“Okay.”
After she’s gone, the cop relaxes, rubs his darkened eyes. He’s exhausted. Beaten to nothing. Another victim of the perpetual night shift. Another bag of meat shuffling sleep deprivation.
“I swear to God,” he says, “that lady is gonna drive me insane.”
I don’t ask what her deal is, but he tells me anyway. Night auditors are psychiatrists. The lobby is a therapist’s recliner, open to invitation.
“To be honest, I’m surprised she could even walk in here. She drank an entire fifth of vodka by herself. Shit, brother, if that was me, I’d be out. Just completely done for, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s kind of crazy, actually. She supposedly lives out in Austin, and every month I guess she attends these meetings, I don’t know, some kind of bullshit women power kind of meeting. Well, tonight she goes to her meeting like everything’s peachy, right? Except she don’t come home. Her husband, poor guy, he’s worried sick. No idea if she’s gotten in a wreck or what. So he calls us, tells us the make and model of what she’s driving, etcetera, and who happens to find her car parked on the side of the street in goddamn Omni, of all places? She’s sitting behind the wheel, crying, sucking on a bottle like it’s her husband’s dick. Only maybe if it was his dick, she wouldn’t be so screwed up in the head, I don’t know.”
His words are like acid raining from the sky, only I can’t unleash my umbrella.
“I look at a receipt in her car, says she bought the vodka back in Austin, so she’s been chugging this bastard for at least an hour, probably longer, driving the whole time. I mean, seriously. How she ain’t dead, I don’t know. I asked her what was out here in San Antone and she tells me some dumbass psycho bitch nonsense about owls. Says, ‘The owls are coming.’ I ask her where they at and she just laughs and tries to grab my dick. Crazy, right?”
I can’t even nod. I just stare. The hotel disintegrates around us.
“So I take her cell, find her husband’s number, give him a call. Dude’s pissed. Rightfully so, too. I let him know I’ll put her in a hotel until he can make the drive down. I figured she won’t find no punishment better than what her man will enforce once he finds her. Because fuck. If that were my girl? Oh man. Oh man.”
The elevator dings and the doors open. Hobbs and Leo round the corner into the lobby, then freeze at the sight of the cop. The cop nods and backs away, gesturing at the front desk, telling them to go ahead and do their business, he won’t get in the way.
I try to speak but end up choking on saliva. I clear my throat and give it another shot. “H-h-how can I help you gentlemen?”
Their mouths remain closed but their eyes scream: what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck.
“Was there anything you needed? Wake-up call, candy?”
Slowly catching on, Hobbs shakes his head. “We’re just heading out. Thanks.”
He grabs Leo’s arm and drags him out of the hotel, telling him to shut his mouth and keep moving.
The cop watches them leave and snickers. “Probably off to rob a gas station. Bet you twenty bucks I get a call about those two sometime tonight.” He pulls out his cell phone and says, “Hey, I don’t suppose you’re any good with technology, are you?”
“Uh. I don’t know.”
He leans over the front desk and pushes his cell phone at me until I take it. “Well, maybe you can help me. Last week I got a new cell phone, then threw my old one in the trash. Except I forgot I had all my crime scene photos still on it. Supposedly, there’s like, I don’t know, a cloud? And I can find the photos on my new phone. At least, that’s what they tell me. I just…yeah. Where the hell do you find phone clouds, right?”
The cop looks up, like he’s expecting to find the cloud hovering above him. I glance at the phone in my hands. My first thought is, damn, I need to get a new cell. It’s easy to forget these kind of things when your life is under constant threat by a deranged shoe counterfeiter. I have no idea what I’m doing, but might as well pretend like I’m giving it a try. I access his photo library and I’m greeted with his most recent pic: a small, erect penis rubbing against a salt shaker. I close out of the photo library and hand it back to him.
“Sorry, I think they’re lost forever.”
The cop curses and returns the cell to his pocket. “I’m going to get so fired. Shit.”
“That sucks.”
“I actually enjoy the night shift, believe it or not,” he says. “You work the day shift, they start paying attention when you park in the middle of nowhere and nap. Night shift, though? Nobody cares. It’s a whole different universe, brother.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean.”
