Dragging Angie along, they moved in tandem toward the door. Expecting the corridor to be filled with smoke or flames, Joanna was amazed when the hallway was relatively clear. Only a thin pall of smoke still hung in the air.
The fire alarm on the wall continued its nerve-shattering clamor, but there was no sign of flames.
At first Joanna was reassured by the fact that the fire was probably already under control, but that didn’t last long. Her second thought chilled her. If Vargas and York would go so far as to set fire to a hotel in order to flush out their quarry, then they would stop at nothing.
As they stepped into the corridor, Angie automatically turned toward the stairs. Joanna dragged her back and urged her in the opposite direction.
“Where are we going?” Angie protested.
“This way. There’s a fire escape back here.”
During their abbreviated honeymoon, Joanna remembered how she and Andy had tiptoed down this same hallway in the middle of the night for a two A.M. unauthorized session of skinny-dipping in the hotel’s postage stamp-sized pool. The space for the pool and surrounding patio had been carved out of a rock outcropping behind the hotel and was walled off by a combination of cliff and high stuccoed wall, but Joanna was sure she re-embered a door in the wall, or maybe a gate.
With Joanna still leading the way, they reached the fire exit door and peered out into the darkness. They were standing at the top of a long and narrow, dimly lit ramp. Halfway down the incline, the ramp doubled back on itself before dropping down to the pool. The back side of the patio was sheer cliff, the other two were impassable walls.
“We’re trapped,” Angie wailed, shrinking back into the building.
“No, we’re not,” Joanna insisted determindly. “This way.”
She dragged Angie down the ramp to the place she remembered. There, at a landing where the ramp doubled back, a dilapidated door had been built into the stuccoed wall. Barely daring to hope, Joanna tried the handle. The door was locked, but the weathered door shuddered and creaked when she pushed against it. She tried again, shoving harder this time. The wood seemed to give way beneath her body. Strengthened by a surge of fear-summoned adrenaline, she threw herself against the door. This time it sprang open, spilling both women headfirst into an abandoned street above a weed-choked yard.
Gaping for breath, Joanna leaped up and attempted to prop the door back shut. Inside the hotel, the clanging alarm ceased abruptly, leaving behind a strangely pregnant silence. Joanna held her breath and tried to listen over the rush of blood in her own ears. Sure enough, on the far side of the hotel, between it and the Presbyterian church next door, she heard at least one pair of pounding feet.
Joanna hurried back to Angie who was on her hands and knees in the rocks, patchy weeds, broken glass, and blowing trash, searching for something.
“Come on,” Joanna whispered urgently. “Someone’s coming.”
“My thong came off,” Angie whispered back. “I can’t find it anywhere.”
“You’ll have to go barefoot. Come on!”
She helped pull Angie to her feet. The woman was still clutching the beach bag. She may have lost a thong, but the money was still intact. Together they started across the broken pavement and the rough, uneven yard. They had gone barely two steps each when a broken bottle sliced into the bottom of Angie’s leg. Gasping in pain, she stopped in her tracks. Joanna looked down in time to see a spurt of blood pour from her wounded ankle.
“It’s not far,” Joanna whispered. “Lean on me. We can make it.”
Together they limped down the steep hill side to where a single frail streetlight dangled on a crooked pole at the top of a stairway. They paused momentarily at the top of the stairs. Below them they heard the occasional tires and saw the headlights of passing automobiles. There was still no sound of pursuit from behind. They might just make it.
“‘That’s Brewery Gulch,” Joanna said, whispering still. “If we can make it down there, we should find someone to help us.”
They started forward again. Joanna looked back over her shoulder. They had delayed for only a matter of seconds at the top of the stairs, but a pool of blood was clearly visible on the rough concrete surface of the step. Even without someone chasing them, there wasn’t a moment to lose.
In the the old days Brewery Gulch had been a wide-open redlight district, complete with bars, gambling dens, and scarlet women. Joanna remembered her father telling stories about how, even in his time, Brewery Gulch had liven a thriving beehive of activity. As they hurried down the stairs, Joanna fervently wished it were still so. In places like that, even a woman with a bloody foot could melt into a crowd and disappear, but the same economics that had closed down the copper mines had also emptied most of the bars along Brewery Gulch.
In the darkness behind and above them something heavy clattered to the ground. Their pursuer had discovered the door and knocked it down in his eagerness to come after them. The sound galvanized them both and they charged out of the stairway onto the raised sidewalk of a seemingly deserted street. Only two sets of neon lights offered any hope of haven.
Leading Angie along, Joanna headed for the closest one, a place called the Blue Moon Saloon. They barged in through the door. The sound of an approaching police vehicle entered the long high-ceilinged room with them. Joanna quickly shut the door closing out the noise.
Inside, the narrow room was smoky and dimly lit. A carved wooden bar ran the entire length of one wall. With the exception of the bartender and two solitary customers seated at opposite ends of the bar, the Blue Moon was empty. All three men glanced up in surprise at the sudden appearance of the two women who had stopped just inside the door.
“Hey, ladies,” the bartender called at once. “You gotta wear shoes in here. The health department’s already after my ass.”
“Hey, Bobo,” Joanna called. “Come quick and give me a hand. She’s bleeding to death.”
Bobo Jenkins, the huge bartender who had been the only black student in Andy’s graduating class, placed both hands on the bar then swung himself up and over and came hurrying to her side. He looked down at Angie’s bloody ankle. “Sheeit, Joanna, what’d she do, try to cut the damn thing off?”
“Somebody’s after us, Bobo. We need your help.”
Without a word, he picked Angie Kellogg up and carried her away from the door. He took her to the far wall where, holding her on raised knee, he opened a door that led to a small stock closet. He set her down on a bar stool.
“You wait here, honey,” he said. “Nobody’s going to find you here.” With that, he hurried back to Joanna who was mopping up the blood with the wet towel she had somehow managed to hang onto.
“I’ll handle that, Joanna. You go be with your friend. The door locks from inside.”
Nodding, Joanna scurried away while Bobo took over the cleanup difficulties. “There are clean towels inside there,” he called over his shoulder. “You’re going to need them. And as for you,” he said to the two men at the bar, “you two jokers may be too drunk to go chase the fire trucks, but you’d by god better be sober enough to keep your mouths shut, you hear7”
‘You’re the boss, Bobo,” one of them returned. “Archie and me’ll do whatever you say.”
Bobo was on his hands and knees mopping up the last of the blood that had pooled on the floor in front of the door. “Fill those two ice buckets with hot soapy water and bring them over here, Willy. Hurry. Archie, you bring me the broom.”
A tipsy eighty-year-old, Willy Haskins was surprisingly spry for his age and condition. He hurried around the end of the bar, filled two plastic buckets with detergent and water, and lugged them over to Bobo. The bartender took them outside. Within seconds the entire length of sidewalk in front of the Blue Moon Saloon was awash in wet, soapy suds. He left the broom out front as though he was in the middle of a routine, late night sidewalk cleanup.