Reaching for the door handle again, I jerked it down with my sticky hands, pulling the hardware right off the door. The dingy piece of metal that doubled as a door handle was now securely in my palm, and no longer useful in any way. The fact that I couldn’t seem to come up with a way out of the room was made worse by the fact that I was keenly aware that I still needed to empty my bladder, but there was no way in the world I was doing it in there. Pounding on the door with my fist, I hoped that the woman behind the counter might be off the phone and actually able to hear my distress signal.
“Help!” I yelled, standing back about a foot from the door and waiting for my rescue. Not hearing any noise outside the door, I stepped forward and considered pressing my ear against the wood, but a weird yellowish tint sprayed down the paint changed my mind.
“Is anyone there?” I asked loudly, straining to hear a response. When only silence met me, I sighed and stood there feeling rather dejected.
How long will Charlie leave me in here? Usually he follows me into the gas station, but this place is flat gross. I can’t believe he even pulled up at this place, much less forced me to go inside. He really was doing it to punish me, wasn’t he?
Charlie, how could you?
“Please, someone!” I yelled again, wishing I could slump down against the wall and fully let the dejection encompass me, but there was no way I was touching the walls or the floor or any inch of that filthy cube.
“Cam, hurry up!” I heard a muffled voice from outside the door.
“Charlie!” I exclaimed, hurriedly stepping closer. “Help me, Charlie. The handle came off the door, and I’m trapped in here.”
“Quit fooling around, Cammie, and hurry up!” he commanded gruffly. Exhaling loudly, I stomped my foot and began to cross my arms across my chest, accidentally sticking both my forearms in my blue slimy shirt.
Gross. Ugh, so gross.
“I am not fooling around, Charlie. I am trapped in this pit of despair and I need out now!”
“Calm down, it can’t be that bad,” he told me.
“Oh, it most definitely is that bad!” I insisted in a very loud voice. “Get me out of here before I start freaking out.”
“Okay, sis, just sit tight and I’ll see what I can do.”
Sit tight. Sit on what, exactly?
Beginning to feel a bit claustrophobic, I started pacing from the door to the sink. It was exactly three steps – that I discovered fairly quickly, because my pattern was getting old in a hurry.
One, two, three, four, five, six…
I counted my steps, back and forth across that small space. By the time I reached two-hundred sixty-eight, I finally heard a voice.
“…taking the door off…”
“What?” I asked frantically, hearing what sounded like mumbling.
“…people who come in here only wanting to use the bathroom. You don’t even buy anything.”
“Give me a break, will you?” I heard Charlie complain. “I’m going to buy something, I just haven’t had the chance yet because your bathroom ate my sister.”
“She broke something,” the male voice insisted.
“Are you kidding me?” I inserted. “You don’t have any water in the sink, and the door handle broke off in my hand. I am a tiny girl without any superhuman strength, so I don’t see how you could blame that on me.”
Hearing grunting, something began pounding against the side of the door, and I stood there patiently waiting. When the top door hinge broke loose, I breathed a little sigh of relief.
“Who’s going to pay for this?” I heard that strange male voice question.
“It’s your crappy door,” Charlie protested, which set off a string of obscenities from the other man, making me cringe. Whoever that guy was, I wasn’t looking forward to meeting him.
Another hinge creaked and slid loose, and I felt slightly excited to be free of my prison. Standing stoically awaiting my release, I planted myself about two feet from the door, staring expectantly. When the banging commenced, a third hinge slid itself loose, leaving only the bottom one remaining. As I watched, the last hinge creaked, and the door splintered and swung inward, tilting toward me. I thought for a second that it might hit me, and I leaned too far backwards – just enough to put me off balance and slowly drop me to the ground, where I momentarily rested flat on my back.
“Get it off, get it off!” I screamed from my position on the floor, feeling the disgusting bacteria from that bathroom floor creeping into my skin. Scrambling frantically, I managed to push myself up and away as the door swung inward, pinning myself against the wall. As a plump, burly hand grabbed the door before it hit me, I jumped up, shaking my arms as though I could repel the grime somehow. Charlie stared at me wide-eyed, accompanied by a grizzly-looking man with a wiry black beard flecked with streaks of gray. Charlie reached out his hand, but I jerked away.
“Do not touch me,” I ordered, stomping out of the room.
“Can I get you something?” the foul-mouthed man asked, suddenly trying to be helpful.
“I don’t know, do you have about a gallon of hand sanitizer?” I asked sarcastically, placing my hands on my hips.
“Sally, get some hand sanitizer!” he ordered. The woman who had been on the phone earlier promptly delivered me a travel-sized version, and rather than squeezing some through the lid, I twisted it off and dumped a large volume into my palms, rubbing it over the backs of my arms and then the backs of my legs, followed by my neck.
“You okay?” Charlie asked quietly.
“Do I look okay?” I hissed at him. “I was lying on the bathroom floor, Charlie. Did you see that bathroom? You might need to haul me straight to the emergency room to check for diseases.”
“Diseases?” he clarified with a smirk, staring at that blue smudge across my t-shirt.
