by Kim Oh
“Lynndie?” I saw a couple of her bags, way down at the end of a long hallway, but not here. “Where are you?”
I got an answer, but not the one I was hoping for. From the corner of my eye, I saw someone step forward, from beside the door I’d just come through. Somebody a lot bigger than Lynndie, and with something big and heavy raised in his hand. The butt of a large-caliber gun slammed into the side of my head, and I fell sprawling across the hallway carpet.
Between that blow and the next one, with the guy bending over me and bringing the gun down hard again, was when I thought about what Elton had told me at the hospital, and I wished that I had brought the .357 along. Because now there wasn’t anything I could do except lie there and get hit, and fall down what seemed like a big black spiraling well. With nothing in it, not even me.
FOUR
I really wish people wouldn’t hit me in the head – I feel kind of fragile about that.
And it’s not because I’m a girl, though I do have to say that it seems a little unchivalrous for some macho thug to take a poke at somebody small as me. What does this guy do during his off hours, wrestle Chihuhuas, two falls out of three?
No, I’m pretty sure it’s really because of that fall I took on my motorcycle, when I was first getting started on this particular lethal career path. I didn’t have that checked out when it happened, since I didn’t have any medical insurance, having just been fired from that accountant job I used to have. Already seems like a long time ago. And since then, I never had a CAT scan, or whatever it is they use to look inside people’s heads, even when I had the money to pay for it – probably because I’m afraid of what they might find. What if there’s something really wrong in there? Then what?
So just like you, I try not to think about stuff like that.
Problem is, whenever I do wind up taking another shot to the head – which I try to avoid, but people keep sneaking up on me, the bastards – things get a little weird for me. Enough so, that I can’t help but notice. I’ve told you before about the creepy feeling I get sometimes, when the world outside whatever window I’m looking through is all kind of flat and two-dimensional, as though everything I’m seeing is just painted on layers of transparent plastic. Which indicates to me that there probably is something knocked loose inside my head, and I’d just as soon not take any more hard shots to the skull, thank you very much.
But it didn’t happen this time, though. My head was pounding, the worst it ever had, and the room was swirling dizzily around me as I rolled over onto my hands and knees. I panted open-mouthed while I waited for my vision to focus, at least enough to stand upright.
Finally I managed it, though I had to lean my shoulder against the entryway to keep from falling again. The floor rocked beneath me like I was on the deck of a boat. Sliding my hands along the wall, I made my unsteady way toward the brightest light I could see.
I didn’t even know where I was. There was a hole in my memory. The last thing I could recall was being in some other hotel room and telling my brother Donnie that I was going to go talk to somebody else, and then riding up in the elevator, all pissed off about something – but just what it’d been, I didn’t know right now.
Stumbling, I made my way to a big picture window next to the door that opened onto one of the room’s patios. The curtains had been drawn back, letting in a blinding flood of daylight. I placed my hands flat against the sun-warmed glass, squinting to look outside. The room was way up in the air – I could tell that much. It was a long way down.
And there were people down there – lots of them. In a big blue pool, glistening and shining like an L.A. dream. And they were young, no older than me, and all having a good time – I could hear the shouting and laughter all the way up here. Sexy fun. Drinking and grinding against each other, skin against skin, all in a jumble with hormones raging. But I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be doing up here in this huge, plush hotel suite – something to do with killing people? Because that was what I could remember doing before, in some other world. I closed my eyes and laid the side of my face against the window. But I felt something wet. And sticky, between my skin and the glass. I pulled my head away and saw strands of my hair mired in the shiny red stain, blotting out the view below. My hand went up beside my ear, and I felt something else warm and wet and tangled down along my neck. When I looked at my hand, I saw that it was covered in blood –
Everything came rushing back, all the missing pieces.
I heard myself telling Donnie, You stay right here while I sort things out, then I saw myself in the elevator, swiping the key card so I could come up here to this suite on the hotel’s top floor. Then using the same card so I could storm into Lynndie’s suite here –
Lynndie, I thought suddenly. Crap. That was my job. I was supposed to be making sure nothing bad happened to her.
And if something bad had happened to me – such as getting clopped in the head soon as I’d walked in the door, hard enough to have lost consciousness – then chances were good that there wasn’t a tea party going on in here.
I ran to the back of the suite, away from the big bright picture windows. The place had three bedrooms – in the second of them, I found what I was hoping I wouldn’t find. Lynndie’s luggage was there, but she wasn’t. From the looks of it, she hadn’t left willingly. The folding rack, with one of her suitcases opened on top of it, had been knocked over hard enough to put a spider-web crack in the mirror that covered the sliding closet door. Even more bad luck – the lamp on the little table beside the bed lay on its side, the shade askew and the lightbulb reduced to glittering bits on the carpet below. Something had been thrown on the bed – probably Lynndie – with enough force to leave a rumpled indentation in the covers.
