Suddenly everything clicked—the locked doors and darkness, the taunting voice on the radio, the corpses in the dark. Six hours ago, all she had was the note Jolie had written to Mike, along with a receipt from her husband’s pocket for a diamond bracelet they couldn’t afford, a style she never wore, and the terrible knowledge that he was cheating on her again. Since then Frank Snow had taught her about true fear, and fear had cleared her mind, reset her counters, and filed her instincts down to hair-trigger sensitivity.

After rocking Eli back and forth for a moment she fell still, her ears picking up the sound of static. It came from one of the cabinets across the suite. She stood up, the boy’s head resting on her shoulder, and walked to the sink, opened the cupboard door, and saw the radio on the shelf. It was switched on, broadcasting nothing.

She pushed the button. “Hello?”

Eli squirmed, grumbled; she sensed him listening in his half-waking way. But there was no answer, and she wasn’t surprised. If Snow was playing games, she could hardly expect anything as coherent as a conversation.

But there was something, very faint, in the background, a sound she didn’t recognize until she heard Eli imitating it, a muffled metallic clanging through the radio’s speaker. Sarah looked at him.

“What is it?”

“The flag,” he said, still half-asleep.

“What?”

“When we came in,” Eli said. “Remember? Clang-clang. The flag?”

“By the emergency room entrance? Is that where?”

Eli nodded, so weary, rested his head back down.

Follow the flag.

Sarah started moving.

CHAPTER 39

39.

Calhoun opened his eyes. The latest version of his mind felt like it had a rusty steel pipe slammed through it, his tongue pasted like desert roadkill to the roof of his mouth, all very familiar sensations from years of chronic binge drinking. He burped, triggering dyspeptic burning in his belly and chest. The bottle on the floor next to him was empty.

All of it?

The lights were back on.

Calhoun groaned, clutched his temples. To his beleaguered brain and eyes, having the lights back wasn’t necessarily an improvement, but it did allow him to see what he’d missed about the bottle.

It wasn’t completely empty.

There was a rolled-up piece of paper stuck inside it, the damp lower edge tinged brown with the dregs of the bourbon that had been the bottle’s original occupant. He’d gotten the bourbon from his mother, the omnipresent Marilyn Lawrence Calhoun. The only problem with that scenario was that Marilyn Lawrence Calhoun had been dead for twenty years.

So you had a bottle stashed up here somewhere for yourself and you forgot about it. You blacked out, took some of that short-term memory with you. Imagine that.