Cell: A Novel (6 page)

With the lunatic down he could see the girl again, one knee on the sidewalk and the other in the gutter, screaming through the curtain of hair hanging across her face.

“Honey,” he said. “Honey, don’t.” But she went on screaming.

11

Her name was Alice Maxwell. She could tell them that much. And she could tell them that she and her mother had come into Boston on the train—from Boxford, she said—to do some shopping, a thing they often did on Wednesday, which she called her “short day” at the high school she attended. She said they’d gotten off the train at South Station and grabbed a cab. She said the cabdriver had been wearing a blue turban. She said the blue turban was the last thing she could remember until the bald desk clerk had finally unlocked the shattered double doors of the Atlantic Avenue Inn and let her in.

Clay thought she remembered more. He based this on the way she began to tremble when Tom McCourt asked her if either she or her mother had been carrying a cell phone. She claimed not to remember, but Clay was sure one or both of them had been. Everyone did these days, it seemed. He was just the exception that proved the rule. And there was Tom, who might owe his life to the cat that had knocked his off the counter.

They conversed with Alice (the conversation consisted for the most part of Clay asking questions while the girl sat mutely, looking down at her scraped knees and shaking her head from time to time) in the hotel lobby. Clay and Tom had moved Franklin’s body behind the reception desk, dismissing the bald clerk’s loud and bizarre protest that “it will just be under my feet there.” The clerk, who had given his name simply as Mr. Ricardi, had since retired to his inner office. Clay had followed him just long enough to ascertain that Mr. Ricardi had been telling the truth about the TV being out of commish, then left him there. Sharon Riddell would have said Mr. Ricardi was brooding in his tent.

The man hadn’t let Clay go without a parting shot, however. “Now we’re open to the world,” he said bitterly. “I hope you think you’ve accomplished something.”

“Mr. Ricardi,” Clay said, as patiently as he could, “I saw a plane crash-land on the other side of Boston Common not an hour ago. It sounds like more planes—big ones—are doing the same thing at Logan. Maybe they’re even making suicide runs on the terminals. There are explosions all over downtown. I’d say that this afternoon all of Boston is open to the world.”

As if to underline this point, a very heavy thump had come from above them. Mr. Ricardi didn’t look up. He only flapped a
begone
hand in Clay’s direction. With no TV to look at, he sat in his desk chair and looked severely at the wall.

12

Clay and Tom moved the two bogus Queen Anne chairs against the door, where their high backs did a pretty good job of filling the shattered frames that had once held glass. While Clay was sure that locking the hotel off from the street offered flimsy or outright false security, he thought that blocking the
view
from the street might be a good idea, and Tom had concurred. Once the chairs were in place, they lowered the sun-blind over the lobby’s main window. That dimmed the room considerably and sent faint prison-bar shadows marching across the turkey-red rug.

With these things seen to, and Alice Maxwell’s radically abridged tale told, Clay finally went to the telephone behind the desk. He glanced at his watch. It was 4:22 p.m., a perfectly logical time for it to be, except any ordinary sense of time seemed to have been canceled. It felt like hours since he’d seen the man biting the dog in the park. It also seemed like no time at all. But there
was
time, such as humans measured it, anyway, and in Kent Pond, Sharon would surely be back by now at the house he still thought of as home. He needed to talk to her. To make sure she was all right and tell her he was, too, but those weren’t the important things. Making sure Johnny was all right, that was important, but there was something even more important than that. Vital, really.

He didn’t have a cell phone, and neither did Sharon, he was almost positive of that. She might have picked one up since they’d separated in April, he supposed, but they still lived in the same town, he saw her almost every day, and he thought if she’d picked one up, he would have known. For one thing, she would have given him the number, right? Right. But—

But Johnny had one. Little Johnny-Gee, who wasn’t so little anymore, twelve wasn’t so little, and that was what he’d wanted for his last birthday. A red cell phone that played the theme music from his favorite TV program when it rang. Of course he was forbidden to turn it on or even take it out of his backpack when he was in school, but school hours were over now. Also, Clay and Sharon actually
encouraged
him to take it, partly because of the separation. There might be emergencies, or minor inconveniences such as a missed bus. What Clay had to hang on to was how Sharon had said she’d look into Johnny’s room lately and more often than not see the cell lying forgotten on his desk or the windowsill beside his bed, off the charger and dead as dogshit.

