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.
I stood on the chair and put my suitcase up into the ventilation ducts. Then I aimed the pistol at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows—not really windows, but huge slabs of what I hoped was plate glass. The bullet punched a hole the size of my fist and the glass was instantly covered, edge to edge, with a network of cracks.
Her suitcase was certainly tempting. I was sure she had things in there I could use. I never tried to open it. Why? If you ever find my Pantechnicon seemingly abandoned, I'd advise you to leave it alone. It has half a dozen ways of defending itself by delivering various degrees of nastiness including, if you don't get the hint after strike three, lethal force. If I could think up stuff like that, I reasoned, who knew what amusements these two bloody-minded monsters had in store for me.
I picked up the suitcase gingerly and hurled it at the window. The glass flew apart in ten thousand glittering ice cubes. I went to the edge and looked down. As I'd hoped, the stuff was landing on the lobby roof. Nobody was likely to get hurt by it. I dragged her body to the edge and tipped her over. I did not stay around to watch the impact.
Then I was in a big hurry. Someone was knocking at the door already. I hoped it was a guest, that the management had not yet been called to deal with the spilled paint and the holes in the door. But they would be up soon, followed shortly by the police. It was time to check out of the luxurious Hotel Othello. Kiss Desdemona good-bye for me.
I moved the chair back to its original position. Then I scuffed at the dents the chair legs had left in the deep carpet. Somebody would look in the duct eventually, but maybe this would buy me some time.
I don't claim to be an acrobat, but I know enough moves to shoot a pretty fair action scene without a stunt double. I jumped up twice to get the measure of the hole in the ceiling. The first time I jumped for real I banged my head hard enough to hear the songs of little birdies for a moment. I took a deep breath and tried it again, and this time I got my palms flat on the bottom of the duct, hung there undecided for several seconds, then with a mighty effort swung my legs up, once, twice, hitching my upper body a few inches forward with each swing, until I could hook my feet over the opposite edge and push myself forward, completely inside the duct.
It was dark inside. I couldn't see very far in any direction. But the cylindrical pipe was just barely big enough for me to turn around, at the risk of permanently turning my spine into a pretzel. I got it done, though, and reached across the opening for the ventilator grille I'd put up there earlier.
I took the toilet paper and the bars of soap and wedged big handfuls of paper and slivers of soap into the ventilator frame. Fingers stuck through the holes of the grating, I carefully lowered the grille down through the hole, then straightened it out and pulled it up against the flange of the ductwork. I tugged hard at it, felt it seat itself a little better, then gingerly let it go. Holding the grille with one hand, I pressed lightly down with the other, then a little harder, and with moderate pressure the grille dropped back out of its frame. Good enough; it wasn't going to be falling on a cop's head like a silent slapstick comedy. I figured if the ruse granted me just an extra ten minutes to get away I'd be happy; half an hour and you'd never find me with a pack of bloodhounds and a herd of process servers.
I backed up so my flailing feet would not dislodge the grating, did the spaghetti shuffle to get myself turned around again, and started my getaway.
In the movie of my life, this getaway would not need a second-unit stunt action team. My progress was nearly as slow as the building itself. I'd shove my suitcase ahead of me an arm's length, then shuffle along on hands and knees until I caught up to it. Then shove it forward again. Repeat step B, repeat step A. Continue until an exit presents itself. But don't take too long, because once they realize you're up here, it's all over with.
At regular intervals I would come to registers like the one I had entered through. I'd look down and see if anyone was below, then gingerly ease myself across it. I didn't know if the gratings would support my weight, and didn't want to find out the answer was no until I was ready to leave.
I wondered at the lack of circulation. Shouldn't there be a howling wind up here? Apparently not. These ducts did not deliver heated or cooled air, since the temperature outside never varied more than fifteen degrees. The purpose of the system was to clean the air, treat it, deodorize it, and keep it fresh as befitted the air in a first-class hotel. Somewhere fans were turning to keep the air in its desultory motion, but I never saw them.