At any rate, I wanted to know what was happening beyond that locked backroom door with all the chairs piled up against it.
Dan joined me, his gaze dancing between the office door and the blocked hallway door.
“It’s locked,” I muttered. “Don’t suppose you have an emergency key.”
“You think Tara would leave me a key to her office?”
We both stared at the blocked door.
“Where’s Andrew?”
He was a new hire, only been with the hotel for a week at that point, as a nighttime bellhop. It was a slow shift. Only occasionally did people check in or leave in the middle of the night. But it happened. And sometimes they needed a bellhop. The owners had resisted hiring someone for that shift. Preferring to let guests just get and use one of the brass luggage carts on their own if they really needed it. We were not the Waldorf Astoria. Guests here knew what they were getting when they booked and it wasn’t all the luxuries.
But with only one night manager, and no other front desk staff for overnight, and all the cleaning staff gone for the night, often Dan was the only person on duty. And that meant he couldn’t take proper breaks. Not to mention the security issues of only having a single member of staff in the hotel for several hours.
The cleaning crew started to arrive around four in the morning. And Miguel arrived for his shift at five. During busier times, there’d be another couple of our part-time desk people working throughout the day, crossing over shifts to make sure there was always coverage. But the nighttime didn’t require so much coverage. None of the regular back-office people, like the bookkeeper, or the maintenance staff were around at night either. Your toilet blocked up at four in the morning, you were going to have to wait until six for one of the two-man maintenance crew to arrive for work.
All this to say, there were often several hours when no one else was around and it was just Dan. So the owners had gotten it into their heads to hire a new bellhop for overnight. Someone who could be a bit of backup to Dan, give Dan his proper breaks—we had a union, they couldn’t short change those breaks—and generally just be another body in the building overnight if that was needed. Andrew was hired on a trial basis to see if this all would work out.
“He went out for a break just before you called. I wasn’t expecting him back for another ten minutes.”
Dan and I exchanged a look. That ten minutes was probably close to up. If Andrew was the conscientious type, he’d be walking into the lobby at any minute.
I gave Tara’s door another jiggle but it was locked and I didn’t have time to google search how to pick a lock. Probably Tara would have frowned on that anyway.
Dan and I hurried back to the blocked door, both of us straining to hear if anything was going on behind it.
“Weren’t the cops due by now?” I asked.
“That’s what the 911 operator told me. I was supposed to stay on the phone with her, but I was worried about you.”
“I appreciate the worry.”
“You’re welcome.”
We leaned forward when there was noise out in the lobby.
“Getting close to this door to listen when they might shoot through it is a bad idea, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yup,” Dan said, and we leaned farther over the chairs and table he’d used to block the door.
“Hear anything?”
The back office wasn’t any more sound proof than it was smell proof. They owners hadn’t wasted a lot of money making this area fancy. It was meticulously cleaned every day, but it wasn’t a looker. And you could hear everything through the walls.
We remained silent, listening, the pressure of not knowing what was happening making my pulse race and my anxiety spiral. I hated not knowing what was going on.
I thought I heard the stairwell door open. Our hotel was tall and narrow. The hallways weren’t that long, so there was only one set of emergency exit stairs located in the middle of the corridor, not far from the guest elevators. Made the emergency routes easy, but required exiting through the lobby. The only back exit in the building was through the cleaning staffs’ offices, which were in the lower part of the hotel. You had to use the staff elevator—which was locked if you weren’t staff—to reach that level, and the exit opened onto a narrow courtyard behind the building where the trash bins and recycling were stored.
If I was a person wanting to get away unnoticed, I’d want to escape out the hotel that way, but it was impossible to reach without a card key for the employee elevator. The only other way out of the hotel was through the lobby.
In this case, the difference between taking the stairs down to the lobby or the elevators wasn’t much, so I wasn’t sure why anyone would bother with the stairs. Maybe looking for another way out? Who knows.
There was some clattering noise in the lobby. I stared at Dan, as he stared at me, and I couldn’t tell if he was breathing, but I was definitely holding my breath.
And then the kind of noise you love to hear in moments like this.
“Police! Freeze!”
Now, I’m fully aware that that particular call isn’t always welcome, and we could have a whole conversation about that. But in that moment, nothing had sounded sweeter.
When no gunshots went off, Dan and I scrambled to get the chairs and table out of the way, then eased the door open enough for Dan to shout, “We work here. We’re coming out slowly.”
No one shot us as we stepped back out into the lobby. I took that as a positive.
Six
The twins and their accomplice stood in the lobby with their hands raised, a couple of guns dropped on the floor a few feet from them, and four police officers standing arrayed in front of them, blocking the front door. Dan and I eased out with our hands up, and one of the cops, who’d been called to the Azur Regent before and knew us, broke away from the others to deal with us.
It took a few hours to get everything sorted. Give our statements. Get the three suspects out. And figure out what they’d been trying to get out of the ice machine.
Turned out they’d failed to get it, and the guy who’d gotten stuck in the machine had ended up with some severe cuts and a broken finger getting his hand back out of the machine. Which seemed a lot of trouble to go to only to get arrested.
What was inside the ice machine, though…
Made more sense after the cops found the hidden package.
It was cash. A lot of cash. Like, a lot of cash. I’m still not sure how they got that thick a wad of bills stuffed up into that ice machine. I also figured it would’ve taken a lot more to get the various parties involved to talk, but apparently, they wanted to lay blame, and I actually got to hear some of the confession this time.
