It was a long office space, a few cubes, several desks, and two empty water coolers. Another door at the bottom, and a long row of windows filling the middle of the side wall. The pissy-faced man was sprawled on his back, lids drooping on dull eyes. Rader kept dragging the heavy guy, all the way down to the other door. He felt a kick in his leg, and the guy made a grab at Rader, who let go. The heavy guy flipped round, onto both knees now, and threw himself forward. Rader yanked up a chair and hammered the back against his face, the man roaring as he fell bleeding. He sat there, blood streaming from a cleft in his forehead, and then slipped to the side, steady on one arm, and crawled. Rader kicked him in the side of his head and he went down flat without a sound.
He opened the other door; more darkness, but the light filtering through the windows showed another, smaller, room. Rader hauled him inside, rolled him to the wall. As he hit the baseboard, a breath came from his lips. Rader felt his wrist, and then he dropped it. He removed the guns the guy had taken from him after the motel-room beating, and locked the door. Then he returned to the pissy-faced man, who didn’t move, just lay on his back looking up at the ceiling with half-closed eyes. Rader reached into his jacket, removing his gun and cellphone. He could hear some shallow breathing, and made the odds on him taking many more breaths no better than even.
Rader jabbed the man with his foot. ‘What’s the password?’ he said. His own cellphone was back in the Shelby, parked at the motel.
Silence.
A kick now. ‘The password,’ Rader said.
The man’s lips opened slowly. A low voice, from far off: ‘Leg...’
A harder kick. ‘I didn’t catch that.’
Now the man said nothing. He just looked up.
Rader grabbed his hair and pulled his head up a few inches.
A shrill sound; not laughter, a gasp. ‘Leg...end1.’
Rader bashed his head at the floor. He keyed it in before he cut the lights and left the room. There was no key in the lock. He called Jill on the cellphone, and kept moving, back through the darkness towards the door where they’d stood moments earlier. The first attempt, to her cellphone, hit voicemail. So he tried the landline in her Davison Avenue house. She answered.
‘Turn on your phone now,’ Rader said, ‘I’m gonna call you.’
‘Right.’
He cut the line, gave it a few seconds, then made the call.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said.
Rader said, ‘You alone?’
The dusty softness of her voice after midnight. ‘I’m always alone, John.’
Rader said, ‘I want you to take a mental note of my whereabouts. Say it out loud when I prompt you.’
‘I’m listening. Wait, why?’
‘The case.’
‘The one you just quit?’
‘That one.’
Now Rader opened up on an office area crammed on the left with filing cabinets. Maps dotted the wall of the various states where Skylar owned hotels. Farther in the furniture wasn’t standard office metal and plastic. A giant ash desk and bureau, ornate lamp tables and a scattering of porcelain figurines all decorated the interior. A man was standing at the far end in pinstripes, red braces showing against a white shirt. The warm golden glow of a ceiling light bounced off the lenses of his rimless glasses. He was short, balding, with a thick salt-and-pepper moustache and the leathery bronzed skin of a man who spent a lot of his time outside. He was holding a gun—looked like a .22 caliber revolver—which in his small, delicately-fingered hands appeared huge.
Rader said, holding the phone to his mouth in one hand, a gun in the other: ‘I’m being held at gunpoint in the sixth-floor security center of the Marquis Vanguard Hotel, Torrent City. If I don’t call back later tonight, within ninety minutes, and if we don’t meet tomorrow halfway between this city and yours, bring in the cops.’
‘We’re meeting there?’
Rader ignored it.
The man took a step to the side, away from his desk, where a pencil lay against dense scribblings on a notebook. The light filled the eyeglasses again, bouncing from the lenses. The gun dipped one inch, then another until it was pointing at the floor.
Rader walked into the room, throwing over the door, which closed with a low click. He moved towards the man and took his gun. The man said, ‘Where do you get off stomping into a guy’s office like you owned it?’
‘Who’s that?’ Jill said.
Again Rader said nothing.
‘You really think you own the place?’
Rader placed the man’s gun inside his jacket and stood there looking down at him. His jacket loaded now with all those pieces.
‘You think you run this fucking hotel?’
To Jill, Rader said: ‘Remember, I don’t call back inside ninety minutes, you know what to do. Go.’
He put it on speakerphone. Jill’s voice saying, ‘Understood. Ninety minutes, and it’s the law. You got it. I’ll be waiting.’
Rader, watching the man, said, ‘Thanks.’
He hung up on Jill.
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ the man said.
Rader said, ‘Sit down.’
The man hesitated, then he drew out an uncomfortable-looking chair with ornate legs. He sat there, kept his feet together. Without the gun, his hands clawed at his thighs. ‘I guess you don’t leave me any other choice. Do you?’
‘What’s your name?’ Rader said.
The man just glared at first, the moustache twisting. Slowly he said, ‘McDonald.’ Then in a voice that sounded like he’d dredged it from the back of a dry throat: ‘Jeff McDonald.’
‘This is a pretty fancy place you get to inhabit. What do you want with me, Jeff?’ Rader said.
McDonald looked up at him. ‘I became aware from several of my guys of a problem at the casino tonight. I took swift action.’ The moustache twisting again above a sour smile.
‘You consider a guest from out of town walking around your premises a problem? I took this to be a luxury hotel, not an FBI field office.’
‘I do when he’s a snoop,’ McDonald said. ‘Going around asking a lot of questions, making his presence felt—’
‘In the hotel? Maybe you think you run the town, as well. Is that it? All from this command center,’ Rader said. ‘That’s quite a power trip.’
‘You didn’t let me finish,’ McDonald said. ‘We pride ourselves on the way we take care of our high rollers. These gentlemen you were watching tonight did not enjoy the attention.’
Rader said, ‘I don’t know where you get your information, Jeff, but whoever told you that I was becoming a problem in your casino was wrong. Dead wrong.’
‘We’re real good at what we do here, and we don’t get very much wrong at all.’ McDonald smiled again, and nodded. ‘That’s the plain truth. And you proved us correct when you barged in the way you just did.’
‘After I was beaten and removed from my motel room.’
McDonald said nothing for a moment. ‘What about my men?’ he said.
‘The nickel and dime thugs who broke into my room and sucker punched me? If those are an example of your men, I’m not impressed.’
‘They did that, and yet here you are, holding a gun on me—that’s right? So where are they?’ McDonald said. ‘There’s no way they’d allow this.’