Forever Odd Read online

  The blot of light on the wall brightened, grew larger. He was ascending fast. I heard footsteps.

  I had the shotgun. In a confined space like the stairwell, even I couldn’t fail to score a solid hit.

  Necessity had driven me to take the weapon, but I wasn’t keen to use it. The gun would be a last resort, not a first option.

  Besides, the moment I pulled the trigger, they would know that I had not left the hotel. Then the hunt would be on with even greater intensity.

  As quietly as possible, I backtracked. At the twelfth-floor landing, I kept ascending in the dark, intending to proceed to the thirteenth, but within three steps, I discovered a riser littered with rubble.

  Unsure what lay above, afraid of stumbling and making too much noise if treacherous mounds of trash lay underfoot, worried that the way might be blocked altogether, I retreated three steps to the twelfth floor.

  The light on the landing wall below swelled bright, the beam directly upon it. He must be only a flight and a half below; and he would see me when he made the turn.

  I dodged through the half-open door, returning to the twelfth floor.

  In the gray light, I saw that at the first two rooms, to my left and right, the doors were closed. I did not dare waste time trying them, in case they proved to be locked.

  The second room on my right stood open. I slipped out of the hallway and took refuge behind the door.

  I seemed to be in a suite. To both sides of this room, drowned daylight seeped through open connecting doors.

  Directly across from the entrance that I had just used, two sliding glass doors provided access to a balcony. Silvery skeins of rain raveled past the high-rise, and wind softly rattled the doors in their tracks.

  Out in the hallway, the climber—Andre or Robert—shoved the stairwell door all the way open as he came through. It banged against the stop.

  Standing with my back pressed to the wall, holding my breath, I heard him pass my room. A moment later, the stair door rebounded from the stop and fell shut.

  He would be heading for the main corridor and 1242, hoping to nail me there before I pressed the white button to free Danny—and instead blew both of us to bits.

  I intended to give him ten seconds, fifteen, long enough to be sure he had left the secondary corridor. Then I would make a break for the stairwell.

  Now that he was past me, I no longer needed to fear that anyone might be ascending. I could use the flashlight, plunge down two steps at a time, and be on the ground floor before he could return to the stairwell and hear me.

  Two seconds later, from the main corridor, Datura shrieked a curse that would have brought a blush to the whore of Babylon.

  She must have come up by the north stairs with her other best fella. Having arrived at Room 1242, she had discovered that Danny Jessup was neither strapped to the bomb nor splattered across the walls.

  FORTY-THREE

  IN THE CASINO, DURING DATURA’S VERBAL assault on Maryann Morris, she had proved that her silky voice could be twisted into a garrote as cruel as any strangler’s cord.

  Now, hiding behind the entry door, just inside the three-room suite, I listened to her curse me at alarming volume, sometimes using words that I had never realized could apply to a guy, and with each passing second, I felt less confident about my chances of escaping.

  Mad-cow crazy she might be, and syphilitic, for all I knew, but Datura was also more than prettily packaged lunacy, more and worse than a homicidal porn merchant whose narcissism exceeded that of Narcissus himself. She seemed to be an elemental force, of no less power than earth, water, wind, and fire.

  Into my mind sprang the name Kali, the Hindu goddess of death, dark side of the mother goddess, the only of their many gods who had conquered time. Four-armed, violent, insatiable, Kali devours all beings, and in temples where she’s worshipped, the usual idols present her with a necklace of human skulls, dancing on a corpse.

  This metaphoric mental image, the dark gaunt form of savage Kali embodied in the lush blond Datura, instantly felt so right, so true, that my sense of reality seemed to shift, to deepen. Every detail of the shadowy hotel room, of the wreckage around me, of the strafing storm beyond the balcony doors came into sharper focus, and I felt that I might momentarily see even deeper than the molecular structure of it all.

  Yet simultaneous with this new clarity, in everything within my view, I detected a transcendental mystery that I had never before perceived, a transforming revelation waiting to be accepted. A chill of a character not easily conveyed worked through me, an awe that felt more like reverence than like dread, although dread was a part of it.

