Free 361 by Donald E. Westlake Page A

acted mad. “Lady, I’m not playing guessing games with you. I don’t have the whole damn hotel memorized. Where’s the door?”
    She waved a hand. “Back there. You’ll have to move that rack.”
    We went behind the counter, down between the racks of cleaned clothes, and I saw the lines of the door in the linoleum floor. I shoved the rack out of the way, and the girl said, “Take it easy with the clothes.”
    I ignored her. I lifted the door, and it was pitch-black down there. We didn’t have any flashlight, and it wouldn’t have looked good to back out. I just hoped there was a light switch somewhere.
    I just barely saw it as I was going down, tucked away behind a beam next to the door opening. I clicked it on, and continued down, and Bill came after me.
    There was a wide, balanced firedoor off to the right. It was filthy dirty. Instead of a lock, there was a latch and hasp, held shut by a twisted piece of thick wire broken off a hanger. By the time I got it untwisted, my hands were coated with dirt. My forehead was wet with perspiration, and I could almost feel the dust settling against it and sticking.
    I shoved the door aside on its roller and pawed around on the other side till I found the switch. I turned it on and saw a bigger chunk of basement, just as filthy as this. Up ahead, there was humming. Machinery, not voice.
    I went back to the foot of the stairs and shouted up. The girl came over and looked down at me. She stood with her legs pressed together and her palms flat against the front of her thighs, so I couldn’t peek up under her skirt. She said, “I got a customer here. What do you want?”
    “We’re going on through this way,” I said. “You can close that door now.”
    She started to bitch about it. I turned away and went through to the other part of the cellar. Bill was already over there, waiting for me. The girl kept bitching about how it wasn’t her job to close trap doors. I pulled the firedoor shut and then I couldn’t hear her.
    Off this room there was a corridor, low-ceilinged, with concrete walls. The walls were dirt-gray except where fresh concrete had dribbled away and showed flaky white. At the end there was another firedoor. This one wasn’t fastened at all. We slid it open and went through to a part that was already lit. The humming was louder ahead of us.
    We came to the end of the corridor a little ways after that door, and found a relatively clean part, with an old chunk of linoleum on the floor, and a battered old desk, and a girlie calendar on the wall. There wasn’t anybody there except a cat asleep beside the desk. The cat woke up when we got there, and slunk away to the doorway where the humming came from. It was brightly lit in there. I got a glimpse of metal stairs going down and a lot of dirty black machinery and a guy with a white housepainter’s cap sitting on a kitchen chair.
    On the opposite wall, there was the door of the freight elevator. I pushed the button, and you could hear the loud groaning of the machinery in the bottom of the elevator shaft, even farther down than we were. The elevator came. It wasn’t fancy, like the one for the customers. It had wide plank flooring and chest-high sides and only a kind of grillwork on top and a grill gate at the front. We got on and I shut the gate and pressed the button for our floor. The elevator ground up slowly and stopped, and we got off. I pressed the top button and unlocked and closed the door. It went on up.
    We came down the hall from the opposite direction that we usually took. There was nobody around. There was a telephone ringing. When we got closer, I could hear it was coming from our room. It rang six times and quit.
    I listened at the door of the room. Then I unlocked it and shoved it open fast and ran in crouched, cutting to the right while Bill faded to the left. But I’d heard right, there wasn’t anybody there.
    We packed what we needed in one bag and left the other one still open on a chair.