by Bryan Smith
Dead Stripper Storage copyright © 2018 by Bryan Smith. All rights reserved.
Grindhouse Press
PO BOX 521
Dayton, Ohio 45401
Grindhouse Press logo and all related artwork copyright © 2018 by Brandon Duncan. All rights reserved.
Cover design copyright Matthew Revert © 2018. All rights reserved.
Grindhouse Press #041
ISBN-10: 1-941918-33-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-941918-33-3
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author.
Dedication
In memory of that one deliriously drunken evening in 1994 in when I blundered my way into the strippers’ dressing room at a Déjà vu in West Palm Beach. Good times. Until I puked all over that hotel room the next day. But that’s another story.
Other titles by Bryan Smith
House of Blood
Rock and Roll Reform School Zombies
Darkened
Highways to Hell
The Dark Ones
Some Crazy Fucking Shit That Happened One Day
The Freakshow
Soultaker
Queen of Blood
Grimm Awakening
Blood and Whiskey
The Halloween Bride
The Diabolical Conspiracy
Deathbringer
Strange Ways
Slowly We Rot
Surrounded By Bastards
The Reborn
Bloodrush
All Hallow’s Dead
Christmas Eve on Haunted Hill
Seven Deadly Tales of Terror
The Late Night Horror Show
Go Kill Crazy!
Wicked Kayla
Murder Squad
Last Day
Depraved
Depraved 2
Depraved 3
68 Kill
68 Kill Part 2
Kayla and The Devil (Kayla Monroe: Haunted World Book 1)
Kayla Undead (Kayla Monroe: Haunted World Book 2)
The Killing Kind
The Killing Kind 2
ONE
Pete Adler woke up feeling pretty good about life in general that Saturday morning. The sun was shining through his window blinds. Birds were chirping somewhere outside. It was a beautiful day. More importantly, the weekend was finally here. Workplace issues that had caused him to entertain fantasies of suicide by midweek had all been resolved in unexpectedly tidy fashion by the end of the day on Friday, lifting a psychological burden he’d been certain would continue to make his life an exercise in dreary misery for untold weeks and months to come.
Deliverance from this dark state of mind came in the form of the unexpected firing of Shane Watson, who had been escorted from the premises about a half hour prior to the normal end of the workday. This came in the wake of a long, closed-door meeting between Shane and his supervisor. Shane went into the meeting all smiles as usual, cracking jokes with his buddies as he moved between the rows of cubicles. His buddies laughed in their usual sheep-like way. Along the way, he mimed firing a gun at Pete, blowing at the tip of his upraised forefinger as if blowing smoke from the barrel of a pistol. The usual supposedly hilarious crap. His pals laughed harder still, as if they’d never seen anything so funny.
Nobody was laughing when a grim-faced Shane finally emerged from that long meeting. Two security guards had taken up positions outside the closed door before the meeting ended and were ready to guide him out of the building. He was allowed only a few brief moments to collect essential belongings from his desk before being seen to the door. The tension was palpable. Shane wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone and no one tried to engage him in conversation. The heavy silence endured even after he was gone. People were in shock at the sudden departure of arguably the most popular salesperson on staff at Brinkley Solutions. Pete even saw one woman dabbing tears from her eyes. She caught him staring and shot him a nasty look, causing Pete to immediately bow his head and stare at the surface of his desk. He did not, however, do this out of embarrassment. Well, not entirely. Maybe a little. Mostly, though, he did it to hide his smile.
Pete hated Shane Watson more than just about anyone else on the planet. It was a hatred that exceeded any ill feelings he harbored toward the truly bad people of the world, including several noted dictators and crooked politicians. He had a more favorable opinion of many of the more well-known serial killers. It wasn’t that Pete was a total misanthrope. He genuinely loathed such villainous personages. They were vile and despicable, shoddy excuses for human beings. In his own humble opinion, however, Shane was worse than all of them combined.
