“Thank you,” Sheppard said, and downed it without a second thought. “Another please.”
The woman smiled and nodded.
Douglas laughed. Gesturing to Sheppard. “Now this mate really knows how to party,” he said to the girls.
Sheppard smiled back. “Just a little.”
“You alright, mate? You were a long time.”
“Ha, let’s just say next time I want to take a piss, I might start out fifteen minutes early. You know what I think we need? I think we need to get far more drunk.”
Perry smiled. “Well, I guess I better drink to that.”
As if on cue, and horrifically fast, the woman came back with another bourbon for Sheppard. He’d lost count of them—he remembered a time when he used to keep track. Now he didn’t bother. Sheppard touched glasses with Douglas and the girls, just as PA Rogers finally passed out. The man’s face hit the table and he collapsed on the floor.
The whole VIP area erupted into uncontrollable laughter.
Sheppard got up onto the table and the music dimmed as the DJ noticed something was going on.
“Three cheers for dopey Rogers,” he shouted.
And the entire club joined in in a round of hip-hip-hoorahs. Half of the people there probably had no idea why, but they joined in nonetheless.
Sheppard waved his drink around, sloshing it everywhere, before collapsing back into his seat.
That was when he lost the night.
26
Sheppard left the bathroom so fast that he crashed into Mandy, who was staring at the wall beside the bed. They almost toppled over together, but Mandy grabbed and steadied him. The commotion drew everyone else’s gaze before they went back to whatever it was they were doing.
“What is it?” Mandy said. She must have seen it in his eyes.
Sheppard opened his mouth, and thought better of it. He didn’t know what to say. He was a fish gasping for air. Something about his admittance to Winter—“I’m not a good man. I never was.”—seemed to draw a line under everything. And the feeling that the evil man knew Sheppard’s inadequacies better than he knew them himself. “What are you doing?” he said.
“I’m looking at this picture. It’s really weird, don’t you think?” The painting of a farmhouse burning and a scarecrow smiling had almost smugly caught his attention when he’d first woken up but he hadn’t thought about it since. “Why the hell is this in a hotel room?”
“I don’t know,” Sheppard said. He remembered thinking exactly the same thing.
Mandy reached up and ran her hand over the paint of the farmhouse. “It’s sad, isn’t it? I like art, puzzling over what it all means. This painting freaks me out. Somehow I just know there’s a family in that house, children burning. And that scarecrow with those eyes. They remind me of the eyes of the guy in the café.”
“What?”
“There have to be people in that house, right?”
“No, the other thing. About the eyes.”
“Oh,” Mandy said, putting her hand down, “I remembered something. That man in the café who was looking at me? I know now what freaked me out so much. It was his eyes. They just looked like the eyes of a man who was up to no good. Like the scarecrow’s.”
Sheppard looked up at the painting. The scarecrow’s eyes looked oddly human. As he stared, they seemed to move and look at him. No, just an illusion. But this lined up with what Constance had said. Mandy had met the same man.
Which meant...
Sheppard put his arm on the wall to steady himself, as a pulse of dizziness threatened to topple him. “We have to get out of here.”
Mandy’s face was losing color. “But...”
You can’t do it.
“I can’t do it.”
All the interviewing, all that time lost, when he should have been doing the right thing. Trying to escape.
Alan’s voice, far off. “Well nice to know he’s on the same page as the rest of us.”
“Shut up, Alan.” Ryan.
Who was lying? Someone had to be? But all the stories fit together. They all had run in with Winter or Constance’s evil man. They all ended up here because of it. But who was lying? Someone with more skill could tell. They could see it in their eyes.
Sheppard looked from Mandy to the timer. Under two hours to go. Too much time. If the evil man knew that Sheppard couldn’t do it, why not just kill him straight off? Not place him here. In death’s waiting room.
“Sheppard, what’s wrong?” Mandy again. Scared this time.
