A shoe scraping over rock. My heart beating like the blades of a helicopter. A corpse, still warm. Panic, scrabbling and clawing inside me. I clutch my gun with dread, knowing deep inside that I’m no match. No match for him at all.
Tears poured down my face and my body shook as I sobbed convulsively. I fought against my bindings, hysterical, terrified. My breath came in snorts as I writhed and squirmed. I threw myself on my front and tried to rise to my feet, but I ended up on my knees with my forehead pressed against the ground.
I lay like that for a while, too exhausted to struggle any more, and I wept.
***
I was still crying when the lights came back on. I blinked rapidly, trying to adjust my eyes to the light, snorting in fright as my door was flung open. Martine stood there, staring down at me.
‘Stupid Rusky put my cable ties on back to front.’ She strode over to me and picked at the corner of the tape on my face. ‘There’s no pretty way to do this,’ she said, ‘so I’m going to count to three. You ready?’
I nodded my head at her, frantic to get the gag removed.
‘One, two…’
I squealed as she ripped off the tape; but the air I sucked through my mouth and into my lungs more than made up for the stinging on my face.
‘Hey,’ she said, ‘maybe we can do that to your arm.’
‘Don’t even think about it.’
She looked a little harder at my face and then said, ‘You all right?’
I must have looked a sight.
‘I had a moment,’ I said, wiping my nose on the back of my arm. ‘How do you know they’re Russian?’
‘Martyn took Russian language classes for a few months. Honestly, that man is such a nerd.’
‘So could you understand what they were saying?’ I held my bound hands up towards her.
‘The tall one with the freaky-deaky teeth is called Boris. The one with the Shotgun is Vladimir and the other one is Dmitrij.’
‘What else?’
‘I said he was a nerd, not a genius.’ She turned away from me and pulled the front of her skirt up while she moved her hips from side-to-side. ‘Ahh, here it is.’
She turned back to me with her pen knife in her hand.
‘You’re kidding?’ I said, as she bent to cut my ties.
‘I figured no one would frisk me that thoroughly.’
I flexed my wrists and my ankles and then clambered to my feet. ‘You still got those other cable ties?’
‘Sure.’
‘Can I have them? I think I need to increase my arsenal.’
I heard her laughing as she disappeared. She came back with a couple of cable ties and handed them to me.
‘I want to see what’s in these other rooms.’ I was hoping we would find either another exit or something we could use as a weapon.
We moved quickly down the corridor checking the other rooms. They were all identically kitted out with stained mattresses. The only exit was the way we’d come in and that was almost too scary to contemplate. However, the thought of being trapped there till the Russians came back was even scarier.
‘You ready to kick some Russian arse?’ Martine asked.
‘Hell yeah.’ My voice was full of bravado.
Our bags lay on the ground amidst their strewn contents. Our phones, money and anything that could be used as a weapon were gone, but the Duct Tape lay where they had discarded it. I threw it into my bag with the rest of the stuff they had left, while Martine crept up the stairs and pushed her body against the trap door.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘It must be locked from above.’
Damn it. Even though we had chest bumped (which is really hard to do with a six foot drag queen in three-inch heels) and fist bumped, and swore, ‘we’d make those Ruskys pay,’ I’d really been hoping for a clean escape. We hadn’t come off so well in round one, and I didn’t have high hopes for round two.
‘What do we do?’ she said.
‘Well, they have to come back down here sometime, so we turn off the light, hide under the stairs and hit them over the head with the chairs.’
It sounded like a good plan. Of course if more than one of them came down we were in trouble, and if all three of them came we were in all sorts of strife. And then of course there was the dark, but I solved that dilemma by turning on my torch.
I wasn’t sure how long we’d been waiting when we heard the trap door rattle. All I knew was that my torch was getting fainter and fainter, and that my pulse rate was in indirect proportion to the brightness of the light.
The trap door lifted, a small beam of light shone down the stairs and an accented voice said, ‘Little vun, I ‘ave a present for you.’