Still, the thought of John’s red cell phone ticked away in his mind like a bomb.

Clay touched the landline phone on the hotel desk, then withdrew his hand. Outside, something else exploded, but this one was distant. It was like hearing an artillery shell explode when you were well behind the lines.

Don’t make that assumption,
he thought.
Don’t even assume there
are
lines.

He looked across the lobby and saw Tom squatting beside Alice as she sat on the sofa. He was murmuring to her quietly, touching one of her loafers and looking up into her face. That was good.
He
was good. Clay was increasingly glad he’d run into Tom McCourt…or that Tom McCourt had run into him.

The landlines were probably all right. The question was whether probably was good enough. He had a wife who was still sort of his responsibility, and when it came to his son there was no sort-of at all. Even thinking of Johnny was dangerous. Every time his mind turned to the boy, Clay felt a panic-rat inside his mind, ready to burst free of the flimsy cage that held it and start gnawing anything it could get at with its sharp little teeth. If he could make sure Johnny and Sharon were okay, he could keep the rat in its cage and plan what to do next. But if he did something stupid, he wouldn’t be able to help anyone. In fact, he would make things worse for the people here. He thought about this a little and then called the desk clerk’s name.

When there was no answer from the inner office, he called again. When there was still no answer, he said, “I know you hear me, Mr. Ricardi. If you make me come in there and get you, it’ll annoy me. I might get annoyed enough to consider putting you out on the street.”

“You can’t do that,” Mr. Ricardi said in a tone of surly instruction. “You are a
guest
of the
hotel.”

Clay thought of repeating what Tom had said to him while they were still outside—
things have changed.
Something made him keep silent instead.

“What,” Mr. Ricardi said at last. Sounding more surly than ever. From overhead came a louder thump, as if someone had dropped a heavy piece of furniture. A bureau, maybe. This time even the girl looked up. Clay thought he heard a muffled shout—or maybe a howl of pain—but if so, there was no follow-up. What was on the second floor? Not a restaurant, he remembered being told (by Mr. Ricardi himself, when Clay checked in) that the hotel didn’t have a restaurant, but the Metropolitan Cafe was right next door.
Meeting rooms,
he thought.
I’m pretty sure it’s meeting rooms with Indian names.

“What?”
Mr. Ricardi asked again. He sounded grouchier than ever.

“Did you try to call anyone when all this started happening?”

“Well
of course!”
Mr. Ricardi said. He came to the door between the inner office and the area behind the reception desk, with its pigeonholes, security monitors, and its bank of computers. There he looked at Clay indignantly. “The fire alarms went off—I got
them
stopped, Doris said it was a wastebasket fire on the third floor—and I called the Fire Department to tell them not to bother. The line was busy!
Busy,
can you imagine!”

“You must have been very upset,” Tom said.

Mr. Ricardi looked mollified for the first time. “I called the police when things outside started… you know…to go downhill.”

“Yes,” Clay said.
To go downhill
was one way of putting it, all right. “Did you get an answer?”

“A man told me I’d have to clear the line and then hung up on me,” Mr. Ricardi said. The indignation was creeping back into his voice. “When I called again—this was after the crazy man came out of the elevator and killed Franklin—a woman answered. She said…” Mr. Ricardi’s voice had begun to quiver and Clay saw the first tears running down the narrow defiles that marked the sides of the man’s nose. “… said…”

“What?” Tom asked, in that same tone of mild sympathy. “What did she say, Mr. Ricardi?”

“She said if Franklin was dead and the man who killed him had run away, then I didn’t have a problem. It was she who advised me to lock myself in. She also told me to call the hotel’s elevators to lobby level and shut them off, which I did.”

