by Jeff Johnson
The hotel was dazzling. I walked across the marble floor, past the check-in desk, and found the concierge office. The door was open and a well-dressed man in his late thirties was sitting at the desk talking on the phone. I stood in the doorway until he saw me and when he did he motioned for me to enter, then covered the phone when I did.
“Get that door?” Then he was back to his conversation, wrapping up what sounded like tickets for two to a gallery opening. I sat and waited patiently.
“You the guy with all the, ah, you’re Darby Holland?” he asked almost apologetically.
“One and the same,” I replied. “You’re Roger?”
“I am.” He spun his monitor around. “Your guy was here this morning. Checked out around nine a.m. Trevor Connor. 7119.”
“Shit. How many days was he here?”
He checked his monitor, tapped for a minute. “A long time, actually. Same room, sixty-four days in total.”
“Expensive.”
“We’ve had people stay here for more than a year, so it’s not that unusual. Depends on who’s paying the bill and what kind of work is involved. Government, no way, three nights tops. Corporate, the wives and whatnot. Mistresses. Foreign business, we see a percentage of that. What was your man up to?”
“Spying on me. What did he drink?”
“Looks like nothing. Not even bottled water. Twelve days ago he made his first and only minibar purchase, two shots of Glenlivet 15.”
I thought back. I had no memory at all of what I had done twelve days ago, if I might have inspired some kind of celebration. I was unsure what day of the week it was, for that matter.
“Room service?”
He tapped. “Several hits, all late afternoon.” He looked up like he had bad news. “Salad man. Your investigator is a vegetarian.”
“Aw, man.” I sat up a little.
“I printed out his signature and his credit card information.” He handed me an envelope. I took it and rose.
“Deal is a deal. Is there anyone in the room right now?”
“Nope. Already cleaned, too.” He sat back and looked back at me, clearly done. “New guest in less than an hour.”
“Can you burn me a key so I can check it out?”
“Sure. I’ll need to hold your credit card, but sure. Be quick though, okay? I have broad discretion, but that’s the kind of thing I like to keep.”
I gave him my debit card and the five hundred dollars while I was at it. He pocketed the cash without a word and put the card on his desk. That thinned out my wallet quite a bit, but I didn’t mind. While he made the key, I took my phone out and checked the messages. One from Suzanne, one from Delia. I didn’t read either one.
“Here,” he said, handing me a key card. “Be quick, okay? Just bring the room card back to me and I’ll give you your card back. Seventh floor, elevators are out the door to your right.”
“Be right back.”
I rode the elevator up alone. The Muzak was some kind of classical, muted and dull yet cloying in the way only fancy elevator music can be. My warped reflection in the polished brass door was at least comical enough to make me smile. The bee sting was just angry enough to give me Bruce Campbell’s jaw.
When I got to the door I paused before I slotted the key. Sometimes in the movies detectives will do that, to listen for activity on the other side of the door, even when the room is supposed to be empty. That’s not what I was doing. Instead, I was probing myself for the haunted feeling I’d had while I was being watched. I closed my eyes and willed myself to become calm, to allow paranoia and fear and darkness to wash over the buzz I had going. I searched my skin for the subtle crawling feeling, listened to the nerves in my stomach, felt for the suggestion of breath in the hair on the back of my neck.
Nothing.
I slotted the key and the little light blinked green. Oleander’s old room was big, with a double bed, large windows, a flat-screen inside a towering oak cabinet, beige on blond with pastels. I stopped in front of the painting. The Oregon coast in winter, very Turneresque kind of sky. I went to the windows and pulled the heavy curtains, looked out at the rainy City of Roses.
This was what the dead man who had been watching me had also seen. The man who had been looking through my windows had also looked through this window. From where I was standing, I could see the irregular grid of the city, the slope down to the river, which itself looked slow and richly black. I wondered what he’d thought when he looked out there. Probably all kinds of things. Like me. Suzanne. The Lucky. Delia. Old Town. All of it. He’d checked out after a long stay, and that was consistent with him having completed his work here. He knew who I was, he’d verified everything; he had my life mapped out.
