Security(58)

Tessa is fearsome when she means to be. “We’re gonna live. They’re gonna die, and we’re gonna live.”

The Killer is passing the eighteenth floor.

The sinews in my fingers ache. It feels so good; it feels. The tip of the nail on my right index scrapes across the controller’s button. And the wall on the twentieth floor slides shut.

And the shelf of juice concentrate, on the nineteenth floor, slides shut.

The Killer, in the secret elevator, rising to the nineteenth floor, tilts his head. He reaches for his hip. The controller isn’t there. The secret elevator arrives at the level of the nineteenth floor, and the Killer pats and pats his hip as if hoping his hip will magically become a controller.

The inert skull, on the twentieth floor, on the security counter, smiles.

The Thinker is tiring. He’s stomping up the stairs, passing the fourteenth floor. His thigh drips.

Brian puts the cell phone in his back pocket. He gives the knife to Tessa and keeps the meat cleaver. They leave the kitchen, unknowingly using perfect two--man SEAL team formation, back--to--back but alternating isosceles directions, to cover all ground. They’re in the center of the ballroom, surrounded by tables with white tablecloths. Hundreds of white napkins have been folded into sailboats. Tessa and Brian are like scared gods in a bleached sea.

“Cops are here in ten minutes?” says Brian.

“Yeah. One car.”

“That one car gets a look in the lobby, he’ll call the National Guard.”

“Right.” Tessa’s examining the disturbed areas by the bandstand, the abandoned squeegee, the table sprinkled in bits of crystal. “Won’t even need to open the door. Entryway’s all glass.” She sees the glass behind the bandstand, noting its crackled appearance.

“You know this place,” Brian says. “Do we take that hidden elevator back down?”

“I didn’t know that was there. I don’t know how it’s controlled. Main elevator?”

“It’s too damn slow. If they figure out we’re on it, they’ll be waiting for us.”

Tessa blows hair out of her lashes, puts the knife on a dinner plate, and winds most of her hair into a bun. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”

“Tess, I’d rather be with you here than with anybody else anywhere.”

Her laugh sounds strange. She takes up the knife again. “That’s crazy, Bri. That’s Mitch--level crazy.”

The Thinker has slowed. Saunters past the fifteenth floor.

The Killer, in the secret elevator, has used up his ninety seconds, and sinks. He punches the secret elevator’s wall, and a hole appears.

Brian says, calm, eyes fixed and wide on the stairway door, “Do you believe in angels?”

“Nope,” says Tessa.

“Mitch appeared to me the night before I did the triple. He told me I was going to over--rotate on the third turn, compensating for how he under--rotated on it. He said that’s what I was going to do and it’d get me killed. He told me to shoot for even rotation, except on the third turn, because that’s when inertia would start to flatten.” Brian is too calm. “He said he’d help.”

Tessa’s silent.

“And I did it.”

“You were dreaming,” Tessa says.

“I was awake.”

“You projected him.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Brian must hear the Thinker’s footfalls on the stairway because his stare lasers in that direction.

On the fourth floor, the secret elevator opens and the Killer tears out of it, surging into the stairway like a rogue wave and taking the steps three at a time.

Brian tells Tessa, “Stay here,” and says as he walks toward the stairway door, “It’s just weird. The photo in the magazine. I knew you wouldn’t sleep with a jerk like that. But I still had to see you. I thought about it every day for the past month and a half at least, but it was like somebody was telling me to wait. Then this morning, I knew this was it. Tonight, I had to be with you tonight. The whole ride up here, it was like somebody was at my back, pushing me.”

“Mitch?” Tessa says. She says it not like it’s a confirmation of something, but like she’s talking to someone. She’s looking at the cracked window behind the bandstand. Outside it, nothing is visible but night, glittering like a flawed cut of onyx.

“Yeah. Mitch,” Brian says. “Quiet. He’s coming.”

Tessa turns from the window and grabs a dinner plate. She does it decisively, as if someone in high authority gave her a direct order. She flips the plate upside down as the stairway door pulls violently open, and Brian strikes with the cleaver, but the Thinker isn’t there; the Thinker is smart, the Thinker stood to the side, knowing Brian would strike because there were no screams from the ballroom, meaning the Killer hasn’t gotten there yet. And the Thinker is aiming a gun, having evidently decided these two final victims are sufficient pains in the ass that a firearm is preferable to a knife. Brian is bent forward with his assault at empty air, but Tessa throws the plate like a Frisbee, as hard as she can, and it cuts through the distance like a bad special--effects spaceship. It shouldn’t smash into the Thinker’s mask, but it does, it does, it hits him on the chin. The plate fairly disintegrates. There’s a thunder of footsteps coming up the stairs, a primeval yell of irate pain. The Thinker shakes ceramic from his rubber face, and his dropped .45 fires a hole into the ballroom’s east wall. Brian overbalances, wobbles, and chops into the backmost part of the Thinker’s right shoulder.