Forever Odd

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 space 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 glass 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 pass 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 button 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 whore 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.

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    FORTY-THREE
        
        IN THE CASINO, DURING DATURA’S VERBAL ASSAULT 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 passing 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 porn 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 , the Hindu goddess of death, dark side of the mother goddess, the only of their many gods 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