fought her neck muscles, which were trying to rotate her head toward the leather boy. "You think he could be one of Barnett's little helpers?"

"Been known to happen during this convention, Rosie. Wouldn't that be an irony, to get jumped on suspicion of being Hartmann fans?"

This time she did look back. He was sauntering along, hands in pockets, first the white shoe, then the black. Ricky was right, one shoulder definitely rode higher than the other.

There was something a little too elaborate about the way he wasn't paying attention to them.

At least he's small. But then, Ricky wasn't exactly Arnold Schwarzenegger…

Once around a curve, Ricky grabbed her hand and they took off running, Sara wobbling on her ingenue heels, Ricky's Guccis slapping the rubber runner. The passageway wound round and around. She kept looking back, saw no sign of pursuit.

They slowed, Sara puffing for breath, Ricky gracious enough to pretend to be winded. "One more turn and we're back in the Hyatt," Ricky said. "Another potentially ugly confrontation avoided. That's how we eighties types handle things."

They turned the bend and there he was. Leaning with his back and his cheek against cool tile, sizing them up. He started to whistle: "Mack the Knife."

Sara grabbed Ricky's wrist and hauled him back around out of sight. "I'm not sure that's a good idea, Rosie," he said. "We should just bluff our way past. "

"Don't you see?" The terror was upon her. It glowed in her eyes like white-hot wires. "How did he get in front of us?"

"Some kind of service passage. We're right near the hotel. If he causes trouble we can make a lot of noise and someone will come rescue us."

And then he came out of the wall at them, lunging like a shark.

Like a dancer Ricky swung Sara behind him. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"Party party," the boy said with a Hans and Franz accent, laughing, spraying spittle from loose lips. "Everybody get down tonight."

There was a buzzing in the air, oppressive as the humid night outside Peachtree Center's artificial chill. The boy swung a hand karate-fashion for the side of Ricky's neck.

Ricky wasn't a racquetball ace for nothing. Nothing wrong with his reflexes; he blocked with a spidery forearm.

The hand went through it. There was a savage shrilling moment like a buzz saw hitting a knot in a plank, and then Ricky's forearm and splayed hand just sort of toppled.

Ricky stood staring at the red hoop of blood springing out the suit-coated stump. Sara screamed.

Ricky pointed his arm, hosing his own blood into his assailant's eyes. The boy fell back, sputtering and swiping at his face. Ricky hurled himself at him, windmill arms whirling. "Rosie, run!"

Her legs would not move. Ricky was pummeling the boy with stump and inexpert fist. It looked like the worst of playground bullying; Ricky was- a head taller, with a good six inches' reach-

That sound came again. She knew she would hear it every time she closed her eyes for the rest of her life. She smelled something like burned hair.

Ricky's arm fell off at the shoulder. His blood vomited over the wall, white with a mosaic sprinkling of blue and green and yellow.

He turned a martvr's face to her. "Rosie," he said, and his gums were shocks of blood, "Please run, for god's sake run-" The hand passed playfully. His lower jaw was sheared away with the rest of his words. His tongue flopped at her unmoored, a ghastly parody of lust.

She turned and fled, the charnel-house sound pursuing. As she rounded the corner the heel of her left shoe snapped. She went to her knee with an impact like a gunshot. She skidded twenty feet, bounced off a wall. She tried to struggle up. Her leg would not carry her; she fell heavily against the tile.

"Oh, Ricky," she sobbed. "I'm sorry." Sorry for blowing the escape he had bought her with his life; sorry for the strange guilty surge of relief down underneath the terror that she would not have to face the question that another night in his room would bring between them.

She began to push herself along with her hands, knees up, scooting sideways on her rump. He came around the corner, looking twelve-feet tall. Blood splashed his leather and his skin, unnaturally bright in the fluorescent light. He was smiling around teeth like a collapsing fence.

"Der Mann sends his regards."

Single-mindedly she sculled away from him. There was nothing in the world but the motions of a losing race.

– And voices, down the corridor, welling up from where the passage from the Hyatt dipped under Center Avenue. A party of delegates in Jackson buttons appeared, black, middle-aged, well dressed, talking happily amongst themselves about their candidate's last-minute upsurge at day's end.

The killer in leather raised his head. A brief pigeon of a woman in a salmon dress with a bow beneath capacious breasts looked up, saw him with the blood upon him and his victim strewn into the corridor bend behind. She jammed fists beneath her eyes and screamed like hell.

The boy's eyes blazed at Sara. "Remember Jenny Towler," he snarled. And walked through the wall.