Security(43)
No again. If it were about me, they’d have tied me up and forced me to watch the anarchy descend. They don’t know I’m alive.
The Killer and the Thinker are mercenaries. Their methodical exactitude, their emotional remove, their adeptness and skill—nothing else fits. Killers for hire. Their names, which are not their names, are whispered in a vast, hateful underbelly of the world that operates with cynically perfected efficiency. Too many ends are too ideally realized by means of murder.
It’s de rigueur, after a decorated career in special forces, that an invitation is at least casually floated to join their ranks. A man might pull up a stool in a high--end Los Angeles bar, strike up a conversation, subtly imply the ops are rare and the salary huge, and leave a card. One might, if one were human, consider it for a single idiot second before asking the bartender for a match and watching the card curl into an ashtray. One could still smoke indoors back then. Though I never did.
So, the Killer and the Thinker’s price had to be astronomical. For the detail, the maximization of grotesquery, the hourly labor for staying all night. Further evidence that a man with astronomical resources was behind the order. Charles Destin or Cameron Donofrio?
Whoever it was, after the contract is in circulation, bidding begins. The team that executes the plan must be small and very experienced, because I made it a point to know every possible danger. Charles Destin told me he had enemies. He described corporate rivals, jealous husbands, and tennis opponents he defeated in tournaments. I took it for granted such men would use civilized means of murder. But civilized men can pick up the phone and call savages, and leaders of nations do it all the time, but Manderley is not a nation. It’s a posh hotel, built for business, for relaxation. For trysts.
Brian bucks. His neck knocks backward. He yelps with no dignity. Tessa pulls on his buttocks with avarice. She is patient. She milks him. He stills. Rolls to his left, on top of her. They are exhausted. They kiss exhaustedly. They don’t talk. A minute later, snoring—Tessa’s—can be heard. Brian smirks. He moves. Removes himself regretfully. He turns the comforter down and rotates Tessa so her head is on the pillow. He spoons her. Less than a minute later, a harmonic octave of snoring—Brian’s, the f*cker—is audible.
The Killer droops. He looks at what he has wrought. He examines the foyer with a nod of satisfaction. Then he peers at his lacerated leg and stabs what once was Delores one more time. He turns away from a stunning, repellent, viscerally offensive mess, and tracks blood across the floor. He tracks blood up the stairs, and down the hall of the second floor, to the laundry room, where he strips off his coveralls and pours into the washer the remainder of the detergent he left atop the washer, before pressing buttons. He goes to the fourth dryer and opens it, to check in on Franklin. The Killer slams the dryer door, turns a dial, and the dryer rattles to life. There is something wrong with it. It was not, evidently, designed to roast hotel managers to death.
The Killer is bleeding, but not too much. His shins are not fractured, but he’s limping. Delores might have severed a few fibers of muscle when the scissors whickered off bone. He goes to the employee break room and takes the first aid kit from a cabinet beside the refrigerator. He cleans the lacerations, and applies bandages and gauze. He has numerous scars. He is an enormous man. He is conclusively a man, and favors tightie whities. This is strangely rewarding.
Then, the duo that wins the contract has to become intimately familiar with the workings of Manderley’s surveillance. They must know when staff change occurs. They need to get an access card to the twentieth floor. The most efficient method for doing all of these things is to pay off a member of the security team. The most torturous part of all of this is not knowing why, and knowing it’s almost impossible I’ll ever know why. But the second--most torturous thing to endure is duplicity on the part of people to whom loyalty is supposed to be sacrosanct.
Tessa doesn’t like to be held in her sleep. Usually.
Jules and Justin do not snore. The Killer tends his wounds.
The Thinker, by now, is completely sick of solitaire. Which is why he’s collating his deck and building a house of cards.
It is eleven o’clock. The security team intended to run a scenario tonight. A fire drill. When all civilian parties in the building were asleep, security was going to set off the fire alarm and watch to see if employees followed protocol. The protocol for a fire drill is to descend the stairs in an orderly fashion, forgoing the elevator, and exit the lobby level. It is a basic protocol, admittedly, but it’s shocking how often civilians, when confronted with imminent threats, forget instructions and panic. Delores was not one to panic. Security was going to wait until Delores left to set off the alarm. Delores would be leaving about now. She didn’t like her home. She preferred her workplace, a bygone habit from a time when a malicious abuser awaited her in his wingback chair, smoking cigars and spitting in a saucepan. This is in Delores’s file.
Delores’s head is on the mantel in the bright red foyer; it’s turned so it can stare at her body on the floor. The fourth dryer tumbles and tumbles its load in the housekeeping storage area. Henri lies facedown on the plush carpet of Room 1408, the carpet dark with blood, the blood discernible in night vision’s green, black, and white. Likewise Twombley’s blood, in which he bathes, in the bathtub of Room 1516. The security cameras switch in and out of night vision automatically, sensing the amount of light available.