Sheppard looked at her. And pushed past her. Ignoring her follow-up query.
There was only one thing for it now. One way to stave off the shakes, and the cold, hard crash. Take the edge off imminent death. Although maybe it would be the evil man’s last laugh for it to be empty.
Sheppard almost fell to his knees in front of the television. The others were talking to him. Instead he found himself on Headphones’s level. She had her headphones on again, and had shuffled back under the desk. He looked at her and she looked back. Running his hands over the cupboard underneath the desk in search of a handle, he hoped to God that he was right.
It was indeed the minibar. And even in the relative light of the room, the manufactured flickering of the fridge bulb was comforting. However, what was inside was not.
The minibar was almost entirely empty, just as he feared. It looked pathetic, in the way barren fridges often do. There were only two items, on the top shelf—airplane miniature bottles. His favorite brand of bourbon.
It was almost worse than nothing.
Sheppard picked up one bottle—barely the size of his forefinger. One swig of alcohol, maybe two—barely enough to get a taste.
His favorite brand—best not to think about the implications of that.
Sheppard slipped one bottle into his pocket and took the other. He stood up and looked around, bottle in hand.
Alan was looking at him with something like confused disgust. The others were just confused.
“I don’t think it’s really time for a piss-up, Sheppard,” the lawyer said. An acid tone that could melt through skin.
“It’s two bottles, Alan,” Sheppard said.
“I knew it. I knew the papers were correct,” Alan said. “Shaky hands. Sweating like a pig. You’re coming down with a nice case of withdrawal.”
Sheppard launched himself at Alan, grabbing him by the lapels of his suit and slamming him into the window. Alan let out an exasperated grunt, snarling at Sheppard.
“There he is,” Alan said, “our real hero.”
“Can you shut your mouth for two goddamn seconds?” Sheppard said. “It’s two bottles.” Too close. He could feel the hatred running out of the old man. Almost burned him.
“Sheppard?” Mandy said, uneasy.
She was staring inside the minibar. Ryan was looking too. Sheppard let Alan go, the lawyer readjusting his tie and dusting his lapels as if Sheppard was unclean.
Sheppard stepped back toward the minibar.
Mandy knelt down and reached into the small fridge, bringing out a small white box that was slotted into the lowest shelf. He hadn’t noticed it before as it perfectly fit the dimensions of the fridge and was suitably camouflaged. She held the box up to Sheppard.
It looked like a first aid box. But written in black marker, in the same handwriting as the rule book, was “With regards, The Great Hotel.”
He turned it over, but nothing was written on the bottom. The box rattled. It was heavy.
A first aid kit? Was this another one of Sheppard’s cravings? If the evil man knew Sheppard’s favorite bourbon, surely he knew what else was needed. Maybe this box was a present.
Sheppard put the other bottle of bourbon in his pocket, and grasped the box with both hands, sliding the locks to open so it flipped open.
&
nbsp; It wasn’t what he wanted. And it wasn’t food or water or sustenance. But even still, Sheppard couldn’t quite believe it.
“What is it?” Ryan said, and Mandy echoed him. Sheppard looked up at them, and emptied the box.
They all looked down at the contents strewn out across the bed. Six mobile phones.
27
Mobile phones—what?
Sheppard looked around at everyone—they looked as confused as he felt. Even Constance had looked around from her seat on the bed and Headphones had stuck her head up from beneath the desk.
He looked down again—he couldn’t see his own phone. “What is this?” Ryan said.
Sheppard randomly grabbed one—a thin smartphone—and tapped the screen. It lit up with a wallpaper of a dog wearing antlers. It had a passcode. No matter. Sheppard saw what he needed. No signal.
Who would he call? The police? Never called the police before. Was it like on television?
999. What is your emergency?
We’ve been trapped in a room by a guy in a horse mask. I’ve got to solve a murder in the next hour and forty-five minutes or he’s going to blow up the building. No wait—don’t hang up.
