'Yeah, but then I won't reuse them. Be dead quiet, Danny Because if you're not quiet, you're dead.'

'You've saved my life, Odd.'

'Not yet.'

I gave him one of my two flashlights and advised him not to use it in the elevator. Light might leak out. He needed to save it for the stairwells in the event that he had to leave by himself.

As I pushed shut the doors, closing him in, Danny said, 'I've decided I don't wish I were you, after all.'

'I didn't know ident.i.ty theft had ever crossed your mind.'

'I'm so sorry,' he whispered through the narrowing gap. 'I'm so d.a.m.n sorry.'

'Friends forever,' I told him, which was a thing we said for a while when we were ten or eleven. 'Friends forever.'

FORTY-TWO.

PAST ROOM 1242 WITH ITS UNEXPLODED BOMB, FROM the main corridor to the secondary, wearing the backpack, toting the shotgun, I schemed to survive. The desire to ensure that Datura rotted in prison had given me a stronger will to live than I'd had in six months.

I expected that they would split up and return to the twelfth floor by the north and south staircases, to cut me off before I could shepherd Danny out. If I could descend just two or three stories, to the tenth or ninth level, and let them pa.s.s by me, I might be able to slip back onto the stairs behind them and race all the way down, out, and away-to return in but an hour or two with the police.

When I had first walked into Room 1203 and had spoken to Datura as she'd stood at the window, she had known without having to ask that I must have gotten around the staircases by using an elevator shaft. No other route could have brought me to the twelfth floor.

Consequently, although they would know that I couldn't get Danny down by that route, they would at least listen at the shafts now and then for sounds of movement. I couldn't use that trick again.

Arriving at the entry to the south stairs, I found the door half open. I eased through, onto the landing.

Not a sound rose from lower flights. I crept down step to step- four, five-and paused to listen. The silence held.

The alien smell, musk-mushrooms-meat, eddied no thicker here than it had earlier, perhaps thinner, but no less off-putting.

The flesh on the nape of my neck did the crawly thing that it does so well. Some people say this is G.o.d's warning that the devil is near, but I've noticed I also experience it when someone serves me Brussels sprouts.

Whatever the precise source of the odor, it must have arisen from the toxic stew left over from the fire, which was why I'd never encountered it prior to the Panamint. It was a product of a singular event, but it wasn't otherworldly. Any scientist could have a.n.a.lyzed it, tracked down its origin, and provided me with a molecular recipe.

I had never encountered a supernatural ent.i.ty that signaled its presence with this smell. People smell, not ghosts. Yet the nape of my neck continued to do its thing even in the absence of Brussels sprouts.

Impatiently counseling myself that nothing threatening crouched in the stairwell, I quickly went down another step in the dark, and another, loath to use my flashlight and thereby reveal my presence in case Datura or one of her horses was somewhere below me.

I reached the midfloor landing, descended two more steps-and saw a pale glow blossom on the wall at the eleventh level.

Someone coming up. He could be only a floor or two below me, because light didn't travel well around 180-degree turns.

I considered racing ahead in the hope that I could reach the eleventh floor and spring rabbit-quick out of the stairwell before the climber turned onto a new flight and saw me. But that door might be corroded shut and incapable of being opened. Or might shriek like a banshee on rusted hinges.

The blot of light on the wall brightened, grew larger. He was ascending fast. I heard footsteps.

I had the shotgun. In a confined s.p.a.ce like the stairwell, even I couldn't fail to score a solid hit.

Necessity had driven me to take the weapon, but I wasn't keen to use it. The gun would be a last resort, not a first option.

Besides, the moment I pulled the trigger, they would know that I had not left the hotel. Then the hunt would be on with even greater intensity.

As quietly as possible, I backtracked. At the twelfth-floor landing, I kept ascending in the dark, intending to proceed to the thirteenth, but within three steps, I discovered a riser littered with rubble.

Unsure what lay above, afraid of stumbling and making too much noise if treacherous mounds of trash lay underfoot, worried that the way might be blocked altogether, I retreated three steps to the twelfth floor.

The light on the landing wall below swelled bright, the beam directly upon it. He must be only a flight and a half below; and he would see me when he made the turn.

I dodged through the half-open door, returning to the twelfth floor.

In the gray light, I saw that at the first two rooms, to my left and right, the doors were closed. I did not dare waste time trying them, in case they proved to be locked.

The second room on my right stood open. I slipped out of the hallway and took refuge behind the door.

I seemed to be in a suite. To both sides of this room, drowned daylight seeped through open connecting doors.

Directly across from the entrance that I had just used, two sliding gla.s.s doors provided access to a balcony. Silvery skeins of rain raveled past the high-rise, and wind softly rattled the doors in their tracks.