“Maybe they’ll just write me up or something.”
“It’s possible.”
The hotel’s silent for a moment, then he sighs. “Well, I’m not waiting here all night. Her husband should be coming soon. Just let him know what room she’s in when he arrives. Cool?”
“Sure.”
As he walks toward the front door, reality slaps me in the face and I remember there’s a corpse outside waiting to be discovered.
“Wait!” I shout, and he jumps, moving his hand to the pistol holstered at his side.
He spins around, not taking the pistol out, but keeping it close enough to draw at a moment’s notice. “What?”
“Uh.” Shit. Think. Think. “I was just going to say, don’t drive around the side of the building.” I point north. “Some idiot broke a bunch of beer bottles in the parking lot, I was on my way to clean it up when you guys came in. Wouldn’t want to slash your tires or anything.”
He doesn’t respond at first, just studies me, letting me sweat it out. Then he smiles. “Thanks for the heads up, brother.”
I watch his car make a U-turn and drive back out the front entrance of the parking lot. He pulls onto the access road and guns it toward the freeway.
Every ounce of me wants to collapse, but somehow I force myself outside, heart pounding.
Part 18
Yates is still impaled on the handicap parking sign. He lies with his back against the sidewalk, the pole sticking out of his stomach, like the metal’s part of his body’s architecture. Strips of gore hang from the parking sign, which is now bent and deformed from the impact. The sidewalk is stained with blood and the splat pattern reminds me of a dropped water balloon. Only full of red food coloring instead of water. His eyes are open but there’s no life in ’em. Dude is dead.
Hobbs and Leo stand around him, scratching their balls.
“What are you doing?” I ask. “Why are you guys just standing there?”
Hobbs notices I’ve joined them, and flinches. “You’re one hardcore motherfucker, Eye Sick.”
“We were hiding until the cop left,” Leo says. “What the hell did he want, anyway?”
“Nothing important. Just dropping off some guest.”
Leo laughs. “Talk about timing. Goddamn, son.” He looks at Yates again and gags, the humor lost just as quickly as it’d arrived.
I suck in oxygen. “I didn’t push him.”
Hobbs twitches. “Then how do you explain this?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“Uh-huh.”
Leo steps forward, grabs the bloody pole, and attempts to yank it out of the concrete. It doesn’t budge. “What are we supposed to do now?”
“Well, we can’t just leave him here,” Hobbs says. “Someone’s bound to notice him eventually. Pigs will come back and question Eye Sick, and he’ll crack. Rat us out. Then we’ll have to bring out the switchblade, open up his sweet little cheeks.”
I think about vomiting, but the thought of lowering my head next to Yates’s blood is enough to make me swallow any hint of discharge building up in my throat.
Hobbs walks around the corpse, inspecting the damage. “The way I see it, we have two options. Since the pole ain’t coming out of the ground without us making far too much noise than I’m comfortable with, we either gotta cu
t this poor bastard in half or—”
I groan. “Jesus.”
“—or we lift the body, bring him up the way he came down.”
“He’s pretty fat, man,” Leo says. “You think we can do that?”
Hobbs shrugs. “Unless you want to go find a hacksaw, I reckon this is our best bet.”
“Shit.” Leo kneels and stares at the corpse. “You sure you don’t want to call your brother? He’s gonna want to know about this.”
“My brother ain’t got shit to do with this.”
“Okay. Just sayin’ is all.”
“C’mon, let’s lift this fat bastard up.”
We move forward then all three freeze as music bursts into the night. I recognize the song immediately, but refuse to believe it’s real.
It’s “Yakety Sax.”
I follow the sound of the song and watch as a featureless white van zips through the parking lot. We witness it drive past us in awe, dumbfounded. It circles the hotel three times, blaring “Yakety Sax” through some kind of surround sound.
Then it drives away and the song fades out as the highway eats it up.
“What in the fuck is going on?” Leo asks.
“This hotel is a piece of shit,” Hobbs says. “Let’s get this over with before they come back.”
