Security(23)

Brian bangs his forehead on the housekeeping storage area’s wall, once, and goes to follow Tessa. He pauses at the table where the maids fold sheets. Runs his finger along the edge. His finger comes away flecked red.

He looks around the room, his eyes landing on the dryers.

Tessa pulls on her padlock, but it doesn’t pop open. Franklin cut off all the padlocks with bolt cutters, on orders from his phone contact, at a quarter after five o’clock today. He then replaced the employees’ padlocks (labeled with employees’ names) with other padlocks. He then hid the bolt cutters in a conference room on the second floor. Tessa tries her combination again.

Brian is opening the first dryer. He wears the grim resignation of a man who feels foolish and yet knows he is right. The dryer is empty but still warm. He touches the ridges inside and spins them. He scowls, shuts the door. And looks at the rest of the row.

He moves to the second dryer. He looks markedly different—threatening, worlds apart from the golden--retriever--like persona he’s been using on Tessa this afternoon. His lips pucker and his eyebrows angle and he opens the second dryer. It’s empty, cool. He checks the third, fast: empty.

Brian inches sideways. He’s shaking his head. His lips are moving in false, rapid--fire consolations that what he knows is inside isn’t inside. He’s reaching for the fourth dryer.

The Killer is still on the toilet, on the seventh floor.

The other Killer is still playing solitaire, on the twentieth floor.





CAMERA 6, 13, 4, 5, 12, 33





Brian grips the handle of the fourth dryer. If he finds Franklin’s body, he might not scream. He might hurry to Tessa, shush her, drag or carry her to the foyer. Maybe—barely—he could do this before the other Killer notices, summons the secret elevator to the twentieth floor, boards it, and presses the button for the first floor.

The other Killer has abandoned his game of solitaire. The red of his cards is so vibrant against the thin gray rug that the colors throb like strobes. The twentieth floor was designed to be boring—no, it was hardly designed at all. It’s a monitor bank on the north and south side and thin carpet and wraparound tinted windows and space and space and space and a conference table and a coffee station and, now, four dead bodies. The other Killer stands at the secret elevator, his finger poised over the “Down” button. He watches Brian.

In the employee break room, Tessa checks her padlock’s underside and sees her name is not on it.

Brian hears swearing and a loud rattle of metal. His hand retreats from the fourth dryer, and he runs. “Tess?” he says, arriving in the employee break room.

Tessa is checking all of the padlocks for labels, finding none. “I am going,” she says, “to murder that rotten little sneak the second I see him, I swear on my life.” Brian is set to ask a question, but Tessa says, “Franklin locked up our stuff. I was going to use my cell and call Charles and fill him in on how Franklin crossed the line and is fired.” She screams the word.

Brian goes near her, but does not touch her. He’s smarter than he looks. “Landline’s out, right?”

Tessa says, “Right” through her teeth.

Brian perches on the back of a break room chair. “I don’t like this.”

The other Killer is terrible at solitaire. He cheats, so he always wins. He’s dealing a new game, his motions like those of a grand-father clock, which will count seconds as long as it has to, and not a moment longer, and not a moment less.

Tessa and Brian are arguing. Brian is asking her why he smells burned flesh and keeps finding red stains, and Tessa is cutting him off by saying she doesn’t want to hear about how his deathsport (she says it like that, like one word) has made him an expert on the smells of burns and blood. She is endeavoring not to cry, but this time, she does not allow Brian to hold her. She says something regarding the stairs.

Henri is turning his music way up, to motivate his cooks.

The other Killer, on the twentieth floor, is wearing the same mask and coveralls as the Killer, on the seventh floor. This makes it difficult to distinguish between them. The other Killer, as he plays solitaire, often rests his masked head on his fist. When he does this, he resembles Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker. The Thinker is—still—playing solitaire, and the Killer is—again—sitting on the bed in Room 717.

US Weekly sprawls, forgotten, beside the toilet.

Brian insists on preceding Tessa down the stairs to the foyer. He enters the stairwell in a stance of intense suspicion, his head snapping upward at the echo of Justin’s dead sprint past the eighteenth floor, up one more flight, to the ballroom (where Justin tears through the door, hearing the manic squall of a concertina, perceiving an opportunity to be of use, and Justin’s very excited about this because now he can save Jules’s ears to make up for betraying her trust), and Brian signals Tessa to wait, wait a second, until the door from the stairs to the ballroom slams, the specter of far--off music hushes, and Brian decides, incorrectly, that silence means they’re safe. He signals Tessa to come on.

Brian moves like an athlete, but an athlete in an effeminate sport, like gymnastics. His body suggests a complete willingness to take a blow or a wound or any discomfort, really, for Tessa, his arm to his side and in front of her, like a mother in a minivan braking suddenly and acting as a human seat belt for her child. The hesitance in his sideways arm suggests he feels stupid. He doesn’t trust his instincts, not enough. He has seen some hell; he has walked through it. But it requires many prolonged sojourns in hell to learn that instincts are the animal inside that wants nothing but to survive. To propagate.