Rachel started to get up.
“I’m going with you,” she said.
“No, you’re not. You’re hurt. You stay here and I’ll be right back. I promise.”
I left her there and stepped onto the elevator. I pushed the 12 button and looked back at Rachel. As the door closed I noticed that Hank the kitchen man was nervously lighting his cigarette.
It was a damn-the-rules moment for both of us.
The service elevator moved slowly upward and I came to realize that so much of Rachel’s rescue had relied on pure luck-a slow elevator, my staying in Mesa to surprise her, my taking the stairs with the bottle of wine. But I didn’t want to dwell on what could have been. I concentrated on the moment and when the elevator finally reached the top of the building, I stood ready with the one-inch corkscrew blade as the door opened. I realized I should have grabbed a better weapon from the kitchen, but it was too late now.
The housekeeping vestibule on twelve was empty except for the red waiter’s jacket I saw dropped on the floor. I pushed through the swinging doors and into the central hallway. I could hear sirens coming from outside the building now. A lot of them.
Looking both ways I saw nothing and I started to realize that a one-man search of a twelve-story hotel nearly as wide as it was tall was going to be a waste of time. Between elevators and stairwells, Courier had his choice of multiple escape routes.
I decided to go back down to Rachel and leave the search for hotel security and the arriving police.
But I knew that on the way down I could cover at least one of those exit routes. Maybe my luck would hold. I chose the north stairwell because it was closest to the hotel’s parking garage. And it was the stairwell Courier had used earlier to hide the body of the room service waiter.
I went down the hallway, rounded the corner and then pushed through the exit door. I first looked over the railing and down the shaft. I saw nothing and heard only the echo of the sirens. I was just about to head down the steps, when I noticed that even though I was on the top floor of the hotel, the stairs continued up.
If there was access to the roof, I needed to check it. I headed up.
The stairwell was dimly lit by a sconce on each landing. Each floor was broken into two sets of stairs and landings in the routine back-and-forth design. When I reached the midlevel and turned to take the next set of stairs to what would be the thirteenth floor, I saw the upper and final landing was crowded with stored hotel room furnishings. I came all the way up to where the stairs ended in a large storage area. There were bed tables stacked on top of one another and mattresses leaning four deep against one of the walls. There were stacks of chairs and mini-refrigerators and pre-flat-screen-era television cabinets. I was reminded of the filing cabinets I had seen in the Public Defender’s Office hallway. There had to be multiple code violations here, but who was looking? Who ever came up here? Who cared?
I worked my way around a grouping of standing stainless-steel lamps and toward a door with a small square window at face height. The word roof had been painted on it with a stencil. But when I got to it, I found the door was locked. I pushed hard on the release bar but it wouldn’t move. Something had jammed or locked the mechanism and the door wouldn’t budge. I looked through the window and saw a flat gravel roof running behind the barrel-tiled parapets of the hotel. Across a forty-yard expanse of gravel I could see the structure that housed the building’s elevator equipment. Beyond that was another door to the stairwell on the other side of the hotel.
I shifted to my left and leaned in closer to the window so I could get a wider view of the roof. Courier could be out there.
Just as I did this, I saw a blurred reflection of movement in the glass.
Someone was behind me.
Instinctively, I jumped sideways and turned at the same time. Courier’s arm swung down with a knife and barely missed me as he crashed into the door.
I planted my feet and then drove my body into his, bringing my arm up and stabbing my own blade into his side.
But my weapon was too short. I scored a direct hit but didn’t do enough damage to bring down the target. Courier yelped and brought his forearm down on my wrist, knocking my blade to the floor. He then took an enraged, roundhouse swing at me with his own. I managed to duck underneath it but got a good look at his blade. It was at least four inches long and I knew if he connected with it, it would be a one-and-done proposition for me.
Courier made another jab and this time I parried to the right and caught his wrist. The only advantage I had was my size. I was older and slower than Courier, but I had forty pounds on him. While holding his knife hand away, I threw my body into him again, knocking him back through the forest of stand-up lamps and onto the concrete floor.
He broke free during the fall and then scrabbled to his feet with the knife ready. I grabbed one of the lamps, holding its round base out and ready to spar at him and deflect the next assault.
For a moment nothing happened. He held the knife at the ready and we seemed to be taking each other’s measure, waiting for the other to make the next move. I then made a charge with the lamp base but he sidestepped it easily. We then squared off again. He had a desperate sort of smile on his face and was breathing heavily.
“Where are you going to go, Courier? You hear all those sirens? They’re here, man. There’s going to be cops and FBI all over this place in two minutes. Where’re you going to go then?”
He didn’t say anything and I took another poke at him with the lamp. He grabbed the base and we momentarily struggled for control of it, but I pushed him back into a stack of mini-refrigerators and they crashed to the floor.
I had no experience in the area of knife fighting, but my instincts told me to keep talking. If I distracted Courier, then I would lessen the threat from the knife and possibly get an open shot at him. So I kept throwing the questions at him, waiting for my moment.
“Where’s your partner? Where’s McGinnis? What did he do, send you to do the dirty work by yourself? Just like Nevada, huh? You missed your chance again.”
Courier grinned at me but didn’t take the bait.
“Does he just tell you what to do? Like your mentor on murder or something? Man, the master’s not going to be very happy with you tonight. You’re oh for two, man.”
This time he couldn’t control it.
“McGinnis is dead, you dumb fuck! I buried him in the desert. Just like I was going to bury your bitch after I was through with her.”
I feigned another jab at him with the lamp and tried to keep him talking.
“I don’t get it, Courier. If he’s dead, why didn’t you just run? Why risk everything to go for her?”
At the same moment he opened his mouth to reply, I faked a jab at his chest with the lamp and then brought the base up into his face, catching him flush on the jaw. Courier staggered backward momentarily and I quickly moved in, hurling the lamp at him first and then going for the knife with both hands. We smashed into a television cabinet and fell to the floor, me on top of him and grappling for control of the knife.
He shifted his weight beneath me and we rolled three times, with him ending up on top. I kept both hands on his wrist and he pushed his free hand into my face, trying to break my grip by stiff-arming me away. I finally managed to bend his wrist at a painful angle. He cried out and the knife came free and clattered to the concrete. With an elbow I shoved it toward the stairwell shaft but it stopped just shy of the mark, balancing on the edge below the blue guardrail. It was six feet away.
I went after him like an animal then, punching and kicking and fueled by a primal rage I had never felt before. I grabbed an ear and tried to rip it off. I swung an elbow into his teeth. But the energy of youth gradually gave him the upper hand. I was tiring quickly and he managed to pull back and get distance. He then brought a knee up into my crotch and the air exploded out of my lungs. Paralyzing pain shot through me and weakened my hold. He broke completely free and got up to go for the knife.