'And they won't expect us to be stupid.'
'Bingo.'
'Why don't we both hide in there?'
'Because that
'Both eggs in one basket.'
I said, 'You're getting a feel for this, compadre.'
In my backpack were three additional half-liter bottles of water. I kept one and passed the others to him.
Squinting in the dim light, he said, 'Evian.'
'If you'd like to think so.'
I gave both of the coconut-raisin power bars to him. 'You could last three or four days if you had to.'
'You'll be back before then.'
'If I can elude them for a few hours, they'll think the plan is to buy you time to get away at your pace. They'll start to sweat that you're bringing the cops, and they'll blow this place.'
He accepted from me several foil-wrapped packets. 'What are these?'
'Moist towelettes. If I don't come back, I'm dead. Wait two days to be sure it's safe. Then pry open the doors and get yourself out to the interstate.'
He entered the elevator, gingerly tested its stability. 'What about-how do I pee?'
'In the empty water bottles.'
'You think of everything.'
'Yeah, but then I won't reuse them. Be dead quiet, Danny Because if you're not quiet, you're dead.'
'You've saved my life, Odd.'
'Not yet.'
I gave him one of my two flashlights and advised him not to use it in the elevator. Light might leak out. He needed to save it for the stairwells in the event that he had to leave by himself.
As I pushed shut the doors, closing him in, Danny said, 'I've decided I don't wish I were you, after all.'
'I didn't know identity theft had ever crossed your mind.'
'I'm so sorry,' he whispered through the narrowing gap. 'I'm so damn sorry.'
'Friends forever,' I told him, which was a thing we said for a while when we were ten or eleven. 'Friends forever.'
FORTY-TWO
PAST ROOM 1242 WITH ITS UNEXPLODED BOMB, FROM the main corridor to the secondary, wearing the backpack, toting the shotgun, I schemed to survive. The desire to ensure that Datura rotted in prison had given me a stronger will to live than I'd had in six months.
I expected that they would split up and return to the twelfth floor by the north and south staircases, to cut me off before I could shepherd Danny out. If I could descend just two or three stories, to the tenth or ninth level, and let them pass by me, I might be able to slip back onto the stairs behind them and race all the way down, out, and away-to return in but an hour or two with the police.
When I had first walked into Room 1203 and had spoken to Datura as she'd stood at the window, she had known without having to ask that I must have gotten around the staircases by using an elevator shaft. No other route could have brought me to the twelfth floor.
Consequently, although they would know that I couldn't get Danny down by that route, they would at least listen at the shafts now and then for sounds of movement. I couldn't use that trick again.
Arriving at the entry to the south stairs, I found the door half open. I eased through, onto the landing.
Not a sound rose from lower flights. I crept down step to step- four, five-and paused to listen. The silence held.
The alien smell, musk-mushrooms-meat, eddied no thicker here than it had earlier, perhaps thinner, but no less off-putting.
The flesh on the nape of my neck did the crawly thing that it does so well. Some people say this is God's warning that the devil is near, but I've noticed I also experience it when someone serves me Brussels sprouts.
Whatever the precise source of the odor, it must have arisen from the toxic stew left over from the fire, which was why I'd never encountered it prior to the Panamint. It was a product of a singular event, but it wasn't otherworldly. Any scientist could have analyzed it, tracked down its origin, and provided me with a molecular recipe.
I had never encountered a supernatural entity that signaled its presence with this smell. People smell, not ghosts. Yet the nape of my neck continued to do its thing even in the absence of Brussels sprouts.
Impatiently counseling myself that nothing threatening crouched in the stairwell, I quickly went down another step in the dark, and another, loath to use my flashlight and thereby reveal my presence in case Datura or one of her horses was somewhere below me.
I reached the midfloor landing, descended two more steps-and saw a pale glow blossom on the wall at the eleventh level.
Someone coming up. He could be only a floor or two below me, because light didn't travel well around 180- degree turns.
I considered racing ahead in the hope that I could reach the eleventh floor and spring rabbit-quick out of the stairwell before the climber turned onto a new flight and saw me. But that door might be corroded shut and incapable of being opened. Or might shriek like a banshee on rusted hinges.
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