Sheppard went to put the smartphone down and someone whimpered. He looked around—Headphones was staring at it. He held it up, the picture of the dog looking out to her. She nodded, and Sheppard gave it to her.
“Do you all see your own?” Sheppard said, but no one moved. So he picked up a flip-top phone that lit up as he opened it. Plain blue background. Old style. And in the corner—no signal.
Phone companies are really doing God’s work.
He put the phone down, and Ryan picked it up. “It’s mine,” Ryan said, opening it.
Alan started forward into his view and snatched one of the phones up. “Finally, I can tell Jenkins to prep my report.”
“I think we’ll call the police first, yeah?” Mandy said, picking another one up. Hers had some kind of dongle thing hanging off it.
Two phones left. A BlackBerry and a smartphone. Neither one his. He picked up the smartphone. Slightly older than the last and cracked in one corner. Wallpaper—a young woman with a baby in her arms. Corner—no signal.
Wait.
Three phones with no signal. Looking around at Alan’s and Mandy’s faces, maybe more than three.
“How is that possible?” Ryan said, realizing what Sheppard had already realized, holding his phone high in the air. Mandy too—whatever was hanging from her phone was swinging in the air.
“Goddamn it.”
There was a groan from Constance, as she digested the words. “God doesn’t need a phone tower.”
“Oh put a sock in it, Jesus-freak,” Alan spat. Sheppard ignored them. “Has anyone got anything?” Blank faces all around.
“No signal,” Mandy said, “but we’re in the center of London.”
“Bastard must be blocking it somehow,” Alan said. “The reception. He’s playing us like a damn flute. Getting our hopes up and then dashing them.”
“What are you talking about?” Ryan said.
“I see this all the time, son,” Alan told him. “This is how you break people.”
Constance shuffled up the bed and gestured to Sheppard. He handed her the smartphone. She took it and recoiled, slinking back to her former position.
One phone left. The BlackBerry. One of the models that had an entire keyboard on it, with impossibly small keys for each letter. But whose was it?
He picked it up and pressed one of the keys at random. The screen lit up. On the screen, behind all the icons were two faces. A wife and a daughter. Younger than they would be now.
The drink and the drugs, they fogged him. They obscured the past. Made him live in nowhere but the present. They made it harder to remember, but it was still there. He just had to be helped in jogging his memory. Looking into Winter’s daughter’s eyes was more than enough. And he remembered how he had hurt them all. And now Winter was dead and they might never know. He shielded the screen from the others, as though he might contain what he had done.
Mandy faltered slightly. “Is that yours?” she said, with a smile. Evidently this phone didn’t look like Sheppard’s style. Which was true.
“Um...yeah,” Sheppard said, looking up. “No signal.” He put it in his pocket, next to the bottles of bourbon.
Lies can ruin a man, Winter had said—in one of his last sessions. They can rot him from the inside out.
Evidently he hadn’t learned.
28
They fanned out to all corners of the room, holding up their phones, looking for any chance of a single bar. Sheppard watched them, knowing it would be no use. No point in putting on a show.
Because Alan was right. The evil man was toying with them, making them waste time.
There’s more to it than that. Right? There had to be some reason why.
His phone wasn’t in the box. Did that mean something? Had he had his phone on him in his pocket in his room in Paris? He couldn’t remember.
So maybe—? Sheppard made sure everyone else was preoccupied with their own devices and took out Winter’s BlackBerry again. It didn’t have a passcode, so he was free to select whatever he wanted. He went to the messages to see none. They must have been deleted. He scoured through the rest of the applications on the home screen, to find much the same. No emails. No alerts. No notes.
Until he came to the calendar. The day was blocked out with a big yellow bar. A bar that kept on running. According to the phone, Winter was busy from now until...
He tapped the bar and it expanded with the details. The appointment ran from 5:00 a.m. on 25 October (today—or at least Sheppard thought it was) to 31 December in the year 2999. The maximum the diary would allow. The appointment was titled in large block letters “4404.” And the location? Sheppard scrolled down to see: TGH.
