The Fading Page 30

  In this situation there was only one option and it matched Noel’s most primitive instincts. He bolted, running down the hall as fast as he could. He didn’t know how fast Dalton could run, or if there was an exit this way, but if he stayed in the hall and tried to fight his way to the elevators, the blade would find him and finish him.

  The room doors blurred. It seemed to take no more than six great strides before the hall ended. To the right was another USE STAIRS IN CASE OF AN EMERGENCY sign and Noel braced the door, blowing through with a slam that echoed four stories up and down. No choice about which way to go; his momentum simply threw him against the door and bounced him to the right, toward the stairs going up. He caught a handrail and took the steps three at a time, rounding the landing and launching himself halfway up the next flight. The door slammed again.

  Below and behind him, Dalton was breathing hard but coming for him.

  Noel thought any floor would do. All he needed was another hall, a long corridor that would give him the space to build a solid lead, grab an elevator and head back down, leaving the casino and Theodore Dalton behind forever. But there were other elevators, other stops, people who might delay his exit. He had no idea when or where Dalton would reappear, and once he was out in the world he would never know how close Dalton might be. He needed a shell.

  In his pocket was the key for the room Tilly had assigned him, on the thirteenth floor. A room, a door between them, a phone to call for help. They’d started on the sixth floor. Noel had already run up three flights, two per floor, which meant he was coming up fast on the eighth floor. Five floors to go, ten flights of stairs. Footsteps slapped the concrete and squeaked. His own heavy breathing echoed and mixed with the killer’s. No way could the fatter, older man catch him on the stairs.

  Three big strides and another flight was gone. Using the rail to swing himself around as fast as possible, the fear of the knife digging into his heels propelling him on, up, around, faster and faster. Knees pumping, blood racing.

  Tenth floor.

  Eleventh.

  Halfway up the twelfth, Noel lost his grip on the handrail and slipped at the turn. The velocity flung him into the outside wall and the foot he kicked out to reach for the second step went high, snagging on the edge of the stair. His ankle rolled his foot to the inside until the sole of his shoe was vertical. He went down, shin slamming into the stairs, elbow into the wall, the entire hard face of the flight stopping him like a fence made of granite.

  ‘Agh, sonofabitch, Jesus!’ The pain raced around inside him from four points of contact and made his head swim. Acidic pain taste in the back of his throat.

  Wham wham wham, gulping breath, wham wham slap slap slap …

  Dalton was at least two stories below, but he hadn’t given up.

  Noel reached for the rail and his elbow throbbed electrically. A dry gash under his forearm, skin opened, probably a bruised bone. The ankle was worse. When he set his weight on his right foot, the pain was glorious.

  Slap slap slap, a string of coughing, hacking, deep breaths. Stomp … stomp …

  Dalton tiring but still catching up.

  Noel hopped on his left foot, using the rail as a life rope, and hopped again, but this would not do. He needed both feet. If he didn’t swallow the pain and run up two and a half more flights, he would be gutted in the stairwell like a hog in its pen, and Julie would be next. Tonight, tomorrow, six months down the road. As long as Dalton was at large, she would not be safe.

  Noel unleashed a banzai scream and hammered the stairs.

  Dalton laughed and shrieked and bumbled after him.

  At the top of next flight there was door 13. Noel shoved through and broke left into the hall, his ankle throbbing so bad the foot below it no longer wanted to respond at all. It was numb, clumsy, like dragging a boot filled with sand. He scanned the numbers on the doors, realized he had no idea which room Tilly had assigned him. Reached in his pocket, hobbling, slapping the wall for support, waiting for the door behind him to slam open, releasing the monster back into the maze.

  A folded slip of paper. He flipped it open. Thank God Tilly had remembered to jot the number on it. 1334.

  Noel hopped and limped to the next door. 1348. But did that mean 1334 was up ahead or had he already passed it?

  Behind him, the stairwell door swung open with a bang.

  Too late now. Only one way to go. Straight ahead, pray he hadn’t passed 1334 yet. If he couldn’t find it, he’d have to try his luck with the elevators. And if those were tied up, he’d be a dead man.

