FORTY-EIGHT
WITH THE STAIRS AND ELEVATOR SHAFT OFF-LIMITS, I had only those resources that the twelfth floor offered.
I thought of the kilo of gelignite, or whatever they called it these days. A quantity of explosives that could reduce a large house to matchsticks ought to be of some use to a young fellow as desperate as I was.
Although I'd received no training in the handling of explosives, I had the benefit of paranormal insight. Yes, my gift had gotten me into this mess; but if it didn't get me in deeper, it might get me out.
I also had that can-do American spirit, which should never be underestimated.
According to the history I've learned from movies, Alexander Graham Bell, fiddling around with some cans and wire, invented the telephone, with the help of his assistant Watson, who was also an associate of Sherlock Holmes, and achieved great success after enduring the scorn and naysaying of lesser men for ninety minutes.
Weathering the scorn and naysaying of a remarkably similar set of lesser men, Thomas Edison, another great American, invented the electric lightbulb, the phonograph, the first sound movie camera, and the alkaline battery, among a slew of other things, also in ninety minutes, and looked like Spencer Tracy.
When he was my age, Tom Edison looked like Mickey Rooney, had invented a number of clever devices, and already exhibited the self-confidence to ignore the negativism of the naysayers. Edison, Mickey Rooney, and I were all Americans, so there was reason to believe that by studying the components of the now dismantled bomb, I might tinker together a useful weapon.
Besides, I didn't see any other prospects.
After slinking along the main corridor and slipping into Room 1242, where Danny had been held captive, I switched on my flashlight and discovered that Datura had taken away the package of explosives. Maybe she didn't want it to fall into my hands or maybe she had a use for it, or perhaps she just wanted it for sentimental reasons.
I didn't see any healthy purpose in dwelling on what use she might have for a bomb, so I switched off my light and moved to the window. By the pallid lamp of the fading day, I examined Terri's phone, which Datura had hammered against the bathroom counter.
When I flipped the phone open, the screen brightened. I would have been heartened if it had presented a logo, a recognizable image, or data of some kind. Instead, there was only a meaningless blue-and-yellow mottle.
I keyed in seven digits, Chief Porter's mobile number, but they did not appear on the screen. I pressed send and listened. Nothing.
Had I lived a century earlier, I might have fiddled with scraps of this and that until, in the can-do spirit, I jury- rigged a nifty communications device, but things were more complicated these days. Even Edison could not have, on the spot, tinkered up a new microchip brain board.
Disappointed by Room 1242, I returned to the corridor. Much less daylight penetrated from the rooms with open doors than had been the case even half an hour earlier. The hallways would go dark at least an hour before dusk actually arrived.
Although plagued by the creepy feeling of being watched, though visibility was so poor that I couldn't dismiss these heebie-jeebies as groundless, I avoided using the flashlight while in the corridor. Andre and Datura had guns; the light would make of me an easy target.
Inside each room that I explored, once I closed the door behind me, I felt safe enough to resort to the flashlight. I had searched some of these spaces previously, when I'd been looking for a hidey-hole in which to stash Danny. I had not found in them what I wanted then; and I didn't find what I needed now.
Deep down, in that coziest corner of the heart, where a belief in miracles abides even in the darkest hours, I expected to stumble upon some long-dead hotel guest's suitcase in which would be packed a loaded pistol. Although a handgun would have been acceptable, I preferred to discover a freight elevator isolated from the bank of public lifts, or a roomy dumbwaiter leading to the kitchen on the ground floor.
Eventually I discovered a service closet about ten feet deep and fourteen wide. Cleaning supplies, bars of guest soap, and spare lightbulbs stocked the shelves. Vacuum sweepers, buckets, and mops were tumbled on the floor.
The sprinkler system that had failed elsewhere appeared to have overperformed here, or perhaps a water line had burst. Part of the ceiling had collapsed; and swags of Sheetrock, obviously once waterlogged, drooped into the room around the edges of the void.
I quickly inventoried the items on the shelves. Bleach, ammonia, and other common household products can be combined in ways that produce explosives, anesthetics, blistering agents, smoke bombs, and poison gases. Unfortunately, I didn't know any of those formulas.
Considering that I frequently find myself in a patch of trouble and that I'm not by nature a walking machine of death, I should be more diligent about educating myself in the arts of destruction and assassination. The Internet provides a wealth of such information for the earnest autodidact. And these days, serious universities offer courses if not entire programs in the philosophy of anarchy and its practical application.
When it comes to this kind of self-improvement, I admit to being a slacker. I'd rather perfect my pancake batter than commit to memory recipes for sixteen varieties of nerve gas. I'd rather read an Ozzie Boone novel than spend hours practicing one-thrust heart punctures with a dagger and a CPR dummy. I never claimed to be perfect.
A trapdoor caught my attention in that portion of the service-room ceiling that had not collapsed from water damage. When I yanked on a dangling rope handle, the heavy-duty spring closure creaked, groaned, but opened, and a segmented ladder unfolded from the back of the door.
When I climbed to the top, the flashlight revealed a four-to-five-foot-high crawlspace between the twelfth and thirteenth floors.
Here lay a maze of copper and PVC pipes, electrical conduits, duct work, and equipment related to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning.
I could explore that space or go back down the ladder and drink a bleach-and-ammonia cocktail.
Because I didn't have any slices of fresh lime, I climbed into the crawlspace, pulled up the ladder, and closed the trap behind me.
FORTY-NINE
LEGEND CLAIMS THAT ALL AFRICAN ELEPHANTS, AS THEY realize they are dying, proceed to the same burial ground, still undiscovered by man, deep in a primeval jungle, where lies a mountain of bones and ivory.
Between the twelfth and thirteenth floors of the Panamint Resort and Spa, I discovered a graveyard equivalent to the elephant burial ground-for rats. I didn't encounter one live specimen, but I found at least a hundred that had left this world for eternal cheese.
They had died mostly in clusters of three and four, although I found one pile of perhaps twenty. I suspected they had suffocated in the smoke that had filled this space on the night of the catastrophe. After five years, nothing remained of them but skulls, bones, a few scraps of fur, and an occasional fossilized tail.
Until this discovery, I would never have imagined that I had within me the sensitivity to find something melancholy about piles of rat carcasses. The abrupt termination of their busy scurrying lives, the collapse of all their whisker-twitching dreams of room-service leftovers, the premature end to their cozy mutual grooming sessions and warm nights of frantic copulation were sad considerations. This rat graveyard, no less than an elephant burial ground, spoke to the transitory nature of all things.
I mean, I didn't weep over their fate. I didn't even get a lump in my throat. Having most of my life been a fan of Mr. Mickey Mouse, however, I was understandably affected by this ratty apocalypse.
Smoke residue filmed most surfaces, though I saw little evidence of direct fire damage. Flames had leapfrogged stories, traveling by way of improperly constructed mechanical chases, and had spared this crawlspace as they had spared the twelfth floor.
At four and a half feet, this between-floor realm didn't force me to crawl. I wandered through it in a crouch, at first not certain what I hoped to find, but eventually arriving at the realization that vertical chases, which allowed
