Stripped

by Brian Freeman

  “Anything?” Serena whispered.

  “No.”

  The car turned again, and their bodies shifted. Serena wasn’t sure why, but she had an intuition that they were almost there, and she had learned to trust her sixth sense over the years. The road beneath them was bumpier, as if there were loose gravel on the pavement. The noise outside had quieted. They weren’t on a busy street anymore.

  “We need to hurry,” Serena said.

  “I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” Claire replied. “It’s near my face. It slid over here on the last turn.”

  “Try to get your hands on it before we turn again.”

  Serena maneuvered herself in the direction of Claire’s voice. She bent her elbows again, bringing her hands near her face. She pushed herself closer and felt her fingers touch Claire’s forearm immediately in front of her. She followed the soft skin up to Claire’s hands and was relieved to feel the cell phone nestled between her fingers. Claire was holding it tightly.

  “Okay, loosen up just a bit” Serena said.

  She worked her own fingers into Claire’s hands and curled them around the phone. It was small and familiar. “I’ve got it.”

  Claire breathed a sigh of relief.

  The car swung through another turn, and Serena clutched the phone and tried to brace herself to keep from sliding. Claire bumped up against her. Serena almost lost her grip and bobbled the phone in her fingers, but then felt it sink back into her hands. She ran her fingertips over the keypad and tried to imagine the numbers laid out on the phone. The keys were almost flat, and she could barely feel them.

  She pressed what she thought was the number two. The speed dial code for Jonny’s cell phone.

  Nothing happened.

  Serena tried another key with the same result. Finally, she realized that she had turned the phone off as she grabbed it from the floor in her bedroom, to make sure that an incoming call didn’t give away what she was hiding in her pocket.

  “Shit, it’s off,” she said.

  She hunted for the key that turned the phone back on and held it down. As she did, she felt the car turn onto a rutted stretch of pavement that rocked the vehicle up and down. The brakes squealed, and the car lurched to a stop.

  The phone lit up. It began hunting for a signal. “Come on, come on,” Serena urged.

  She heard the driver’s door open and Blake get out. His footsteps crunched on gravel.

  “Hurry,” Claire said.

  Serena punched the number two button again and held her breath. Blake was almost to the trunk. The phone began ringing.

  FORTY-SIX

  Stride swung into the gated driveway of the town-home complex and knew something was wrong. The gate was wide open. He hesitated and felt his horror grow as he heard sirens drawing closer through the surrounding streets.

  He tried Serena’s cell phone again, as he had been doing constantly on the drive west from downtown. There was no answer. He tried their home number again, too, and heard Serena’s voice as the answering machine picked up. The hollow feeling in his stomach became an awful pounding in his head. He accelerated into the winding streets past the maze of homes.

  When he reached their street, he saw a body lying under the glow of a streetlight. A big man, slumped like a beached whale. Stride got out of the car, the engine still running. The man was facedown, half off the curb, with blood dripping in the gutter. Recently dead. The burnt smell of powder was still fresh in the air. Stride bent down and saw the hole in the man’s forehead, and despite the red trails on his face, he knew it was Leo Rucci.

  He had held out a faint hope that it might be Blake.

  Stride ran for the house with an awful vision of what he would find inside. The front door was open. He drew his gun and leveled it as he crept through the doorway. He listened for voices or movement upstairs but didn’t hear a thing. When he glanced automatically at the alarm box on the wall, he saw that it had been disconnected. His heart turned to lead and seemed to plummet to the floor.

  He was about to scream her name, but he stopped himself. Blake might still be here.

  Stride silentiy followed the wall to the stairs and waited, listening again. He scoped out the empty hallway and took the steps to the second floor. The three bedroom doors upstairs were all ajar. The first, their office, hadn’t been touched. The second was the spare bedroom, and he saw Claire’s clothes on the floor. He checked the bathroom and the closet inside and didn’t find anything amiss.

  That left their own bedroom at the end of the hall.

