Blow Fly

She stabs at the elevator button, missing it several times, swaying and clutching the drunk man's arm.

"Come on, baby, let's go," she slurs with a Russian accent, leaning against him.

"Now ain't that sweet…" He is about to show besotted surprise and pleasure in her company when she reaches up and kisses him hard on the mouth.

The elevator doors open and she pulls him inside, wrapping herself around him and continuing a long, tongue-groping kiss that tastes like garlic and whiskey. The security guard stares stonily at them as the doors shut.

Mistake.

The guard will remember her face. Lucy's face is hard to forget, and the guard had plenty of time to look at it because Lucy was trapped with the drunk asshole.

Big mistake.

She hits button 2 as the man paws her. He doesn't seem to notice that the elevator is stopping at the wrong floor, but suddenly his new lover is ru

Lucy follows exit signs, turning into another hallway, then into a stairway. She silently makes her way up three flights and waits on the dimly lit landing, holding her breath and listening, sweat rolling down her face and soaking her sexy black blouse. Possibly, it was habit more than instinct that caused her to pluck up a plastic hotel key from the table in Caggiano's room and tuck it in a pocket of her windbreaker. Whenever she checks out of a hotel, she always keeps a key, if it is a disposable one, in the event she suddenly realizes she has forgotten something. Once, and she doesn't like to remember this, she left her gun in a bedside drawer and didn't realize it until she was climbing into a taxi. Thank God she still had a key.

The Do Not Disturb sign hangs ominously from the doorknob of room 511, and Lucy searches the hallway, desperately hoping she is not surprised by anyone else. As she makes her approach, she faintly hears the television inside Rocco's room, and a sick pain stabs her stomach. Fear burns. Recalling what she and Rudy just did is awful, and now she must confront their sin again.

A green light flickers, and she pushes open the door with her elbows because she has no fresh gloves, having raced off without them. She runs into a wall of rank smell from Rocco's last greasy meal and detects his alcohol-saturated blood. It coagulates like pudding under his head, his eyes half open and dull, the chair overturned, the gun under his chest, every detail exactly as she and Rudy had left it. Blow flies buzz around his body, searching for the perfect piece of moist human real estate to appropriate for their eggs. Lucy stares, transfixed, at the frenzied insects.

She focuses on her tactical baton. It, too, is exactly as she left it, on the table to the left of the bed.

"Oh, thank God," she mutters.

The baton is safely back up her sleeve as she cautiously opens the door, wiping the knob with her blouse. This time she takes the stairs all the way down to the service level, where she hears the murmur of voices, possibly from the kitchen. Along walls are carts loaded with dirty dishes, wilted flowers in bud vases, empty wine bottles and what is left from cocktails and other beverages. Food is hardened on hotel china and stains white cloths and wadded napkins. There are no flies down here. Not one.

She swallows repeatedly, suddenly nauseous as she envisions the blow flies crawling all over Rocco and feeding on his gore. She thinks about what will happen next. Inside his warm room, blow fly eggs will hatch into maggots that, depending on how long he remains undiscovered, will teem over his decomposing body, especially inside his wound and other orifices. Blow flies love deep, dark, moist crevices and passageways.

The intense presence of carrion predators will throw off Rocco's time of death, as intended when Rudy introduced the flies into the room. The forensic pathologist who examines Rocco's body will be confused by the story of when room service delivered his late di

The warmth of the room will be factored in but should not arouse suspicion. The empty champagne bottle has Caggiano's prints on it, should the police bother to check, although there will be no record of his ordering the champagne or receiving it compliments of the manager. He could have bought it elsewhere. The Red Notice will have his prints on it, should anyone bother to check, and she must assume someone will.

She wishes Rocco had not ordered room service, but she pla

Who will care that Rocco Caggiano is dead? Perhaps no one except the Chando

46

LUCY SPRINTS THROUGH the dark, her aching chest not due to physical exertion.

The Mercedes is quiet on the side of the street, and she can't see Rudy through the tinted windows. The locks click free and she opens the driver's door.

"Mission accomplished?" he grimly asks in the dark. "Don't start the car yet."

She tells him about her encounter with the drunk and the hotel staff and explains the way she handled it. He says nothing. She feels his disapproval and irritation with her.

"Give me some credit. I think we're fine."

"As fine as you could be under the circumstances," he has to admit.

"There's no reason for anyone to co

"And his blood alcohol will be high, no reason in the world for anyone to think anything but suicide, and the hotel will want his rotting body and maggots out of there as quickly as possible. And the medical examiner will think he's been dead longer than room service says-assuming there is an exact time associated with Rocco's di

"For a fact?" Rudy asks. "How the hell can you know that for a fact?"

"What do you think I am, fucking stupid? I called. Days ago. Said I was a Hewlett-Packard rep checking on their computers and that the one the kitchen used for room service needed a software upgrade. And they didn't know what I was talking about, said they didn't use computers for room service, only for inventory. Then I talked about the advantages of using an hp pavilion 753n with an Intel Pentium processor and eighty-gigabyte hard drive and CD-ROM and all the rest for room service orders… Point is, there is no computer record of what time Rocco ordered di