13. Edie Debates a Score.
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Room 542
The second hand on Edie’s wrist watch dragged itself to 3:57 a.m. which triggered the lever that released the pent-up hammer. The alarm buzzed.
Like an automaton she sat up in bed, twirled her feet to the carpet, and walked to the window to examine the sky. Clear and moonlit, with a lone black cloud. Bright enough that she shouldn’t need a flashlight.
She closed the curtains and turned on the desk lamp. She’d set her suitcase on the room’s luggage rack in preparation, and now she cycled through its combination lock. It popped open.
She unfolded, then stepped into her outfit: custom-fit black wool pants that kept a tight contour around her legs; a long-sleeved black turtleneck tucked into her pants; black socks; black high-tops; leather gloves; black ski mask. She unrolled a small hand towel in which she kept her single-shot pistol. She stuck the pistol into her pocket.
She hoisted her gig-bag over her shoulder, flipped off the desk lamp, and crawled out the window onto the fire escape.
The haze from the rooftop sign bathed the courtyard in scarlet, and the moonlight reflected off the glass of the hotel’s dining hall below. She began to climb.
Over her career, Edie had learned that the trick to a rapid ascent wasn’t about trying for speed, but simply maintaining a rhythm. When feet and hands were perfectly in sync, quickness was a side effect. In less than a minute, she’d climbed seven flights and was outside the penthouse suite.
She pressed a gloved hand against the window to jar it from its frame, but after a millimeter of movement, it caught the interior lock.
It was worth a shot.
She climbed the ladder to the rooftop and poked her head above the ridge to make sure there wasn’t some graveyard shift worker up there for a smoke. With the coast clear, she ascended and the red glow of the sign on the hotel’s opposite building dissipated from view. Edie took the thirty-foot length of rope from her bag, tied a slipknot, and hung it around a pipe. She tested its strength, and satisfied, rappelled down the side of the brick building.
Edie hated exterior entries. She’d last pulled a job like this way back in ‘49, when she was in her mid-20s and in better shape, or at least more confident in her invincibility. But purses in the tens of thousands didn’t come around often.
The current occupant of the Palmer’s penthouse was one Gregory Hurst. He was a gangster from Kansas City who’d come into the city last week to put the finishing touches on his relatively simple boxing scam, the classic kind where the heavy favorite took a dive in a predetermined round.
The only unique bent to Hurst’s plan was to spread the bets across twenty accomplices, each of whom walked away with a cut. This method was meant to accomplish two goals. First, mitigate the stink of the fix before it took place. Second, and primarily, to send a message to the city bosses when they inevitably got wind of it.
For Hurst, this wasn’t just a way to snatch some dough for his operations back in Kansas City. it was an advertisement that there was a new man in town. A taunt: a show of power, a display of resources, demonstrating that he could get so many local bookies and bettors to play along. This is what other bosses feared, a cohesive gang coming into town all at once. And that fear, warranted or not, would be needed to stake his claim on the city’s take.
But Edie had gotten wind of the scheme, too.
The nature of the plan meant that all twenty bettors had to show to the hotel after the fight was over and they’d collected their winnings. They’d take their cut, give the rest to Hurst, then take off.
Earlier on, right after midnight, Edie had watched each and every one come into the lobby from behind a newspaper. A few faces looked familiar, but they wouldn’t notice her in the dowdy outfit she was wearing. Women that were dressed like her blended into the background for guys like these. After the twenty showed and left, she returned to her room for a few hours of sleep until her alarm buzzed.
On the rooftop, Edie pulled the rope taut, then wrapped it over her shoulder and under her leg to form a kind of pulley chair. She clambered along the wall to the penthouse’s next window and pressed it. It slightly shifted in its frame, just like it had two nights ago when she’d cased the spot.
She reached into her pocket and removed a metal tool, slipped it under the frame, and flicked open the lock with a tweak of her wrist. She pried open the window, snuck a foot inside and then a knee, and limbo’d the rest of her body through. The rope dangled behind for her egress.