  Dalton was breathing hard, breathing bad. Sounded like a man who’d been underwater for the past two minutes. Good, I hope you have a heart attack, you fucking slug. Noel figured he had a ten-second lead, no more.

  The next door, on his left, read 1344. The numbers were going down. His room was just a little ways up ahead. Encouraged, he forced his right foot down and soldiered on. One big step off his left, then a softer, nearly crippling hobble with his right. Step, hobble. Step, hobble. He was loping down the hall at a good clip when he bashed a small display table and a vase of flowers to the floor.

  1342.

  1341.

  1340.

  And then a blank wall on one side, the wide berth for the elevators on the other. He calculated the distance to go. Fifty feet at most.

  ‘I’m going to eat her parts … eat her sunny fucking face,’ Dalton said behind him. He sounded ragged but very close. ‘… taking the next flight … to Los Angeles … suck her milk …’

  Noel grunted and stomped ahead.

  1338 … 37 … 36 … 1335 … one more and he would be home free.

  He fumbled the key from its paper sleeve.

  ‘… staying?’ Dalton said. ‘… play with me?’

  His ugly choking laughter.

  Noel jabbed the plastic key at the slot.

  Too high.

  Too low.

  In.

  The little red light stayed red. He jerked the handle.

  ‘Motherfucker!’

  Red.

  He removed the card, wiggled the knob to clear the mechanism, slammed the card in.

  ‘You’re going to … die here.’ Dalton was steps away.

  Blinking red.

  Solid green.

  The tumbler clicked. Noel wrenched the handle, flung himself inside, snagged his foot on the carpet – his bad foot – and his leg buckled.

  Dalton hit the door.

  Noel screamed and slammed it back. The door stopped three inches from the latch and Dalton howled in agony. At that moment the arm re-imaged – Dalton was inside up to his elbow – and the knife fell to the floor, on Noel’s side.

  Noel brought the door back as far as he dared, then rammed it home again.

  Dalton moaned like a trapped bear cub.

  Noel brought the door back one more time and flung it hard. Dalton’s arm was withdrawing when the door smashed his fingers into the frame. Noel drove his shoulder into the door over and over, grinding Dalton’s fingers with whatever strength he had left. The professor gasped in a series a great big whoops of surrender.

  ‘Let go, let go, lemme go!’

  Noel did not release the hand, its shattered bones and bulbous swelling fingers. He kept the door planted as he crouched for the knife. Caught it in his right hand and swept it up, raking all four of Dalton’s fingertips. The knife bounced over speed bumps of bone and blood spurted high. This time there was no scream, only three knobs of reddened flesh that fell to the floor as the rest of Dalton’s appendage slithered out into the hall.

  Noel thumbed the lock, slipped the chain and backed away, holding the knife out as if Dalton really were about to turn into smoke and filter in through the threshold. But he didn’t. A series of shouts and curses rebounded off the door, and stopped abruptly. Noel forced his breathing down, down and under control, waiting for the assault to resume, but there was only silence. He wedged the desk chair under the knob.

  He was locked
in now. Dalton was free but wounded. Bleeding profusely by now. Unless the man had truly lost his mind and all sense of self-preservation, he would have to go away. Find something to wrap his hand in, escape. It was a miracle they hadn’t set off a series of alarms and screams, but as far as Noel could recall, on this floor, there had been no witnesses.

  The dead man bleeding all over the sixth floor would be a problem. Someone had to have seen that by now. Police would be summoned. Soon there would be sirens, a dozen cops rapping on hotel room doors, cornering witnesses. Would they bother with the thirteenth floor? For a murder, yes, they would scour the place. Faded or not, Dalton was in no condition to stick around.

  Noel was safe for now, but he could not afford to stay.

  He backed deeper into the room and drew the curtains, shutting out the sunlight. He went to the bathroom, tore off a wad of toilet paper, picked up the fingertips and flushed them down. He rinsed the knife and washed his hands. He was bleeding into his torn black shirt, from the long but shallow cut Dalton had made across his chest. He washed that, too, and hesitated to use any of the clean towels to wipe away his own blood. More evidence he had been here. Noel was the victim, Dalton was the killer, but Noel’s crimes – the theft, and, more to the point, what he was, what they both were – essentially rendered them both monsters.

