The dark, heavyset man was still there, a lit cigarette in his hand. Watching. One hand held the elevator door as the other clutched a plastic shopping bag with a Mercedes-Benz logo emblazoned on it.
The man made eye contact for no more than a moment before turning without a word and stepping out of sight into the elevator, letting the doors shut behind him.
Strange, Robert thought, reminding himself that, although he was considerably short of being a celebrity, his face had become public when he’d won the Pulitzer.
He stepped around a service cart in the middle of the hallway and nodded to the maid as he fished out his card key, wondering almost in passing why the door would swing inward before he’d turned the handle.
What the…? He stood in confusion for a few seconds. He’d checked the door when he left, hadn’t he? He was always careful about such things.
Of course. The housekeeper! She must have just opened it.
Robert looked around, but the housekeeper and her cart were gone, which was curious. He turned back with a growing feeling of unease and pushed the door open. He moved inside slowly, flipped on the light switch, and came to a sudden halt.
Everything was in shambles. Drawers had been pulled and dumped. The contents of his bag were everywhere. The seams of his gray suit had been ripped open. His computer disks were spread over the bed, several of them bent and destroyed.
Good Lord.
The scene in the bathroom was no better. The room reeked of his cologne; the remains of the green bottle lay strewn on the bathroom floor.
He placed the small computer briefcase on the edge of the bed and moved to check the closets before slamming the door to the hallway and bolting it. His heart was pounding, apprehension driving his blood pressure through the roof.
As the door clicked closed, the phone rang, causing him to jump. He moved to it immediately and lifted the receiver, but there was only an open line — followed by a deliberate hang-up. He replaced the receiver and the phone rang again almost instantly.
Once more he answered. Once more someone listened without a word for nearly fifteen seconds before deliberately breaking the connection.
The chill that had crept up his back when he walked in returned as a virtual ice storm of apprehension, as if someone were watching him with malevolent intent. Whoever had searched his possessions knew he was back in his room.
There was no time to call security. Robert yanked his upended roll-on bag back to the bed and began piling his possessions inside as fast as he could. What if someone knocked? There was no other way out. He was on the thirty-second floor.
The telephone began ringing again, each repetition a malignant presence.
The gray suit was a total loss and he decided to leave it. He dumped his shaver into the mound of clothes in his bag and struggled to close the fabric top, working the zippers and kneeling on the bag to compact it, succeeding at last. The room was too warm suddenly, and he found himself perspiring, whether more from effort and apprehension than atmospheric conditions, he couldn’t tell.
The telephone continued to ring as he rushed to the door and pressed his eye to the peephole to survey the distorted version of the hallway on the other side.
It was empty.
He threw open the door and entered the hall, carrying his roll-on in one hand and his computer case in the other, feeling like a panicked child leaving a haunted house. The elevators were a hundred feet distant, and he broke into a run, the roll-on bag banging painfully against his shins along the way. He could still hear the telephone ringing in room 3205.
He reached the elevators and jabbed at the DOWN button. The rancid aroma of cigarette smoke still hung in the air as his eyes took in the furniture of the elevator lobby: a small table, two end chairs, a potted plant, and a plastic shopping bag someone had left propped against the wall.
A bag with a Mercedes logo.
Blind panic washed over Robert as he recalled the bag in the hand of the heavyset man at the elevator ten minutes ago. The man had obviously come back, or never left. Probably the one who trashed my room, Robert concluded. He recalled the brief, cold moment of eye contact, and the man’s hesitation at the elevator door suddenly made sense.
There was no sign of the elevator, but there was an emergency stairway a dozen yards back and Robert dashed in that direction, throwing open the door and hefting his bags through the opening to race down the staircase, relieved to hear the heavy fire door slam shut above him.
He stopped on the twenty-ninth-floor landing, out of breath, wondering if it would be safe to try for the elevator again. The air in the stairwell was musty, with a disorienting hint of garlic mixed with the dust of a seldom-used enclosure. But this is better than walking down twenty-nine flights with these bags.
He reached for the doorknob to the hallway and found it locked. He tried it again several times, but it wouldn’t budge.
There was a sound from somewhere above. A fire door being opened, followed by the footfall of heavy shoes on the landing.
Once more the feeling of unfocused panic welled up in his stomach, this wave more sustained and unyielding. He struggled blindly with the locked door, his face plastered against the little wire-mesh-embedded glass window as he rattled it and struggled. But it was immovable, and the hallway beyond was empty.
The footsteps above began moving down the stairs with an ominous, confident, unhurried gait. Whoever it was knew there was no way out for the quarry.
Robert dashed as quietly as he could down another flight to the twenty-eighth floor, finding that door locked as well. As he turned, a small sign caught his attention, warning that there were no exits from the stairwell except on the ground floor.
He plastered his back against the door and tried to think. Calm down, dammit! How do I know whoever’s coming is a threat?
His trashed hotel room and the ringing phone answered the question.
Once more he lifted the bags and ran on the balls of his feet down the stairway as fast as he could go. The footsteps from above sped up suddenly.
Robert’s heart was pounding, his mind focused only on escape, his feet slipping every few steps as he tried to accelerate the descent. He scrambled around the landing of the twenty-second floor, calculating his leap to the next set of steps, when the fire door flew open and knocked him off his feet. His roll-on bag flew out of control into the wall with a loud crash that reverberated in the concrete shaft.
“Oh! So sorry!” A feminine voice reached him through the fog of panic. Two young girls, probably fifteen, were standing in the doorway, holding the door open and wondering what to do for the wild-eyed man they’d decked with the door.
Robert picked himself up quickly, grabbed the roll-on, and dashed past the startled girls into the safety of the hallway to head for the elevator. He heard the girls reenter the hallway behind him and let the door close.
“You all right, Mister?” one of them asked, some thirty feet behind him, as he moved to the elevator and jabbed at the DOWN button.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” he shouted. “But don’t let anyone else in through that door.”
“I… not understand,” one of them said.
The bell chimed above the elevator. The elevator doors would be opening in a second, and whoever was chasing him in the stairwell would be approaching the hallway door, which was now locked.
He turned toward the girls again. “Don’t let anyone out of that stairwell, okay? Do not open that door. No one’s supposed to come through there.” Their blank stare and startled expression told him it was a losing battle.