He’d been mapping out my life.
I was being set up for something.
I sat down on the bed. Then I lay back and stared at the ceiling. The same ceiling Oleander stared at, night after night, day after day, whenever he took a break from learning all he could about the Old Town hustler named Darby Holland.
The bleating of goats didn’t even surprise me. I took the iPhone out of my pocket and answered.
“I wondered if it was possible to track these things,” I said. “I mean, for realsies. S’why I brought it along. Now I know. What’s up?”
“How do you enjoy the Mineral Man’s room?”
“Fine.” The voice modulation sounded the same. I closed my eyes to scan the background again. Faint music. Muzak.
“The clock stopped ticking. Time is up.”
“That’s bad news for you,” I said slowly. “Your guy? The flower dude? He was sniffing around my patch long enough to learn the most important thing you need to know about me. Give you one guess.”
“That you’ve finally turned into a killer?”
“Nah.” I sat up. “It’s that I always win.”
I let that hang as I walked into the bathroom. It was twice the size of mine at home, but I liked my old claw-foot bathtub way more. I walked over to the toilet and unzipped, let loose a bladder full of expensive booze. All that came through from the other end was spooky breathing.
“Wasn’t always that way.”
I cradled the phone under my chin while I zipped up. “We learn,” I said. “We adapt. We—” I dropped the phone in the toilet and watched it sink to the bottom. “We drop dead people’s phones in their toilets.” The last part was just for me.
The concierge, whose name I had already forgotten, was puzzled when I told him I’d found a phone in the toilet but left it there. I got my card back before I told him, so there was nothing he could do about it. I recognized the Muzak, too. The caller was somewhere in the Heathman, in a public area where the music was playing. This time the background sound was just to toy with me, so I walked out without bothering to look around.
It was close to midnight and I was exhausted. But there was a psychopath somewhere in the rain watching me, playing some kind of game at that very instant. I turned my face up to the sky and let the drops hit my hot skin.
The clock had stopped. That meant that whatever kind of well-planned disaster had been crafted for me was complete.
Show time.
I lit a cigarette and the urban sorcery of doing so caused a cab to pull up. I bit the filter off and had one last good drag before I got in.
“I could have waited,” the driver said. It was a guy in his mid-twenties with a wide-open face. I shrugged and gave him my address.
“You eat there?” he continued. “The French badass who got the stars for the place moved, but I heard it was still good.”
“I was just visiting,” I replied. Suddenly, I was hungry.
“Bar is awesome, I hear.” He glanced in the rearview and wiggled his eyebrows. “Uptown girl, you know what I—”
“Dude,” I interrupted. “That’s a Billy Joel song, right?”
He looked back at the street and went quiet.
Traffic was light, so we made good time through downtown. I stared out the window at the
sporadic homeless people framed against the huge display windows showcasing shit they would never in this life be able to afford, the rain swirling through the gold halos of the streetlamps, the beaded windows of the cars we passed, and then we were going over the bridge.
“Burnside used to be a mud chute they slid old-growth logs down,” I said. The driver glanced back.
“That right?
“Skid row. A skid row.”
“You know Hawthorne used to be called Asylum Way?”
“No.” I looked out over the dark water. It was different from this angle, reflecting the lights of downtown. One of the tiny speckles was likely from the room the man Oleander had been in, lost in the trillion shimmers. “That doesn’t sound good though.”
“Yep. Great big insane asylum right at the end of it, around where 40th is now, I guess.”
I sighed. So much for small talk.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Old Portland. More of it gone every day, but some of it probably never needed to be there.”
“I feel like that all the time these days.”
He glanced back and went silent a second time, and this time it lasted.
My street was quiet. The unmarked car the feds were using was visible three houses down, just sitting there. Whoever was inside was on his phone reporting that I’d arrived. I went up the stairs, more and more tired with every step, and when I finally got to the door I wasn’t surprised to find a note taped to it.