As soon as Edie hit the hardwood floor, she heard loud bassy snores through the door leading into the next room. That’s where Hurst and the money would be. The wall of curtainless windows allowed her to guide herself by moonlight through the furniture, which had been dragged into a haphazard array, almost like intentional barriers. After a stressful minute, she was through without a sound.
As grabbed the bedroom doorknob, she heard a faint ding behind her. She spun around.
It came from beyond the door that led to the foyer that housed the penthouse’s private elevator. The ding was followed by a pair of muffled gunshots and a concussive thud as someone, likely Hurst’s guard, hit the ground. She heard the soft metallic screech of a lightbulb being loosened, and the sliver of soft yellow from under the door disappeared.
Edie walked briskly to the piano in the corner next to the bedroom wall. She gracefully stepped onto the wooden bench, grabbed the piano’s top, and slowly lowered herself into the cramped space behind. She squatted down and reached into her pocket for the pistol.
This new development hadn’t shaken her. These kinds of things, she found, were largely out of one’s hands. She’d do her best, and that’d be good enough, because that’s all it could be. Nothing else to do but prepare in advance, and that time had passed.
The door opened. Sharp footsteps rapped the wooden floor as the shooter neared the piano on their way toward the loud snoring from the bedroom. She aimed the pistol where she imagined a head would appear, then heard the bedroom door creak open.
A booming blast rattled the window panes as a spatter of buckshot splintered the door.
Edie then heard two rapid muffled gunshots in the bedroom and the sound of bedsprings stretched to their capacity. A strained, painful bubbling wheezed for a moment until another muffled pop silenced it. It seemed like the assassin had taken care of Hurst for good, but the loud snore still continued. Then she heard the sound of a tape being stopped, and the snoring stopped. Hurst’s trap had failed him.
In her crouch, Edie heard clothes thrashed aside on their hangers, luggage unzipped. The sharp footsteps rapped again, out the bedroom and past Edie toward the elevator foyer. There goes the score, Edie thought.
It was worth a shot.
Suddenly the footsteps stopped. Edie instantly thought of the rope, still dangling in the courtyard, catching the rooftop sign’s red glow outside the open penthouse window.
She clutched her pistol and took aim. A few seconds went by, then a minute, then another, but she remained still in the room’s looming heaviness. She heard only her own heartbeat pulsing through her temples.
Edie then heard another sound in the room. A quiet, wet gurgling.
With her pistol leading her way, Edie poked her head up from behind the piano. Halfway between her position and the foyer door she saw a grey figure. The assassin, his back to her. His hands were at his sides. One gripped the silenced gun, the other held a duffel bag.
Edie rose from her hiding spot and took aim. The moonlight streamed in from the row of windows at an angle that cast the assassin’s long shadow onto the wooden floor. But then Edie noticed something peculiar.
The man’s toes were pointed down to the floor, but they weren’t touching it. There was about a two-inch gap between shadow and shoes.
He was floating in the air.
The bag dropped from his hand with a weighty thud, then the gun clanged on the floor. A moment later, the assassin’s body slumped forward with a sickening snap.
Edie waited for her heartbeat to settle, then lifted herself over the piano, never lowering her pistol, never taking her eyes from the shape. As she crested the piano’s top, her foot caught the ridge and she fell forward. Her knees struck the keys, and a cacophonous discord rattled in the room as she faceplanted onto the ground. Her gun spun out in front of her.
She frantically crawled to retrieve it, snatched it up and trained it again on the dark shape. But the assassin never moved as the piano’s resonance dissipated into silence.
Edie slowly stood and took a hard swallow. To her left, the open window and her dangling exit rope. Straight ahead, the fallen assassin and the duffel bag, and whatever else was still over there. She tucked her pistol back into her pocket, and considered.
Maybe the score was worth a shot.
Artwork by Tiffany Silver Braun.
If you like Tales from the Palmer Hotel, tell a friend. If you really like it, the suggested donation for the series is a one-time payment of $6.66. Venmo (@Rick-Paulas) or Paypal (rickpaulas@gmail.com).