He motions for us both to help and we surround the corpse. Even with the three of us combining our strength, his body is still nearly impossible to free from the pole. We groan and lift, but progress is slow. His wet innards scrape against the pole and make a repulsive grating noise. Blood spills from his back and soaks into our shoes.
The side door of the hotel opens and closes and we’re frozen like deer in headlights. Deer who have recently murdered somebody and are trying their damnedest to dispose of the evidence.
“Is this the orgy?” Tilda Smith asks, planting her ass down on the bench and lighting a cigarette. I peek my head around the corpse in our arms and watch her smoke. She’s looking at us, but not in a way that shows she’s horrified. Her eyelashes flutter and she smiles and I realize she’s more horny than anything.
Hobbs looks at me for advice. I mouth, “She’s drunk,” and he seems to relax, as much as someone can relax while holding a corpse impaled with a handicap parking sign.
“Aren’t you supposed to stay in your room, ma’am?” I ask.
Tilda laughs. “That pig is a joke. I follow the orders of a higher force. I obey only the owls.”
“What?” Leo says. “What the fuck is she talking about?”
“What are you boys doing over there?” Tilda leans forward on the bench. Maybe it’s too dark to make out Yates, or maybe she’s simply too drunk. Or maybe she notices and doesn’t care, maybe the owls already warned her that this would happen. “You start that orgy without me?”
I let go of Yates and step forward, thinking Hobbs and Leo have a good enough grip by themselves. Wrong. The corpse drops back down to the sidewalk. When I glance behind me, I notice there’s now a long string of what only looks like melted lasagna cheese hanging from the pole. Leo vomits. Hobbs curses. Tilda doesn’t seem fazed. None of this is real. I never showed up for tonight’s shift. I’m still at my apartment, sleeping off a drunk. This is just some fucked-up dream, a punishment for not knowing my limit with rum.
“Is that fella okay?” Now Tilda shows concern. She tries to rise off the bench, but only falls back down, laughing and belching. I approach her and take her by the arm.
“C’mon, ma’am, let’s get you back to your room.”
“Back to the owl room.”
“Sure.”
“Hoot, hoot. Hoot, hoot.”
I hear her words but I can’t ascertain if she’s actually saying them. Reality itself is a hallucination. I lead her upstairs and settle her into bed. Somehow she’s already trashed the room. She’s drawn an owl on the wall with black nail polish. Her bank account will pay dearly for this action, and so will my psyche.
She falls asleep almost immediately and I stand above her, wondering if she’s even real. I feel my own face and it’s numb. This is not my body. Not my mind. I am an alien marathoning star projections. Rotting my brain on reruns of annihilated galaxies.
Back outside, Hobbs and Leo have gotten Yates off the pole. They throw the corpse in the dumpster across the parking lot. Leo crawls inside and shuffles trash bags around, thoroughly burying the dead hotel guest. Meanwhile, I inspect the pole. The sign is practically destroyed, folded up into a C. The pole itself is slightly bent, but it’s also still dripping with intestines, stained with blood. Same goes for the surrounding sidewalk. There may no longer be a corpse here, but there’s plenty evidence of something shady happening. It wouldn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out what, either.
Hobbs and Leo return to the deformed pole and admire the owls’ (my) handiwork. All of our clothes are soaked in sweat and blood. We’re not even close to being home-free. It’s absurd to assume we’ll ever be.
I straighten my tie, which now resembles something found hanging in a slaughterhouse. I check my phone. Half an hour ’til Virginia strolls into the building. She’s going to be pissed enough I haven’t set up breakfast yet. “What now?”
Leo wipes sweat out of his eyes. “That dude’s car is still out front, right? We can’t just let it sit there. It’ll get towed. When the police figure out he’s missing, they’ll know he never left the hotel.”
Hobbs nods. His face looks like a Halloween mask. “My brother’s friends with this mechanic asshole. He’ll make the car disappear.” He flinches and snaps his head to the sky, terrified. “Wait, shit. The fucking car keys. Are they still in his pocket?”
Leo kicks a rock into the grass. “I ain’t going dumpster diving again.”