Christ, it was Dmitrij. I was suddenly intensely glad that I was hiding under the stairs and not bound and gagged in my room.
I counted the sound of his feet coming down the steps. When he got to eleven, and I knew he would be reaching for the light switch, I slammed my chair over the back of his head.
He let out a satisfying, ‘Ooof,’ and slumped to the ground.
I dropped the seat, grabbed our bags, and sprinted after Martine up the stairs and down the corridor to the front door. This time it was locked. It felt like forever while Martine wrangled with it, swearing and cursing under her breath until she finally turned the handle and yanked open the door. We heard a yell from behind us as we raced down the stairs and into the night.
We had planned the escape from the house, but we hadn’t planned what we were going to do after we escaped. I had thought they wouldn’t chase us once we were free. I was wrong.
We sprinted across the road towards the Stratosphere. I looked back and saw Boris pelting down the front stairs with Vladimir behind him.
‘We need to blend in,’ Martine yelled over her shoulder.
I wasn’t sure how she was planning on doing that. The only time I had ever seen her blend in was when she was on stage with a troupe of drag queens.
A crowd of people clustered near the entrance to the Stratosphere. We darted through them and then I spied a smaller door off to the side. ‘In here,’ I said. I dived through the door and stood just behind it peeping out at our pursuers.
‘Hiyee,’ a chirpy voice said.
‘Hi.’ I glanced over my shoulder at the owner of the voice. A petite blonde stood behind a desk, wide eyes staring at Martine and me. I looked back out around the door. The men paused in front of the tower and scanned the crowd for us. When they couldn’t see us, they went through the main door into the tower.
So, ummm, you two are wanting to jump?’ The extra chirpy voice said.
‘We sure do,’ Martine said. I could feel her looking over my shoulder.
‘You just need to sign here.’
Two clipboards with pieces of paper on them were shoved in front of us. I grabbed one, flipped the pen out of the top clip and scratched my name across the bottom. Martine did the same.
‘Great,’ the lady said. ‘That’ll be $199.98.’
‘Huh?’ I started to look over at her but saw Boris come back out of the tower and head in our direction. Shit.
Martine and I rushed towards the woman and threw ourselves down behind her desk. ‘Don’t look at us,’ I hissed.
To her credit, she didn’t. A few moments went by and then she said, ‘Hiyee, do you want to do the jump?’
‘Two vomen,’ a man said. ‘Vun very large and masculine. Have you seen them?’
‘One really large?’ the woman clarified.
‘That is correct.’
‘Not tonight.’ A few moments passed before she said, ‘They’re gone.’
I climbed out from behind the desk. ‘Who’s he calling masculine?’ Martine said, flicking her bob back with her hands and re-adjusting her skirt. ‘Does my make-up look okay?’
‘Perfect,’ I lied. ‘Is there another way out of this tower than that?’ I said to the woman as I pointed at the door we’d come in.
‘Sure, the way you’re going to go.’
‘I don’t know how we can thank you enough,’ I said.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I get paid by commission so you could buy the t-shirt and DVD as well.’
I had no idea what she was talking about, and didn’t have the heart to tell her my money had been stolen.
‘Sure,’ Martine said. She turned away from the woman and made the same side-to-side action with her hips as when retrieving her pen knife. She turned back around and flipped a credit card at the woman.
‘I’m not sure I even want to know what else you have down there,’ I said.
The woman handed Martine back her credit card, with a piece of paper to sign, and then disappeared into a side room. I watched the entry door nervously until she re-appeared with two blue and yellow jumpsuits.
‘Here you go,’ she said, handing them to us. ‘Come back here afterwards for your t-shirts and DVDs.’
‘Excellent. Disguises.’ This was my kind of woman.
Martine and I pulled the jumpsuits up over our clothes and followed the woman to an elevator.
‘Have fun,’ she said as the doors closed.
‘Shit, you said my make-up was good,’ Martine said, staring at herself in the elevator mirrors.
‘Considering we’ve been chased, gagged, tied up and chased again, it does look good.’
