by Thomas Perry
Kira stayed still for another few seconds to give Mr. Mallon a chance to move or cough or snore. Then she straightened and walked silently, as Debbie had taught her, placing her weight on the outer edges of her feet. She slipped through the doorway of 1509 past Tim, and waited for him to close the door quietly.
“I’m pretty sure he’s out,” she said. “It’s too early for dinner.”
Tim nodded. “Best thing to do is wait for him.” He sat down on the bed.
She stood in front of him so she could look into his eyes. “Do you want to see if we can get into his room and wait there for him?”
Tim said, a little too quickly, “I don’t see how.”
“You’re right,” she said. “That was a silly idea.” She sat on the other side of the bed. “It’s just that these magnetic key cards sometimes don’t work right, and you can open more than one door with them. I don’t suppose it happens very often.”
He seemed a bit more interested. He stood and picked up his jacket, then quickly went out the door. She was amazed. He had not said anything to her about joining him or anything. She picked up her purse and went to the door. She opened it a crack to look down the hall, but he was already on the way back. He brushed past her into the room, then went to the windows. He said, “So much for that. Not even any balcony, so that’s out too.”
“I don’t think it would be much fun to climb from one to the other way up here, anyway,” she said, then gave a little shiver. He didn’t seem to have seen it, or to be listening to her.
Kira walked toward the cabinet that held the television set, but when she reached it she didn’t feel like opening it. She was aware that time was going by, and the time was precious. It was nearly dark outside, day turning to evening. She knew it was likely that if Mallon was out now, he would probably be out for the evening. If he came back, the others would be watching for his car. He was dead without knowing it. What was bothering her was that she had gone to a lot of trouble, taken a lot of chances, and used up some luck to get where she was at this moment, and her forward motion seemed to have stalled.
Each of them seemed to be letting sentences die off at the end, and then turning their attention inward, wishing that they liked each other better, wondering what had gone wrong. She stole a glance at Tim. He was lying on the bed with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling with a pouting expression. People in situations like this wore out their enthusiasm; they just got tired of smiling, tired of thinking of the right things to say, tired of listening.
Kira couldn’t let it go that way, let this chance turn into a failure that would gnaw at her later, just because of shyness, or passivity, or laziness or something. She heard herself whispering, “I want this.” She hesitated, glancing at the television cabinet. Finally she took two deep breaths and walked around to the other side of the bed.
She sat down, then swung her legs up, lay beside him, put her hands behind her head, knitting the fingers as he had, and stared up at the smoke detector on the ceiling. “I guess all we can do now is wait.”
“Guess so,” he said.
“Any ideas about how we could pass the time?”
She caught a swift movement as he turned his head toward her abruptly, so she turned hers more slowly and looked into his blue eyes. She saw that they had suddenly become inquisitive. She turned her body toward him, crooked her elbow, and leaned her head on her right hand. She gave him a mischievous smile.
He rolled, almost a lunge toward her that startled her a little, and put her on her back. He hovered above her as he kissed her, pressing his mouth against hers too heavily. His tongue pried open her lips and came inside, searching, and then his right hand was groping, moving to her left breast. He was eager, she told herself: passionate, not rough. She began to need to stop for a second, because it was hard to breathe, but he didn’t stop for that. She turned her head to break off the kiss, and took three deep breaths, and then she was feeling better. It was easier now, nice, really. He was kissing her neck, and he didn’t have the weight of his upper body on hers anymore.
Then he was undressing her, but so quickly that she was afraid he was going to rip her top, or maybe tear the zipper of the leather pants. “Wait,” she whispered. “Let me.”
At first there was an instant when she was not sure that he would, but his hands stopped. She sat up, took off the top, and she could see the blue eyes staring in appreciation. She was beautiful, and she was glad that he knew it. She swung her legs off the bed and laid the top on the chair, then took off the leather pants. She left her underpants on and walked to the counter by the television, dug into a pocket of the purse, and found the condom. She stepped to the bed, holding it up and smiling.
He was beside the bed, quickly stripping off his clothes. As soon as he was naked, he stepped closer and pulled her to him. He kissed her and then pushed her onto the bed, and continued what he had been doing before.
“Here,” she said after a few minutes. She pushed the condom into his hand.
He tugged her panties off. He obviously had interpreted her gesture as a signal that she was ready to accept him, but she noticed he had tossed the condom aside.
“Aren’t you going to use it?”
He shook his head. “Don’t like them.”
“But we should. Would you please do it anyway?”
He stopped and held her at arm’s length, staring into her eyes. “What? Do you have AIDS or something?”
“No,” she snapped. “Do you?”
“What do you have, then?”
“Nothing!” she said angrily. “It’s just a normal precaution.”
He let go of her, then turned to pick up the condom, and sighed heavily as he tore the wrapper off and put it on. “There. You happy?”
She quickly made a decision. She lay back on the bed. She wriggled a bit to get closer. “Yes,” she said. “Very happy.”
She wanted it to be true, but something had turned sour. He had seemed a bit too rough and hurried before, but now he was distant, uncaring. He was very strong, and he made sudden, almost violent movements, grasping her too tightly and then thrusting too hard. She said, “Wait, be a little more gentle.”