The ever-smirking young sales executive’s time with the company had lasted just six months, but that had been more than enough time to drive Pete to the brink of utter despair. From day one, the brashly insufferable asshole had made it his mission to torment and humiliate Pete. Watson was an arrogant loudmouth. Pete was humble and soft-spoken. Watson was handsome and athletic. And tall. Pete was considerably shorter and had a slight build. He wasn’t genuinely ugly, but no one had ever called him handsome and never would. Watson mocked him for his mediocre looks and introverted nature in merciless fashion, being aggressively mean in a way that should have earned him a pink slip long before his actual dismissal. The problem was that Pete was the man’s only object of abuse at the company. Everyone else loved him. They thought he was a great guy. His constant jabs at Pete were seen as being in good fun, a well-meaning way of trying to draw the quieter man out of his shell. If his co-workers noticed Watson’s many minor acts of physical abuse against Pete, they either looked the other way or didn’t care.
These instances of physical harassment happened multiple times a week. Shane would flick at Pete’s ears or smack the back of his head whenever the opportunity to do so arose, which happened with distressing frequency. This was primarily because of the location of Shane’s cubicle, which was three down from Pete’s own cubicle on the same row. He passed behind Pete several times daily. Every time he went on break or lunch. Every time he retrieved documents from the printer or fax machine. Every time he went to the supervisor’s office to ask a question. And he was always careful to abuse Pete when no one was watching. No one who would report him for it, that is.
Pete endured all of it without complaint because, among other reasons, he didn’t want to be seen as weak. As a victim. He was a man, not a kid in high school. In theory, he could report the constant abuse to human resources and demand something be done about it. If he had, something probably would have been done. In this age of ever-increasing political correctness and sensitivity, maintaining a non-hostile work environment was in the best interests of any company wishing to avoid controversy. As an individual, however, Pete also wished to avoid controversy. He didn’t want to be seen as the reason a popular employee was given the boot. The resentment this would foment among his coworkers almost certainly would be more than he could withstand.
He would be forced to quit and find another job. Pete didn’t want another job. He liked the one he had. He was good at it. It fit his skill-set. The money was good and the benefits were great. Aside from all that, the prospect of going on a round of job interviews filled him with almost as much dread as one of Watson’s slow marches down the aisle between cubicle rows. He just didn’t want to do it, so he kept his mouth shut and clung to the desperate hope that he could one day have a heart-to-heart
talk with the man and convince him to knock off the abusive behavior. Getting him to stop seemed an unlikely outcome, but he could at least give it a shot. If it worked, great. If it didn’t … well, he hadn’t yet come up with a plan for next steps, thus the deep depression that had engulfed him over these last several days.
Now, though, he didn’t need to come up with a plan, thanks to Shane Watson’s abrupt removal from his life. And the best part? He hadn’t had to lift a finger to make it happen. For reasons unknown, someone else had done it for him. He didn’t even care why it had happened. He was sure he would have been consulted beforehand if it’d had anything to do with him. That hadn’t happened, though, which meant nobody could blame him for Shane being gone. He was in the clear. He felt liberated. Lighter than air. Free to resume normal life. He felt like throwing open his bedroom window and exclaiming his joy to the world in a loud, jubilant voice.
He didn’t do that, of course. Such outbursts just weren’t part of the Pete Adler way of doing things. Instead, he got out of bed, stretched and yawned, and strolled out of the bedroom into the hallway with the intent of heading to the kitchen for the day’s first cup of coffee.
His house was a small one. The “hallway” was a hallway in name only. It was more of a small, open junction functioning as a means of egress and ingress between the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living room. The kitchen was through the archway in front of him, while the living room was visible through the archway to his right. He was on the brink of stepping through the archway into the kitchen when he abruptly stopped in his tracks, frowned, and thought for a moment about what he had blearily glimpsed in the living room. Or, rather, what he might have glimpsed, because surely it couldn’t have been real. He was still groggy. His mind was playing tricks on him. That was the only rational explanation. And it was one that made total sense.
