The Flip (An Angel Hill novel)

by C. Dennis Moore

  “What’s going on down there?”

  Mike shook his head, shrugged, said, “Some old guy got hit by a van, stepped out into the street without looking.”

  “Shit.”

  “Man, that was fucked. Up. Tore half his damn face off.”

  “You heading home now?”

  “Yeah,” Mike said. “I’m beat to hell. Hey, you working in the basement?”

  “I will be. Kevin said you were tearing down the plaster?”

  “Yeah, I got one wall done. Hey, you seen . . . um, anything weird and shit down there?”

  Keith shook his head, asked, “Why? You see something?”

  “No,” Mike said. “I sort of passed out for a second down there and had this fucked up dream, got me rattled I guess.”

  “Go get some rest, man, I got this. What’s that?” he asked, nodding toward the thing in Mike’s hand.

  “Nothing, just something he was holding. It flew into the park. Funny, I didn’t even realize I had picked it up.” He tossed it into the passenger seat of his Jeep.

  Keith went inside and Mike got into his car.

  He kept seeing the guy’s tattered face, the bits of rock stuck in his skin, the blood pumping out of the gash in his forehead with every beat of his heart. He wanted to get home, lie down, close his eyes, but he had a feeling that sight was going to play behind his eyes for the rest of the night.

  He went inside and dropped his keys on the end table next to the couch, then lay down face first in the cushions. He wanted so badly to let the sleep he felt crawling over him claim him fully and sink down into a black nothing for the next several hours, but as he’d expected, the vision of that guy’s blood and muscle, the twisted way his limbs lay on the highway, Mike kept having to open his eyes and cleanse his mind’s eye before trying again.

  After a while, twenty minutes, he thought when he pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the time, he got up and sat staring at the blank television screen.

  He wanted to do this later, he wanted to do it after he’d rested. But he wasn’t going to sleep. The images may stay with him for a long time, he understood that. But there was something else he needed to verify before he could move forward.

  He scrolled through the contacts in his phone, found the one he wanted, then tapped it to dial.

  The phone didn’t even ring, just went straight to voicemail.

  Maybe she was showing a house, he thought. He should leave a message asking her to call him. Instead, he hung up and stared some more at the television screen.

  He had to admit to a part of him that wanted to be able to claim plausible deniability should anything come out about the house after it was sold, if anyone tried to sue him and the company for not telling them before. He couldn’t disclose something he didn’t know. And maybe that was the case with Lynette, too. It was very likely she simply didn’t know.

  But he had to know. He couldn’t start off the business doing dirty, underhanded work. That wasn’t going to be their business model.

  He called again and got voicemail. He left his message asking the realtor to call him as soon as she could, then he sat and waited, staring at the blank television, as if he expected the call to be returned right away. Eventually he had to get up and put something on the screen, otherwise he was going to keep seeing that mangled face superimposed over the black.

  Keith stared at what Kevin was showing him and thought, That’s not good at all.

  “That’s got to be completely replaced, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s the floor,” Kevin said, “so yeah.”

  “I can’t believe we didn’t know that before.”

  “How could you? That linoleum was hiding it.”

  While Kevin was outside measuring and cutting for the porch, one of his guys--Keith didn’t know their names yet--had been tearing up the linoleum in the kitchen. They had decided on trying to match the hardwood from the living and dining rooms and carrying it throughout the entire house. But once the linoleum came up and the rotten sub floor was revealed, Keith knew this was a bigger problem than he was prepared to deal with.

  Too bad, he thought. Equal partner means equal responsibility. He was the only one here, so it was his issue to solve.

  “It’s no problem at all to fix,” Kevin said. “The only question is how far it goes. What else is rotten under there?”

  “Hopefully not much,” Keith said.

  “I’ll stop and get the wood for the sub floor on my way in tomorrow, so we’ve got it. But we’re gonna want to make sure this is all that’s bad before we lay it. We’ll get started on it early.”

  Keith nodded and said, “Okay, cool.”

  “We have to wrap up here for the night, though,” Kevin said.

  Keith nodded again.

  Kevin and his crew gathered their tools, packed them away, and were gone in fifteen minutes, leaving Keith alone in the living room of a demo’d house.

  He strode back into the kitchen and stared at the rotten wood, most likely water from a leak in the bathroom getting under the wall, or maybe from the fridge. Whatever the reason, the result was the same. More money they had to shell out. He hoped they wouldn’t find anymore.

  With nothing else to do, Keith got into his car and drove to the party he’d told Mike about earlier.

  He wasn’t interested in the company so much, nor in the drinking, although he would enjoy both while he was here. The party was thrown by one of the women he’d worked with at Fett. He’d slept with her a few times but cut it off when she got too clingy. But they were still friends and still met up once in a while at parties around town thrown by one friend or another. He hadn’t slept with her in almost a year, and had no intention of doing so. But that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be someone there tonight who would wind up going home with him.

  He walked in and spotted three people he knew immediately. Beaver stood against a wall talking to two girls Keith knew from St. Joe, Michelle and Robin. One of them, Robin, he’d slept with a few times, the other he’d been trying to get on for a while but she kept saying no. So he kept asking.