“If you’d relax, you’d enjoy it.”
“Please.”
He seemed to get more quick, more violent, ignoring her voice. She decided that what he had said might actually help if she could do it, and it was all she could do, so she tried to relax all her muscles, to offer no resistance. She only had to endure it for a few more minutes, and it was over. He disengaged himself from her, and she kept still, staring at the ceiling. He lay beside her for a few seconds, then got up, walked into the bathroom, and closed the door.
Kira wanted to cry, but she knew she shouldn’t, or everything would be lost. A minute later, he came out again. Maybe he had been just so filled with lust, so sexually hungry for her, that he had needed to do it that way. Maybe that part was over now, and they would be closer to each other than before, and he would be kinder and in less of a hurry. She had proved she was not just a tease, getting him aroused and then not letting him find release. Maybe he had even been a little bit suspicious of her before, and resentful in advance, and now he would be okay. She cleared her throat and found her voice. “Come back and lie down with me.”
He looked at her. He didn’t smile, but he went back to the bed and lay there obediently.
She did not feel as though anything she tried was working, but she had decided that the only way was to advance, not retreat. “That was really nice. Thanks.”
He looked at her again, more curious than warm. Then he seemed to remember something. Before he said it, she knew what it meant. “We’d better see if he’s back.” He got up and rapidly pulled his clothes on.
She had known it would be something that required him to go away from her for a bit. That way, before he saw her again she would be dressed, and he could pretend nothing had ever happened. She watched him put on the jacket with the gun in it and sl
ip outside.
Kira remained on the bed and considered. Ordinarily, a girl would be happy to acquiesce in the deception, dress while he was out, and by the time he got back, have her makeup fixed and be demurely brushing her hair. A girl would wait for him to speak before she would say anything about having had sex, and maybe he would never mention it again, just assume that the next time he wanted sex, she would agree. Maybe they would part, and never speak again about anything.
Kira sat up. She was proud of the way her body looked in the big mirror across from the foot of the bed. She instinctively did not want to let this incident be over, just out of some misplaced modesty or a fear of awkwardness. Tim would realize in a minute that room 1503 was empty. She was positive that Mallon could not have come back onto this floor and gone into his room without her hearing it.
She was beginning to feel frustrated about Tim. He was attractive, he was strong, he was a person who should be able to understand her, a person she didn’t need to lie to. She looked into the mirror again and fluffed her long blond hair. This should have worked better. He should be in here with her now, seeing what she saw, and marveling at his good luck.
CHAPTER 25
Kira pulled the halter top on over her head, brushed her hair a few times, angrily, and then put the last touches to her makeup. She had given Tim a half hour, but he still had not come back to the room. She was going to have to find him. She made sure her bag was packed and locked, took her purse, then went out and closed the door behind her.
She stopped at the door of 1503 and listened for a moment, but then she heard the ding of the elevator bell, announcing that it had arrived. She quickly moved away from 1503 and took the final fifteen feet to the elevator doors so she would be there, face-to-face with Tim when the door opened. She had time for an instant’s regret that she had not brought her overnight bag. The sight of her standing there with her bag—or maybe just brushing past him into the elevator without speaking—would have forced him to think quickly: if he wanted her, he would have to acknowledge it and make her know it, or she would be gone. She had not brought the bag, so she would have to do without it. She stood a pace back from the door, her head up and her shoulders back, and an expression in her eyes that would freeze a bird in flight.
The door slid open: no Tim. Instead, there were two men in their thirties who looked to her like businessmen. She lowered her eyes to avoid theirs and waited for them to move past, and as they did, she could detect the smell of liquor. They must have been sitting in the bar having a few drinks before dinner. She stepped into the elevator and pressed and held the “Close Door” button, pushed P2, the lowest button in the row, and felt the elevator begin to sink.
Kira was tired of men right now. Some time ago, she had discovered that after having acceptable sex, she often didn’t think about having it again for days. That had not seemed surprising. What was odd was that having really bad sex had nearly the same effect. Afterward, she imagined she should have been prowling around trying to satisfy unfulfilled desire, but she found that even desire could be used up, depleted. Either way, men seemed unappetizing until the clarity of her recollection of the experience receded.
She wanted to find Tim right now and salvage the investment she had made in him. There were not going to be that many get-togethers where she could meet young men, and most of the young men she had met at the camp had not seemed promising. She had bet the whole hunting trip on Tim—she could hardly expect to meet someone else now—and gone to the trouble of separating him from the herd, seducing him and then enduring him. She had a sudden vivid memory of how awful he had been in bed, but she did not linger on it. She could teach him to be better at it. She turned and stared into the mirror at the back of the elevator car, straightened her hair, pulled her halter top down a little and her pants up on her waist a bit. The elevator stopped. The door opened on the lower parking level.
