She was gone, leaving Vangie gasping like a netted fish.
“Noreen! Wait...” Noreen was still gone. “But... but he can’t... we can’t...”
She ran almost blindly at the door, slamming it shut and bolting it. Panting, she reached down the front of her cache-sexe and took out a flat old-fashioned tin aspirin box. She dropped it into her purse as she crossed on wobbly legs to the pay phone beside the door. She dropped her quarter into the slot and began tapping out a number, leaving the receiver hang on the end of its silvery flex so she could be pulling on her street clothes with the other hand. She was almost crying.
“He... he promised me, tomorrow afternoon... it isn’t fair...”
Zimmer’s eyes darted toward the door at the discreet knock. His face looked flayed down to the bone. Maxton came in wearing an elegant summer-weight suit and open-throat raw-silk sport shirt. He looked a question at Nicky, who shook his head. Trask came out of the bathroom. Like Nicky, he wore thin surgical gloves. He also shook his head.
“Indeed.” Maxton dragged a straight chair in front of the door, sat down in it backward so he faced the room with his arms on the back, said to Zimmer, “James, take off your clothes.”
“No!” cried Zimmer in a terrified voice.
The phone rang. Zimmer jerked galvanically toward it. Maxton shook his head and said soothingly, “Just to make sure you aren’t hiding some significant other in your shorts, James.”
The phone kept on ringing, but it was now much too late for anything outside this room to affect events inside it. Zimmer began to unbutton his shirt with leaden fingers.
Vangie was buttoning her last button with one hand while slamming the receiver back on the hook with the other. She grabbed her purse from the dressing table, her high heels clattered down the hallway on her way to the alley door.
Maxton was out of his chair, leaning against the inside of the door with his arms folded on his chest, staring at Zimmer nude and shivering in the middle of the floor. Zimmer had thin arms and a sunken chest with a single scraggly tuft of brown hair growing over the breastbone. Nicky dropped the last of Zimmer’s clothes on the floor.
“Nothing significant, Mr. Maxton.” He snapped Zimmer’s flaccid organ with a finger, chuckled, “Especially not in his shorts.”
“So she does have the bonds. Dain was right.” Maxton spoke almost to himself. He turned an icy eye on Zimmer. “James? Talk to me.”
“A key,” said Zimmer eagerly. “Vangie has it. It was all her idea to take the bonds, Mr. Maxton. I... I didn’t think until... until it was too late...” Maxton was silent. Zimmer cried, “Dain! Dain knows she has the key!”
Maxton’s voice was a whip. “You spoke with Dain?”
“Vangie did.”
“Key to what?”
“To a locker. At the bus depot.”
Maxton was silent, then smiled and nodded. “Yes. I see. Thank you, James. You’ve been a great help.”
“Can... can I get dressed now, Mr. Maxton?”
Maxton gestured to his men. “Goodbye, James,” he said.
He turned away as Nicky and Trask began crowding Jimmy back toward the open bathroom door like driving a steer into the slaughterhouse chute. He clung to the door frame with despairing strength; their big athletes’ hands tore his soft deskman’s hands free like wet blotting paper. They shut the bathroom door behind them. Maxton could hear the muffled sound of water being run into the tub as he departed the hotel room.
Vangie came through the open street door at almost a run, slowed abruptly to a walk, trying to look casual and not making it. As she put out a finger to press the elevator button, it started down from the sixth floor. She ducked into the doorway of the emergency stairwell beside the elevator. Nicky and Trask left the elevator glancing around the lobby, seeing nothing of interest, strutting toward the street. Trask was telling Nicky a dirty joke, and they were guffawing.
Vangie cautiously opened the stairwell door to peek out into the hallway. Empty. She shut the door behind her, trying to stifle her panting from the six-floor all-out stair climb. The elevator descending from this floor didn’t have to have anything to do with her and Jimmy. He probably had gone out just to bug her, and hadn’t come back yet. That was all.
Still she hesitated before keying the lock with exaggerated caution. She let the door drift open on its own. The dim overhead was on, the bed still looked freshly made.
“Jimmy?” It was little more than a whisper. She moved in, shut the door behind her. “Jimmy?”
The closet was empty except for their clothes; she edged toward the bathroom door, cautious as a doe at the edge of a clearing. Turned the knob, feathered the door open, stuck her head in. The very narrow wedge of light let her see Jimmy’s bent knees rising above the water in the nearly full tub. One arm, resting against the edge of the tub, was also above-water.
Vangie pushed the door wider and fumbled along the wall for the light switch. Relief made her voice buoyant.
“Why in heaven’s name are you taking a bath in the dark?”
The room sprang into view. The water filling the tub was rosy with diluted blood, with Zimmer’s bent knees islands above this pastel surface. Brighter, richer red had run down the forearm above the water from his slashed wrist.
Vangie reeled against the sink, gripping the sides with her hands, face contorted, mouth working. Somehow she kept from screaming, though she clapped a hand over her mouth as if to physically hold in the sound. She ran from the room.
The Delta’s only bellboy, an aged man in his seventies with little hair and one cloudy lens in his eyeglasses, was leading an equally aged couple down the hallway outside with their suitcase in his hand. Vangie erupted from her room and knocked him down, bounced off the wall, eyes vague and unfocused, a hand still across her mouth. She lowered it to speak.
“Ex... excuseme...”
She ran away down the hall, careening from side to side like a car driven by a drunk. The bellboy braced one hand on the wall and with the help of the couple got shakily to his feet. He stared after Vangie, then turned and looked at the open door of the room. Back down the hall. To the room.
He started shakily through the open doorway.
19
The gypsy cab driver lit his cigarette, shook the match out and dropped it into the street. Vangie, after being handed a wig box by the woman behind the counter, came out of the exotic underwear shop in her very short skintight skirt and blouse with the top four buttons undone. She opened the rear door of the cab but the cabbie patted the seat beside him insinuatingly.
“Plenty of room up here, baby.”
“Bus depot,” she said, getting in the back.
He slammed the cab into gear, left rubber pulling away from the curb. He found her face in the rearview mirror. She had her head back against the seat with her eyes closed, Jimmy dead in their bathtub vivid against her eyelids.
“Stuck-up bitch,” the cabbie muttered to himself.
The cabin door crashed back against the wall. Two bulky men, silhouetted by moonlight, charged in with sawed-off shotguns in their hands. Heavy boots grated on bare plank floor. Silver ring glinted on a finger. One, sunglasses, curly hair. The other, ski mask.
“Doesn’t it bother you... that we might be killed?”
Vangie went back and up, her mouth strained impossibly wide, her eyes wild, her hair an underwater slow-motionswirl...