  He went straight for them, said hi, and lost himself in talking to Beaver and the two girls for the next hour. When the girls weren’t looking, Beaver threw a raised eyebrow at Keith, then flashed his eyes at Robin and Keith nodded. Beaver had his sights set on her tonight and that was fine; Keith had already had her and knew there wasn’t any damage Beaver could do that Keith hadn’t already done. He decided to make another play for Michelle if Mother wasn’t shadowing her.

  Michelle lived with a roommate she’d met at work, an older woman who swore up and down she was the most Christian woman one was ever bound to meet. She even had a closet where she prayed, because, as Keith had heard it, she liked to quote a verse where God mentioned praying in your closet.

  Michelle had been somewhat brainwashed by old Mother--hence his, so far, inability to get her into bed--but he’d heard she had finally moved out, got her own place, got her own mind most importantly, and had been seen at a lot of parties lately.

  This was all good news for him.

  “So what have you been up to,” he asked over the music. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “I been busy,” she said, nearly yelling into his ear.

  “I heard you got your own place.”

  She nodded, but didn’t elaborate.

  He got a whiff of her perfume and thought he recognized it from somewhere.

  “What are you wearing?” he asked. “Your perfume.”

  “It’s called Sunflowers,” she said.

  He was trying to place why it was familiar, but didn’t want her to get bored and walk away so he asked, “What ever happened with that woman you were living with?”

  “I got tired of the talk,” Michelle said.

  “What kind of talk?”

  He didn’t need to ask, he knew exactly what kind of talk, and had participated in it himself from time to time. Word on the street was Mother wa
s a bull dyke and Michelle was her new toy. Whether it had actually been true or not, Keith didn’t know, and didn’t really care. What Michelle did in her free time was her business, he was only asking for a few hours himself.

  “Just talk,” she said. “None of it true, but I finally realized it wasn’t going to stop unless I did something to make it stop. So I had to get out on my own again.”

  “Good move,” he said. “I always wondered why you moved in there in the first place,”

  “Needed a place to live,” she said. “I was living with this guy for a while, but he was a jackass, so we broke up and he kicked me out. She had an empty room and took me in right away.”

  “That was nice of her.”

  Keith really didn’t care, wasn’t interested, but he didn’t know what else to talk about with her, and was trying to avoid the first awkward silence, because from there on out they only got longer and more awkward until one of them, most likely Michelle, suddenly spotted someone across the room she had to say hi to, and he wouldn’t see her the rest of the night.

  So he feigned interest until he found his in.

  It didn’t take long.

  “I’ve been working at this cabinet and countertop place the past few months.”

  “Hey you give discounts?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t have anything to do with the pricing.”

  “Do you do the design and stuff?”

  “Not really,” she said. “Not really design. I just work with people to help measure out what they need as far as size and material, what colors, if they want to go to the showroom and pick out their own slabs, simple kind of stuff.”

  “Damn, you on the clock right now?”

  She laughed and shook her head.

  “I got this new house some buddies and I bought and are renovating. We’re totally redoing everything in the kitchen. Do you help with the layout?”

  “Yep,” she said, “all that stuff.”

  “You wanna come by sometime and check it out?”

  She shrugged and said “Sure, I can do that. If you’re buying from us, that is. I think I’d get in trouble if I was doing freelance work for free.”

  “You help us out and we’ll buy from you,” Keith said. “You get commission?”

  She nodded and took a sip of whatever she was drinking. Looked like a Long Island Ice Tea to Keith.

  “Then I’ll make sure we buy directly. I’m a quarter partner in the company, I got pull.”

  “Sweet,” she said and smiled.

  Man, he thought, I got to get this chick out of here and someplace alone. She is finer than frog hair!

  “We could go check it out now if you want to get out of here,” he said. “It’s not far from here. I only came to say hey to Beaver, and he looks busy, so I’m thinking of heading out anyway.”

  Michelle looked around, saw Robin was nowhere to be seen, shrugged and said, “Why not. You show me where you want the cabinets and what kind of finish you want, I might even be able to give you rough quote.”

  “Cool,” Keith said and walked her outside. “You just want to follow me over there?”

  “I didn’t drive,” she said, holding up her drink. “I got a ride with Robin.”

  “Oh. I can drive, then. I’ll give you a ride home after.”

  After what, he didn’t specify, but he knew what he was hoping.

  He couldn’t say if it was the alcohol, his own natural charm, or the allure of an empty house with no bathroom or kitchen and a big hole in the floor, but there was definitely something in the air when they got inside the house.

  He turned on the lights and showed her the kitchen. She laughed at the hole before he explained the wood had been rotten and needed to be replaced.

  “Sounds expensive,” she said. He shrugged it off as if the expense were nothing, just part of doing business in this field. “Since you’re starting with a clean slate in here, is the sink still going to go in the same place, or are you doing a full reconfiguration?”

  “I don’t have the plans, but I’m pretty sure it’s staying, so we’re going to design everything around the placement of the sink, but since we took out this bathroom we’ve got a lot of extra space.”

