The Golden Globe

She just seemed to be idling around out there. She never really glanced at my door. Then, suddenly, she was moving, walking at a businesslike pace, until I couldn't see her anymore. A couple went by in the other direction, and I realized it was the arrival of the elevator that had spurred my lady into action. When I first saw her she was waiting in the wings, as it were. She went onstage when the new people arrived, and if all those suppositions were correct... yes, here she was again, pulling the suitcase, moving slowly, this time glancing at my door and then at her watch.

Okay. She's with Comfort. Did she see me enter the room? Possible. I'd seen her go around a corner, but she might have peeked back.

Say she didn't see me enter. I don't think she'd have recognized me, as the face I was wearing right now was quite different from the one Comfort had seen. So she didn't see me, and she's out there as an early warning system for Comfort.

I didn't believe it. I think she did see me, and the reason she was still outside was she was more use as a lookout than as a second-string torturer. They were contemptuous enough of my abilities against him alone that they felt they didn't need her as reinforcements. And they were right, too. I had been very lucky, and I didn't intend to abuse that luck.

Sparky, you must think very fast, and move very fast. You need a plan.

Soon I had one. It was full of holes, but it was the best I could do.

Near the center of the parlor a ventilation outlet was set into the ceiling, covered by a grid. I got my Swiss Army knife, moved a chair into position to stand on, and removed the screws holding the grid in place. I put the grid up into the ductwork above, then chi

I hurried into the bathroom once more. I stuffed a roll of toilet paper and three of those tiny bars of soap into my shirt, then I kicked 'Sambard Comfort in the head three more times, for luck. He still didn't move, still wasn't breathing.

It was time. I took a deep breath, and went to the front door again.

She was out there, looking a little impatient. Thinking he was taking too long? Waiting for a signal? It would probably be some sequence of taps on the front door. No way to know what it was. But that was okay. Keeping my eye to the lens, I rapped sharply, twice.

It galvanized her. She came away from the wall, hands going inside her coat for something. As she reached for the doorknob I put one round through the door about chest-high.

It hit her square in the sternum, lifted her, slammed her back against the opposite wall. Her right hand came out of her coat with a gun looking exactly like Comfort's. The impact with the wall knocked it loose and it bounced on the carpet. She started to reach for it again and I angled the gun down and fired four more rounds. It wasn't as noisy as I expected. There was some sort of silencer on the pistol, I was to discover, so most of the sound came from the lead ripping through the wood of the door.

Outside, each slug delivered a nasty spray of splinters that tore at her as well as the lead. One of the bullets went into the wall beside her head. The other three hit her at various places, doing a great deal of damage each time. She slumped over.

I had bitten the inside of my cheek. It hurt like hell. Feeling slightly numb, I noticed a brass casing at my feet. Shell casing? I picked it up, saw it was a whole bullet, a .55, I think. I had no idea what I'd done to make it eject an intact round. But I saw why the bullets had hit her so hard, caused so much damage, yet hadn't punched right through her into the wall. It was a hollow-point round. The slugs must have mushroomed when they hit the door, so by the time they hit her they must have been great, wide, irregular masses of hot metal. I winced at the image. Killing this person I didn't know did not exhilarate me. But she was the one who came hunting.

I jerked the door open. Nobody had stepped out in the hall to investigate the noise. The Othello's soundproofing was first-rate. I kicked her weapon through the open door, then grabbed her by the back of her coat and pulled her inside the room. She was deadweight, making no move at all. I hoped that meant she was as dead as Izzy Comfort.

The hall was sprayed with bright red blood. Nothing I could do about that. It didn't affect my plans, anyway. I'd be happier if no one called the front desk about spilled paint for the next fifteen, twenty minutes or so, but it wasn't vital to my plan.

My plan? Essentially, confuse the trail. Make it hard to figure out what happened here, with two corpses and a torture victim. Get out of the way, and maybe, maybe I'd have a shot at maintaining I hadn't been here at all when all the shit hit the fan.

Flimsy, I know, but what else was I going to do?

One thing, I decided in a hot flush of rage, was to make triply sure of Comfort this time. I was not going to let him become my Javert, chasing Jean Valjean down the endless years. I hurried to the bathroom, saw with satisfaction that he'd not moved an inch. I pressed the barrel of his weapon to his forehead and pulled the trigger.

Click.

I frowned, shouted something very nasty but heartfelt, and examined the data panel on the side. Again, all I could understand was ROUNDS REMAINING 10. I aimed down at him again.

Click, click.

Well, shit. Was it the round I ejected? An empty chamber? I looked at the side panel once more and squeezed the trigger.

Ker-THUNK! I jumped three feet in the air. Not because it was very noisy; it wasn't. The ker is an inadequate way of describing the sound the gun made as it fired, but the THUNK is a reasonable approximation of the bullet hitting the wall two feet above the floor, nowhere near Comfort.

God's holy freaking trousers. I thought I saw it now. I aimed and fired again at the dead man. Click. Click click. This gun would not fire at its owner.

My bowels suddenly turned to lime jelly. Comfort had some device on him, or in him, that his weapon sensed. Some type of safety mechanism. And if it wouldn't shoot at Comfort, what about...?

I stumbled into the parlor and aimed at the bloody corpse on the floor.

Click.

I sat right down where I had been standing. I was feeling faint. I had come that close to opening the hotel-room door and attempting to hold this woman at gunpoint—so I could bring her into the room and shoot her in the back, but she wouldn't have known that. What she would have known was that the pistol I was aiming at her was no more use than a pointed finger. She would have broken me in five or six places, and brought me in here for the two of them to clean, dress, and consume at their leisure.

All right, all right. Get a grip. Get up. Go into the bathroom again. Grab Izzy by the back of his coat and drag him through the door.

He wouldn't fit.

Played correctly it might have looked like a comedy of pratfalls, but I wasn't laughing. I pulled at him and tugged at him and fell over him, and slipped in a pool of his blood and nearly plunged into the spa pool. His body was not resisting, not moving in any way, but he seemed all arms and legs, all angles and corners, not limp like a dead body should be but hard and rigid. It was a cinch there was still something going on in that reengineered body, heartbeat or no heartbeat.

I can relate it all dispassionately now, but don't imagine I went about any of this coolly and logically. I was whimpering with fear, shaking with anger, sobbing in frustration. When I was sure I could no longer hold in a scream I dropped him again. I kicked his head one more time to grow on, then another because I felt like it. Then I left him there.