  He stared at it and didn’t want to go through the doorway. Reluctantly, he sniffed the air, and he was relieved that he didn’t catch the mineral scent of blood. He could see part of the bed ahead of him, its blankets rumpled.

  Anyone who was there would already have heard him coming. “Serena?” he called, not expecting an answer.

  Stride used the toe of his shoe to push the door open slowly. He led the way inside with his gun. His eyes swept the room in an instant, and his heart started beating again when he realized there were no bodies on the floor. But something had happened here. The nightstand lamp was on the carpet, and the nightstand itself was tipped against the wall. Debris littered the floor-a hairbrush, a hardcover book, lipstick.

  A fight?

  It didn’t matter. They were gone.

  Stride went back downstairs and tried to figure it out. If Blake hadn’t killed them here, what had he done with them? His MO was murder, not kidnapping. If he had taken them, why? Where was he going?

  Stride went out into the night air again. The sirens were closer. The police would find him soon, and he didn’t want to be here. Every second put Serena and Claire at greater risk.

  He went back to his Bronco. As he turned it around and headed for the street, he heard his cell phone ringing. He grabbed it from his pocket and saw Serena’s number on the caller ID.

  “Where are you?”

  Serena froze. She heard Jonny’s desperate voice in her ear as he answered. Blake was at the trunk, and she expected to feel a rush of air as he swung it open and see him looming above them.

  “Wait, Jonny,” she hissed into the phone.

  She listened and realized that Blake had continued walking past the trunk. He was somewhere close by, and she heard the jangle of metal, like a chain scraping through the links of a fence.

  “Serena!” she heard in her ear.

  “I’m here, I’m here,” she whispered.

  “Where are you?” he repeated.

  Serena knew their emotions were both running wild. She had to stay in control. Report the facts. They wouldn’t have much time before Blake came back.

  “I don’t know yet. Claire and I are in the trunk of a white Impala.” She rattled off the license plate. “We drove for twenty minutes or so, and we’re stopped now.”

  “Are you hurt?” Stride asked her.

  “No. A little bruised, but we’re both okay. He killed Rucci.”

  “I know, I found the body. Do you know which direction he went?”

  “I think we headed east, but I couldn’t keep track.”

  “Do you know what he’s doing?” Stride asked.

  “No. This feels like the endgame, though.”

  “How do I find you?”

  Serena thought about it. “I don’t know.”

  “If you keep the cell phone on, I might be able to have the phone company trace the signal,” Stride suggested.

  “That’ll take too long, Jonny.”

  “I know.”

  Serena listened. Blake was doing something outside. She heard a grinding of metal. “It sounds like he’s opening a fence now. I think we’re going to drive inside. Hang on.”

  She heard Blake’s footsteps returning. She hesitated again, wondering if he would let them out of the trunk, but he continued back to the driver’s door and got inside.

  “He’s back in the car,” Serena whispered. “I don’t think we have much time “

  “Can you
keep the line open?”

  “I’ll try. We’re tied up. I may be able to hold the phone without him seeing it.”

  They were driving again. The Impala moved slowly, but the rocky ground caused the car to bump and jolt. Serena felt as if a prizefighter were delivering hammer blows to her kidneys. She heard Claire wince in pain beside her. They drove for less than a minute, and the car stopped.

  “I think this is it. I have to go quiet now, Jonny. I don’t know what you’ll be able to hear. If he finds the phone, I’ll try to shout something before he shuts it off.”

  “I’ll find you.”

  The driver’s door opened, and Blake came around to the trunk. Serena heard a click as the lock unlatched. The trunk opened, and she felt as if she could breathe again. The hot air outside felt cool compared to the stifling interior. Wherever they were, it was barely lit, but Serena still squinted, her eyes adjusting to something other than complete darkness. She saw Blake’s outline above them. Behind him, stars in the night sky.