  You might think that I’m struggling to describe the heightened perception that frequently accompanies mortal jeopardy. I’ve been in mortal jeopardy often enough to know what that feels like, too, but this metaphysical incident was not the same.

  Like all mystical experiences, I suppose, when the ineffable seems about to be made clear, the moment passes, no less ephemeral than a dream. But after passing, this one left me electrified, as if I had been zapped by a different kind of Taser, one designed to energize the mind and force it to confront a difficult truth.

  The nasty truth before me was that Datura, for all her lunacy and ignorance and laughable eccentricities, was a more formidable adversary than I had acknowledged. When it came to committing extreme violence, she had as many eager hands as Kali, and my two hands were reluctant.

  My plan had been either to bolt from the hotel and get help or, failing that, to elude this woman and her two enforcers long enough to convince them that I had in fact escaped and that they themselves ought to flee before I sent back the authorities. This was not a plan of action as much as it was a plan of avoidance.

  Listening to Datura rant, apparently somewhere near the junction of the corridors—much too near for comfort—I realized that while rage might be an impediment to clear thinking in most people, for her it sharpened her cunning and her senses. Likewise, hatred.

  Her talent for evil, especially for the vicious brand of it that once went by the name wickedness, was so great that she seemed to be possessed of uncanny gifts to rival my own. I might be persuaded that Datura could smell the blood of her enemy while it remained in his veins, and follow the scent to spill it.

  Upon her arrival, I had put on hold my plan to make a break for the north stairs. Making a move while she lingered in the vicinity seemed suicidal.

  Avoidance most likely would not be possible. Yet I wasn’t eager to hasten a confrontation.

  In the light of my new and more fearsome perception of this disturbed woman, I began to steel myself for what survival might require of me.

  I recalled another grim fact about the four-armed Hindu goddess that inspired me not to underestimate Datura. Kali entertained a thirst for horror so unquenchable that she had once decapitated herself in order to be able to drink her own blood as it spouted from her neck.

  Being a goddess only in her own mind, Datura would not survive decapitation. But when I recalled her vile stories of the cries of murdered children in a Savannah basement and the sacrifice of a seamstress in Port-au-Prince, which had seemed so delectable to her in the telling, I couldn’t pretend that she was any less bloodthirsty than Kali.

  And so I remained behind the door, in shadows that were often relieved by storm light, listening to her curse, then rant. Soon her voice softened to the degree that I could make out no words at all, but there was no mistaking the urgency of it, the insistent frenzied cadences of rage and hate and dark desire.

  If Andre and Robert spoke—or dared to try—I didn’t hear their deeper voices. Only hers. In the degree of their obedience and self-effacement, I read the souls of two true believers, as ready to drink the poisoned Kool-Aid as any cultists had ever been.

  When she fell silent, I suppose I should have been relieved, but instead I got that Brussels-sprouts feeling. Intensely.

  I had slumped wearily against the wall. I stood straighter.r />
  In my two-hand grip, the shotgun, which had come to seem like nothing more than a tool, suddenly felt alive, slumbering but alive and aware, as guns had always felt to me before. As in the past, I worried that I would not be in control of the weapon when the crisis arrived.

  Thank you, Mom.

  When Datura ceased talking, I expected to hear movement, perhaps doors opening and closing, indications that they had begun a search. Only quiet followed.

  The muffled hiss of rain spending itself against the balcony and the occasional grumble of thunder had been mere background noise. But as I listened intently for activity in the hallway, I resented the storm, as if it were Datura’s willing conspirator.

  I tried to imagine what I would do in her circumstances, but the only rational answer seemed to be Get out. With Danny freed and both of us missing, she should want to strip her bank accounts bare and head at high speed for the border.

  An ordinary psychopath bails when the going gets rough—but not Kali, eater of the dead.