Clay and Tom exchanged a look that carried a wordless thought:
Good idea.
Clay got a sudden vivid image of bugs trapped between a closed window and a screen, buzzing furiously but unable to get out. This picture had something to do with the thumps they’d heard coming from above them. He wondered briefly how long before the thumper or thumpers up there would find the stairs.

“Then
she
hung up on me. After that, I called my wife in Milton.”

“You got through to her,” Clay said, wanting to be clear on this.

“She was very frightened. She asked me to come home. I told her I had been advised to stay inside with the doors locked. Advised by the police. I told her to do the same thing. Lock up and keep a, you know, low profile. She
begged
me to come home. She said there had been gunshots on the street, and an explosion a street over. She said she had seen a naked man running through the Benzycks’ yard. The Benzycks live next door to us.”

“Yes,” Tom said mildly. Soothingly, even. Clay said nothing. He was a bit ashamed at how angry he’d been at Mr. Ricardi, but Tom had been angry, too.

“She said she believed the naked man might—
might,
she only said
might
—have been carrying the body of a…mmm… nude child. But possibly it was a doll. She begged me again to leave the hotel and come home.”

Clay had what he needed. The landlines were safe. Mr. Ricardi was in shock but not crazy. Clay put his hand on the telephone. Mr. Ricardi laid his hand over Clay’s before Clay could pick up the receiver. Mr. Ricardi’s fingers were long and pale and very cold. Mr. Ricardi wasn’t done. Mr. Ricardi was on a roll.

“She called me a son of a bitch and hung up. I know she was angry with me, and of course I understand why. But the police told me to lock up and stay put. The police told me to keep off the streets. The police. The
authorities.”

Clay nodded. “The authorities, sure.”

“Did you come by the T?” Mr. Ricardi asked. “I always use the T. It’s just two blocks down the street. It’s very convenient.”

“It wouldn’t be convenient this afternoon,” Tom said. “After what we just saw, you couldn’t get me down there on a bet.”

Mr. Ricardi looked at Clay with mournful eagerness. “You see?”

Clay nodded again. “You’re better off in here,” he said. Knowing that he meant to get home and see to his boy. Sharon too, of course, but mostly his boy. Knowing he would let nothing stop him unless something absolutely did. It was like a weight in his mind that cast an actual shadow on his vision. “Much better off.” Then he picked up the phone and punched 9 for an outside line. He wasn’t sure he’d get one, but he did. He dialed 1, then 207, the area code for all of Maine, and then 692, which was the prefix for Kent Pond and the surrounding towns. He got three of the last four numbers—almost to the house he still thought of as home—before the distinctive three-tone interrupt. A recorded female voice followed. “We’re sorry. All circuits are busy. Please try your call again later.”

On the heels of this came a dial tone as some automated circuit disconnected him from Maine…if that was where the robot voice had been coming from. Clay let the handset drop to the level of his shoulder, as if it had grown very heavy. Then he put it back in the cradle.

13

Tom told him he was crazy to want to leave.

For one thing, he pointed out, they were relatively safe here in the Atlantic Avenue Inn, especially with the elevators locked down and lobby access from the stairwell blocked off. This they had done by piling boxes and suitcases from the luggage room in front of the door at the end of the short corridor beyond the elevator banks. Even if someone of extraordinary strength were to push against that door from the other side, he’d only be able to shift the pile against the facing wall, creating a gap of maybe six inches. Not enough to get through.

For another, the tumult in the city beyond their little safe haven actually seemed to be increasing. There was a constant racket of conflicting alarms, shouts and screams and racing engines, and sometimes the panic-tang of smoke, although the day’s brisk breeze seemed to be carrying the worst of that away from them.
So far,
Clay thought, but did not say aloud, at least not yet—he didn’t want to frighten the girl any more than she already was. There were explosions that never seemed to come singly but rather in spasms. One of those was so close that they all ducked, sure the front window would blow in. It didn’t, but after that they moved to Mr. Ricardi’s inner sanctum.

The third reason Tom gave for thinking Clay was crazy to even
think
about leaving the marginal safety of the Inn was that it was now quarter past five. The day would be ending soon. He argued that trying to leave Boston in the dark would be madness.