Blood was spilling on the carpet in a torrent from the neck of the man whose head was inside the television set. He would have a gun too, with even more bullets in it. Merrill grabbed the man by the collar and pulled. He could feel the screen cutting deeper into the man’s throat as more blood poured onto the floor. The man fell onto his back, his shirt covered with blood. He blinked. He was still alive? Merrill turned his head away. He saw the gun in the man’s waistband and went for it. Slippery with blood, it almost fell to the floor. Merrill had to hurry. He flipped open the cylinder and dumped the bullets into his other hands, then spilled them into his shirt pocket. He looked over at the other one. Still alive, too, waiting to die.

“Where are they taking her?”

The man’s eyes were glazing over with misery.

Merrill grabbed his sirt and lifted him into the air. “Tell me!”

The man bared his teeth.

Merrill dropped him and started for the door, stopped and turned to the closet for a pair of pants. Just touching them with his fingertips turned the pants bloody. He took a DO NOT DISTURB sign from the doorknob and threw it on the man.

“Rest in peace, asshole.”

Three down, three to go, he thought as he hopped into the pants as he headed toward the elevator.

Oh really? What makes you think so? He almost said it aloud as he pressed the elevator button. No, they could be waiting for him on the first floor. A terrible weight was falling on him, and he knew why at once: putting the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the man. Making a joke of a man dying. It was like asking for bad luck.

Gun in hand, he headed for the stairs.

In the lobby people looked like statuary, fixed on what was happening outside the front entrance. A puddle of water extended across the floor in that direction. The rear door of the white stretch Lincoln was being pulled shut. One of the big blond men looked back toward Merrill in confusion. They were kidnapping Amy. The others were supposed to have kidnapped him. What he had just done upstairs was still sinking in. Merrill had not had a real fight with another human being since the eighth grade. The Lincoln pulled away, burning rubber.