  Noel sat on the bed, picked up the phone. Julie did not own a cellphone – they each had at one time, but had been forced to cancel the service to save money.

  He did not know Lisa’s and his father’s home number because Julie had been the one to make the calls over the past couple years. He called information – a risk but one he had to take. After seven rings, he got the home voice mailbox. Heard his father’s voice. He did not leave a message. He tried again, then again every five minutes, a dozen times, then hourly. He could not think of a message that wouldn’t sound like lunacy. He didn’t want John or Lisa to hear it. He wanted to talk to Julie.

  He leaned back against the high faux-leather headboard, trying to still his mind. He had no idea what he would tell her even if she had answered. A warning would only bring more questions. What had he gotten mixed up in? What did he expect her to do? What was he going to do now?

  He waited for the sirens to come, for the knocking to begin. But as the afternoon light bled from the sky and night fell over the desert, there were no sirens a hundred and thirty feet below. Tilly did not send a maroon blazer to kick him out.

  He checked the peephole every half-hour, but of course there was nothing to see.

  You’re being a coward. You have to get out sooner or later. Go now while you can, because when morning comes it’s only going to get worse.

  When the gray moon of the alarm clock showed 5.55 a.m., Noel rose from the bed and checked the peephole one last time. He opened the door and scanned the empty hall. Dalton did not come for him, but he’d left a souvenir.

  On the floor just outside his door was a standard-sized manila envelope with his name written on one side, in blood. Noel shoed it back into the room, shut and locked the door. He opened the envelope and a series of twelve or more large glossy color photos sifted into his free hand. Together they told a story, one that Noel was already familiar with.

  In the first, Lucy Bagley’s face confronted him with wide-open eyes, her mascara running, her teeth bared and clamped on the barrel of a large shiny silver pistol.

  In the second, her husband. Garroted with pantyhose, another pair pulled down over his face, a spray of blood recently erupted from his left ear where the head of a golf club now lay broken off and resting on the carpet.

  The daughter blindfolded, the knife being put to use in her midsection.

  The son before, alive, pale with what was coming.

  The son after, minus his head.

  The framed family photographs on the fireplace mantle, beside Ezra’s severed head. An arm and hand above it, combing the hair.

  There were a dozen more capturing them in their final repose, the mess the killer had made of them some four years ago, but Noel had seen enough. He dropped them in disgust. The man who’d slain the producer and his family was one and the same hunting him, his disappointing protégé. This could not be a coincidence. But the Bagleys had been murdered before Noel and Julie ever found the guest house. How could Dalton have known they would choose that guest house?

  He hadn’t known, of course.

  I knew. I felt it. I was drawn to the scene of his crime the way I was drawn back to Bryan Simms in the Funhouse. I resisted it for four years, almost like Julie was protecting me, keeping me out of trouble, but eventually the fading pulled me in. I had to look inside, to feed it. Because Dalton and I are alike. The fading brought us together. The fading demands a sacrifice.

  He took the envelope with his name and Dalton’s blood on it, and when he shuffled the photos to stuff them inside the last in the stack fell out, face down on the floor. Noel turned it over.

  Julie stared up at him from a restaurant booth he could not recall. She was smiling, a red circle finger-drawn around her head.

  He dialed the home number again, but she didn’t answer.

  No one did.

  36

  The resorts never close, never sleep. Middle of winter, sweltering summer, the deadest seasons, when no major conventions are in town. Four a.m., six a.m. It doesn’t matter. Someone’s always awake, always up, always on the move, eating, drinking, cruising for sex, trying their hand at one of the gaming tables, using the gym, waking for a red-eye breakfast, crawling out of a cab, staggering to a room to pull the blinds and sleep off another night better forgotten. A night when the beast snapped its chains, the kraken was released. When normal folks from Plano, Texas, discovered something dark and vicious they never imagined had been living inside them all along. And there was always a dealer to serve these walking wounded, the revved-up table bangers. Cleaning staff, front desk, concierge, security. Even the aging resorts have something going on. This morning, at a little past six o’clock, Caesars Palace was no exception. Business was a long way from full swing, but solids were on the move.