Sheppard dropped the phone to his side. 4404. This room? The room Winter had measured out. If this was 4404 (and it had to be), the location was The Great Hotel. It all lined up. What was Winter doing with the evil man? And why would he willingly come to this room if he knew what was going to happen to him? Unless he didn’t. The appointment running until 2999. Winter was all booked up until the end of time.
“Sheppard.” He looked up to see Mandy standing in front of him. How long had he been staring into space? Behind Mandy, Sheppard saw Alan trying to gain height by jumping up and down. It was almost funny. Almost. “There’s nothing. No signal anywhere.”
“No,” Sheppard said.
“How is that possible?” Mandy said, turning her phone over in her hands.
“I don’t know,” he said, half-heartedly. “Maybe a blocker like Alan said. Maybe he did something to the phones.” Tired of assumptions. Tired of shooting wildly in the dark. The running theme of all that had happened so far.
“That’s not really how blockers work,” Ryan said, coming forward. “Unless the horse man has a blocker taking out the entire floor. But someone would notice.”
“What about—?” Mandy started.
“We don’t have time for this,” Sheppard said.
“I know,” Mandy said, almost smiling. “I just thought you’d want this.” She held up a thin sliver of metal. It took Sheppard a moment to realize what it was. An army dog tag. It had been hanging off her phone. The name PHILLIPS pressed on it—a string of numbers underneath.
Sheppard looked confused. “I’m not sure why I...”
Ryan seemed to be on Mandy’s wavelength. His eyes lit up. “Not a penny, but it’d do.” Mandy nodded.
Sheppard got it, and smiled. He smiled—because after everything, there was finally something. He took the dog tag and looked at it. “The vent.”
“Can I have the other one?” Ryan said.
“Why?”
Mandy gave it to him any
way. He held it up. It matched the other perfectly. “The bathroom. I’m not a plumber, but I know there’s at least one way out of the room. The pipes.”
Sheppard wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. There were at least two things traveling in and out the room. The air in the vents. And the water in the toilet.
“If I can jimmy the toilet off the wall, maybe there’ll be some kind of opening.”
“Yes,” Sheppard said, looking down at the dog tag in his hand. It might just work.
“There’s one problem,” Mandy said, cutting into the hope. “What do you think the horse mask’ll do when he sees what you’re up to?”
That was true. One press of a button on the evil man’s part and all this could be over. But Sheppard couldn’t see any other way forward.
“I don’t think the horse mask is done with us yet. I don’t think he’d blow up his little game on a whim,” Ryan said. He looked at Sheppard and they both nodded in turn.
“What if you’re wrong?” Mandy said.
“This is the best chance we have,” Sheppard said.
Mandy thought for a moment, growing quiet. Slowly she nodded. “Okay.”
“After Ryan helps me get the grate off the wall, I’ll go through the vents while he tries to find a way out in the bathroom. And I need you here. You need to keep the peace. Keep Constance quiet and keep Alan at bay and keep Headphones... I trust you.”
“Okay,” Mandy said. “Will you be okay? I would fit better in there.”
“This is my problem,” Sheppard said firmly. “It’s only right that I go.”
Mandy nodded and went to sit with Constance.
Ryan watched her go. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “She was right, you know. She would have fit better in the vents. Or Rhona, even.”
Sheppard shook his head. “Rhona has claustrophobia and Mandy doesn’t owe anyone anything. This is on me. I don’t want it to be her fault if the horse mask takes this the wrong way. I don’t want it to be her fault if we all die.”
29
Ryan made his way down the right side of the bed and Sheppard followed, twirling the dog tag in his fingers. The name PHILLIPS shining in the light. Sheppard hadn’t asked Mandy what the tags meant, but he assumed a family member. He resolved he would do it if...no, when he got back.
Guess Who Page 12
