59

Duke Pellafino sometimes felt that hotel-security work was beneath him, so that when he went into Room 414 in response to the sound of breaking glass, he had been a bit lax. He was expecting a hobo, a raggedy-ass burnt-out alkie or doper as thin as a scarecrow with no more brain cells than teeth. Instead, here was this well-scrubbed clean-cut guy who looked like maybe he belonged in the hotel. For a moment, Duke thought he should have said Has there been an accident, sir? instead of What are you doing here? But the guy was transfixed by his iPhone, and he started spouting weird stuff about his eleven-year-old daughter in danger, life and death. His voice and manner were manic, suggesting he was flying on something.

Then Duke saw the pistol. He didn't feel like Barney Fife—he felt pretty good, like he was back on the force—when he put the perp on the floor and took the weapon away from him.

The dude dropped the phone, too. Duke plucked it off the carpet and realized that it wasn't quite like any phone he'd seen before. On the screen were the words WARNING and CONFIRM DESTINATION, with a skull and crossbones between them.

The hard-compressed nerve would keep the perp on the floor for a few minutes, until feeling started to come back into his arms and his nausea subsided.

Frowning at the phone, Duke tucked the 9 mm Smith Wesson under his belt, in the small of his back. The skull and crossbones intrigued him, worried him. He wondered if this joker might be a terrorist of some kind.

He swiped his finger from top to bottom of the screen, to see if anything above the current display could be pulled down to put it in context.

He was blinded by the white.