The Scarecrow (39 page)

I started running down the hall, panic engulfing me as I yelled into the phone.

“I need help! Mesa Verde Inn, seventh floor! Now!”

I made the turn into the central hallway and caught a split-second glimpse of a man with bleached-blond hair and wearing a red waiter’s jacket. He was pushing a large laundry cart through a pair of double doors on the far side of the guest elevators. Though it had been only a quick view, the picture didn’t add up.

“Hey!”

I increased my speed, covered the ground quickly and hit the double doors just seconds after I saw them close. I came into a small housekeeping vestibule and saw the door of a service elevator closing. I lunged for the door, reaching my hand out, but I was too late. It was gone. I backed away and looked up. There were no numbers or arrows above the door that would tell me which way he was going. I smashed back through the double doors and ran to the guest elevators. The stairwells, at either end of the hallway, were too far to consider.

I quickly pushed the down button, thinking it was the obvious choice to make. It led to the exit. It led to escape. I thought about the laundry cart and the forward-leaning angle of the man who was pushing it. There was something heavier than laundry in it, I was sure. He had Rachel.

There were four guest elevators and I got lucky. As soon as I hit the button the door chimed and an elevator opened. I leaped through the opening door and saw that the lobby button was already lit. I machine-gunned the close-door button and waited interminably long as the door slowly, gently closed.

“Easy, buddy. We’ll get there.”

I turned and saw there was a man already on the elevator. He was wearing a conventioneer’s name tag with a blue ribbon hanging from it. I was about to tell him it was an emergency, when I remembered the phone in my hand.

“Hello? Are you still there?”

There was static on the line but I still had a connection. I could feel the elevator start to drop quickly.

“Yes, sir. I’ve dispatched the police. Can you tell me—”

“Listen to me, there’s a guy dressed like a waiter and he’s trying to abduct a federal agent. Call the FBI. Send every—Hello? Are you there?”

Nothing. I’d lost the call. I felt the elevator come to a hard stop as we reached the lobby. The conventioneer pushed back into the corner and tried to disappear. I stepped up to the doors and moved through them before they had barely opened.

I stepped into an alcove off the lobby. Adjusting my bearings in relation to where the service elevator would be located, I took a left and then another left through a door marked employees only and entered a rear hallway. I heard kitchen noises and smelled food. There were stainless-steel shelves lined with commercial-size cans of food and other products. I saw the service elevator but no sign of the man in the red jacket or the laundry cart.

Had I beaten the service elevator down? Or had he gone up?

I pushed the elevator call button.

“Hey, you’re not supposed to be back here.”

I turned quickly to see a man in kitchen whites and a dirty apron walking toward me in the hall.

“Did you see a guy pushing a laundry cart?” I asked quickly.

“Not in the kitchen, I didn’t.”

“Is there a basement?”

The man took an unlit cigarette out of his mouth to answer.

“There ain’t no basement.”

He gestured with the hand holding the cigarette. I realized he was going outside for a smoke break. There was an exit somewhere close.

“Is there a way out from here to the parking garage?”

He pointed past me.

“The loading dock is—Hey, look out!”

I started to turn back to the elevator just as the laundry cart came crashing into me. It hit me thigh high and my upper body pivoted over the edge. I put my hands out to break my fall into the pile of linens and the bedspread in it. I could feel something soft but solid under the covers and knew it was Rachel. I pushed my weight backward and slid back onto my feet.

I looked up and saw the elevator closing again as the man in the red jacket held his hand on the door-close button. I looked at his face and recognized it from the mug shot I had seen earlier that night. He was cleaned up and blond now, but I was sure it was Marc Courier. I looked back at the elevator control panel and saw a floor light glowing from the top. Courier was going back up.

I reached into the cart and yanked back the bedspread. There was Rachel. She was still wearing the clothes she’d had on earlier in the day. She was facedown with her arms and legs hog-tied behind her back. A terry cloth belt from a hotel room bathrobe had been tied as a gag across her mouth. Her nose and mouth were bleeding profusely. Her eyes were glassy and distant.

