Bad Girl - By Blake Crouch Page 0,1

the crowd. He looked around and kept glancing at his watch. After awhile, he turned away and started back through the lobby to the elevators.

Lucy stood up and grabbed her handbag and followed.

The middle elevator in a row of three lifted out of the lobby, and through its glass, she could see Mark leaning against the railing inside, looking out across the hotel.

She watched it climb. Counted the stories until it stopped and then followed Mark’s progress onto the fourteenth floor, counting doors to the room he disappeared inside.

Lucy rode alone, watching the lobby fall away beneath her as the elevator car soared up the back wall of the atrium.

She walked the exposed hallway, the noise from the lobby faint up here and no one else about. From the door beside 1428, she grabbed a “Do Not Disturb” sign and hooked it on the door to Mark’s room.

Then she put her ear to the door, couldn’t hear anything. Knocked.

In a minute, it swung open, and Mark, now wearing only a white oxford shirt and khaki pants, stood staring down at her, looking both confused and vaguely annoyed.

He said, “Yes?”

“It’s Lucy.”

“I’m sorry, what do you want?”

“I just wanted to see your book. The one you told me about.”

“You followed me to my room to see my book?”

“Yeah. It sounded good.”

“Look, maybe I’ll see you downstairs tomorrow, and if you buy one of my books, I’ll even sign it for you. How would that be?”

Lucy furrowed her brow and made what she hoped resembled a wounded expression. “Why don’t you like me, Mark?”

“I don’t…dislike you, I don’t even…”

She put her face into her hands and pretended to cry.

“Jesus.”

“You’re the first real author I’ve ever met. I don’t know anyone here.”

“Where are your parents?”

“My mom’s in our room watching ‘Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.’”

He sighed. “If I invite you in—and only for a minute—will you stop crying?”

“Yes.”

“All right, come on in, Lucy.”

Lucy wiped her face and followed Mark into the hotel room. His suitcase lay on the bed, open but not yet unpacked, and Mark was bending over a cardboard box and trying to tear open the top.

“I brought twenty copies of A Death in the Family.” He pulled a trade paperback out of the box and handed it to her. Lucy thumbed through the pages, skimmed the flap copy on the back.

The cover was of a gravestone, the book’s title engraved into the stone above the author’s name: Mark Darling.

“Is anybody else sharing the room with you?” Lucy asked.

He tilted his head slightly, like he couldn’t comprehend the question. “No, just me.”

“I need to use the bathroom.”

“Right through that door.”

“Would you sign this for me while I pee?”

“Um, sure.”

She gave back the book and walked into the bathroom and closed the door.

“Write something good!” she called out from inside.

She did have to pee actually, and when she’d finished, she flushed the toilet and washed her hands and took all of her clothes off. She folded them and stacked them on top of her black Chuck Taylors on the toilet basin under a towel, then turned her attention to her handbag.

The marble of the sink was cold against the soles of her bare feet. She walked down to the end and crouched down beside the door.

She’d been in the bathroom more than five minutes already, and she crouched there another five, her legs beginning to cramp, before Mark’s voice passed finally through the door.

“Lucy?” he said.

She brought her hand to her mouth to suppress the giggle. She’d imagined this a hundred times, and something about the moment finally being here struck her as funny and surreal. It was the strangest thing. Her body felt all tingly, like whenever she had been around Bobby Cockrell, the first boy in high school she’d had a major crush on.

“You’ve been in there awhile,” Mark said. “Everything okay?”

She didn’t answer.

“Lucy, I need to get back down to the lobby.”

Silence, Lucy smiling.

“I’m opening the door, all right? Are you um…are you decent?”

She watched the doorknob turn and the door ease open.

Mark’s head appeared.

“Lucy?”

She was right beside him, well within reach, but he didn’t see her. Kept looking at the toilet, and then the shower, as if trying to piece together how this girl had vanished through the walls.

Lucy reached out and pulled the blade of her dead father’s Zwilling J.A. Henckels straight razor through his windpipe in a quick, delicate swipe and the blood from his carotid artery sprayed her face and she squealed with delight as Mark clutched