Creepers

Unseen lightning cracked. Amanda and Vi

"So now you're a pop psychologist in addition to being a failed soldier and a mediocre policeman?" the voice asked.

"Detective. I was a detective. And I guess all that research you did about me didn't tell you the crimes I investigated. Or maybe you made yourself ignore that because you didn't want to think about your problem. Sex crimes, Ro

Ro

"1968," Balenger said into the walkie-talkie. "There's a photograph of you and Carlisle. It has a date on the back: July 31, 1968. A month later, Iris McKenzie disappeared. By the end of the year, Carlisle closed the hotel, dismissed the staff, and lived here alone. Or maybe he wasn't alone. Ro

Balenger flipped through the police file, page after page, remembering something, searching for it. Ro

"What?" the voice asked.

54

"Ro

"Shut up," the voice said.

Thunder rumbled.

"You're Ronald Whitaker."

"Shut up. Shut up."

Amid the din of the rain, Balenger heard pounding from below. Not from the trapdoor. Farther down. Aiming, he unlocked and opened the trapdoor. His goggles revealed the curved, green-tinted stairs.

"Shut up. Shut up," Ro

As the fierce pounding continued, Balenger eased down the stairs and peered through the demolished wall into Danata's ravaged living room.

The pounding came from the barricaded door, powerful enough to jostle the furniture stacked against it.

"Your mother died," Balenger said into the walkie-talkie. "Your father molested you."

"I'll make you hurt so much, you'll beg me to kill you!" Ro

Balenger entered Danata's living room and aimed toward the door. Keeping his voice low, trying to make Ro

"I won't listen!"

"The guy tried to bribe you with a baseball, a glove, and a bat. I can't imagine how unspeakable it was. Afterward, your father came back to the room with the money. He was drunk. He fell asleep. You bashed his head twenty-two times with the bat. Ro

Rain lashed against the building. Thunder shook the walls.

"But I hate everything he became, Ro

"My name's Walter Harrigan!"

Balenger fired toward the voice. Once. Twice. At the door's middle, his bullets plowed through the wood.

Immediately, he shifted position, an instant before part of the wall roared open from two shotgun blasts, pellets spraying toward the noise from his gun.

One of the pellets caught Balenger's arm. Ignoring the pain, he fired to the right and left of the holes in the wall. He veered toward the stairwell as two more holes roared through the wall.

From the darkness beyond the holes, he heard Ro

Damn it, I let him trick me! He got me to waste ammunition! Only five rounds left!

Static crackled from his walkie-talkie.

Ro

"The holes don't show the light from your headlamp," the voice said from Balenger's walkie-talkie. "Now I understand. While your friends distracted me, you went down the stairwell to the bodies. You got their night-vision goggles."

Balenger braced himself at the trapdoor's opening. Ro

"Well, there's one you didn't find," the voice said.

A rumble shook the building. For a moment, Balenger thought it was another strong burst of thunder. But as the walls trembled, it was obvious that the reverberation came from inside. He had to grip the edge of the trapdoor's opening to steady himself. He felt a shock wave slam his ears.

Above him, Amanda yelled, "Over here! The surveillance room!"

Balenger surged up through the hatch. He ran to the surveillance room and opened its trapdoor. Smoke made him cough. As it cleared, the goggles showed him that the staircase had been blown apart three floors down. The twisted steel remnants vibrated, swaying. Far below, there were flames.

Balenger raised the walkie-talkie. "If you're talking about the metal box you strapped to Amanda, we did find it. I threw it down the surveillance room's staircase. A fire's trying to get started down there."

"Tomorrow, I pla

The abrupt change of topic made Balenger uneasy. "The coins?"

"A fortune, but I couldn't use them to pay the taxes on this place," the voice said bitterly. "I went to different coin dealers in different cities. Never more than a couple of coins at a time. Never the priceless ones. But you need to sell a lot of seven-hundred-dollar coins to try to pay fifty thousand dollars in property taxes. One day, in Philadelphia, a dealer I'd never met looked at what I offered and said, 'So you're the guy with all the double eagles. The other dealers are talking about you.' And that was the last coin I dared try to sell.''

Why is he talking so much? Balenger wondered. He's stalling for time. What's he up to?

Abruptly, Balenger recalled what he'd said to Ro

Balenger charged from the open trapdoor, lunging toward the bedroom. Something exploded behind him, but there wasn't any shrapnel. What the blast sent was a flash of heat that filled the surveillance room. The detonator next to the trapdoor, Balenger realized. Ro

Amanda and Vi

"Vi

In the bedroom, Vi

"The trapdoor!" Balenger shouted. "Get away from-"

Stu

The trapdoor.

The detonator.

The blast was small but deafening. It sent a flash up Vi

Balenger grabbed the bedspread and flailed at Vi

In rapid succession, detonators exploded throughout the penthouse. Balenger saw their flashes, saw flames in the surveillance room and the medical room.

"A fire extinguisher!" Amanda yelled. "The kitchen!" She ran through the surveillance room, dodging the fire.

Balenger grabbed a decorative pitcher from a bureau and hurried into the bathroom. He twisted a knob on the sink, but no water came out. The electricity's off! The pump isn't working! he remembered. He scooped water from the toilet bowl, ran into the medical room, and dumped the pitcher onto the flames. A shotgun blast tore another hole in the floor, but by then Balenger was racing back to the bathroom. He yanked off the toilet-tank lid and scooped water. This time, he didn't enter the medical room but stopped at its entrance, hurling the water onto the flames. The fire hissed and shrank. The toilet tank again. He scooped out all the water he could get and ran to the medical room. Now, when he threw the water, the flames went out.