HOLLAND, WE ARE ON THE EDGE OF SOMETHING YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT. STOP BY TOMORROW WHEN YOU’RE SOBER. —DESSEL
I wadded the note up and carried it in. The cats weren’t all that happy about being trapped inside all day, but they didn’t have the energy to mope, a condition unique to cats. I stripped off the top part of my disguise and left it in a pile on the couch, then went into the kitchen and opened them a can of food, poured myself a drink, and threw the note away. There were some leftovers in the fridge, two-day-old braised pork shank and shaved Brussels sprouts with hazelnuts from Alcott that I ate without tasting. When I was done, I took a shower and changed into pajama jeans, old and worn almost to nothing, and carried my final drink back out to the couch. Once I was settled and the muscles in my back had turned into something other than wads, I picked up my phone. Almost two in the morning. I dialed.
“You better not be calling to give me shit about this chicken thing,” Delia said. “I don’t think I could take it. I was on the phone all day trying to get black roses and I know they have the fuckin’ things. I’ve seen them, like in real life. But nooooo. You want a few dozen of them and you might as well be shopping for a baby albino. People think it’s ghoulish to the point that they, no shit, hang up on you.”
“Tell me all about it,” I replied. I closed my eyes and listened.
I woke up just before sunrise on the couch, exhausted, my phone on my chest. After I fed the cats and got the coffee going, I did fifty push-ups and as many pull-ups on the bar in the bathroom doorway before I was empty. After that I took a shower, slammed two beers, turned the coffee off untouched, and split as soon as I was dressed.
The car situation was a bummer. I had an old Alfa Romeo in the garage with a bunch of other crap, but it was a total piece of shit. The Armenian had tricked me into buying it as an investment for an even grand, and afterward Santiago had told me that the blue book value for it was around five hundred. It ran, but it leaked everything, including rain, and the battery never stayed charged. I opened the garage door and moved bags of packing material I’d been hoarding for unknown reasons and unplugged it from the charger it had been hooked to for the past several months. Anticipating nothing at all, I got in and turned the key. When it started, I almost laughed out loud. Almost.
I pulled out and closed the garage and it was still running, so I drove to the airport cell phone waiting area, stopping once at a Starbucks drive-through, and made it there as the horizon began to glow in earnest. Steeling myself, I called Suzanne.
“If you’re calling from jail you should have called someone else.”
Ah. A sign. I sipped my coffee.
“Where exactly are you?” She was walking, fast and angry.
“Drinking coffee out by the airport. My car, ah you know how it is, so I’m driving that little red Alfa.”
“Serves you right. Did you get my messages?” A door opened and closed.
“I was afraid to check them,” I admitted.
“Darby.” Suzanne stopped whatever she was doing and gathered herself for the summary of her text essays. “When you called me the other night you sounded different.”
“I was drunk. My bad.”
“It wasn’t that.” She was being careful now. “I could hear it in your voice. Something I’ve never heard before. You—how do I put this? Are you happy? Not with the way things are between us, but in general. If you had never met me and this relationship was not a factor in your sense of well-being, how, I mean, what, would you be happy?”
I thought about it for less than a second. “Nah.”
“Why?”
“Suze, this is a bad time to get into my emotional landscape. Now is just what it is. Now. Yesterday and tomorrow are—”
“It’s always a bad time to ask you questions like this.” Firm. She was right and she knew it.
“Then why the fuck did you ask?”
“Move here. Move to Seattle.”
I froze. All the air in my lungs was gone.
“Did you hear me?” she continued softly.
“Why?”
It was her turn to be speechless.
“I mean, Suzanne, I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean, why would that make me different or better or somehow more worthwhile? Why would that make a difference?”
