Slow Burn (15 page)

I heard the key
slide out. I kept taking deep breaths and counted to sixty before turning
around and peering out through the magnified peephole. She stood in the hall
with her hands on her hips staring at the door. I put my back to the door and
waited. Three hundred this time. When I peeked again, she was gone.

Keeping as far
from the slime as possible, I crossed the room and switched on the table lamp.
In the harsh light, the slop was no longer black but a deep rust red, sprinkled
here and there with bits of what looked like oysters. I decided not to think
about the oysters, instead focusing on several small gray-and-white feathers,
whose airy arms fluttered in the artificial breeze.

I used my
knuckles to push the bedroom doors apart. The light was coming from under the
bathroom door. I walked over the threshold carefully, staying out of the
occasional .blood trail. The bed had been turned down far enough to expose the
pillows, one of which now sat in the middle of the flowered bedspread, its
pillowcase gone, bleeding goose feathers from a nasty-looking hole in its
striped middle.

I kept my eyes
on the floor and my hands in my pockets as I sidled along the length of the
room, my butt dragging across the face of the dresser. No body on either side
of the bed. Reaching the far side of the bed, I knelt down, took a deep breath,
lifted the bed skirt and peeked under. Nothing.

I unbuttoned
the cuff of my shirt, drew my hand back inside and used the cuff to try the
bathroom door. Locked. I leaned my weight against the door and discovered one
of the few drawbacks of five-star hotels. Nothing is cheap. I reached in my
pocket and pulled out the electronic key for my room. I knelt by the lock,
wiggled the thin piece of plastic into the crack between the door and the jamb,
covered my right hand with the cuff again and gave the door a hard wiggle. On
the second try, the plastic key began to bend and then moved forward a quarter inch.
With my left hand I held the card in the lock; with my right hand I tried to
pull the door open. Nothing doing.

Careful to keep
the cuff between my hand and the crystal doorknob, I gave it another series of
tremors, concentrating this time on pulling down on the knob. With a rush, the
card slipped all the way between the door and the jamb.

I was smiling
inwardly as I pushed myself to my feet and jerked the door open. I swallowed
the smile in a hurry, using my mouth to breathe instead. Lo and behold, there
was the missing pillowcase, presently holding not a pillow but what appeared
from the doorway to be the lion's share of Mason Reese's brains.

He sat on the
toilet fully dressed, his head thrown back and his mouth wide open as if
singing arias to the balcony. The bottom third of his face was starting to show
beneath the hem of the pillowcase as the weight of the glutinous material
dripping from the back of the sack gradually pulled it off his head.

He'd been shot
just beneath the nose. Most of his yellow upper teeth, some still connected to
bone, now rested haphazardly on and around his thickening tongue. I reached
over and touched him on the shoulder. He was just beginning to stiffen, and the
body waved like that of a drunk. I held my breath, not daring to move until the
corpse settled down and stopped rocking.

I left him as I
found him, sitting there agape, losing his bag under the bright lights. The
door relocked itself as I closed it slowly, then retraced my steps through both
rooms to the hall door.

I leaned
against the door again and took stock. I figured this was the point of no
return. Sooner rather than later, I was going to have to step out into the
corridor. I'd already made up my mind that if I was seen by anyone, I was going
to go back to my room and call my attorney and the police, in precisely that
order, and then sit down and wait to see who showed up first. I was betting on
Jed. These days you can get food delivered before the police show up.

I cracked open
the door and looked out toward the elevators. Nothing. I put my ear to the
crack and listened. Again nothing. One . . . two . . .

In one fluid
motion I yanked open the door, stepped out into the hall and shut the door
behind me. So far, so good. The smell of rusting iron swirled about my head and
then lost itself in the sterile air of the corridor. I turned and beat feet
down the hall.

I took three
steps before the elevator bonged. I thought about sprinting but decided against
it. I was still seventy feet from the stairway door, so I stopped, put my hands
on my hips and turned around. The cast came out first.

None of this thumb-and-fingers-sticking-out
crap. The doctor had encased the whole damn hand in a five-pound ball of
cement. The rest of Lance appeared next, followed by his buddy, Mr. Lincoln
Aimes. The sight of me standing in the hall drew them up short. Lance stuck out
his left arm, keeping Aimes in the elevator. . "Go down and call the cops,
Line," Lance said.

Aimes pushed
the red button on the walkie-talkie he held in his right hand and opened his
mouth to speak. Lance beat him to the punch. "No. Go downstairs,
man," he said, pawing at the device.

The doors began
to close. Aimes, looking confused, used his forearm to force them back open.
"What are you—" he started.

"Just do
it, man. Go down and get the cops."

Lance turned my
way. "I've got something to settle with Waterman here. Waterman here is
going to resist being taken into custody."

Line didn't
like the idea one bit. "Aw, now, Lance, man, remember what Mr. Conlan
said. We should just—"

Lance was a
poor listener. Using both hands, he pushed Aimes deeper into the elevator.
"Marty's not here, man. He took his old lady to a movie. You just call the
cops. You're out of it, okay?" I heard him say. "He didn't bust your
thumb," he added, reaching in and pushing a button.

Lincoln Aimes
was still protesting as the doors hissed shut.

The sleeve of
Lance's blue blazer had been split up the seam to allow for the cast, with only
a safety pin at the wrist keeping the thing from flapping in the breeze. He
jerked the pin loose and started shuffling down the hall in my direction with
the torn sleeve hanging straight down, feeling around the floor with his lead
foot like he expected a trapdoor or something. I held up a hand.

"This may
not be the time for this, kid." I said. "Oh, it's the time, all
right," he said. He held his left arm forward like a ram, allowing the
right one to dangle down by his right knee as he moved slowly forward.