She pulled a face and started wiping away the smudged mascara and eyeliner from under her eyes. I didn’t even bother to try to rescue mine.
‘This elevator is slow,’ Martine said.
‘What do you think she meant about coming back for our t-shirt and DVD?’
‘I have no idea.’
The doors opened slowly and we hurried out, looking for a flight of stairs to exit the building.
‘Christ,’ Martine said, clutching a hand back towards me. She missed my arm and got a breast but I wasn’t complaining. I was too busy staring out over the night skyline of Las Vegas.
***
‘I’m not thinking that lift was so slow,’ Martine said.
‘How high are we?’
‘829 feet.’ We’d been so busy staring at the view, we hadn’t noted the man waiting at the doors of the elevator.
‘Creepers,’ Martine said, squeezing my breast. I wasn’t sure if she were scared or excited.
I reached up and removed her hand before turning towards the man.
‘How do we get down?’
‘This way,’ he said, pointing to a platform leading off the side of the tower.
‘You’re kidding?’
I looked over at Martine. Her mouth was opening and closing silently in time with her clenching fists. I was really glad I had detached her hand.
‘It’s The Jump,’ he said.
Oh Dear God. Those bodies I’d seen earlier, hurtling off the tower. This is what they’d been doing. I leant over and placed my head in the vicinity of my knees. I wasn’t that fond of heights. But what was the alternative? Going back down and giving ourselves up to Boris?
Martine’s mouth slammed shut and she turned to me. ‘Is he saying what I think he’s saying?’ Her eyes glowed with a feverish light.
I stood back up and nodded my head. ‘Look at the bright side. It’ll be over really fast.’ If we don’t die was the unspoken part of my sentence.
Martine looked from the platform, back to the elevator, then back to the platform. She nodded her head and said, ‘Oh yeah. I’m going to own this bad boy.’
I tried to get on board with her enthusiasm by humming the soundtrack to ‘Bad to the Bone’ in my head, but instead I got ‘Baby did a Bad, Bad Thing’.
‘Who’s going first?’ the man asked.
‘Me,’ I said. If I had to watch Martine jump there was no way I was going over.
‘All righty,’ he rubbed his hands together. ‘Let’s get you hooked up.’
I tried not to look down as he placed the harness over my suit. He played around behind me attaching first one rope and then a cable, and very slowly my eyes were drawn down.
Eeeeepppp.
My stomach reacted to the sight by doing a double flip and starting to crawl up my oesophagus. I jerked my eyes back up and turned to look at Martine. She gave me a manic smile and I gave her a thumbs-up, which would have been far more impressive if my hand hadn’t been shaking.
‘You’re ready to go,’ the man said, giving my cables one last tug.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Ahuh.’
‘You’re absolutely positive?’
‘Yesiree.’
‘Have you ever been wrong?’
He scratched his head while he considered my question. ‘Well, I never shoulda married Noelene. My Ma was right about that one. She said Noelene was a two-timing, gold-digging, piece of… that wasn’t what you were talking about was it?’
I shook my head and then looked back at Martine who made an ‘O’ with her thumb and first finger. I wasn’t sure if it were ‘O’ for okay or ‘O’ for oh-God-you’re-going-to-die.
My pony-tail whipped around in the wind as I urged my trembling legs towards the edge of the platform. My head spun as I stared down at the city. I mean it was very pretty and all that, but it was a long, long way down. I clutched desperately at the hand rails and started to say the Lord ’s Prayer.
‘What’s she saying?’ Martine called out.
‘Hallowed be thy name,’ the man replied.
‘You’re going to have to push her.’
I felt his hand on my back and I tightened my grip. He leaned forwards and prised my fingers off the rail one by one, and then he shoved me with enough force that I flew off the edge of the platform and plummeted towards the ground.
‘Thy will be dooooonnnneeeeeeeeeeeeeee,’ I screamed.
It was over before my terrified mind had fully comprehended the horror of what it was doing. I landed on my feet and bent over, gasping as another man wearing a The Jump shirt unhooked me.