“I said diseases,” I glowered, stomping towards the door. We stepped outside into the sunshine, and he followed me silently towards the car. When I reached the back door, I flung it open and grabbed my suitcase, pulling out a new t-shirt and flinging mine over my head.
“Whoa, Camdyn, you’re in public!” Charlie informed me, running over to shield me from passersby. Giving him a disgusted glance, I pulled the new shirt over my ponytail, realizing with a start that my hair was on that floor, too. That sent a shiver down my spine, and I fought the urge to panic. When I unbuttoned my shorts, Charlie shoved me behind the door of the car with wide eyes.
“Camdyn!” he reiterated, not saying anything else.
“I am seconds from freaking out, Charlie,” I clarified. “Don’t scold me, and you better not say a word.” Struggling to get the shorts stretched over my shoes, I finally released myself and stepped into my clean shorts, buttoning them and groaning.
“What’s wrong?” Charlie asked quietly.
“I still need to pee,” I whispered, waiting for the sound of my brother’s laughter that followed.
Chapter Thirteen
There was no way I was good company for Charlie in that car for the next couple of hours, because I could not manage to make myself comfortable. Every time I thought about being stuck in that bathroom, my skin started to crawl. When I thought about the fact that my hair touched that floor, though, that was ultimately my undoing. I would force the thought out of my mind and try to focus on something else, and although it would work for a brief moment, ultimately I would be right back to that bathroom floor in my mind, reliving the disgusting experience.
When Charlie stopped around lunch time, announcing that he was hungry, I knew there was no way I could eat in my current state. He pulled into the parking lot of a fast food joint and stretched his arms behind his shoulders, and I dejectedly looked out the passenger side window. There was a mom next to us with her two kids, trying to remove them from her minivan, and I watched her for a split second before my eyes drifted to the hotel beside us. One of the maids was pushing her cart along the walkway outside on the second floor, and when she disappeared into one of the
rooms, suddenly a wild idea flashed through my mind.
“Hey, Charlie, I’ll be just a minute,” I told him, watching as he opened his car door.
“Let me guess – you can’t function until you call your husband,” he laughed, gazing over at me.
“Wow, you caught me,” I sighed, watching as he handed me the keys and closed the driver’s side door. As soon as he was in that restaurant and out of sight, I grabbed my suitcase from the seat behind me and threw the car keys in my pocket, heading towards the hotel. I crossed over a concrete barrier between the establishments that was about two feet tall, pulling the suitcase up behind me. When I reached the hotel, I glanced back at the car to make sure Charlie wasn’t watching. Not seeing him, I proceeded up the steps to find the maid I spotted earlier.
On that second floor walkway, just inside the center corridor, I located the cart and knocked gently on the open door. When the slight Hispanic woman with dark hair in a ponytail glanced back at me, she looked rather startled.
“What you doing?” she asked with a definite accent, as though she did not speak English very well, and then she looked at her watch.
“Is this room clean?” I wondered, feeling rather awkward.
“I clean room,” she told me, giving me a quizzical raise of her eyebrows.
“I’d like to use the room, just for a minute,” I told her, stepping through the doorway. Without saying a word, she walked out into the daylight and glanced back and forth along the corridor.
“We not that kind of hotel,” she informed me quietly.
“Oh, I can tell,” I was quick to clarify, feeling slightly embarrassed. “This seems like a first-rate establishment. What I meant was, I’d like to use the room for maybe five minutes. Just to use the restroom. Can I do that?”
“Five minute,” she repeated without emotion, and I nodded. She stoically went about taking stock of the items on her cart, not even glancing at me for a few seconds, and I wondered if we were having a communication problem.
“You with sting?” she finally blurted.
With Sting? The singer? What, did he have a concert here or something? She thinks I’m a rock star groupie. Are there Sting people here? I would imagine him at a little swankier place…
“Yes, I am,” I told her with fake sincerity.
I know I shouldn’t lie – really, I do, but I have bathroom floor grime in my hair. This is an emergency.
“Okay,” she whispered. “I look the other way.”
Since she was technically looking the other way, I helped myself to four bottles of shampoo from her little cart. Strangely, she did not glance at me at all. She was taking this “looking the other way” very literally.
Hurrying into the bathroom, I locked myself inside and quickly stripped off my clothes, slipping into the shower and letting the water course over my body. I used the little wrapped bar of soap against the shower wall to remove the smell of hand sanitizer from my skin, and then I dumped the shampoo from the tiny bottles into my hair, unloading three of them before I was satisfied. Working up quite a lather, I consequently struggled to get all the soap removed from my scalp. When I finally managed to feel clean, I stepped out of the shower and quickly dried myself, careful not to make a very big mess. Managing to find myself clean and sporting a fresh white t-shirt and green cargo shorts, I squeezed as much water out of my hair as possible. Satisfied that I couldn’t wring it any more, I pulled it back into a ponytail and checked myself in the mirror. Quite pleased with myself, I gathered my suitcase and pulled open the bathroom door.
The door to the room was closed, and I stopped right before pulling it open to double-check the button on my shorts. Then, I pulled two twenty dollar bills from the zippered pouch at the front of my suitcase for the maid’s trouble. As I prepared to open the door, there was a rapid knock, and I assumed she was coming back to check on me. When I opened the door, however, I was met by a young gentleman with a scraggly goatee and a very shifty expression.