“Rachel!”

I reached down and pulled the gag down off her mouth.

“Rachel? Are you all right? Can you hear me?”

She didn’t respond. The kitchen man stepped over and looked down into the cart.

“What the hell is going on?”

She was bound with plastic cable ties. I pulled the folding corkscrew out of my pocket and used the small blade designed for cap cutting to slice through the plastic.

“Help me get her out!”

We carefully lifted her out of the cart and put her on the floor. I dropped down next to her and made sure the blood had not closed off her airways. Her nostrils were caked with it but her mouth was clear. She had been beaten and her face was beginning to swell.

I looked up at the kitchen man.

“Go call security. And nine-one-one. Now!
GO!
”

He started running down the hall for a phone. I looked back down at Rachel and saw she was becoming alert.

“Jack?”

“It’s all right, Rachel. You’re safe.”

Her eyes looked scared and hurt. I felt a rage building inside me.

From down the hallway I heard the kitchen man yell.

“They’re coming! Paramedics and po-lice!”

I didn’t look up at him. I kept my eyes on Rachel.

“There, you hear that? Help is on the way.”

She nodded and I saw more life returning to her eyes. She coughed and tried to sit up. I helped her and then pulled her into a hug. I rubbed the back of her neck.

She whispered something I couldn’t hear and I pulled back to look at her and asked her to say it again.

“I thought you were in L.A.”

I smiled and shook my head.

“I was too paranoid about going away from the story. And from you. I was going to surprise you with a good bottle of wine. That’s when I saw him. It was Courier.”

She made a slight nodding motion.

“You saved me, Jack. I didn’t recognize him through the peephole. When I opened the door, it was too late. He hit me. I tried to fight but he had a knife.”

I shushed her. No explanation was necessary.

“Listen, was he by himself? Was McGinnis there?”

She shook her head.

“I only saw Courier. I recognized him too late.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

The kitchen man was standing back down the hall, now with other men dressed in kitchen clothes. I signaled them to come forward and they didn’t move at first. Then one reluctantly stepped forward and the others followed.

“Push that elevator button for me,” I said.

“You sure?” one asked.

“Just do it.”

I leaned down and put my face into the crook of Rachel’s neck. I hugged her tightly, breathed in her scent and whispered in her ear.

“He went up. I’m going to go get him.”

“No, Jack, you wait here. Stay with me.”

I pulled up and looked into her eyes. I said nothing until I heard the elevator open. I then looked up at the kitchen man I had originally spoken to. On his white shirt the name
Hank
was embroidered.

“Where’s security?”

“They should be here,” he said. “They’re coming.”

“Okay, I want you men to wait here with her. Don’t leave her. When security gets here, you tell them there’s another victim on the seventh-floor stairwell and that I went up to the top to look for the guy. Tell security to cover all the exits and elevators. This guy went up, but he’s gonna have to try to come down.”

Rachel started to get up.

“I’m going with you,” she said.

“No, you’re not. You’re hurt. You stay here and I’ll be right back. I promise.”

I left her there and stepped onto the elevator. I pushed the 12 button and looked back at Rachel. As the door closed I noticed that Hank the kitchen man was nervously lighting his cigarette.

It was a damn-the-rules moment for both of us.

T
he service elevator moved slowly upward and I came to realize that so much of Rachel’s rescue had relied on pure luck—a slow elevator, my staying in Mesa to surprise her, my taking the stairs with the bottle of wine. But I didn’t want to dwell on what could have been. I concentrated on the moment and when the elevator finally reached the top of the building, I stood ready with the one-inch corkscrew blade as the door opened. I realized I should have grabbed a better weapon from the kitchen, but it was too late now.

The housekeeping vestibule on twelve was empty except for the red waiter’s jacket I saw dropped on the floor. I pushed through the swinging doors and into the central hallway. I could hear sirens coming from outside the building now. A lot of them.

