50

“Okay. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the latest. What is this episode? Number 352, I believe,” Gannon heard Eric Wheldon saying.

Gannon sat there in the side room beside the slightly cracked-open door, fidgeting in his kitchen chair. Even though it wasn’t TV and his voice would be disguised, and it wasn’t even live, he was still nervous about saying something stupid and screwing it up. A memory of being an altar boy came to him. Standing next to the priest, wide-eyed up on the bright altar with the eyes of the entire parish staring at him waiting for him to trip over his feet.

“Tonight,” Wheldon said, “I have a really great info drop for all of you that relates to your favorite new subject and mine. The oh-so-mysterious death of—”

In the suite’s little sitting room, Gannon sat up in his chair waiting for Eric to continue.

Then there was a heavy thump through the crack in the door.

“Eric?” he heard the Mrs. Smith woman say. “ERRIICC!”

Gannon went to the door and pulled it open and saw the screaming Mrs. Smith down on the carpet. Eric Wheldon was down on his back beside her with the back of his neatly combed head half gone and the scarlet mush of the inside of it dumped out on the floor.

Even over the woman’s screaming, Gannon suddenly heard a slight yet distinct sound in the air on his left.

He’d heard it before.

It was the soft yet unforgettable slight click that a high velocity bullet made when it just missed you.

“Down, down, down!” Gannon yelled and immediately dropped to the carpet as the window above the radiator came in with a crashing rain of glass.

A muffled clatter of silenced automatic fire made a constellation of ripping holes grow across the yellow shade as Gannon crawled low alongside the bed. He reached out and seized the screaming navy lieutenant by the back of her plaid shirt, and she screamed even louder as he yanked her around the other side of the bed away from the window.

A corner of the bed’s headboard exploded into toothpicks as he dived with her into the sitting room. As they landed, a dotted line of bullets popped instantly through the Sheetrock wall just above them. Gannon kicked closed the door. Then he flipped the cheap table and propped it against the wall with his back.

In the next room outside the broken window, Gannon could hear the high turbo whine of a helicopter hovering close above the hotel. Then he heard a sound at the window itself. Something was smashing at the glass.

It was a boot! Gannon realized.

Holy shit! There was somebody at the damn window! They must have been on a rappelling rope or something. They were coming in!

Gannon folded into the fetal position as the gun started up again blowing more holes through the wall. Bullets whined and pinged off the small two-burner stove across the room.

Gannon suddenly stared at the stove. He quickly crawled over and turned up the two gas burners as high as they would go. More bullets burst in through the shower tile as he speed-crawled low into the bathroom. He grabbed toilet paper rolls from under the sink and some towels and crawled back out.

The paper wrapper on the rolls caught immediately as he threw all of it up onto the clicking blue-flame stove burners. Then one of the towels began to burn.

The hotel fire alarm that went off a split second later was unspeakably deafening. There were two earsplitting blasts of what sounded like a circus clown slide whistle and then a recording began shouting.

“THE SOURCE OF THE ALARM SIGNAL YOU ARE HEARING IS NOW BEING INVESTIGATED. THE SOURCE OF THE ALARM SIGNAL YOU ARE HEARING IS NOW BEING INVESTIGATED.”

As the siren blast whooped twice again, Gannon glanced over and saw that all of the towels were burning now. He crawled over and grabbed one and opened the door into the bedroom. Keeping low, he thrust the burning towel under the edge of the bedspread and set it alight. It caught up immediately in a horrid chemical stink, and there was immediate thick black smoke. He threw another burning towel onto the desk.

When the bed was going pretty good, he peeked out around the burning bottom of it. The entire end of the room by the shattered window was covered in smoke, and the wall behind the desk was catching fire.

Gannon got to his knees, coughing, and grabbed the metal frame of the bed and hurled the whole burning mess of it up and at the window. Then he reached into the sitting room and grabbed the young woman by the hand.

He thought he was certainly going to get shot in the back as they leaped over the murdered reporter a split second later.

But the bullets didn’t come, and Gannon got the front door flung open, and they were out in the hallway with the black smoke chasing behind them.