  “Which means more cabinets,” Michelle said.

  He nodded.

  “It’s going to get expensive,” she added.

  He shrugged again and she smiled.

  “How come you were never this calm and serious when we met?”

  “I was still pretty young and stupid back then,” he said.

  “We’ve only known each other a couple of years.”

  “I grew up a lot these last few.”

  She laughed and waved away his comment, obviously not buying it.

  “So how come you never let me take you out before?” Keith asked.

  “Before? Before what? Before now? This isn’t out, this is business.”

  “You know what I mean. I asked a hundred times, and every time you always said no.”

  “I wasn’t interested,” she said. “You gotta think about how you come across sometimes. Especially to people who know you. We hear the stories, we see you tell them and how funny you think they are. Some of us just aren’t amused.”

  “But they’re not supposed to be funny stories,” he said. “They’re just my life, it’s stuff that really happens to me.”

  “And you really like telling them,” she said. “You talk about friends with nicknames like Butterbean, Donkeypunch. And you’ve got that one friend with the Mexican girlfriend. What’s he call her?”

  Keith laughed out loud and said, “Cuntsuella.”

  “Yeah. It’s not funny. Some people find it offensive. You’re a nice guy, I’ve always liked you, but you’re not boyfriend material.”

  “I never asked to be your boyfriend. I just wanted to take you out for some drinks or something.”

  “Yeah, it’s the ‘or something’ that matters.”

  “So just drinks.”

  “You wouldn’t stop at just drinks.”

  “I never made anyone do anything,” he said. “Girls come to me. Maybe it’s my reputation, maybe it’s I don’t know what, but they come to me.”

  “Some of them,” she corrected.

  “Yeah, not all of them, but it happens more than you might think.”

  “I’m not saying it doesn’t,” she said. “I’m just not one of them. We’re friends.”

  She pulled a card and a pen from her purse, put it facedown against the kitchen wall, then looked around the kitchen again and wrote down a list of numbers.

  “I’m guessing this is the footage you’re thinking of. So with tops and bottoms, just a basic package, unfinished, it’ll cost around here.” She handed him the card, one of her business cards from work, and he looked at the number circled at the bottom.

  “That’s not bad,” he said.

  “That’s because they’re unfinished. You want them painted or stained or something, it’ll cost more, or you’ll have to do it yourself. But this is a rough starting point for what I think you’re looking for.”

  “Awesome, thanks,” he said, and slipped the card into his back pocket. “So if we take the ‘or something’ off the table and just keep it at a few drinks, then I take you home and say goodnight, would you wanna?”

  “I’ll think about it,” she said. “But I still think I know you too well and I don’t trust you to really take the ‘or something’ off the table completely.”

  “Well just think about it,” he said.

  She nodded, then said, “Show me around the rest of the place?”

  He nodded and took her back into the living room.

  “This is the living room,” he said.

  She laughed and said, “Fascinating. I’ve seen this.”

  He said, “Okay, you’ve seen the dining room and kitchen and what used to be the bathroom. The bedroom is in here.” He led her into the room and turned on the light, then said, “There’s ano
ther one through here, but that’s gonna be where the bathroom is. So we’re turning some of the downstairs into another bedroom, with a small bathroom and an office.”

  “Can we see it?”

  He nodded and led her to the stairs. She went ahead of him and while he was trying to find the light switch, he heard a yell, then a thump followed by the sound of Michelle falling down the stairs and cracking her head on the concrete floor.

  He got the light on and stared down, said, “Oh shit!” and ran down after her.

  He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to move her, but he didn’t want to just leave her, either.

  He pulled out his phone and called for an ambulance, then waited on the stairs for them, watching her still body and fearing the worst.

  “Jesus,” he kept repeating to himself over and over while he listened for the sirens. When he heard them finally, he ran out and led them inside, directing them to the basement.

  Michelle stirred as they braced her and put her on the stretcher, then carried her upstairs. She wasn’t really conscious, but she moved and Keith sighed in relief, glad he hadn’t killed her. After they carried her upstairs, her perfume lingered in the air, and something about the combination of that smell and this basement seemed familiar.

  He locked up the house and followed the ambulance to Angel County, then waited in the emergency room for almost two hours before someone came out and told him how she was.

  She had a broken leg, and some bruised ribs from falling down the stairs, but they would heal. She had knocked herself unconscious, but hadn’t cracked her skull, which was another sigh of relief from Keith, but she had a concussion and would be in the hospital for a while, they said.

  He told himself he would come visit her every day, and whatever she needed, he would take care of it. He also decided he was pushing for buying the cabinets from Michelle so she would get the commission--he’d told her that earlier, but hadn’t actually decided to keep his word on the matter until just now. It would have been an easy promise to break, all he had to do was say he was outvoted, and who was she to prove otherwise? But after this, he would press the issue until the other guys gave in. Or if he had to, he’d just order them anyway, then send the bill to Mike. He didn’t mind taking the “easier to ask forgiveness than permission” approach in this case. Hell, he thought, it was the least he owed her after doing that to her.