My foot kicked against something on the floor when I stepped farther into the room. I picked it up and found myself holding a partial roll of duct tape, the loose end dangling ragged silvery threads, as though somebody in a hurry had torn off strips with his teeth. The tape must’ve gone over Lynndie’s mouth to keep her quiet, then around her wrists, pulled behind her, then her ankles. That was easy enough to figure out. The whole operation wouldn’t have taken more than two or three guys, one of them the lookout at the door who’d swung the butt of his gun into my head when I’d shown up. Maybe then Lynndie had been dumped into one of the hotel’s laundry carts, so she could be wheeled into the service elevator at the end of the corridor and taken down to the loading dock at the back of the building without anyone seeing.
Speaking of which – the last thing I needed was for somebody to find me here in Lynndie’s hotel suite. Especially with the side of my head all bloodied, as though I’d been part of whatever had gone down. VIP guests like her got all kind of constant attention from the hotel staff – for all I knew, there was somebody heading up here right now, to see if the fridge under the wet bar needed to be restocked already with Cristal champagne. They knew she’d come to party.
I tossed the duct tape under the bed, scooted into the adjoining bathroom and turned the shower on full-blast. Standing outside it, I stuck my head under the needle-spray until the water swirling around the drain faded to pink. With the water off again, I grabbed a thick white towel from the rack and pressed it hard against the side of my head. Plenty of red when I pulled it away – I grabbed another one and did the same, with better results this time. I’d be able to make it back to my suite without anybody freaking and calling the paramedics if they caught sight of me.
Opening the suite door a crack, I peered outside to see if the coast was clear. No one – I slipped out into the corridor, hung the PRIVACY PLEASE – DO NOT DISTURB card on the door knob, then hurried to the elevator.
“Did you go swimming?” That was what my brother Donnie said, soon as I got back into our suite. “Or something?”
“What?” I stood there with the card key in my hand. “What’re you talking about?”
“You’re hair’s all wet.” Sitting in his wheelchair, he
peered more closely at me. Trying to figure out what was going on. “And –”
“Nothing to worry about.” I slipped the card key into the front pocket of my jeans. “What the hell’s all this stuff?”
“I thought maybe you went downstairs and maybe somebody pushed you into the pool.” He gave a frown. “But that doesn’t make sense, because your clothes are still dry –”
“Don’t try to change the subject. I asked you a question – where’d this stuff come from?”
From the corner of my eye, I had spotted it on the suite’s patio, out past the open sliding glass door. Now I stepped out there to get a closer look at it. Definitely not anything we’d packed to bring with us. From what I could see, it was an assortment of high-tech – and expensive – surveillance gear. A pair of chrome tripods, one with some long-barreled Bushnell binoculars mounted on it, the other with a video camera, the kind that’s about the size of a couple bars of soap, but can zoom in on a gnat’s ass. A black cable ran from the camera to some kind of digital recording device, its front lit up with scrolling numbers. The camera lens, like the binoculars, was aimed down at the raucous poolside action below.
Coming back inside, I nearly tripped over the electrical wires trailing into the suite and plugged into the nearest wall socket. My brother Donnie had some real explaining to do.
Turned out I didn’t have to wait long for answers. From way over on the other side of the suite’s main room, I heard something rustling and clunking around behind the wet bar. I looked over and saw somebody stand up with a bottle in each hand –
A girl.
Specifically, a girl I’d seen before, and not too long ago. It was that nerdish, underage college kid Mavis, who’d been getting all chummy with Donnie on the flight down here.
“This was all I could find,” she announced. “That wasn’t alcoholic, I mean.”
“Crap –” Usually I can keep from speaking my thoughts out loud, but maybe I was a little shaky from getting clopped in the head. “This is all I need.”
“Oh, hi.” Mavis peered through her glasses at me. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Yeah, well, just make yourself at home. Don’t mind me.”
“Are you all right?” She seemed to pick up on the fact that I wasn’t in a good mood. Coming from behind the wet bar, she stepped closer, then stopped with an alarmed expression on her face. “You’re bleeding.”
She was right about that. I could feel it on the side of my neck, trickling down from my wet-plastered hair. My hand went up on its own, and I glimpsed the thin, diluted red on my fingertips.
“Don’t worry about me,” I told her as I wiped my hand on my trousers. “Right now, you’re the problem.”
“What do you mean?” That was my brother piping up. “Why’s there a problem?”
“Don’t even start.” My head was beginning to throb, and not just from getting hit. “You know I’m down here on business. I got a job to do. You talked me into bringing you along because you wouldn’t get in the way. Now I’m sorry I listened to you –”
“What’d I do?” Donnie put on his offended younger brother voice. “I have a friend over, that’s all. Big deal. I’m not supposed to have friends?”
