First Class Killing

Chapter 22

I WAS OUT OF THE GOOD REVEREND’S HOTEL room in half an hour, which was not soon enough for him. He had readily agreed to vouch for me with the powers that be and insisted on making the required contact right in front of me so I would have no reason to doubt him. I insisted he do it with his pants on.

I tried to pry more information out of him, but he was a basket case. He had only the Web site we already knew about. His ID and password were temporary since he was new. My guess was, it had expired after he’d booked. Since this was his first time, that was all he had to offer. Judging by his horrified reaction, it would be his last.

Feeling good about the successful operation, I called Harvey on my way back to the crew hotel. He managed to act as excited as Harvey can, only once referring to the dangerous circumstances. He never mentioned our disagreement, but something had shifted in our relationship. I could feel it. He knew he could no longer trust me. I had meant what I said when I told him I wouldn’t go in unless we were both comfortable. In the end, I had done what I always did-exactly what I wanted. It had worked, but at what cost? I hadn’t meant for it to happen, which only proved something else. When it came down to it, maybe I couldn’t trust myself.

Yawning and creaking from the long, tense day, I unlocked the door to my own hotel room, pushed through, and dropped my key on the dresser. I wasn’t listening for the door to close behind me. I wasn’t thinking about it at all until it didn’t close. When I turned, it was already too late. A big man in a yellow sport coat had followed me in. With one large hand on the door and one foot already in, there was no way he could be pushed back out, but I tried anyway, throwing all my weight against the formidable metal and wood door. It was no contest.

He reached his other oaken arm up and pushed back so hard the door slammed into my head, and I was on the floor. When I looked up, he was inside my room. With a calm manner that I found chilling, he closed and locked the door. The snap of the dead bolt as it slipped into place was like a rib cracking in my chest.

Oh, God.

Phone. They were usually…it was across the room on the far nightstand. I crabwalked backward to the bed. I was on it, across it, and down the other side in seconds. The base of the phone went flying when I grabbed the receiver. I crouched low and peeked at him across the top of the bed. He lingered at the door with his back turned.

Where the hell was theO? I couldn’t think. There was a sea of information plastered across the front of the phone. Housekeeping…messages…bell stand…theO. It was there. I punched it, punched it, punched it. The line began to ring. It kept ringing, the sound teasing me into thinking someone would pick up. Answer.Someone, please answer.

He was moving toward me now, buttoning his jacket on the way, a jacket that was the color of lemon chiffon pie. I looked around for anything that wasn’t nailed down. Lightweight floor lamp. Heavy chair. Clock radio. Fight or run? Notepad. Magazine. Pencil. Run or fight? Pillows. Runwhere?

He cleared the corner of the bed. Since his hands were at my eye level, that’s where I focused. They were big. His nails were smooth and square. His only adornment was a ring large enough to fit around a bratwurst. Gold with a red stone, gaudy like the rest of his attire. I was halfway to my feet with the receiver pressed to my ear. I reached down around my thigh, found the cord that led from the base of the phone to the wall, and started to wrap it around my hand.

“Hang up the phone.” His voice was heavy with a choppy accent that sounded eastern European.

“What do you want?”

“I want you to hang up the phone.”

“Um…” I needed a few more twists of the cord. It was slow work because of the way my hand was flopping and jerking. “Who are you?”

“If you do not hang up now, I will be forced to take the telephone away from you.”

I tried to look as if I were thinking it over. Hard to do when I was actually checking for ways to get around him. I could slip over the bed. If I waited for exactly the right moment, I could beat him to the door. I was quicker, more agile. Probably.

“Do not try to run from me. You will not make it, and it will go worse for you.”

Whatwould go worse for me? “All right, I won’t.”

I jerked the phone cord from the wall and used it as a whip to sling the base at his head. He batted it away. I dove across the bed and landed hard enough to crush the air from my lungs. His hand closed around my ankle. I kicked at him with my other foot. Hit nothing. Kept my legs churning and my arms swimming toward the side of the bed. Tried to scream but couldn’t draw enough breath to get anything out.

He yanked my leg, but I held tight to the far side of the mattress. He yanked again, this time snapping my hipbone in its socket. The sharp pain of bone jammed on bone pissed me off. I kicked harder. When he yanked for the last time, I shot backward and over the side and back to the floor. The heavy bedspread with sheets, still bunched in my fists, came with me. I pulled it over my head. He tried to grab me, and I scrambled under the bed. He found my wrist and used it to fish me out. With my free hand, I reached up and felt the top of the bedside table for anything I could grab to fend him off, drive him away, stop or at least delay whatever it was he was about to do to me.