Out in the hallway, the climber-Andre or Robert-shoved the stairwell door all the way open as he came through. It banged against the stop.

Standing with my back pressed to the wall, holding my breath, I heard him pa.s.s my room. A moment later, the stair door rebounded from the stop and fell shut.

He would be heading for the main corridor and 1242, hoping to nail me there before I pressed the white b.u.t.ton to free Danny-and instead blew both of us to bits.

I intended to give him ten seconds, fifteen, long enough to be sure he had left the secondary corridor. Then I would make a break for the stairwell.

Now that he was past me, I no longer needed to fear that anyone might be ascending. I could use the flashlight, plunge down two steps at a time, and be on the ground floor before he could return to the stairwell and hear me.

Two seconds later, from the main corridor, Datura shrieked a curse that would have brought a blush to the wh.o.r.e of Babylon.

She must have come up by the north stairs with her other best fella. Having arrived at Room 1242, she had discovered that Danny Jessup was neither strapped to the bomb nor splattered across the walls.

FORTY-THREE.

IN THE CASINO, DURING DATURA'S VERBAL a.s.sAULT ON Maryann Morris, she had proved that her silky voice could be twisted into a garrote as cruel as any strangler's cord.

Now, hiding behind the entry door, just inside the three-room suite, I listened to her curse me at alarming volume, sometimes using words that I had never realized could apply to a guy, and with each pa.s.sing second, I felt less confident about my chances of escaping.

Mad-cow crazy she might be, and syphilitic, for all I knew, but Datura was also more than prettily packaged lunacy, more and worse than a homicidal p.o.r.n merchant whose narcissism exceeded that of Narcissus himself. She seemed to be an elemental force, of no less power than earth, water, wind, and fire.

Into my mind sprang the name Kali Kali, the Hindu G.o.ddess of death, dark side of the mother G.o.ddess, the only of their many G.o.ds who had conquered time. Four-armed, violent, insatiable, Kali devours all beings, and in temples where she's worshipped, the usual idols present her with a necklace of human skulls, dancing on a corpse.

This metaphoric mental image, the dark gaunt form of savage Kali embodied in the lush blond Datura, instantly felt so right, so true, that my sense of reality seemed to shift, to deepen. Every detail of the shadowy hotel room, of the wreckage around me, of the strafing storm beyond the balcony doors came into sharper focus, and I felt that I might momentarily see even deeper than the molecular structure of it all.

Yet simultaneous with this new clarity, in everything within my view, I detected a transcendental mystery that I had never before perceived, a transforming revelation waiting to be accepted. A chill of a character not easily conveyed worked through me, an awe that felt more like reverence than like dread, although dread was a part of it.

You might think that I'm struggling to describe the heightened perception that frequently accompanies mortal jeopardy. I've been in mortal jeopardy often enough to know what that that feels like, too, but this metaphysical incident was not the same. feels like, too, but this metaphysical incident was not the same.

Like all mystical experiences, I suppose, when the ineffable seems about to be made clear, the moment pa.s.ses, no less ephemeral than a dream. But after pa.s.sing, this one left me electrified, as if I had been zapped by a different kind of Taser, one designed to energize the mind and force it to confront a difficult truth.

The nasty truth before me was that Datura, for all her lunacy and ignorance and laughable eccentricities, was a more formidable adversary than I had acknowledged. When it came to committing extreme violence, she had as many eager hands as Kali, and my two hands were reluctant.

My plan had been either to bolt from the hotel and get help or, failing that, to elude this woman and her two enforcers long enough to convince them that I had in fact escaped and that they themselves ought to flee before I sent back the authorities. This was not a plan of action as much as it was a plan of avoidance.

Listening to Datura rant, apparently somewhere near the junction of the corridors-much too near for comfort-I realized that while rage might be an impediment to clear thinking in most people, for her it sharpened her cunning and her senses. Likewise, hatred.

Her talent for evil, especially for the vicious brand of it that once went by the name wickedness wickedness, was so great that she seemed to be possessed of uncanny gifts to rival my own. I might be persuaded that Datura could smell the blood of her enemy while it remained in his veins, and follow the scent to spill it.

Upon her arrival, I had put on hold my plan to make a break for the north stairs. Making a move while she lingered in the vicinity seemed suicidal.

Avoidance most likely would not be possible. Yet I wasn't eager to hasten a confrontation.

In the light of my new and more fearsome perception of this disturbed woman, I began to steel myself for what survival might require of me.

I recalled another grim fact about the four-armed Hindu G.o.ddess that inspired me not to underestimate Datura. Kali entertained a thirst for horror so unquenchable that she had once decapitated herself in order to be able to drink her own blood as it spouted from her neck.