“I thought I was supposed to meet Lola,” he stated, glancing down the corridor.
“I’m sorry?” He looked nervous, and I wished the maid hadn’t looked the other way quite so thoroughly.
“Never mind, it doesn’t matter,” he decided. “Do you have the cash?”
The cash? What, is he hotel security or something? The maid ratted me out? Look the other way, huh?
“Um, I have forty dollars that I was going to give to the maid for her trouble, is that okay?” Looking at me like I had just asked him if there was life on Mars, he scratched his chin for a second.
“I think it’s best not to get the maid involved,” he told me quietly.
“Okay…” I hesitantly breathed, wondering if he was going to make me pay a whole day’s fee for the use of the room. Judging by the quality of the hotel, it couldn’t be too much more than forty dollars.
“Look, I’ve got the goods, do you have the cash or what?”
“What sort of goods?” I asked, slightly perplexed by his line of questioning.
“Oh, I get it, he told you to inspect it, did he?” he chortled, clearing his throat. “You can check it. It’s all there.” With that, he held a brown paper bag out to me, and I reluctantly grabbed it with my left hand. “Now, the cash,” he insisted. The glint in his eyes was making me feel uncomfortable, and I held the two folded twenties in my fist and extended my hand towards him. He took it and twisted it over in his hand, pulling up one side of his mouth in a smirk.
“Stop playing around,” he insisted. At that moment, the door to the room beside me was thrown open, and the maid from earlier was standing directly in front of our door pointing a gun at that guy’s face.
“Get your hands up!” she ordered. When he hesitated, she became more forceful. “I said let me see your hands now!” Within seconds, there were two male police officers directly behind the man, one of them yelling to get down on the ground. In a moment of panic, I lowered myself to the hotel room carpet and lifted my hands, scared out of my wits.
“You’re under arrest for drug trafficking,” I heard from my prone state, and immediately I bolted upright.
“No, I was just taking a shower,” I insisted.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” the policeman growled at me, jerking the goatee guy up from the ground with his arms safely behind his back. “What’s with this girl? She’s not the one we were briefed about.”
“They must have sent someone else,” the maid explained. “She just showed up at the door, asking me goofy questions, and then she said she was part of the sting. She had the password – five minutes.”
The sting, as in a police operation.
Sure, that makes more sense than Sting being in this hole in the wall hotel.
I was just involved in a drug deal, I think.
Oh my word!
Really, who uses five minutes for a password?
“I just wanted to take a shower,” I whimpered.
“Sure, you just walked up to the hotel randomly wanting to use the restroom like a completely normal person,” the maid interjected sarcastically, lowering the gun to her side.
“Speak English, do ya?” I threw at her, rising to my feet and brushing myself off. “Just for that, you’re not getting the forty dollars.”
“Maybe we should take this one in for questioning,” she muttered, jutting her thumb at me across the corridor.
“You said she had the password, didn’t ya?” the male policeman shot back at her as he rounded the corner, taking the goatee guy down to his car.
“Still, she seems suspicious,” the maid insisted.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” I told her, placing my hands on my hips. “I feel like my rights have been violated. There is definitely something unethical about all of this.”
“Seems to me that someone who was worried about ethics would have gone to the lobby to pay for a room instead of offering the maid forty dollars.”
“Well, that shows what you know,” I stated stupidly, glan
cing across the parking lot and seeing Charlie looking for me. “Charlie, over here!”
“Who is that, your accomplice?” the fake maid wanted to know as she jerked off her uniform to reveal a navy t-shirt and khaki shorts underneath, along with a holster at her side.
“That’s my brother,” I informed her. “You should be ashamed of yourself. You could have gotten me killed.”
“You said you were with the sting,” she stated gruffly as Charlie stepped up to us.
“What’s this about a sting?!” Charlie wondered with surprise. “Cammie, I thought you were calling Cole. Why is your hair wet?”
“She’s your sister?” the unfriendly would-be maid asked.
“Yes,” he stated simply. She folded her arms across her chest.
“You’d best keep her out of trouble, then. She wandered into a police operation and just took part in a drug deal. I’m surprised she didn’t blow our cover. I think the only thing that saved her was the fact that she reacted a little stupidly.”
“I beg your pardon?” I hissed at her. “I am not stupid.”
“Shut up, Cammie, and let’s just get out of here,” Charlie insisted, grabbing my elbow. I reached behind me to wrap my fingers around the suitcase handle, but Charlie had a pretty good grip on my arm and wouldn’t let go. Within seconds he was marching me away from that hotel room.
“I’m not stupid!” I flung back at that cop-maid, but Charlie jerked me around and shoved the small of my back, directing me towards the car.
“Are you trying to get yourself arrested, you dope?” he whispered.
“No, I just wanted to take a shower.”
“That’s it,” he stated forcefully. “You’re not getting out of my sight again. How am I supposed to explain that one?”
A Reason to Forget (The Camdyn Series Book 3) Page 17