  He reached in and took Claire by the upper body and lifted her out of the trunk. Her legs were rubbery, and she began to fall, so he had to support her. Claire turned and looked up and saw where they were, and she gasped.

  Serena laced her fingers together, cupping the cell phone between her hands. She hoped she didn’t accidentally cut the connection. Blake pulled her gun from his belt and pointed it at her. “Please don’t try anything.”

  Serena nodded. “It’ll be easier if I roll over.”

  “Do it.”

  She shoved herself over on her stomach. Her face and breasts were squashed against the floor of the car, and her hands were between her legs, clutching the phone. She felt Blake take hold of her belt and T-shirt and drag her roughly over the edge of the trunk. She dangled there briefly until he took one of her legs and maneuvered it so it was outside the car and almost on the ground. He took her T-shirt and lifted her up again, and Serena was able to stumble out onto the gravel.

  She turned around and looked skyward at the dark hotel.

  “Welcome to the Sheherezade,” Blake said.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  It was a looted beauty, stripped bare, ready for the imploders to do their work. Where the grand entrance had been, a jagged hole was punched in the wall of the building, more than two stories tall, as if some comic-book monster had fought its way inside. The windows on the lower floors were broken, leaving empty holes. Serena could see columns inside with their decorations gone, just rough concrete where carefully measured charges of dynamite would be inserted.

  Higher up, the hotel looked as it always had. If they turned on the lights, it would be the same place she had driven by hundreds of times in the past two decades. It had been a jewel once, but that was long ago. Other towers dwarfed it now. Even before the wreckers had come, it was showing its age. Twenty stories held up by nostalgia and echoes. Sinatra’s voice. The whine of the roulette wheel. Honeymooners making love. All of it about to become dust.

  She had never been inside, never been this close. Until tonight.

  “The Sheherezade,” Serena said as loudly as she could. Did you hear that, Jonny? She added, “Why are we here, Blake?”

  But she knew. This was Amira’s house, where she danced, where she died. Blake was coming home.

  He gestured them inside. Serena and Claire led the way. They had to make their; way past rubble and glass. They walked right through the gaping hole into the lobby, as if they were checking in for the night.

  “You can imagine what it was like, can’t you?” Blake asked.

  Serena understood. It was easy to float back to the 1960s here. Easier than it would have been a few weeks ago, when the hotel was still open, and all the twenty-first-century guests were coming and going. Now they were alone with the ghosts. The furniture was all gone, the fixtures pulled off and sold at auction, everything taken away: chairs, wastebaskets, ashtrays, slot machines, paintings, craps tables, beer taps. Only the skeleton was left-but even the bones of the building told a story. The geometric Arabian design in the wallpaper. The desert mural stretching across the ceiling. The etchings of Sheherezade herself in gold leaf on the elevator doors.

  Blake pushed the button for the elevator.

  “Where are we going?” Serena asked. She heard the singsong chime of the elevator as its doors slid open. It seemed odd to her that the elevator still worked in a hotel that was about to be destroyed, but then she realized it would probably work right up until the last day, as explosive experts checked their charges throughout the building.

  She was afraid she would lose the signal when the elevator doors closed.

  “The roof?” she speculated loudly. “Of course, that’s where Amira was killed. In Walker’s suite. That’s where you’re taking us.”

  Jonny? Are you there?

  The doors closed. The three of them were alone in the small compartment as it hummed upward. Blake pushed the button for the top floor, heading exactly where Serena had expected-but why?

  “I don’t see what you hope to accomplish, Blake. None of this will bring Amira back.”

  “I’m here for the truth,” Blake said.

  He didn’t say anything else. The elevator was slow, or maybe it was just that her nerves were on a razor’s edge, not knowing Blake’s next move. She watched the numbers for each floor Illuminate one by one. Climbing higher and finally thudding to a halt. With another birdlike song, the doors opened again, and Blake forced them out into the hallway. They were opposite two double doors, painted gold.