Finally, I stood back up and unzipped my jumpsuit. I heard a wild shrieking coming closer and closer and looked up in time to witness Martine plunging from the tower.
‘That was fucking awesome,’ she said, when she had landed.
‘Ahhh Martine…’
‘Did you see me?’ she said. ‘I didn’t even scream. And he didn’t have to push me either.’
I refrained from telling her that I had heard her from all the way down there because we had bigger problems. ‘Martine…’
‘I might do that again. Do you want to do that again?’
‘MARTINE.’
She stopped talking and looked at me. ‘Right, the Russians.’
‘Yes, but more importantly… where is your wig?’
Her hands flew up and frantically patted her bald head. ‘Ahhhh,’ she squealed. ‘Aghhhhhhhhh. Oh my, oh my.’ She looked around, wildly searching for her hair.
I unzipped her jumpsuit and wiggled it down her body to her feet. She stepped out of it, still clutching her head.
‘Can we leave these here?’ I said to the man.
‘No problems. It’s a quiet night.’ He was watching Martine with a big grin on his face.
‘We have to find it,’ she said urgently. ‘I can’t go without it.’
‘Okay, okay,’ I said. I’d seen Martine get hysterical before and it wasn’t pretty.
I licked my finger and lifted it in the air to see which way the wind was blowing.
‘It’ll be long gone by now,’ the man said.
Martine turned to look at him, arms still up, eyes wide.
‘The wind up there is much stronger than down here,’ he said.
It was true. The wind had been whistling up on the platform.
‘It’s probably down at Circus Circus by now.’
He really wasn’t helping.
‘Which way is Circus Circus?’ Martine asked.
‘It’s that way,’ he pointed back down the strip, ‘but I didn’t mean that literally.’
‘We have to go to Circus Circus.’ Martine turned to me a
nd clutched my hands. ‘Please Chanel, please.’ She was a mess: smudged lipstick, running mascara, no wig. I wondered at what point she would turn back into Martyn.
The decision of what to do was taken out of our hands when we heard a familiar voice yell, ‘Over there.’
‘Shit,’ I said. An empty cab was pulling out of the Stratosphere and I grabbed Martine’s arm and dragged her towards it.
I yanked open the back door and we both jumped in. ‘Circus Circus,’ Martine barked at the cabby. I could see the three Russians running towards the cab and held my breath as we whizzed away from them. Another cab was pulling into the hotel and as we turned the corner I could see them rushing towards it.
‘I don’t know if we should go to Circus Circus,’ I said to Martine.
‘I need to find my hair,’ she whispered. ‘Besides, we can’t lead them back to The Luxor.’
She had a point.
We jumped out of the cab at Circus Circus and as we ran towards the entrance I glanced over my shoulder. Another cab was turning into the front of the hotel. I could see the bulky form of Boris squashed into the back.
‘Crap,’ I said. Guess we wouldn’t be looking for Martine’s wig. ‘Come on.’ We ran towards the brightly lit circus tent, barrelling through the front door and straight into a crowd of clowns. They milled around with their big shoes and their fake noses and their curly wigs, and suddenly I had an idea.
‘We’re late,’ I said to a clown with tear drops drawn down one cheek. ‘Which way are the change rooms?’
The sad clown used his fingers to mime walking and then pretended to open a door.
‘Well that clears things up,’ I said.
‘Don’t listen to Larry,’ another clown said. ‘He don’t know what he’s talkin’ about. Go through those doors, down the corridor, take a left and then your second right.’
‘Down the corridor, left, second right,’ I said, heading for the doors.
‘What are we doing?’ Martine asked, her hands pressed over her skull.
‘We’re going to get you a wig.’
We were through the doors before the Russians made an entrance. We ran down the corridor, took a left then the second right and all of a sudden we were in a huge changing room. It had a long row of tables scattered with pots of make-up. Each table had a huge mirror surrounded by light bulbs. It looked very Hollywood.
Donna Joy Usher - Chanel 02 - Goons 'n' Roses Page 7