“I wish you had read my messages. This is it in a nutshell. Darby, I love you. You love me. I know you do. But this life you have, the Lucky Supreme, all the terrible shit that happens in Old Town, all of it, it’s all bad for you. Don’t you realize that? Is your life really so good you can’t walk away from it? The other night when you were wasted you went on and on about how you wanted to go to the train station and go somewhere far, far away. Why not here? Seattle? With me?”
“Jesus.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Delia is leaving. Old Town is the new San Francisco. Everything you worked for is done. You have money. You’re still young enough to do something different. You’ve told me a million times how much of a nightmare it would be to wind up like your old boss. Think about it! A fresh start! And I would be right there with you the whole time! We don’t even have to live here! We could go anywhere! As long as it was new, and your old life was just that. Your old life.”
“I—I don’t know what to say, Suze.” I scratched my head and realized my hands felt cold and numb. “That’s—that’s either the nicest thing in the world or something else entirely.”
“Don’t say anything,” she gushed, and right then I could hear how much she loved me. My face went hard and sad and my chest hurt. I wanted to smell her hair more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life.
“Suze.”
“Just think about it,” she whispered. “I’m coming down on Sunday, don’t have to be back for three days. We can go to the coast like we used to, stay at our little place, the one with the BBQ.”
“What day is it?”
“It’s Wednesday, Darby. Wednesday.”
“Okay.”
“I have to go.” She was far more upset than she was letting on, I could hear it. She didn’t like talking about her feelings any more than I did. She did write and text about them, however.
“I’ll call you way before then.”
Sniff. “You better, mister.”
I lowered the phone when she was gone and looked out at the long, swaying grass. I didn’t blink until my eyes hurt.
Delia gave me the X-ray treatment as we walked through Oregon’s Best Feed and Stock. I was pushing the wheelbarrow she had been loading with Hallowee
n wedding objects: shovels, burlap, rolls of wire fencing, hand trowels, the three-pronged dirt claw things, and now we were strolling through the live chickens. Delia was in search of the rare solid black Surinam rooster. Black heart, black eyes, black liver. No doubt she intended for Flaco to make posole with stained corn out of it for some kind of hellish pre-honeymoon snack. I’d still been sitting in the cell phone waiting area when she called to make sure we were still on, and she’d been immediately suspicious when I sounded enthusiastic. She still was.
“I like this chicken,” Delia said, pausing in front of a striking red and gold model. He crowed violently and gave us the evil eye.
“Seems like the right kind of bastard to me,” I agreed. “Let’s fuck him up.”
Delia gave me a curious look, the hundredth in the last half hour, and continued with her hands clasped behind her back. She was dressed in skintight black jeans, giant red engineer boots, and a kid’s King Kong T-shirt, riding high. She’d left her oversized raincoat in the car, which was maybe good because she’d spray-painted it with stenciled revolvers. The gun imagery might have made the wrong kind of impression. Her hair was scarlet and her lips and eye shadow were orange, appropriate for chicken-shopping when it came to the old guy at the register maybe, as he quickly looked away when she winked at him, but it had an alarming effect on the birds.
“You say you spent the entire morning at your airport picnic area in quiet contemplation.” It wasn’t a question. “I can admire that. Did you talk to Suzanne?”
“She’s what I was contemplating. But she’s super excited about the wedding.” It was premature to tell her about the “move” or “abandon my life” discussion we’d just had. I had no plans at all to tell her about Santos or the dead man buried in the field, so I was on a roll. Delia snorted. I went on before she started talking.
“Farm slash horror theme Halloween wedding gets you style points all around, kid. You can see why Suzanne’s excited.” No way I was going to tell her about Nigel and his bad news until I was absolutely certain, either.
“Maybe she can write a Portlandia-style article about it,” Delia suggested innocently. “Make some money. Then your ill-gotten gains, your reckless lifestyle, your shitty pals, all of it will feed back into her tidy American ATM machine.” She gestured at a chicken. “Down payment on a Saint John’s condo for her right there if we sacrifice him to Odin or—”