Being a G.o.ddess only in her own mind, Datura would not survive decapitation. But when I recalled her vile stories of the cries of murdered children in a Savannah bas.e.m.e.nt and the sacrifice of a seamstress in Port-au-Prince, which had seemed so delectable to her in the telling, I couldn't pretend that she was any less bloodthirsty than Kali.

And so I remained behind the door, in shadows that were often relieved by storm light, listening to her curse, then rant. Soon her voice softened to the degree that I could make out no words at all, but there was no mistaking the urgency of it, the insistent frenzied cadences of rage and hate and dark desire.

If Andre and Robert spoke-or dared to try-I didn't hear their deeper voices. Only hers. In the degree of their obedience and self-effacement, I read the souls of two true believers, as ready to drink the poisoned Kool-Aid as any cultists had ever been.

When she fell silent, I suppose I should have been relieved, but instead I got that Brussels-sprouts feeling. Intensely.

I had slumped wearily against the wall. I stood straighter.

In my two-hand grip, the shotgun, which had come to seem like nothing more than a tool, suddenly felt alive, slumbering but alive and aware, as guns had always felt to me before. As in the past, I worried that I would not be in control of the weapon when the crisis arrived.

Thank you, Mom.

When Datura ceased talking, I expected to hear movement, perhaps doors opening and closing, indications that they had begun a search. Only quiet followed.

The m.u.f.fled hiss of rain spending itself against the balcony and the occasional grumble of thunder had been mere background noise. But as I listened intently for activity in the hallway, I resented the storm, as if it were Datura's willing conspirator.

I tried to imagine what I would do in her circ.u.mstances, but the only rational answer seemed to be Get out Get out. With Danny freed and both of us missing, she should want to strip her bank accounts bare and head at high speed for the border.

An ordinary psychopath bails when the going gets rough-but not Kali, eater of the dead.

They must have parked a vehicle or two at the hotel. After s.n.a.t.c.hing Danny, they had returned here on foot, by a circuitous route, to test my psychic magnetism, but they had no reason to walk out, rather than ride, when the fun was over.

Maybe she had grown worried that if Danny and I reached the ground floor and got out of the Panamint, we would find their car, hot-wire it, and leave them stranded. If so, Andre or Robert-or Datura herself-might have gone down to disable the vehicle or to stand guard over it.

Rain. The ceaseless susurration of rain.

A faint mewl of wind, pleading at the balcony doors.

No sound alerted me. Instead, the threat revealed itself by that musky, mushroomy cold-meat smell.

FORTY-FOUR.

I GRIMACED AT THAT UNIQUE SUBTLE SMELL, WHICH was not conducive to a healthy appet.i.te. Then he must have taken a step or shifted his weight, because I heard the feeble but crisp crunch of a small bit of debris crushed underfoot.

Two-thirds open, the door afforded me a wedge of s.p.a.ce in which to stand concealed between it and the wall. If my stalker pushed it wider, the door would rebound from me and reveal my presence.

The construction of many other buildings would have allowed the s.p.a.ce between the back edge of the open door and the jamb to provide a narrow view of someone standing on the threshold. This casing was deeper than standard code required and the stop molding so thick that it occluded the gap.

Looking on the bright side, as I desperately needed to do at that point: If I could not see him, he could not see me.

Having encountered this disquieting smell only at various times in the staircases and on the second visit to the casino, I had not a.s.sociated it with Andre and Robert. Now I realized that I could not have detected it within the candlelit walls of Room 1203, where I had also enjoyed their company, because the cloying fragrance of Cleo-May had effectively masked it.

Framed by the big sliding doors, to the north, an inverted tree of lightning caught fire, its trunk in the heavens and its branches shaking at the earth. A second tree overlaid the first, and a third overlaid the second: a brief-lived bright forest that burnt out even as it grew.

He stood in the doorway so long that I began to suspect that he knew not only of my presence but also of my exact position, and that he was toying with me.

Second by second, my nerves wound tighter than the rubber band on the propeller of a child's balsa-wood airplane. I warned myself not to fly into rash action.

He might, after all, just go away. The fates are not always in a snotty mood. Sometimes a hurricane roars toward a vulnerable coast, then veers away from land.

No sooner had I been buoyed by that hopeful thought than he stepped off the threshold and ventured into the room, movement that I as much sensed as heard.

A pistol-grip shotgun is not, by definition, one that you fire with the stock b.u.t.ted against your shoulder. You hold it forward, but to the side.

Initially, the door still screened the searcher from me. When he moved farther into the s.p.a.ce, I would need my cloak of invisibility, which I did not have with me because, unfortunately, I still wasn't Harry Potter.