  They must have parked a vehicle or two at the hotel. After snatching Danny, they had returned here on foot, by a circuitous route, to test my psychic magnetism, but they had no reason to walk out, rather than ride, when the fun was over.

  Maybe she had grown worried that if Danny and I reached the ground floor and got out of the Panamint, we would find their car, hot-wire it, and leave them stranded. If so, Andre or Robert—or Datura herself—might have gone down to disable the vehicle or to stand guard over it.

  Rain. The ceaseless susurration of rain.

  A faint mewl of wind, pleading at the balcony doors.

  No sound alerted me. Instead, the threat revealed itself by that musky, mushroomy, cold-meat smell.

  FORTY-FOUR

  I GRIMACED AT THAT UNIQUE SUBTLE SMELL, which was not conducive to a healthy appetite. Then he must have taken a step or shifted his weight, because I heard the feeble but crisp crunch of a small bit of debris crushed underfoot.

  Two-thirds open, the door afforded me a wedge of space in which to stand concealed between it and the wall. If my stalker pushed it wider, the door would rebound from me and reveal my presence.

  The construction of many other buildings would have allowed the space between the back edge of the open door and the jamb to provide a narrow view of someone standing on the threshold. This casing was deeper than standard code required and the stop molding so thick that it occluded the gap.

  Looking on the bright side, as I desperately needed to do at that point: If I could not see him, he could not see me.

  Having encountered this disquieting smell only at various times in the staircases and on the second visit to the casino, I had not associated it with Andre and Robert. Now I realized that I could not have detected it within the candlelit walls of Room 1203, where I had also enjoyed their company, because the cloying fragrance of Cleo-May had effectively masked it.

  Framed by the big sliding doors, to the north, an inverted tree of lightning caught fire, its trunk in the heavens and its branches shaking at the earth. A second tree overlaid the first, and a third overlaid the second: a brief-lived bright forest that burnt out even as it grew.

  He stood in the doorway so long that I began to suspect that he knew not only of my presence but also of my exact position, and that he was toying with me.

  Second by second, my nerves wound tighter than the rubber band on the propeller of a child’s balsa-wood airplane. I warned myself not to fly into rash action.

  He might, after all, just go away. The fates are not always in a snotty mood. Sometimes a hurricane roars toward a vulnerable coast, then veers away from land.

  No sooner had I been buoyed by that hopeful thought than he stepped off the threshold and ventured into the room, movement that I as much sensed as heard.

  A pistol-grip shotgun is not, by definition, one that you fire with the stock butted against your shoulder. You hold it forward, but to the side.

  Initially, the door still screened the searcher from me. When he moved farther into the space, I would need my cloak of invisibility, which I did not have with me because, unfortunately, I still wasn’t Harry Potter.

  When Chief Porter had used a pistol-grip shotgun to save me from the loss of a leg and from emasculation-by-crocodile, the weapon had appeared to have a mean kick. The chief had stood with his feet wide apart, the left somewhat in front of the right, knees slightly bent, to absorb the recoil, and he had been visibly jolted by it.

  Moving far enough into the room to reveal himself, Robert was not aware of me. By the time he stepped forward into my line of sight, I was well out of his.

  Even if he turned his head to look sideways, his peripheral vision might not pick me up behind him. Should instinct warn him, however, the shadows in which I stood weren’t deep enough to blind him to me if he turned around.

  The gloom didn’t reveal enough of his features to allow me to identify him by looks alone. He was big rather than massive, which ruled out Andre.

  In the thrashing garden of the storm, more lightning put out roots, and the jarring crash of thunder was the sound of an entire forest felled.

  He continued across the room, looking neither left nor right. I began to think that he had entered here not in search of me, but for some other reason.

  Judging by his behavior, even more somnambulant than usual, he had been drawn by the call of the storm. He stopped in front of the balcony doors.

  I dared to think that if this current escalation of the storm’s pyrotechnics continued for as much as a minute, distracting Robert and covering what sounds I made, I might be able to come out from hiding, slip quickly into the hall without alerting him, avoid this confrontation, and make that break for the stairs, after all.