Then I was on my feet, back flat against the wall, with his face close to mine and my right wrist caught in his left paw. It felt odd to be suddenly still. Breathing was hard, because I was so scared and choked with panic and because his other hand was clamped around my throat.

His respirations, on the other hand, were quite normal, his shoulders relaxed, and both grips steady. The only physical response my frantic fleeing had caused in him was a slightly ruddier complexion and a glistening of the deep gouges that lined his forehead.

“Please, I asked you not to run. You said you wouldn’t.” His voice held more than a little disappointment.

“Sorry.” My voice was a dry croak. “It’s in my nature.”

He stared down at me for a few seconds, and I thought I saw a hint of a smile ghost across his chiseled lips.

“I am here to deliver a message. It stops now. Do you understand?”

“Okay. What stops now? I don’t-”

“Stay away from Arthur Margolies,” he said. “You will not call. You will not send e-mails. You will not see him. If that video ever sees the light of day, I will find you, and I will kill you. If you contact the police, I will kill you. Do you understand?”

“I don’t…I didn’t-” I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I couldn’t talk. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t listening.

In one seamless motion, he gripped my throat, lifted me nearly off my feet, and slammed me so hard my head bounced off the wall. The pictures rattled. My hands flew up to claw at his.

“Don’t try to fight it.” His voice had a soothing, almost-comforting quality. “It makes it worse.”

I couldn’tnot fight. It wasn’t a decision my brain made. Tears streamed from my eyes like blood from a fresh wound. I felt them on his hands as I tried to pry his fingers loose. My mouth stretched open. My stomach wanted to squeeze up the back of my throat. I gagged against the feeling of his hand on my windpipe. My chest heaved, trying to pull in oxygen. Every time I thought I would pass out, he’d ease up just enough to let air in so I wouldn’t.

“You get one chance, and this is it. Do you understand? Stop what you are doing. Destroy the videos.”

I tried to dig my fingernails in, but he only squeezed harder. I felt the tips of his thumb and his fingers almost meeting at the nape of my neck. I felt his palm, dry as sandpaper, against the concavity of my throat. He eased off again.

“This is the end of the message.”

The pressure resumed, and I felt myself drifting. I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing, and everything turned black.

I woke up in the dark, the side of my face mashed against a pillow. I rolled onto my back, reached for my throat, and stared up at the ceiling. For the longest time, the only messages that got through to my congealed brain were those telling me how many parts of my body were in pain. My hip and my side just below my armpit. My wrists and my ankle and the back of my head. I reached back and touched it, felt the scar from another time, another mishap. Everything in my throat felt improperly arranged for swallowing, so that hurt, too.

Eventually, other stuff started to seep in. I was on a bed. I pushed up against the headboard until I was sitting. I squeezed my eyes shut and held still, both hands cradling my head. In time and with great effort, I remembered that I was in a hotel room and had been attacked. What I couldn’t remember was climbing onto the bed. I didn’t like having whole swaths of memory deleted from my consciousness.

I moved to the side and dropped my legs over. The floor seemed like a long way away, so I sat with my legs dangling, thinking about standing up. A glass of water sat on the nightstand. Everything else that had been on either nightstand was scattered on the floor, knocked there during the fracas. But there sat a glass of water, and why was my bed made? I vividly remembered dragging the linens onto the floor.

I tried to stand, but the room slanted and slid across the surface of the earth, so I went down on my hands and knees and crawled into the bathroom. After a short rest leaning against the bathtub, I stood up and checked the mirror. Lint from the carpet had collected on my face in streams made damp by my tears. My eyes were bloodshot. My pale face made the pools of bright red around my throat burn that much hotter. I leaned in to take a closer look at the violated area. The splotches were red fingerprints in the configuration of his hand on my throat. Remembering the pressure and what it had done to my body almost made me vomit.

The water when I turned it on was cold. I leaned over the sink and started with a few slow splashes to the face that would have made me shiver if I wasn’t already racked with violent spasms. As the water turned warm, I unwrapped a bar of soap and used it to wash, scrubbing every inch of my face with the pads of my fingers, trying to massage the pain out. I wobbled to the shower and started it running. The double bolt on the door did not seem formidable enough, so I pulled the dresser across the carpet to block myself in. It was so heavy it took me almost twenty minutes. By then, the whole room was humid from the shower. I went to the windows and checked those locks, then back to the bathroom, where I peeled off the little black dress, the same one I’d worn to visit the reverend, and disappeared into the steam. A long time later, I was on the floor of the tub, legs pulled up and gathered in by arms that couldn’t hold them tight enough, rocking back and forth and trying to stop shaking.