Security(41)

The Thinker stands up from behind a reception sofa. He does not move quickly. He doesn’t need to. Delores rebounds off the locked main doors. She drops the scissors. She has hit her head. She reels. She bumbles right into the Thinker, who puts his hands around her throat and begins to squeeze.

Tessa bumps into the bed. The mattress pushes the backs of her knees to bend, and she sits easily. She is eye level with Brian’s pants, and he lets her pull them down this time. He steps out of them, then a pair of boxer briefs, and Tessa’s lips swell around his penis as she takes it into her mouth. Brian hisses, allowing her mouth to work awhile before he puts a thumb to her chin and bends, too, kneeling at the bed to undress her. He doesn’t do it slowly, but he doesn’t hurry, either. When she’s naked, Tessa pushes Brian’s jacket off, then his T--shirt, and then they stop. They eye one another like curiosities.

When the Killer comes tearing across the foyer, knife high, Delores is slapping at the Thinker’s mask. But the Thinker keeps his masked face remote enough that the edges of Delores’s short fingernails scrape the tip of the Thinker’s rubber nose and that’s all. The Killer arrives at the pair of them and throws Delores into the bellhop counter. Delores casts out a hand to catch herself and smacks the bellhop’s bell as she rams into the counter hard enough to break all the ribs on her right side. A tinny ping sounds through the foyer.

The Killer and the Thinker look at each other. An observer might find the image surreal. As if a funhouse mirror stood between them, altering the average man’s stature to gigantic, or the gigantic man’s stature to average.

The Thinker walks away, to Franklin’s office, and to the secret elevator. He boards and presses the button for the twentieth floor.

Tessa touches the side of Brian’s face.

Brian puts his hands on Tessa’s knees. He kisses her left knee. He leaves his lips there and puts his head sideways. Tessa touches a scar on the top of his bicep—a burn.

Brian puts his chin on her knee. He smiles. He stands and sets his palms softly on her upper arms, pushes her onto her back. She is on top of the comforter. Tessa frequently espoused to me the belief that it is in poor taste to make love on top of the comforter, as that is how hotels obtain a reputation for being unsanitary, with black--light detection of semen and vaginal secretions on the bedding, so on. One might scold Tessa for scolding on such grounds—might tell her she’s cold, removed, cruel. It would seem advisable to withhold the criticism that she is incapable of love, for two reasons: one, it would turn her off, immediately and irrevocably, for hours or maybe days; two, if one met her after years of hard work in difficult fields that prohibited romantic attachment, prohibited romantic but not sexual attachment, that unprohibited sexual attachment resulting in two sons and an ex--wife, a family that feels strangely like a footnote, like something that—beside the moment of meeting Tessa—becomes an asterisk corresponding to an afterthought at the bottom of a page, because meeting and getting to know and falling in love with Tessa was like having a monster inside wake up and make one suddenly aware that air could smell like flowers, whereas air when one was asleep, as one was during one’s whole life before meeting her, was only a bland and unremarkable means to keep breathing. In such a case, it ceases to matter after a while whether the other person feels similarly. It stops hurting—much—so long as she consents to allow one to wait for her in Room 1802, the deluxe penthouse, where one turns off the camera feed when one knows one will be with her there, turns the feed on again when one is not, in case someone else is with her there, as now, when—

The Killer walks to Delores, who is groping for the kitchen scissors she dropped. She reaches with her left arm, so as not to move her right side. Reaching with her left arm makes her move her right side. Delores wails like a woman in labor, but she keeps reaching. The Killer steps on the scissors when she reaches them. He grinds his heavy boot onto her fingers. Delores wails but will not let go. The Killer puts all his weight on her hand, and Delores wails more loudly as bones in her fingers pop like a pinecone in a campfire. But the Killer is standing on one foot. Delores sweeps her right foot around in what must be an excruciatingly painful maneuver, into the back of the Killer’s right knee. The Killer falls like an awkward child on an icy sidewalk. His tumble to the marble and his loud, deep cry of pain happen in concert with a warbling quasi cheer from Delores, who is moving. In spite of unbearable pain, she moves and gets the scissors, and she isn’t foolish enough to climb the Killer in search of a kill strike. She instead jabs the scissors’ blades into the Killer’s left shin, and he yells and she yells, and she moves higher on his shin and stabs him again. And maybe Delores knows this is the extent of her hope. It’s quite possible she added up the scenario of locked doors to a second killer to her vicious injury and arrived at the sum that the likelihood of her survival was next to nothing. Perhaps she is thinking of Tessa, or of Jules—certainly not of Brian or Justin or any other man in the hotel—and has decided that she, Delores, can increase their odds of survival by hobbling the Killer. Or maybe she does believe she’ll live. It’s conceivable she believes she’ll live, but I doubt she does. She’s a realist. It took her four tries to make her husband stay away. It took shooting off his testicles. Delores poises the scissors above the Killer’s testicles.

And the Killer swipes sideways with his knife, a kinesthetic sequence that is the unquestionable signature of Navy SEAL training, hilting the blade into Delores’s neck. The Killer braces his foot on Delores’s chest and pushes. The knife pulls horizontally out of its puncture, which is not a SEAL move. It’s not even a SEAL flourish. Navy SEALs have a deserved reputation for being masochists. Some masochists are sadists, but by no means all. When sadistic Navy SEALs are denied the pleasure of killing for valid US military missions—say, through a dishonorable discharge—they often become mercenaries. Honorably discharged SEALs often find high--paying positions as experts in security.