Cell

and Tom had moved Franklin's body behind the reception desk, dismissing the bald clerk's loud and bizarre protest that 'it will just be under my feet there.' The clerk, who had given his name simply as Mr. Ricardi, had since retired to his inner office. Clay had followed him just long enough to ascertain that Mr. Ricardi had been telling the truth about the TV being out of commish, then left him there. Sharon Riddell would have said Mr. Ricardi was brooding in his tent.

The man hadn't let Clay go without a parting shot, however. 'Now we're open to the world,' he said bitterly. 'I hope you think you've accomplished something.'

'Mr. Ricardi,' Clay said, as patiently as he could, 'I saw a plane crash-land on the other side of Boston Common not an hour ago. It sounds like more planes—big ones—are doing the same thing at Logan. Maybe they're even making suicide runs on the terminals. There are explosions all over downtown. I'd say that this afternoon all of Boston is open to the world.'

As if to underline this point, a very heavy thump had come from above them. Mr. Ricardi didn't look up. He only flapped a begone hand in Clay's direction. With no TV to look at, he sat in his desk chair and looked severely at the wall.

12

Clay and tom moved the two bogus queen anne chairs against the door, where their high backs did a pretty good job of filling the shattered frames that had once held glass. While Clay was sure that locking the hotel off from the street offered flimsy or outright false security, he thought that blocking the view from the street might be a good idea, and Tom had concurred. Once the chairs were in place, they lowered the sun-blind over the lobby's main window. That dimmed the room considerably and sent faint prison-bar shadows marching across the turkey-red rug.

With these things seen to, and Alice Maxwell's radically abridged tale told, Clay finally went to the telephone behind the desk. He glanced at his watch. It was 4:22 p.m., a perfectly logical time for it to be, except any ordinary sense of time seemed to have been canceled. It felt like hours since he'd seen the man biting the dog in the park. It also seemed like no time at all. But there was time, such as humans measured it, anyway, and in Kent Pond, Sharon would surely be back by now at the house he still thought of as home. He needed to talk to her. To make sure she was all right and tell her he was, too, but those weren't the important things. Making sure Johnny was all right, that was important, but there was something even more important than that. Vital, really.

He didn't have a cell phone, and neither did Sharon, he was almost positive of that. She might have picked one up since they'd separated in April, he supposed, but they still lived in the same town, he saw her almost every day, and he thought if she'd picked one up, he would have known. For one thing, she would have given him the number, right? Right. But—

But Johnny had one. Little Johnny-Gee, who wasn't so little anymore, twelve wasn't so little, and that was what he'd wanted for his last birthday. A red cell phone that played the theme music from his favorite TV program when it rang. Of course he was forbidden to turn it on or even take it out of his backpack when he was in school, but school hours were over now. Also, Clay and Sharon actually encouraged him to take it, partly because of the separation. There might be emergencies, or minor inconveniences such as a missed bus. What Clay had to hang on to was how Sharon had said she'd look into Johnny's room lately and more often than not see the cell lying forgotten on his desk or the windowsill beside his bed, off the charger and dead as dogshit.

Still, the thought of John's red cell phone ticked away in his mind like a bomb.

Clay touched the landline phone on the hotel desk, then withdrew his hand. Outside, something else exploded, but this one was distant. It was like hearing an artillery shell explode when you were well behind the lines.

Don't make that assumption, he thought. Don't even assume there are lines.

He looked across the lobby and saw Tom squatting beside Alice as she sat on the sofa. He was murmuring to her quietly, touching one of her loafers and looking up into her face. That was good. He was good. Clay was increasingly glad he'd run into Tom McCourt . . .or that Tom McCourt had run into him.

The landlines were probably all right. The question was whether probably was good enough. He had a wife who was still sort of his responsibility, and when it came to his son there was no sort-of at all. Even thinking of Johnny was dangerous. Every time his mind turned to the boy, Clay felt a panic-rat inside his mind, ready to burst free of the flimsy cage that held it and start gnawing anything it could get at with its sharp little teeth. If he could make sure Johnny and Sharon were okay, he could keep the rat in its cage and plan what to do next. But if he did something stupid, he wouldn't be able to help anyone. In fact, he would make things worse for the people here. He thought about this a little and then called the desk clerk's name.

When there was no answer from the inner office, he called again. When there was still no answer, he said, 'I know you hear me, Mr. Ricardi. If you make me come in there and get you, it'll annoy me. I might get annoyed enough to consider putting you out on the street.'

'You can't do that,' Mr. Ricardi said in a tone of surly instruction. 'You are a guest of the hotel.'

Clay thought of repeating what Tom had said to him while they were still outside—things have changed. Something made him keep silent instead.

'What,' Mr. Ricardi said at last. Sounding more surly than ever. From overhead came a louder thump, as if someone had dropped a heavy piece of furniture. A bureau, maybe. This time even the girl looked up. Clay thought he heard a muffled shout—or maybe a howl of pain—but if so, there was no follow-up. What was on the second floor? Not a restaurant, he remembered being told (by Mr. Ricardi himself, when Clay checked in) that the hotel didn't have a restaurant, but the Metropolitan Cafe was right next door. Meeting rooms, he thought. I'm pretty sure it's meeting rooms with Indian names.

'What?' Mr. Ricardi asked again. He sounded grouchier than ever.

'Did you try to call anyone when all this started happening?'

'Well of course!” Mr. Ricardi said. He came to the door between the inner office and the area behind the reception desk, with its pigeonholes, security monitors, and its bank of computers. There he looked at Clay indignantly. 'The fire alarms went off—I got them stopped, Doris said it was a wastebasket fire on the third floor—and I called the Fire Department to tell them not to bother. The line was busy! Busy, can you imagine!'

'You must have been very upset,' Tom said.

Mr. Ricardi looked mollified for the first time. 'I called the police when things outside started . . . you know . . .to go downhill.'

'Yes,' Clay said. To go downhill was one way of putting it, all right. 'Did you get an answer?'

'A man told me I'd have to clear the line and then hung up on me,' Mr. Ricardi said. The indignation was creeping back into his voice. 'When I called again—this was after the crazy man came out of the elevator and killed Franklin—a woman answered. She said . . .' Mr. Ricardi's voice had begun to quiver and Clay saw the first tears running down the narrow defiles that marked the sides of the man's nose. '. . . said . . .'

'What?' Tom asked, in that same tone of mild sympathy. 'What did she say, Mr. Ricardi?'

'She said if Franklin was dead and the man who killed him had run away, then I didn't have a problem. It was she who advised me to lock myself in. She also told me to call the hotel's elevators to lobby level and shut them off, which I did.'

Clay and Tom exchanged a look that carried a wordless thought: Good idea. Clay got a sudden vivid image of bugs trapped between a closed window and a screen, buzzing furiously but unable to get out. This picture had something to do with the thumps they'd heard coming from above them. He wondered briefly how long before the thumper or thumpers up there would find the stairs.

'Then she hung up on me. After that, I called my wife in Milton.'

'You got through to her,' Clay said, wanting to be clear on this.

'She was very frightened. She asked me to come home. I told her I had been advised to stay inside with