Brian Freeman - Stripped

He reached in and took Claire by the upper body and lifted her out of the trunk. Her legs were rubbery, and she began to fall, so he had to support her. Claire turned and looked up and saw where they were, and she gasped.

Serena laced her fingers together, cupping the cell phone between her hands. She hoped she didn’t accidentally cut the connection. Blake pulled her gun from his belt and pointed it at her. “Please don’t try anything.”

Serena nodded. “It’ll be easier if I roll over.”

“Do it.”

She shoved herself over on her stomach. Her face and breasts were squashed against the floor of the car, and her hands were between her legs, clutching the phone. She felt Blake take hold of her belt and T-shirt and drag her roughly over the edge of the trunk. She dangled there briefly until he took one of her legs and maneuvered it so it was outside the car and almost on the ground. He took her T-shirt and lifted her up again, and Serena was able to stumble out onto the gravel.

She turned around and looked skyward at the dark hotel.

“Welcome to the Sheherezade,” Blake said.

It was a looted beauty, stripped bare, ready for the imploders to do their work. Where the grand entrance had been, a jagged hole was punched in the wall of the building, more than two stories tall, as if some comic-book monster had fought its way inside. The windows on the lower floors were broken, leaving empty holes. Serena could see columns inside with their decorations gone, just rough concrete where carefully measured charges of dynamite would be inserted.

Higher up, the hotel looked as it always had. If they turned on the lights, it would be the same place she had driven by hundreds of times in the past two decades. It had been a jewel once, but that was long ago. Other towers dwarfed it now. Even before the wreckers had come, it was showing its age. Twenty stories held up by nostalgia and echoes. Sinatra’s voice. The whine of the roulette wheel. Honeymooners making love. All of it about to become dust.

She had never been inside, never been this close. Until tonight.

“The Sheherezade,” Serena said as loudly as she could. Did you hear that, Jonny? She added, “Why are we here, Blake?”

But she knew. This was Amira’s house, where she danced, where she died. Blake was coming home.

He gestured them inside. Serena and Claire led the way. They had to make their; way past rubble and glass. They walked right through the gaping hole into the lobby, as if they were checking in for the night.

“You can imagine what it was like, can’t you?” Blake asked.

Serena understood. It was easy to float back to the 1960s here. Easier than it would have been a few weeks ago, when the hotel was still open, and all the twenty-first-century guests were coming and going. Now they were alone with the ghosts. The furniture was all gone, the fixtures pulled off and sold at auction, everything taken away: chairs, wastebaskets, ashtrays, slot machines, paintings, craps tables, beer taps. Only the skeleton was left-but even the bones of the building told a story. The geometric Arabian design in the wallpaper. The desert mural stretching across the ceiling. The etchings of Sheherezade herself in gold leaf on the elevator doors.

Blake pushed the button for the elevator.

“Where are we going?” Serena asked. She heard the singsong chime of the elevator as its doors slid open. It seemed odd to her that the elevator still worked in a hotel that was about to be destroyed, but then she realized it would probably work right up until the last day, as explosive experts checked their charges throughout the building.

She was afraid she would lose the signal when the elevator doors closed.

“The roof?” she speculated loudly. “Of course, that’s where Amira was killed. In Walker’s suite. That’s where you’re taking us.”

Jonny? Are you there?

The doors closed. The three of them were alone in the small compartment as it hummed upward. Blake pushed the button for the top floor, heading exactly where Serena had expected-but why?

“I don’t see what you hope to accomplish, Blake. None of this will bring Amira back.”

“I’m here for the truth,” Blake said.

He didn’t say anything else. The elevator was slow, or maybe it was just that her nerves were on a razor’s edge, not knowing Blake’s next move. She watched the numbers for each floor Illuminate one by one. Climbing higher and finally thudding to a halt. With another birdlike song, the doors opened again, and Blake forced them out into the hallway. They were opposite two double doors, painted gold.

There was no suite number on the doors. Maybe they had sold the room numbers at auction. Or maybe, if you were in the high roller’s suite, you simply knew where to go.

Blake twisted the handle. The door was open. He pushed it in and waited as Serena and Claire walked past him into the foyer of the suite. Without furniture, the room was vast, and it kept a lingering elegance, despite its barren appearance. Even the carpet had been rolled up and sold, along with the chandeliers, but stretches of delicate porcelain tile had been left to be crushed in the demolition, presumably because it couldn’t be safely removed for sale.

Serena had to imagine what the suite would have looked like when it was fully furnished. There were hints in the multicolored kaleidoscope of the tile and the pistachio colors of the painted ceiling. She thought of flowing draperies behind honey sofas laden with pillows. Wrought-iron hanging lamps. Rich lapis vases. All that and a five-hundreddollar hooker would make any high roller feel like a sultan.

“Keep going,” Blake said.

He pushed them through the deserted suite to the far wall leading to the outdoor patio. Serena slid through open stained-glass doors and stepped outside with Claire beside her. Blake followed. They were immediately bathed in a rainbow of light from the giant Sheherezade sign flashing above them. Each letter in the name was mounted on its own frame and must have been thirty feet tall. They flicked on and off in a rhythm of darkness and color that made Serena think of a nightclub dance floor.

There were twelve-foot walls on three sides of the huge patio, all decorated in Moroccan tile, leading up to the actual roof of the hotel. She could see a barbed-wire fence on the roof, preventing trespassers from creeping down from the roof to the high roller’s suite. The fourth side of the patio, on her right, had a much shorter wall topped with scalloped icons. That wall faced the street and created the distinctive notch in the roofline of the Sheherezade.

The patio, like the rest of the suite, had been largely stripped of its decorations. There were still date trees that had been planted into stone circles cut directly into the floor, and marble fountains, now turned off, carved into the walls. The pool was filled with water that had turned dank and green from lack of care.

She noticed that Blake was staring into the murky water. Thinking of Amira.

“I’m sorry,” Claire said.

Blake looked up. “For what?”

“That you lost your mother. I never knew my mother either. It’s hard growing up that way.”

Blake was silent. Serena wondered how many times he had made secret visits to this place in the past few weeks. It wasn’t his first time, she was sure of that. She could imagine him alone in the hotel, here by the pool, obsessing over his mother’s death.

“I think I know what you want,” Claire continued, “but you won’t get it from him. I know him too well. He won’t confess. He won’t apologize. He’ll never tell you the truth.”

“We’ll see,” Blake said.

“He betrayed me, too, Blake. I hate him like you do.”