Cell

' That was Franklin,' said the desk clerk as he led the way around the uniformed man lying facedown on the floor.

He looks too old to be a bellhop, Tom had said, peering in through the window, and Clay thought he certainly did. He was a small man, with a lot of luxuriant white hair. Unfortunately for him, the head on which it was probably still growing (hair and nails were slow in getting the word, or so he had read somewhere) was cocked at a terrible crooked angle, like the head of a hanged man. 'He'd been with the Inn for thirty-five years, as I'm sure he told every guest he ever checked in. Most of them twice.'

That tight little accent grated on Clay's frayed nerves. He thought that if it had been a fart, it would have been the kind that comes out sounding like a party-horn blown by a kid with asthma.

'A man came out of the elevator,' the desk clerk said, once more using the pass-through to get behind the desk. Back there was apparently where he felt at home. The overhead light struck his face and Clay saw he was very pale. 'One of the crazy ones. Franklin had the bad luck to be standing right there in front of the doors—'

'I don't suppose it crossed your mind to at least take the damn picture off his ass,' Clay said. He bent down, picked up the Currier & Ives print, and put it on the couch. At the same time, he brushed the dead bellman's foot off the cushion where it had come to rest. It fell with a sound Clay knew very well. He had rendered it in a great many comic books as CLUMP.

'The man from the elevator only hit him with one punch,' the desk clerk said. 'It knocked poor Franklin all the way against the wall. I think it broke his neck. In any case, that was what dislodged the picture, Franklin striking the wall.'

In the desk clerk's mind, this seemed to justify everything.

'What about the man who hit him?' Tom asked. 'The crazy guy? Where'd he go?'

'Out,' the desk clerk said. 'That was when I felt locking the door to be by far the wisest course. After he went out.' He looked at them with a combination of fear and prurient, gossipy greed that Clay found singularly distasteful. 'What's happening out there? How bad has it gotten?'

'I think you must have a pretty good idea,' Clay said. 'Isn't that why you locked the door?'

'Yes, but—'

'What are they saying on TV?' Tom asked.

'Nothing. The cable's been out—' He glanced at his watch. 'For almost half an hour now.'

'What about the radio?'

The desk clerk gave Tom a prissy you-must-be-joking look. Clay was starting to think this guy could write a book—How to Be Disliked on Short Notice. 'Radio in this place? In any downtown hotel? You must be joking.'

From outside came a high-pitched wail of fear. The girl in the bloodstained white dress appeared at the door again and began pounding on it with the flat of her hand, looking over her shoulder as she did so. Clay started for her, fast.

'No, he locked it again, remember?' Tom shouted at him.

Clay hadn't. He turned to the desk clerk. 'Unlock it.'

'No,' the desk clerk said, and crossed both arms firmly over his narrow chest to show how firmly he meant to oppose this course of action. Outside, the girl in the white dress looked over her shoulder again and pounded harder. Her blood-streaked face was tight with terror.

Clay pulled the butcher knife out of his belt. He had almost forgotten it and was sort of astonished at how quickly, how naturally, it returned to mind. 'Open it, you sonofabitch,' he told the desk clerk, 'or I'll cut your throat.'

10

' No time!' Tom yelled, and grabbed one of the high-backed, bogus Queen Anne chairs that flanked the lobby sofa. He ran it at the double doors with the legs up.

The girl saw him coming and cringed away, raising both of her hands to protect her face. At the same instant the man who had been chasing her appeared in front of the door. He was an enormous construction-worker type with a slab of a gut pushing out the front of his yellow T-shirt and a greasy salt-and-pepper ponytail bouncing up and down on the back of it.

The chair-legs hit the panes of glass in the double doors, the two legs on the left shattering through ATLANTIC AVENUE INNand the two on the right through BOSTON'S FINEST ADDRESS.the ones on the right punched into the construction-worker type's meaty, yellow-clad left shoulder just as he grabbed the girl by the neck. The underside of the chair's seat fetched up against the solid seam where the two doors met and Tom McCourt went staggering backward, dazed.

The construction-worker guy was roaring out that speaking-in-tongues gibberish, and blood had begun to course down the freckled meat of his left biceps. The girl managed to pull free of him, but her feet tangled together and she went down in a heap, half on the sidewalk and half in the gutter, crying out in pain and fear.

Clay was standing framed in one of the shattered glass door-panels with no memory of crossing the room and only the vaguest one of raking the chair out of his way. 'Hey dickweed!' he shouted, and was marginally encouraged when the big man's flood of crazy-talk ceased for a moment and he froze in his tracks. 'Yeah, you!' Clay shouted. 'I'm talking to you!' And then, because it was the only thing he could think of: 'I fucked your mama, and she was one dry hump!'

The large maniac in the yellow shirt cried out something that sounded eerily like what the Power Suit Woman had cried out just before meeting her end—eerily like Rast! —and whirled back toward the building that had suddenly grown teeth and a voice and attacked him. Whatever he saw, it couldn't have been a grim, sweaty-faced man with a knife in his hand leaning out through a rectangular panel that had lately held glass, because Clay had to do no attacking at all. The man in the yellow shirt leaped onto the jutting blade of the butcher knife. The Swedish steel slid smoothly into the hanging, sunburned wattle beneath his chin and released a red waterfall. It doused Clay's hand, amazingly hot—almost hot as a freshly poured cup of coffee, it seemed—and he had to fight off an urge to pull away. Instead he pushed forward, at last feeling the knife encounter resistance. It hesitated, but there was no buckle in that baby. It ripped through gristle, then came out through the nape of the big man's neck. He fell forward—Clay couldn't hold him back with one arm, no way in hell, the guy had to go two-sixty, maybe even two-ninety—and for a moment leaned against the door like a drunk against a lamppost, brown eyes bulging, nicotine-stained tongue hanging from one corner of his mouth, neck spewing. Then his knees came unhinged and he went down. Clay held on to the handle of the knife and was amazed at how easily it came back out. Much easier than pulling it back through the leather and reinforced particleboard of the portfolio.

With the lunatic down he could see the girl again, one knee on the sidewalk and the other in the gutter, screaming through the curtain of hair hanging across her face.

'Honey,' he said. 'Honey, don't.' But she went on screaming.

11

Her name was alice maxwell. she could tell them that much. and she could tell them that she and her mother had come into Boston on the train—from Boxford, she said—to do some shopping, a thing they often did on Wednesday, which she called her 'short day' at the high school she attended. She said they'd gotten off the train at South Station and grabbed a cab. She said the cabdriver had been wearing a blue turban. She said the blue turban was the last thing she could remember until the bald desk clerk had finally unlocked the shattered double doors of the Atlantic Avenue Inn and let her in.

Clay thought she remembered more. He based this on the way she began to tremble when Tom McCourt asked her if either she or her mother had been carrying a cell phone. She claimed not to remember, but Clay was sure one or both of them had been. Everyone did these days, it seemed. He was just the exception that proved the rule. And there was Tom, who might owe his life to the cat that had knocked his off the counter.

They conversed with Alice (the conversation consisted for the most part of Clay asking questions while the girl sat mutely, looking down at her scraped knees and shaking her head from time to time) in the hotel lobby. Clay