  Noel Shaker walked among them, taking an uneventful ride down the elevator with no stops until the cage bobbed once and the doors opened on L for lobby. Curiosity urged him to have a peek at 6, check out the crime-scene tape, the bloodstained floor, but he couldn’t risk that.

  He exited, vowing to maintain a balance of vigilance and continual motion. Down the marble corridor, past the coffee and pastry shop (open but vacant save for a lone Latina in chef whites), past the sunglasses store (closed), the luggage store (closed), into the wider mouth at the front of the casino. The Italian restaurant was closed, ditto the noodle joint, though a slender Chinese woman in heels and a dress was at the hostess stand beside the high aquariums with their hundreds of now-dimmed goldfish, writing something on a clipboard. No one watched him, no one cared who he was.

  And that was good, because while he had been lucky to avoid getting blood on his jeans or shoes, his black t-shirt had some spots and streaks on it. He didn’t think the stains would be visible to anyone who wasn’t standing within arm’s reach, and he had no plans to let anyone get that close.

  Behind him was the larger maze of the casino with its dozens of tables and hundreds of slots, dinging and bleeping and loom-loom-looming their electrical music in sleepy fashion. He passed the cashier’s counter with its imitation gold jail bars and the maroon-blazered cashier on duty, a black woman with braids and bright red lipstick, did not look up as he passed.

  Then it was an easy hook into the front lobby, with the wide arcing front desk to his right and freedom – the revolving doors and cab lines and fresh air – to his left. There were two people working check-ins for the three or four early arrivals, an older man with presidential hair and a younger woman who was not Tilly but might be in another ten years. The vast room was quiet and another maintenance man was running a floor polisher around, jigging to it in a private lullaby. Noel wanted to run but
his ankle, while no longer throbbing in a siren of pain, was still sending hot tendrils up his leg that flared every time he came down on that foot. His back ached, his head ached. Bright lights overhead. The gray-blue of sunrise just beyond the windows.

  Noel crossed an arm over the tear in his shirt and pretended to fuss with an itch at his ear, concentrating on walking in fluid steps, burying the limp and paying for it, gritting his teeth. Any moment now he expected someone to shout, ‘Stop! You, hold it right there!’ but no one did.

  He was less than a dozen paces from the revolving doors when he saw the policemen. They were standing outside, facing each other, one on each side of the central revolving door. His heart sank. He’d begun to wonder if Dalton had somehow cleaned up the mess on sixth before anyone reported the dead man, but clearly that had been wishful thinking. Noel slowed but continued his forward progress so as not to draw attention. Ahead of him, a perky middle-aged lady with a large turquoise purse was exiting the revolving door to the right. She was scooted right up to the door, waiting for the automatic turnstile to release her, and when the gap opened she set off at a clip close to running.

  The cop on her side whistled loud and darted back to stop her. She reared back and gawked at the officer. He waved a hand in apology and said something that got her to cough up her ID. He nodded and sent her on her way.

  They were looking for somebody. Had they connected this crime scene to the condo? They might not be onto Dalton yet, who left no witnesses by virtue of his talent, but if they were, then they were onto Noel too. His fingerprints taken from the condo. They probably would not have the name Noel Shaker, but would be happy to stop anyone who appeared suspicious. Someone, say, who looked like he hadn’t slept or bathed in five days, and by the way, what’s this stain on your torn-up shirt, sir?

  The front exits were not going to work.

  Noel changed course and continued through the lobby, into another hall decorated as a temporary art gallery whose theme might have been The Wild West and Sleepy Cowboys Who Lived There. There had to be more exits, plenty of them. But, then again, this was a casino and they practiced a school of feng shui that funneled you away from the exits for the same reason they didn’t want you to see a clock.