Cell: A Novel by Stephen King Page A

follow-up. What was on the second floor? Not a restaurant, he remembered being told (by Mr. Ricardi himself, when Clay checked in) that the hotel didn’t have a restaurant, but the Metropolitan Cafe was right next door. Meeting rooms, he thought. I’m pretty sure it’s meeting rooms with Indian names.
    “What?” Mr. Ricardi asked again. He sounded grouchier than ever.
    “Did you try to call anyone when all this started happening?”
    “Well of course!” Mr. Ricardi said. He came to the door between the inner office and the area behind the reception desk, with its pigeonholes, security monitors, and its bank of computers. There he looked at Clay indignantly. “The fire alarms went off—I got them stopped, Doris said it was a wastebasket fire on the third floor—and I called the Fire Department to tell them not to bother. The line was busy! Busy, can you imagine!”
    “You must have been very upset,” Tom said.
    Mr. Ricardi looked mollified for the first time. “I called the police when things outside started… you know…to go downhill.”
    “Yes,” Clay said. To go downhill was one way of putting it, all right. “Did you get an answer?”
    “A man told me I’d have to clear the line and then hung up on me,” Mr. Ricardi said. The indignation was creeping back into his voice. “When I called again—this was after the crazy man came out of the elevator and killed Franklin—a woman answered. She said…” Mr. Ricardi’s voice had begun to quiver and Clay saw the first tears running down the narrow defiles that marked the sides of the man’s nose. “… said…”
    “What?” Tom asked, in that same tone of mild sympathy. “What did she say, Mr. Ricardi?”
    “She said if Franklin was dead and the man who killed him had run away, then I didn’t have a problem. It was she who advised me to lock myself in. She also told me to call the hotel’s elevators to lobby level and shut them off, which I did.”
    Clay and Tom exchanged a look that carried a wordless thought: Good idea. Clay got a sudden vivid image of bugs trapped between a closed window and a screen, buzzing furiously but unable to get out. This picture had something to do with the thumps they’d heard coming from above them. He wondered briefly how long before the thumper or thumpers up there would find the stairs.
    “Then she hung up on me. After that, I called my wife in Milton.”
    “You got through to her,” Clay said, wanting to be clear on this.
    “She was very frightened. She asked me to come home. I told her I had been advised to stay inside with the doors locked. Advised by the police. I told her to do the same thing. Lock up and keep a, you know, low profile. She begged me to come home. She said there had been gunshots on the street, and an explosion a street over. She said she had seen a naked man running through the Benzycks’ yard. The Benzycks live next door to us.”
    “Yes,” Tom said mildly. Soothingly, even. Clay said nothing. He was a bit ashamed at how angry he’d been at Mr. Ricardi, but Tom had been angry, too.
    “She said she believed the naked man might— might, she only said might —have been carrying the body of a…mmm… nude child. But possibly it was a doll. She begged me again to leave the hotel and come home.”
    Clay had what he needed. The landlines were safe. Mr. Ricardi was in shock but not crazy. Clay put his hand on the telephone. Mr. Ricardi laid his hand over Clay’s before Clay could pick up the receiver. Mr. Ricardi’s fingers were long and pale and very cold. Mr. Ricardi wasn’t done. Mr. Ricardi was on a roll.
    “She called me a son of a bitch and hung up. I know she was angry with me, and of course I understand why. But the police told me to lock up and stay put. The police told me to keep off the streets. The police. The authorities.”
    Clay nodded. “The authorities, sure.”
    “Did you come by the T?” Mr. Ricardi asked. “I always use the T. It’s just two blocks down the