And he found a pay phone, off the lobby, out of sight from the desk. He turned and went back out. 'C'mon,' he said.
'What?'
'I got a phone.'
He took Grandpa through, the old man putting on a hobble as they walked into the lobby. They ignored the girl behind the desk, who ignored them back, and he left Grandpa with the phone. 'One minute exactly,' Carl said. 'You've got change?'
Grandpa fumbled in his pocket, took out some quarters and dimes. 'Go,' he said.
Carl took the elevator to the seventh floor. Another piece of luck: not as many rooms as he'd feared. The floor was circular, curving away from him, nobody in sight. He waited, looking at his watch. One minute. The phone should be ringing…
Then he heard it. He followed the sound, four rooms down. Room 745. He paused outside the room, making sure. When he was sure, he walked the rest of the way around the tower, and found nothing but silence. He came back around to 745, and the phone was still ringing. Good.
He pushed the elevator button, the door popped open, and he rode back to the lobby, walked around to the pay phone. He nodded at Grandpa, who hung up. 'Yes?'
'Yes,' Carl said. He took a ballpoint out of his pocket and wrote 745 on the palm of his hand.
Before they left, he tried to imagine exactly where Kalin's room was. It had been to the right out of the elevator, not the last room… hard to figure in a round hotel.
'Wait one more minute,' he said to Grandpa. 'I want to look at the stairs.'
'Hurry,' Grandpa muttered.
Carl had to know where the stairs went, where they came out-and after scouting them, stopped at the third floor, 345, and walked off the distance between the room and the elevator. Back in the lobby, he held up a finger to Grandpa, then he walked it off, so he knew about where Kalin's room would be overhead. He marked the position in his mind, went outside, and counted up the building. Third room from the center line, he thought. Maybe fourth. Not second…
But maybe he was wasting his time. The hotel seemed nearly empty, and maybe any light on the seventh floor meant that Kalin was home…
Time to kill. They drove up the hill, spotted the Domino's just to make sure it was still there, and open, continued to the Miller Hill Mall, spent a half hour walking around the bookstore. Grandpa took a leak, they each bought a danish, and Carl found an outdoor-sports section and browsed the books on guns. Grandpa disappeared into politics.
The hours dragged. At nine o'clock, they couldn't stand it any more. Grandpa had argued that they should wait until after ten, but when Carl looked up and counted, there were lights on the seventh floor, three past the center line. 'She's there,' Carl said.
'You're sure?'
'Just about.'
'Then…'
'Rock and fuckin' roll,' Carl said.
They went out to the Domino's, waited for the pie. 'Get a stinky one,' Grandpa said. 'Psychologically, you want her to smell it-it means you're real.'
Looking out the window of the pizza joint, Carl wished he had a different car. Basically, a cooler car. An SVT Mustang Cobra would be about right; black, so it could run at night without being seen. With tinted windows, so he couldn't be seen. A secret box under the floorboards, right under his knees, where he could pop the gun out if a cop stopped him at a crucial point. Bap. Cop goes down, and he's on his way… And you wouldn't want Grandpa there; can't be cool with the old man hunched in the corner, peering out over the windowsill.
He got the pizza, olives, onions, and pepperoni, and they each ate a slice on the way back to the hotel, found a parking spot two blocks away, across a welter of streets, not far from a corner. 'If it goes smooth, then I just walk back. If there's a problem, it'll be easier to lose them on foot,' Carl explained. 'You've got your radio, I've got mine, I can hide, you can come and get me.'
'I've got the map…'
Carl walked around to the back of the car: right. Like he's got this black Mustang, 4.6 liter V8 punching out 390 horsepower, and he's cool, but this cop has got to pull him over, see, and the thing is, something's going on and he can't be late so he pops the cop. But don't the cops call in your license tags when they stop you? It seems like they did on Cops…
He was caught up in the fantasy, but came out of it when he had to struggle with the hatch lid. He had a piece-of-shit Taurus with about as much cool as a fuckin' baby buggy. He got the gun out of a storage bin, checked the magazine, reseated it, went back to the passenger side. Grandpa handed him a pair of light gloves, and said, 'I wiped the box, it should be clean.'
'Back in a minute,' Carl said.
'Wait, wait.' Grandpa fished under the seat, took out a single blaze-orange glove, the kind that hunters wore during deer season. 'You must remember-whatever else, you must drop this in the room, you must drop it. This is part of the confusion, part of the plan. Drop the glove.'
New girl behind the desk. She was reading something, and when Carl sensed that she was about to look up, he looked away from her. He pushed the elevator button, but then walked up the seven floors, carrying the pizza, to make sure the stairs were clear.
On seven, he poked his head out into the corridor. Empty. He took his old pizza delivery hat out of his pocket, walked down the corridor, the pizza balanced on top of the gun, which he held horizontally. Knocked on the door. 'Pizza.'
Nothing. Shit, the lights were on. He knocked again. 'Pizza.'
Then a thump, and his heart sped up just a step. Somebody coming. An eye at the eyehole, blue. He stepped back a bit, to let the woman get a look at him, the flat box and the hat.
The door opened. No woman. A guy, a big guy, a great big fuckin' guy with short hair, barefoot, slacks, and a T-shirt, and then, an instant later, behind him, the woman, saying, 'I didn't order a pizza…'
And the guy saw the gun, or at least the barrel of it. His eyes widened, and Carl-what the heck-shot him in the heart. The guy looked surprised, and then went down like a ton of bricks and the woman screamed and ran back into another room.
The Imperfect Weapon thought with a tiny splinter of his mind, Might have known there was another room, and went after her-strode after her, tall, movie-killer-like-it was all over but the shooting, bitch. He heard a latching sound-sounded like a gun?-and he did a quick peek at the doorway and saw her kneeling behind the bed, fumbling with something, and he brought the gun up.
And she started to turn and he saw the gun in her hand and thought Whoa, and the gun seemed to explode in her hand and the doorway next to his head splintered and Carl got off a shot and the woman fired again, ten feet away, hit the door, and then another shot punched through the drywall next to his head and Carl poked the gun around the door and fired twice, quickly, and heard what sounded like a piece of china exploding. He remembered the pink lamp on the nightstand where she got the gun, thought he must have hit it; another shot hit the door and Carl said, 'Fuck it,' and ran.
And as he ran, he dropped the orange glove Grandpa had given him. He'd forgotten about it until that minute, had held it under the pizza box, but now he'd changed his grip on the box and he saw the glove fall and thought, 'Yes,' and hurtling the body in front of the door, ran down the corridor, into the stairwell and down the stairs.
He was two flights down when he heard somebody, a man, shout, 'Hey, hey…' but he kept going, averting his face from the front desk as he hurried by, and was outside before he realized he still had the pizza. He headed for the car-walking fast, trying not to catch anybody's eye, two minutes, no more-and a hundred yards out, realized he was being chased: glancing back, saw a guy in a sport coat coming fast, and the guy was running with one hand held out to his side, like there was something in it. Like a gun.
Carl ran.
Still had the pizza, though.