One thing was
for sure. If he hit me with the cast, I was going to the graveyard, not the
hospital. The more swings he got, the better his chances became. No doubt about
it. This was going to have to be short and sweet.

I let him get
within about eight feet and then began to match him shuffle for shuffle; every
one he took forward, I took one back, until I sensed we'd found a rhythm, and
then, as he lifted his lead foot to plod forward, I closed the distance in a
hurry.

He brought the
cast up and over the top, not so much trying to punch me as to drive'me through
the floor. I was one step too quick and took his forearm high on the shoulder.
The force jammed my neck into my torso, sending an electric shock racing down
my spinal column and momentarily loosening my joints.

I could smell
the old coffee on his breath as I grabbed both of his ears and drove my
forehead upward, aiming at an imaginary spot about a foot behind his face. I
remember the sound of impacted flesh as bone met bone with a wet crack, and a
brief recognition that Lance had a head like a rock . . . then, only the giddy
feeling of flight.

I saw a green
dragon kite darting in a clear blue sky, one moment climbing hard, the next
angling dangerously toward the whitecaps. The dragon needed a longer tail. I
reached to jerk the string hard, to turn and run toward land, when, without
warning, the dragon hovered for a moment above the waves, looked me right in
the eye, then shimmied tail-first down into the blue water. The string had
broken.

I overheard one
of the uniforms telling a new arrival that they'd found us lying on the carpet
with our legs entwined, both of us out cold. I wasn't a bit surprised. I had a
knot on my forehead the size of a bread box and a brain-tumor headache.

I didn't know
what the hell had happened to Lance. He was gone when the smelling salts cauterized
my nasal passages and dragged me back to consciousness. All that re--mained
were two small bloodstains on the hall carpet. At his end, not mine, I was glad
to see.

It was
six-fifteen; I was sitting with my hands cuffed to a wide leather belt which-
was locked around my waist, so I could still read my watch. It was odd to be
sitting there, doing nothing, in a room two doors down the hall from Mason
Reese, while an army of cops and technicians scurried about the eighth-floor
corridor.

I'd given the
two SPD detectives my name, rank and serial number and then completely clammed
up. My attorney, Jed James, had arrived thirty minutes later and was now making
waves somewhere down the hall. For the Seattle law enforcement community, Jed
James was a nightmare come true. Jed's ten years as the ACLU's chief litigator
in New York had cultivated a confrontational manner seemingly designed to
appall the average, ever-polite Seattleite. No cause was too unpopular, no
infringement too slight. To my knowledge, if you counted appeals, his record
remained unscathed.

I heard his
voice rise from somewhere in the hall. I could only catch the words "brain
damage," but was comforted to know he was thinking of me.

The door opened
and Jed began to back in. He was still talking to someone I couldn't see.
"I can't promise anything, Detective," he was saying. "Let me
have a few words with my client and I'll get back to you." The other
person said something, but I couldn't make it out.

Jed closed the
door behind him and walked over and sat on the edge of the bed, pushing his
face in close to mine, speaking softly.

"You
really did tell them nothing."

"Correctomundo."

"And when
we talked before, you told me everything." He made it a statement but
meant it as a question, so I told him again.

"Well,
then," he said, "I know this is going to sound weird coming from me,
Leo, but, all things considered, my best advice is to tell them everything you
know."

My head
throbbed as I raised it to look in his eyes. He didn't look drunk or stoned, so
I said, "I'm found lying stone cold outside the door of a guy with his
brains blown out, and What’s supposed to be the most incisive legal mind in the
Pacific Northwest is advising me to spill my guts?"

He folded his
arms across his chest. "They don't make you for the murder, Leo. They keep
saying they do, but they don't mean it. They sure as hell are going to keep
pretending they do, though, unless you give them a hand. If we give them what
we have on the murder, they'll back off the rest of the shit. You know the game
as well as I do, my man."

"What rest
of the shit?"

"The
first-degree assault, the tampering with evidence, the breaking and entering,
that little shit, you know. The shit you're actually guilty of."

"The kid
attacked me."

"We'll
worry about that later. Whadda you say?" "I don't want to admit to
being in the room," I said. "You said you didn't touch
anything." "I didn't. But they're really not going to like me being
in there."

"They've
got a maid who says somebody was in eight-fourteen about five minutes before
she reported it to security. If you tell them that wasn't you, it changes the
whole direction of the investigation."

"They're
gonna go rat-shit," I insisted.

"You let
me worry about that. We'll trade them what you know for what you did."

I thought it
over. He was right. "I'd have to talk to my client."

Without a word,
he left the room, leaving the door open. SPD uniforms leaned against the wall
on either side of the door. Through the opening I saw a medical examiner's
assistant named Morris scurry by and realized that I'd never been sure whether
Morris was his first or his last name. I was still ruminating on this quirk of
nature when Jed reentered the room carrying a standard black desk phone, which
was, I suspected, the same one they'd taken out of here earlier.

He attached the
cord to the jack in the back of the phone, stretched the cord out and set the
thing in my lap. With his left hand he held the receiver to my ear.
"Number," he said.

'
'One-six-zero-zero."

He dialed. I
listened as Rowcliffe answered.

"Sir
Geoffrey Miles's suite," he said.

"Rowcliffe.
It's Leo Waterman."

"Good
evening, sir."

"I need to
talk to Sir Geoffrey."

"Sir
Geoffrey is dressing, sir, and, if I may say so, having a rather dreadful time
with his tie. This might not be an altogether propitious moment."

"Tell him
Mason Reese is dead," I said.