TWENTY-NINE
I CAUGHT A glimpse of someone in a ball cap, and I was hit in the face and knocked off my feet. It was Vlatko. He looked down at me. His hair was dark brown under the ball cap, and he had sunglasses stuck over the brim. His injured eye was horrible, stitched together in a ragged, bunched-up scar that sliced through his eyebrow and ran into his cheek. He was wearing a lightweight gray hoodie and jeans. I could see the odd tattoo on his neck.
I tasted blood, and I didn’t know if it was from my nose or my mouth. I was on my hands and knees, still fuzzy from being hit.
“What?” I said.
The earbud was on the floor. Vlatko picked it up and smiled. “Are you listening?” he said into the earbud. “I have your girlfriend, and she’s going to be my ticket out. If anyone comes near me, I’ll gut her. You know I can. She’s already bleeding. It wouldn’t take much to finish her off.”
Vlatko dropped the earbud onto the floor and crushed it under his heel. He grabbed me and dragged me to my feet. I looked past him and saw the FBI guy on the floor in a pool of blood. His neck had been slashed so that his head was almost completely severed from his neck.
“That could easily be you,” Vlatko said.
“You killed him.”
“He came in at the wrong time. I was placing the polonium.”
I looked over at the air handler. “You’re going to poison everyone in the ballroom?”
“Clever, don’t you think? An act of terrorism. A political statement rather than a planned assassination of a single political figure. I admit it hasn’t gone as smooth as I’d hoped, but the job is done. And I have you. You’ll get me out of here, and then I’ll skin you alive and leave you for, what’s his name now, Ranger?”
The dead agent, the blood, the skinning alive, were mind-numbingly terrifying. I was telling myself to focus, to be alert, not to be overwhelmed by the fear and the horror. When the opportunity came, I had to be ready to run. Yeah, right. My legs were shaky, and my heart was beating so hard my vision was blurred. Running wasn’t currently an option.
“It won’t work,” I said. “They know we’re in here. Someone will burst in any second and stop you.”
“It’s too late. The polonium’s in the system. In fifteen minutes it will reach the ballroom.”
“All those people …”
“Dead,” Vlatko said.
Acting more from instinct than coherent thought I staggered back, flung my arm out, and pulled the fire alarm that hung on the wall. Vlatko yanked me away, but the alarm was already wailing, red ceiling lights flashing in the mechanical room. He put his knife to my neck and shoved me into the storage cabinet in the corner, and I realized how he’d managed to get into the room undetected. There was a hole punched into the wall between the mechanical room and the service pantry.
I went through the hole, into the storeroom, and attempted to scramble away, but he was too fast. He half dragged me, half shoved me into the stairwell. There were footsteps on the stairs below us. Men running.
“Up,” he said, the knife to my throat again.
I stumbled on the first step and felt the knife bite into my neck. I managed to get to the fourth-floor landing, I looked over at him, and I saw no panic. No nervous sweat, no fear, no confusion. He was stone cold calm, calculating what to do next. He moved us into the fourth-floor supply room, went to the window and opened it.
“Out,” he said.
“Out where?”
“Onto the ledge.”
“Are you crazy? Do I look like Spider-Man? I’m not getting on that ledge. It’s like a foot wide.”
“You can die here, or you can go out the window.”
“Where am I going once I get out there?”
“You’re going to inch your way over to the covered pedestrian bridge to the parking garage.”
“And then?”
“You’re going to drop onto the bridge.”
“No way!”
“It’s not that far. Go!”
I crept out the window and carefully stood with my back pressed tight against the building. I’m not great with heights, and I was paralyzed with fear.
Vlatko was out of the window, standing next to me, his hand wrapped around my wrist. “Start moving,” he said in his strange British accent.
“My f-f-feet won’t move.”
“I’m going to count to three, and then I’m throwing you off this ledge. You’re in my way.”
I moved one foot, then the other.
“Faster,” he said.
The covered bridge to the parking garage wasn’t far away. A few more steps. Don’t look down, I told myself. Concentrate on the bridge. It wasn’t a far drop, and it had a nice wide, flat roof. I could do it.
“Keep moving until you’re in the middle of the bridge,” Vlatko said. “I’ll tell you when to jump. We’re going to jump together.”
“Aren’t you afraid of a sniper?” I asked him. “The FBI probably has you in their sights.”
“You’re my insurance policy. If they shoot me now, you’ll go down with me.”
“Surely you don’t think you can get away.”
“It’s not over until it’s over. I’ve been in worse spots. And if I’m captured I’ll be extradited to Russia, where I’ll get bonus pay. I came here on a diplomatic visa, and I have friends in very high places.”
I reached the middle of the bridge and allowed myself to finally look down. The cement roof was about four feet below me. If for some reason I skidded off the roof, I’d fall three stories to the street. Not a good thought.