Mavis spoke up. “We weren’t doing anything, Kim –”
“Kim?” I turned and looked at her. “So now we’re friends? That’s what you think?”
“Well . . .” She seemed a little perplexed. “Sure. Why not?”
“You’re kidding me, right?” I gazed at her in amazement. “Okay, I’ll explain it so even someone like you can understand. I’m a working person – got it? I have the problems that someone who works for a living has, someone who has to pay the frickin’ rent and put the food on the table. That’s different from you and those morons out there –” I pointed to the patio window, where the shouts and drunken laughter and over-amped music came floating in, like a radio with too much static. “I don’t have any mommy and daddy to call up if I go over the limit on my Amex card, or the check bounces that I wrote for my designer flip-flops –”
“Well, as a matter of fact –” Mavis got visibly huffy. “Neither do I. If I hadn’t gotten a full scholarship, including a food and housing stipend, I wouldn’t even be here. My mom’s a waitress at Applebee’s.”
“And that’s another thing,” I said. “Not your mother, who I’m sure is a nice lady, but you being here at all. You told me on the plane that you’re on some . . . whatever . . . archaeological project –”
“Anthropological.”
“That’s it. You’re supposed to be in some pokey little Third World village in the middle of nowhere, without any running water. Or shoes, or anything. Doing research, and making a pest out of yourself. Not hanging out here in party central with the spring break crowd, waiting for the guy behind the bar, with the Hawaiian shirt on, to bring you another margarita.”
“Nobody’s going to bring me a margarita.” Mavis’s voice was full of teenage scorn. “I’m not old enough. Even for here.”
“Good,” I said. “I don’t believe in getting children liquored up, even if it’d make them less trouble in the long run. But that’s not the point. The point is, why’re you here? I mean, did you bail on the whole anthropology thing, and the research project and all that, just so you could spend face time with my brother?”
“Jeez, Kimmie –” From the corner of my eye, I could see Donnie giving a shake of his head. “You’re getting kinda out there.”
“For your information.” Mavis spoke with as much aggrieved dignity as someone in cut-off jeans and a dab of white zinc oxide paste on her nose could muster. “This is my research project. The little village without running water? That was something you came up with inside your own head.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Anthropology’s gotten a little more modern since your day –”
Since my day; I liked that. The little snot.
“It’s not just going to some island in the middle of the Pacific and talking to people with bones through their noses. That stuff went out with Margaret Mead. My department’s research grant is paying for me to come here and document the mating rituals of contemporary urban post-adolescents.”
“Excuse me?”
“Come on,” said Donnie. “Get with it. She’s here studying how college kids get it on.”
“Yeah . . .” I nodded slowly. “That part sunk in even through my skull.” Which was still throbbing. I turned back toward Mavis. “Is that why all the video camera gear’s out on the balcony?”
“Of course.” She gave me of those looks. “Acquisition of primary research material. I had to spend a semester in the university media lab just to learn how to run all that stuff.”
“Great,” I said. “Porno for anthropology nerds. Wouldn’t it have been easier – and cheaper – just to buy a bunch of Girls Gone Wild DVDs? I mean, I realize you’re getting a free trip out of this, but still . . .”
“Something like those would lack scientific validity.” She got her sniffy junior-researcher tone on again. “Since the subjects in commercial videos are compensated for their participation.”“Yeah, I know; they get a free T-shirt. Big whoop.” Granted, I’ve killed people for less than that. Or at least thought about it. But then again, there probably aren’t many people who’d be interested in seeing me hoist my top up over my head. So I have to do what I can.
“Look,” I continued with our little anthropologist, “let me fill you in on something. This isn’t mating rituals –” I pointed toward the balcony. “This is just a bunch of sorority girls getting bombed and letting frat boys mack heavy on them. Any ‘mating’ that goes on will get cleaned up when they go home and get a group rate for going to see their gynecologists.”
“Well . . .” She gave a nod, conceding my point. “We’re going with something of a loose definition. For the purpose of the study.”
“Right. Whatever. So my next question – why here?”
“Uh
. . . because this is where they are. The research subjects, that is.”
“No, I mean why here in my room. Or suite, or whatever. This hotel’s got balconies all over it, where you could’ve set up your spy gear. And do your little scientific voyeur thing. Why didn’t your department take some of that research grant money and spring for a room with a view out on the pool area?”
“They did. They paid extra and everything. But then something happened. Some VIP, or somebody like that, got me booted out of it. I didn’t find out until I got here and checked in. I got stuck in some pokey little room in the back, with just a couple windows that look out on the alley behind the hotel.”