Looking both ways I saw nothing and I started to realize that a one-man search of a twelve-story hotel nearly as wide as it was tall was going to be a waste of time. Between elevators and stairwells, Courier had his choice of multiple escape routes.

I decided to go back down to Rachel and leave the search for hotel security and the arriving police.

But I knew that on the way down I could cover at least one of those exit routes. Maybe my luck would hold. I chose the north stairwell because it was closest to the hotel’s parking garage. And it was the stairwell Courier had used earlier to hide the body of the room service waiter.

I went down the hallway, rounded the corner and then pushed through the exit door. I first looked over the railing and down the shaft. I saw nothing and heard only the echo of the sirens. I was just about to head down the steps, when I noticed that even though I was on the top floor of the hotel, the stairs continued up.

If there was access to the roof, I needed to check it. I headed up.

The stairwell was dimly lit by a sconce on each landing. Each floor was broken into two sets of stairs and landings in the routine back-and-forth design. When I reached the midlevel and turned to take the next set of stairs to what would be the thirteenth floor, I saw the upper and final landing was crowded with stored hotel room furnishings. I came all the way up to where the stairs ended in a large storage area. There were bed tables stacked on top of one another and mattresses leaning four deep against one of the walls. There were stacks of chairs and mini-refrigerators and pre–flat-screen-era television cabinets. I was reminded of the filing cabinets I had seen in the Public Defender’s Office hallway. There had to be multiple code violations here, but who was looking? Who ever came up here? Who cared?

I worked my way around a grouping of standing stainless-steel lamps and toward a door with a small square window at face height. The word roof had been painted on it with a stencil. But when I got to it, I found the door was locked. I pushed hard on the release bar but it wouldn’t move. Something had jammed or locked the mechanism and the door wouldn’t budge. I looked through the window and saw a flat gravel roof running behind the barrel-tiled parapets of the hotel. Across a forty-yard expanse of gravel I could see the structure that housed the building’s elevator equipment. Beyond that was another door to the stairwell on the other side of the hotel.

I shifted to my left and leaned in closer to the window so I could get a wider view of the roof. Courier could be out there.

Just as I did this, I saw a blurred reflection of movement in the glass.

Someone was behind me.

Instinctively, I jumped sideways and turned at the same time. Courier’s arm swung down with a knife and barely missed me as he crashed into the door.

I planted my feet and then drove my body into his, bringing my arm up and stabbing my own blade into his side.

But my weapon was too short. I scored a direct hit but didn’t do enough damage to bring down the target. Courier yelped and brought his forearm down on my wrist, knocking my blade to the floor. He then took an enraged, roundhouse swing at me with his own. I managed to duck underneath it but got a good look at his blade. It was at least four inches long and I knew if he connected with it, it would be a one-and-done proposition for me.

Courier made another jab and this time I parried to the right and caught his wrist. The only advantage I had was my size. I was older and slower than Courier, but I had forty pounds on him. While holding his knife hand away, I threw my body into him again, knocking him back through the forest of stand-up lamps and onto the concrete floor.

He broke free during the fall and then scrabbled to his feet with the knife ready. I grabbed one of the lamps, holding its round base out and ready to spar at him and deflect the next assault.

For a moment nothing happened. He held the knife at the ready and we seemed to be taking each other’s measure, waiting for the other to make the next move. I then made a charge with the lamp base but he sidestepped it easily. We then squared off again. He had a desperate sort of smile on his face and was breathing heavily.

“Where are you going to go, Courier? You hear all those sirens? They’re here, man. There’s going to be cops and FBI all over this place in two minutes. Where’re you going to go then?”

He didn’t say anything and I took another poke at him with the lamp. He grabbed the base and we momentarily struggled for control of it, but I pushed him back into a stack of mini-refrigerators and they crashed to the floor.

I had no experience in the area of knife fighting, but my instincts told me to keep talking. If I distracted Courier, then I would lessen the threat from the knife and possibly get an open shot at him. So I kept throwing the questions at him, waiting for my moment.