“Jump,” he said, stepping off the ledge, taking me with him.
I landed hard, my legs buckled, he pulled me up and yanked me forward.
The parking garage was a ten-story reinforced concrete structure that wasn’t totally enclosed. At each level the thick outer wall was five feet high, leaving five feet of open space between the top of the wall and the beamed structure of the next concrete deck. In theory this should have allowed the wonderful sea breeze to waft through the garage. In practice, the hotel blocked the sea breeze, and what wafted through the garage was the smell of fried food spewing out of the kitchen ventilation system on the second floor.
The pedestrian bridge very nicely opened onto the third-floor parking deck, but if you happened to be on the roof of the bridge, there was no easy access. The bridge’s roof connected to the five-foot very solid wall of parking deck number 4. Even with a knife to my throat and adrenaline surging through me, I had no ability to get over the five-foot wall. Maybe with a running start, but that wasn’t going to happen.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Vlatko said. “I’m going to give you a boost up, and before you even hit the ground on the other side, I’m going to be over the wall. So don’t think about running away. If you even attempt to run, I’ll catch you and kill you.”
He gave me a boost that belly-flopped me onto the top of the wall and tumbled me off onto the floor on the other side. I landed on my back, and looked over at Ranger pressed flat against the wall. Vlatko swung himself over, and Ranger snatched him out of midair. There was the flash of Vlatko’s knife blade, and in the next instant Ranger flung Vlatko off the fourth floor of the parking garage.
I was still on my back, and Ranger knelt beside me.
“Is anything broken?” he asked.
“Holy crap,” I said. And a tear leaked out of my eye.
Ranger brushed the tear away and lifted me to my feet. We went to the wall and looked down at Vlatko, sprawled on the road below us.
“Do you think he’s okay?” I asked.
“Babe,” Ranger said. “He’s one inch thick.”
“Your arm is bleeding.”
“He tagged me when I grabbed him.”
“How did you know we’d be coming over the wall?”
“I was listening to you the whole time. I didn’t trust you to hang on to the earbud, so I had a mini-microphone sewn into your shirt. It’s just under the rolled hem on the neckline.”
I glanced at it. “I thought it was just another rhinestone.”
Men were running at us from all directions. Uniformed Rangeman guys, two guys in suits and ties that I knew were FBI, a hotel security guard.
The Rangeman guys secured the perimeter a short distance from us. The two FBI agents went to the wall and looked down at Vlatko and then looked over at Ranger.
“What happened?” one of the FBI guys asked.
“He jumped,” Ranger said.
The agent nodded. “I figured. I could tell by the way he sailed out into space.”
“He released the poison,” I said. “He told me it would reach the ballroom in fifteen minutes.”
“The fire alarm emptied the entire hotel,” the FBI guy said. “The ballroom emptied in less than ten. Right now we’re waiting for the hazmat team to suit up and go into the mechanical room to retrieve the canister. We’ll know more when they get the canister out and take air quality readings in the ballroom.”
I looked down at my bloody shirt and jeans. “My face hurts all over,” I said to Ranger. “Where’s all the blood coming from?”
“You’re getting a bruise on your cheek. You have a small cut on your lower lip. You were bleeding from your nose, but that seems to have stopped. You have a puncture wound on your neck.”
“I’m a mess!”
Ranger wrapped his arms around me and held me close. “You’re beautiful. You evacuated the hotel and you delivered Vlatko.”
We stared down at the street. It was clogged with police and firemen and vodka salesmen. No one was being allowed back into the hotel.
“What’s next to us?” Ranger asked the hotel security guard.
“It’s the new hotel that’s all jungle theme. The Monkey Pod.”
Ranger told Tank to get a suite and an extra room at the Monkey Pod. And he asked him to get us new clothes and to bring a first-aid kit from one of the Rangeman cars. We took the elevator to the ground level and exited the garage from the rear, away from the crowd. Ranger’s men came with us, and the FBI went to check out Vlatko.
The Monkey Pod manager met us in the hotel lobby and escorted us upstairs. There were monkeys everywhere. Monkey wallpaper, monkey designs on hall carpets, and monkey sconces. It was worse than the birthday cake hotel. It was dark, and the monkeys didn’t look happy.
Ranger took the key cards and assured the manager that everything was wonderful. He gave one card to the two men who accompanied us, and they went next door.
The suite had the same monkey theme as the hall. Monkey lights, monkey candy dishes, monkey wallpaper. At least it was large and everything was new and clean. And it felt far away from the horrors that had just happened in the poor birthday cake hotel.