I shake my head, nauseated. “The car was running when you guys started fighting. The keys are still in the ignition.”
“Oh, yeah.” Leo mouths a silent prayer.
“Smooth thinking, Eye Sick,” Hobbs says, then turns to his partner. “You take his car, I’ll get in my truck and you follow me. I just hope this asshole is at the shop right now.”
“Why don’t you call him?” Leo asks.
Hobbs pauses. “My brother has his phone number.”
“Dude, I’m telling you, he’s gonna get pissed we didn’t tell him what happened.”
Hobbs grabs Leo by his shirt and pulls him close, eyes wide, nostrils flaring. “And I done told you, I can fucking handle myself. You see my brother in that room, busting his ass all goddamn day and night cooking up Jordans? I don’t think so. I’m the man here. I get things done. So go get in that asshole’s car before I break your fucking skull.”
As Leo walks around the hotel, he mumbles, “Fucking psycho.”
Hobbs laughs. “Leo thinks I’m dumb and deaf. Well, Eye Sick, I ain’t dumb, and I certainly ain’t deaf.”
“Okay.”
He waves to the mess on the sidewalk, to the deformed handicap pole. “You need to clean this shit up while we’re gone. And quickly.”
“What? How?”
He shrugs. “It ain’t my job to clean up blood.”
“Well, it’s not mine, either.”
“Boy, it became your job as soon as you pushed that sorry sumbitch off the roof.”
“I didn’t—”
“Look, just get the shit cleaned, all right? Otherwise we’re all going down. You want to be some fat prison bitch?”
“I’m just the night auditor.”
Hobbs sneers and looks at me like I’m just some kid who can’t handle the incredibly complex concept of potty training. He turns around and heads toward his pickup truck. After he’s driven off, I check the time again. Fifteen minutes until Virginia arrives. I wonder if anybody’s called the hotel in the past hour or so. Maybe the lobby’s full of pissed off guests waiting to slice my throat. I miss Kia.
I rush to the wall and grab the hose, then spray it against the handicap pole. Strips of gore fly off like dandelion seeds in the wind. I redirect
the hose’s aim to the sidewalk. The puddle of blood spreads against the cement. Some of it flows into the grass. Most of it remains in the cement, drying into its hard surface. Fuck. I keep spraying but the blood is stubborn and refuses to accept the water’s friendship. I drop the hose on the sidewalk with the water still running, then sprint back into the hotel, through the lobby. A guest’s sitting on the sofa, waiting to check-out.
“There was no receipt under my door.”
“I’m terribly sorry, sir. I’ve been a bit distracted tonight,” I say as I print him out a receipt, because it’s not like he’s going to be emailed one, anyway.
“Son, you look like hell.”
I try to laugh but it comes out sounding like a mental patient orgasming. “Those raccoons are vicious.”
After he leaves, I run to the kitchen and turn the coffee pot on so Virginia can’t say I’ve done nothing all night and fill a bucket with soapy water, then take the bucket and a sponge outside, through the side door. Walking down the hallway, I tried to convince myself that the blood wasn’t as bad as I was making it out. My imagination had lost control. There were maybe a few drops at most. But of course that wasn’t true. One step outside the hotel and the reality of the situation is like a bullet to the gut. This is the kind of job Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction would be hired to do. What the hell do I know about cleaning up human remains?
Except I don’t really have a choice. It doesn’t matter if I know what I’m doing or not. The crime scene either goes away or I go away. I’m far too involved to claim that I’d simply been forced into helping. I’m all alone now, and I’m still not calling the cops. That makes me less of a victim and more of an accessory.
I kneel down and attack the bloody concrete with the sponge. I scrub hard and fast and I don’t stop until my arms can no longer move. The bucket is now full of red water and the sidewalk is still as chaotic as it’d been before I introduced the sponge. I check my phone. Virginia has to be here already. People are going to start coming down for breakfast. They’re going to have complaints to direct at me about who the hell knows what. There are always complaints. If I still exist, then someone will be pissed.
The Nightly Disease (Serial Novel) Page 15
