The Scarecrow

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.