Leaping to my feet, I ran inside and picked up the bedside phone. My own phone was in my shirt pocket, but it’d take time to find the hotel’s number. I punched zero and it rang twice before the front desk answered.
“Sí, señor?” answered a tired, but cheerful voice.
“This is Alex Dockerty in 1620. I want to report someone being assaulted on the roof,” I said as rapidly as I could.
The man’s voice lost its jovial tinge. “Señor? Are you on the roof?”
“No, the woman being assaulted is. I just saw her.”
“I don’t understand. If you aren’t on the roof, how could you have seen someone being assaulted?”
“For Christ’s sake, she was hanging off the edge directly above my balcony.”
“You think she was trying to commit suicide?” the desk clerk asked.
I took a second to stare at the handpiece in shock. Was this fool messing with me or was he just stupid?
“No, damnit, someone was assaulting her. Send hotel security to the roof, I’m going up to see if I can help.”
“Señor, the roof is off limits to guests.”
I slammed the phone down and started toward the door. Realizing I had no weapon of any kind, I stopped and stared around the small room. There wasn’t a kitchen in this unit, so no knives. The desk lamp? No, too light. Damn it! There had to be…
I opened the closet door, grabbed the thick wood rod that held up my hanging clothes and yanked it down. The hangers and my clothes fell to the floor as I raked a hand down its seven feet of length. I hefted the weapon. It didn’t have the right feel to it, but it would be a damned sight better than my bare hands.
Throwing open the door, I burst into the hallway, turned left and ran the ten feet to the entrance to the stairwell. If there’s anything an hotelier knows it is to check out all of the fire exits as soon as your arrive and to make sure your room is near one.
Hitting the crash bar, I glanced at the sign that said, “Acceso al techo.”
My Spanish wasn’t great, but I had installed similar signs in our own stairwells when I was sixteen. Except ours were bi-lingual.
I ran up the stairs, two at a time, and hit the crash bar on the roof exit a few seconds later.
The hotel was one of the taller ones on the beach and the view from its roof was amazing, but I didn’t have time for sightseeing. The roof was flat. It looked like the old style liner with gravel and tar covering the waterproof layer. An assortment of air stacks poked through the liner to various heights, depending on whatever the local code was for hotels. A massive air handler took up a quarter of the roof to my right. To my left was the three-foot high safety wall that circled the roof. There was no sign of the woman or the man whose arm I’d seen dragging her out of sight.
I raised my improvised weapon and took a quick look to either side of the door. Nothing there.
Then I heard a muffled scream somewhere to my right. I let the door close behind me and moved in that direction. I was nearly to the air handler when I caught a glimpse of the blonde struggling with a man who was nearly my six-foot-two but had to outweigh me by at least fifty pounds. He was attempting to drag the bikini-clad girl–she looked to be no more than fifteen–toward the entrance to another stairwell on the far side of the roof.
“Let her go!” I hollered as I hurried toward them.
The man, probably a Mexican from his dark skin and hair, was in his late thirties. He looked back at me when I yelled but kept dragging the girl toward the door.
When I was ten feet from them, I slid to a stop in the gravel. Not an easy trick in flip-flops. The strap on the left one snapped, and my toes dug into the hot gravel. I gritted my teeth against the sudden pain in my toes and raised the wooden rod in both hands as though I was waiting for a pitch.
“I said let her go.”
The man glared at me over the girl’s head. The girl’s eyes were brown, unusual for a blonde unless she was a bottle blonde, and her skin’s dark color didn’t look like a suntan, but a natural color. It didn’t matter. There was no way I was letting some brute drag the girl off. I kicked off my remaining flip-flop and set my feet shoulder width apart in the hot gravel. I took another step closer and drew back the rod. It was not as heavy as I would have liked, but it was long enough that I thought I could handle this bastard.
Hefting the rod, I moved closer. The man was considerably taller than the blonde–what was she doing on the roof in a bikini?–and if I moved fast, I could pop him between the eyes with a lunge. That should make him let go of her and then I could beat him about the head and shoulders until…
I heard feet scraping through the gravel behind me.
Sidestepping, I brought my weapon around in an arc at head height, swinging it as hard as I could.
The eyes of the man behind me went wide, and the rod vibrated in my hands as it struck him just above his left ear. He’d tried to duck under my swing, but I’d allowed for that, and the light weight of the rod made it easy to alter its course an inch or