My cellphone buzzed in my pocket. Grandma.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey, yourself,” Grandma said. “I hope you’re not missing all the action at that hotel that looks like a birthday cake. First off, the fire alarm sent everybody out. And then some guy went splat on the road. Nobody knows if it was a suicide or what. Lula and I were at the Monkey Pod when it all happened, and I got out in time to see the guy before the police roped it all off. He was flat as a fried egg, and his head was burst open like a ripe melon. It was terrible … in a fascinating kind of way.”
“Poor man.”
“Yeah. One of the people there said the smushed dead guy just broke up with his girlfriend and they had a big fight in the casino. Where are you, anyway? Did you get a chance to see all the commotion?”
“I’m at the Monkey Pod. Just checked in.”
“We’re out on the boardwalk. Boy, I’d kill to see one of those rooms. Do they have the monkey theme like the casino?”
“Yep. There are monkeys everywhere.”
“I don’t suppose we could come up just to take a peek?” Grandma asked.
“Sure. Just to take a peek, but this is actually Ranger’s room and he’s working, so you can’t stay long.”
“We’ll be in and out.”
I gave her the room number and hung up.
“Grandma and Lula want to see the room,” I said to Ranger.
Ranger’s shirt was soaked with blood. “I’m going to rinse off in the shower,” he said. “I can’t tell how deep this slash is on my arm. You’re welcome to join me.”
“Tempting, but I’ll wait here for Grandma and Lula. They said they’d be right up.”
I went to the powder room, switched the light on, looked in the mirror, and had to steady myself with my hands on the vanity. I looked like something from a horror movie. I washed my face, neck, and chest as best I could. I scrubbed my arms to above the elbow. I couldn’t do anything about the blood on my shirt and jeans, but at least the shirt was red from the start.
The suite had a doorbell that sounded like a monkey screaming. I opened the door to Lula and Grandma.
“Look at this,” Lula said, pushing past me. “This is the shit. This is the bomb. It’s got a dining room table. I bet the Queen of England lives like this. Like when she goes on vacation, I bet she stays in places like this.”
“There’s a separate bedroom,” Grandma said, rushing into the bedroom. “And it’s got its own television. And it’s got monkey lamps and a monkey bedspread with a bunch of monkey pillows.”
“Yeah, but that’s nothing,” Lula said. “It got a kitchen area with bottles of wine and packages of crackers. And there’s a basket with Snickers in it, and all kinds of shit.”
I understood their excitement. This was a high roller suite, and we weren’t high roller people. Unfortunately, I’d just gotten punched in the face and thought I was going to swan dive off a ledge, so I was having a hard time getting excited about the Snickers and the monkey pillows. The adrenaline rush had burned off, and I was exhausted.
“They even got two bathrooms here,” Grandma said. “There’s a powder room, and then there’s this bathroom here off the bedroom.”
“Do you want this Snickers?” Lula asked me. “Because if you don’t want it, I might want it for the ride home. And what about Granny? Does she want anything here?”
I looked around. I didn’t see Grandma. She was in the bedroom, and she’d mentioned the bathroom, and Oh my God!
“Babe!” Ranger shouted from the bathroom. “Come get your grandmother.”
Ranger was standing in the glass-enclosed shower with the door open, looking out at Grandma. He was dripping wet and seemed not especially concerned that he was naked.
“It’s like she’s paralyzed,” he said.
“Amazing,” Grandma said, eyes wide, staring in unblinking stupefaction.
I yanked Grandma out and closed the bathroom door.
“It was mesmerizing,” Grandma said. “It was like staring into the eye of a cobra. I don’t care if I do anything else on the bucket list. This was awesome. It was like a biblical experience.”
Lula stared at my shirt and my face. “What the heck happened to you?”
“There was a little skirmish,” I said. “It’s all okay.”
“You got a nasty bruise shaping up on your face. You didn’t get that from anybody I know, did you?”
“Nope. We took down a bad guy. Where are you going now? More slots?”
“We didn’t get to Caesars yet,” Grandma said. “That’s our next stop. And we’re going home after the dinner buffet. Call if you need a ride.”
I walked them to the door and locked up after them. Ranger was out of the shower when I went into the bedroom. His hair was damp, and he was wearing a hotel robe.
“Sorry about Grandma,” I said. “She got away from me.”
“She just stood there staring. It was eerie. I was afraid she’d had a stroke.”
A stroke of good fortune, I thought. Not everyone was lucky enough to see Ranger naked.
“I heard a text come in while you were in the shower,” I said.
Ranger looked at his phone. “It’s from Mac. This was a more sophisticated delivery system than the one they were going to use on Rangeman. The timer actually showed the start time, and they calculate that the ballroom emptied well before the gas reached it. Plus Mac immediately shut the ventilation system down, so much of the polonium was trapped in the duct.”
Rafael came to the door with a couple bags of clothes. “I did the best I could,” he said, “but everything downstairs has monkeys on it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m sure they’re great.”