Cell: A Novel by Stephen King Read Free Book Online Page B

go two-sixty, maybe even two-ninety—and for a moment leaned against the door like a drunk against a lamppost, brown eyes bulging, nicotine-stained tongue hanging from one corner of his mouth, neck spewing. Then his knees came unhinged and he went down. Clay held on to the handle of the knife and was amazed at how easily it came back out. Much easier than pulling it back through the leather and reinforced particleboard of the portfolio.
    With the lunatic down he could see the girl again, one knee on the sidewalk and the other in the gutter, screaming through the curtain of hair hanging across her face.
    “Honey,” he said. “Honey, don’t.” But she went on screaming.
     
    11
    Her name was Alice Maxwell. She could tell them that much. And she could tell them that she and her mother had come into Boston on the train—from Boxford, she said—to do some shopping, a thing they often did on Wednesday, which she called her “short day” at the high school she attended. She said they’d gotten off the train at South Station and grabbed a cab. She said the cabdriver had been wearing a blue turban. She said the blue turban was the last thing she could remember until the bald desk clerk had finally unlocked the shattered double doors of the Atlantic Avenue Inn and let her in.
    Clay thought she remembered more. He based this on the way she began to tremble when Tom McCourt asked her if either she or her mother had been carrying a cell phone. She claimed not to remember, but Clay was sure one or both of them had been. Everyone did these days, it seemed. He was just the exception that proved the rule. And there was Tom, who might owe his life to the cat that had knocked his off the counter.
    They conversed with Alice (the conversation consisted for the most part of Clay asking questions while the girl sat mutely, looking down at her scraped knees and shaking her head from time to time) in the hotel lobby. Clay and Tom had moved Franklin’s body behind the reception desk, dismissing the bald clerk’s loud and bizarre protest that “it will just be under my feet there.” The clerk, who had given his name simply as Mr. Ricardi, had since retired to his inner office. Clay had followed him just long enough to ascertain that Mr. Ricardi had been telling the truth about the TV being out of commish, then left him there. Sharon Riddell would have said Mr. Ricardi was brooding in his tent.
    The man hadn’t let Clay go without a parting shot, however. “Now we’re open to the world,” he said bitterly. “I hope you think you’ve accomplished something.”
    “Mr. Ricardi,” Clay said, as patiently as he could, “I saw a plane crash-land on the other side of Boston Common not an hour ago. It sounds like more planes—big ones—are doing the same thing at Logan. Maybe they’re even making suicide runs on the terminals. There are explosions all over downtown. I’d say that this afternoon all of Boston is open to the world.”
    As if to underline this point, a very heavy thump had come from above them. Mr. Ricardi didn’t look up. He only flapped a begone hand in Clay’s direction. With no TV to look at, he sat in his desk chair and looked severely at the wall.
     
    12
    Clay and Tom moved the two bogus Queen Anne chairs against the door, where their high backs did a pretty good job of filling the shattered frames that had once held glass. While Clay was sure that locking the hotel off from the street offered flimsy or outright false security, he thought that blocking the view from the street might be a good idea, and Tom had concurred. Once the chairs were in place, they lowered the sun-blind over the lobby’s main window. That dimmed the room considerably and sent faint prison-bar shadows marching across the turkey-red rug.
    With these things seen to, and Alice Maxwell’s radically abridged tale told, Clay finally went to the telephone behind the desk. He glanced at his watch. It was 4:22 p.m., a perfectly logical time for