Kira saw all three boys instantly. Jimmy and Lee were seventy or eighty feet from her, both crouching behind parked cars, one on either side of the aisle ahead of her. The spaces in this underground parking area were all diagonal; the cars on both sides of this aisle were angled away from Kira, so each was squatting behind the rear tire of a car. Tim was much farther from the elevator, nearly at the far end of the next aisle, but his reddish hair made him easy to see and impossible for her not to recognize. He was sitting behind the wheel of the car in which Jimmy had driven them all here. She stepped out of the elevator.
She heard the elevator door slide shut behind her. She tried to read the sight, to extrapolate from the positions of the three men what was going on, but she could not. Certainly Jimmy and Lee could not have been crouching there for all this time, with their backs visible to the elevator door. And what was Tim doing way down there in the car, not even in the same aisle as the others? Something had begun.
Her legs seemed to be acting on a decision she had not consciously made. She had started to walk quietly to the right, away from Jimmy and Lee, and toward the aisle where Tim sat in the car. Her eyes kept returning to Jimmy and Lee, because she did not want to startle them, but she wanted a chance to be in for the kill.
There was the faint sound of an engine. It was idling, just coasting slowly down the ramp from the level above them. She realized that she had been hearing it since the elevator door had opened, driving up and down the aisles above, searching for a space. Jimmy reached into his jacket and pulled out a pistol. Lee had been watching him across the aisle, and now he did the same.
Kira’s legs moved faster, carrying her to the beginning of Tim’s aisle. Her right hand reached into her purse and closed around the new Beretta pistol. She could feel the rough pattern of the knurled handgrips, and she lifted it just a little off the bottom of the purse to feel the comforting weight of it as she walked. Kira craned her neck to look to the left, toward the aisle where Jimmy and Lee crouched. The sound of the car grew just a bit louder, and then it appeared. It was Mallon’s red Toyota. She could feel her heart speeding up.
She was still too far away to open fire. She checked to be sure the others had not moved. Tim was all the way at the end of her aisle, at least two hundred feet from her. She decided that all she could do was stay in plain sight. She kept walking toward Tim, a little faster now.She lowered her face toward her purse, as though she were a woman searching for a set of keys, but she held the red car in the corner of her eye.
She heard a car’s starter turn over, then the hum of its engine. It was Tim. She saw him back the black car out of its space. Her heart stopped, then started again, faster. She gave the fingers of her left hand a little flutter, trying to get his attention, but he didn’t seem to see her. She had expected him to move into the third aisle and drive toward her, but he steered the car around the end of the first aisle.
He had moved into the other aisle behind Mallon’s car, and she understood. He was blocking the aisle, keeping Mallon from backing up. She heard his door open and slam shut.
Lee and Jimmy suddenly stepped into the aisle in front of Mallon’s car, and opened fire. The noise of each report was a sharp bright clap that pounded her eardrums, then seemed to take a second to fade as it echoed around the concrete surfaces. She raised her pistol, but she could already hear Mallon’s car.
The car’s tires screamed, the engine growled. She stopped and pivoted, then dodged to the left, trying for a clear aim to the left of the nearest concrete column. The car’s front end seemed to rise as it shot forward. The safety glass of the rear window was spiderwebbed with cracks radiating from bullet holes, and much of it had been pulverized into a milky translucence, so she could not see anyone inside. She saw the car hit Lee and throw him forward through the air, then hit Jimmy, drag him under it for a few yards, then bump over him.
The taillights came on and the tires screeched, trying to grip the pavement before the car reached the end of the aisle, turning sideways and sliding. Kira fired twice at the car as it rocked to a stop, but then it moved ahead aroun
d the end of the aisle and fishtailed toward Kira, heading for the ramp back up to the next level. Kira sidestepped out of its path into the aisle where Lee and Jimmy had ambushed it. As she ducked down, she took note of what she saw. Lee had flown most of the way to the elevator, and he lay near it with his head turned at an angle that meant he had to be dead. She ran past Jimmy. He was the apex of a long wet triangle of bright red blood that was flowing down the gradual incline of the floor.
Kira could see Tim clearly. He was all right. He was standing by the black car, his gun in his hand. He was staring at the car Mallon was driving up the next aisle, turning his whole body as he watched it. He made no attempt to raise his gun to shoot at Mallon. He made no attempt to move the black car again to block Mallon’s way to the ramp. Kira could see that his eyes were not angry or calculating. They were open wide, staring with weak incomprehension.
Mallon sped up to the next level, and it was as though a door up there had closed. It was very quiet now. Kira moved toward Tim quickly, running on the balls of her feet, the soles of her shoes making a chuff each time they hit the textured concrete. Tim seemed to hear the sound. He turned to look up the aisle in her direction, but Kira could not tell whether he was looking at her or the crushed bodies of Lee and Jimmy. He put the pistol back into his jacket, then got into the driver’s seat of the car and slammed the door. He began to back the car and turn the wheels to swing around.
“Wait!” she called. “Wait, it’s me!” She watched him as she ran, hoping to see his head turn to look in the rearview mirror, but it never did. The car glided forward and turned up the ramp and out of sight.
Kira stopped running. She turned and looked back toward the elevator doors, past the two bodies. She was aware that the whole incident seemed to have taken much longer than it really had. It had taken less than half a minute, she was sure, but there would be people here soon.