  As I eased forward, intending to peer around the entry door to be sure that Datura and Andre were searching elsewhere and that the hall was safe, an effect of the next barrage of thunderbolts stunned and arrested me. Each flare bounced off Robert and cast his ghostly reflection in the glass of the balcony doors. His face shone as pale as a Kabuki mask, but his eyes were even whiter, bright white with the reflected lightning.

  I thought at once of the snaky man, fished from the flood tunnel, his eyes rolled far back in his head.

  Three more flares repeatedly revealed a reflection with white eyes, and I stood immobilized by a marrow-freezing chill, even as Robert turned toward me.

  FORTY-FIVE

  DELIBERATELY, NOT WITH THE QUICK REFLEXES of violent intent, Robert turned toward me.

  The inscrutable semaphore of the storm no longer brightened his face, but silhouetted him. The sky, one great galleon with a thousand black sails, signaled, signaled, as if to regain his attention, and thunder boomed.

  Averted from the lightning, his eyes no longer shone a moonish white. Nevertheless…though his features were deeply shadowed, his gaze still seemed vaguely phosphorescent, as milky as that of a man blinded by cataracts.

  Although I could not see him well enough to be certain, I felt that his eyes were turned back in his head, no color revealed. This might have been a shiver of imagination born of the chill that had seized me.

  Having assumed the stance that I recalled Chief Porter taking, I brought the shotgun to bear on him, aiming low because the kick might pull the muzzle higher.

  Regardless of the condition of Robert’s eyes, whether they were as white as hard-boiled eggs or the sullen bloodshot beryl-blue they had been earlier, I felt sure that he was not merely aware of my presence but that he could see me.

  Yet his demeanor and his slump-shouldered posture suggested that the sight of me failed to shift him into psycho-killer gear. If not confused, he appeared to be at least distracted, and weary.

  I began to think that he had not come in search of me, but had wandered in here either for another purpose or without any purpose. Having found me inadvertently, he stood as if in resentment of the need to resolve the confrontation.

  Curiouser and curiouser: He let out
a long sigh of exhaustion, with a thin plaintive edge that seemed to express a sense of being harassed.

  As far as I could recall, these were the first sounds that I had heard issue from his lips: a sigh, a plaint.

  His inexplicable malaise and my disinclination to use the shotgun in the absence of a clear threat to my life had brought us to a bizarre impasse that, just two minutes ago, I could never have imagined.

  A sudden sweat greased my brow. The situation was not tenable. Something had to give.

  His arms hung at his sides. Lambent storm light licked the shape of a pistol or a revolver in his right hand.

  When he first turned from the window, Robert could have whipped toward me, squeezing off shots, dropping and rolling as he fired to avoid the 12-gauge. I had no doubt that he was a practiced killer who knew the right moves. His chances of killing me would have been much better than my odds of wounding him.

  The gun hung like an anchor at the end of his arm as he took two steps toward me, not in a threatening manner, but almost as though he wished to beseech me for something. These were heavy draft-horse steps that comported with the title, cheval, that Datura had given him.

  I worried that Andre would come through the door next, with all the irresistible power of the locomotive of which he had initially reminded me.

  Robert might then shake off his indecision—or whatever mood caused his inaction. The two could cut me down in a cross fire.

  But I was not capable of blasting away at a man who didn’t at this moment seem inclined to shoot me.

  Although he’d drawn closer, I could see his dissolute face no more clearly than before. Still I had the unnerving impression that his eyes were frosted panes.

  From him came another sound, which at first I thought must be a mumbled question. But when it came again, it seemed more like a stifled cough.

  At last the hand with the gun came up from his side.

  My impression was that he raised the weapon not with lethal purpose, but unconsciously, almost as though he had forgotten that he held it. Given what I knew of him—his devotion to Datura, his taste for blood, his evident participation in the brutal murder of Dr. Jessup—I couldn’t wait for a clearer indication of his intent.