  There was no suite number on the doors. Maybe they had sold the room numbers at auction. Or maybe, if you were in the high roller’s suite, you simply knew where to go.

  Blake twisted the handle. The door was open. He pushed it in and waited as Serena and Claire walked past him into the foyer of the suite. Without furniture, the room was vast, and it kept a lingering elegance, despite its barren appearance. Even the carpet had been rolled up and sold, along with the chandeliers, but stretches of delicate porcelain tile had been left to be crushed in the demolition, presumably because it couldn’t be safely removed for sale.

  Serena had to imagine what the suite would have looked like when it was fully furnished. There were hints in the multicolored kaleidoscope of the tile and the pistachio colors of the painted ceiling. She thought of flowing draperies behind honey sofas laden with pillows. Wrought-iron hanging lamps. Rich lapis vases. All that and a five-hundreddollar hooker would make any high roller feel like a sultan.

  “Keep going,” Blake said.

  He pushed them through the deserted suite to the far wall leading to the outdoor patio. Serena slid through open stained-glass doors and stepped outside with Claire beside her. Blake followed. They were immediately bathed in a rainbow of light from the giant Sheherezade sign flashing above them. Each letter in the name was mounted on its own frame and must have been thirty feet tall. They flicked on and off in a rhythm of darkness and color that made Serena think of a nightclub dance floor.

  There were twelve-foot walls on three sides of the huge patio, all decorated in Moroccan tile, leading up to the actual roof of the hotel. She could see a barbed-wire fence on the roof, preventing trespassers from creeping down from the roof to the high roller’s suite. The fourth side of the patio, on her right, had a much shorter wall topped with scalloped icons. That wall faced the street and created the distinctive notch in the roofline of the Sheherezade.

  The patio, like the rest of the suite, had been largely stripped of its decorations. There were still date trees that had been planted into stone circles cut directly into the floor, and marble fountains, now turned off, carved into the walls. The pool was filled with water that had turned dank and green from lack of care.

  She noticed that Blake was staring into the murky water. Thinking of Amira.

  “I’m sorry,” Claire said.

  Blake looked up. “For what?”

  “That you lost your mother. I never knew my mother either. It�
�s hard growing up that way.”

  Blake was silent. Serena wondered how many times he had made secret visits to this place in the past few weeks. It wasn’t his first time, she was sure of that. She could imagine him alone in the hotel, here by the pool, obsessing over his mother’s death.

  “I think I know what you want,” Claire continued, “but you won’t get it from him. I know him too well. He won’t confess. He won’t apologize. He’ll never tell you the truth.”

  “We’ll see,” Blake said.

  “He betrayed me, too, Blake. I hate him like you do.”

  Serena thought again about the schism between Boni and Claire and wondered what terrible thing he had done. Whatever it was, Claire still carried the baggage. Serena had felt it from her since the first day they met. It was always there. Even when they were in bed together, Serena felt this aura of loss emanating from her, as if she were haunted. That was what made them kindred spirits.

  “He hasn’t rejected you,” Blake said. “He hasn’t denied your very existence.”

  “No, it was worse than that.”

  Claire’s intensity made Blake hesitate. Then his face became a hard mask again. “I guess we’ll both find out how much you really mean to him,” he said. He pulled a phone from his pocket and dialed.

  “Hello, Boni,” Blake said. “You know who this is, don’t you? I’m here where it all started. I’m home. If you go out on your nice penthouse balcony, you can see us all down here. By the pool. Where you had my mother murdered.”

  Blake paused. “What do I want?” he said. “I want to see you face to face. Right here. You’ve got twenty minutes. Or else I kill your daughter.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Stride parked across the street, outside the hurricane fence. He stared through the windows of his truck up at the roof of the hotel, trying to see if anyone was watching from behind the parapet, but his eyes couldn’t penetrate the shadows at night. He had to take the chance. He got out of the Bronco, pulled his gun, and crossed the street, taking cover behind the plywood wall that surrounded the property.