Verification nonetheless seemed necessary.
He backtracked a few steps and peered through the archway into the living room. He gasped. His mouth dropped open. If he’d already had a coffee mug in hand, it would have slipped from his fingers and shattered on the floor. He felt weak in the knees. He had to grip the archway frame to keep from falling over. Even with the support of the frame, remaining upright was difficult in those first several moments. During that time, he gaped at the impossible thing in his living room and willed it to go away. He screwed his eyes shut and rapidly repeated the same words several times: “You’re not real. Please go away.”
At last, he let out a breath and opened his eyes.
“Oh, shit.”
She was still there. Denial of this essential point was no longer possible. There was a dead woman on his couch.
TWO
Another few minutes were necessary to gather strength and courage. Pete then tentatively entered the living room, taking a look around to ensure no one else was in there. It was a small space. Behind the TV stand and the large TV atop it was the only nominally viable potential hiding place in the room. A cautious peek into the narrow space behind the stand and the wall revealed only the usual tangle of wires and cables. The back of the couch sat flush against the opposite wall. No one could hide there, unless they were the size of a small cat, which seemed unlikely. This woman hadn’t been murdered by some freakish miniature human being. Some big brute had done this heinous thing. A red recliner sat to the left of the couch, away from the wall and turned at an angle to face the TV. He’d seen that no one was behind it upon entering the room, but his paranoia was in overdrive, so he took a closer look. The area behind the recliner was in need of a good sweeping, but there were no lurking villains there, either.
After confirming no one else was in the living room, Pete stood there and stared at the dead woman for a while. He fidgeted. A nervous sweat rose on his brow. His armpits dampened. He made sounds of impotent frustration. Indecision about what to do next threatened to paralyze him. He pictured years passing while he remained rooted to this spot, subsisting on bugs that flew into his mouth while he grew an unruly beard and the hair on his scalp lengthened until it reached the hardwood floor. An absurd notion, of course, but was it really any more ridiculous than the discovery of a murdered woman on his couch?
He didn’t think so.
Several minutes passed before the wild jumble of half-formed thoughts raging inside his head settled into something closer to cohesiveness. He then wiped the sweat from his brow and took a reluctant step closer to the couch and the corpse resting upon it. She was in a seated position, with her head tilted backward and her arms splayed out to either side of her. Her legs were crossed. A number of colorful tattoos had been etched into her creamy smooth skin. He was able to see them because most of her flesh was exposed. The dead woman wore only a lacy black bra and black panties. Her feet were ensconced in a pair of black platform heels. She had been an attractive woman, with a slender yet shapely body, large breasts, and a pretty face framed by long locks of hair dyed a shade of black darker than the heart of midnight. The only thing detracting from her beauty were the ugly marks around her neck. She had been brutally strangled prior to being mysteriously deposited here on his couch. A detached part of him noted that at least the killing method employed had been a relatively clean one. If she had been shot or stabbed, blood from her wounds might have leaked onto his couch cushion. It was a callous thing to think in the face of this horror, but that made it no less true.
He didn’t know the woman. At this point, that was the only thing he knew for an absolute fact about her inexplicable presence. A woman who looked like this wasn’t someone he could have forgotten, even if he’d only glimpsed her in passing. Of all his female acquaintances, not one of them had remotely resembled this gorgeous creature. Some of the ladies he worked with were attractive enough in their own right, but this unfortunate woman had existed in a league far above any of them. She was like a perfect vision out of an erotic dream. Aside from the nasty marks on her neck, that is.
Another thing Pete knew for an absolute fact was that he was not responsible for this woman’s death. His hands had not created those hideous bruises on her crushed throat. Even if he’d ever felt inclined to do such an awful thing, he doubted he was physically capable of it. A much stronger person had done this. Someone with bigger hands. Someone able to firmly hold the woman in place without any real trouble while committing this vile act.
And yet the question remained, how was it she had come to be here on his couch?
He was a sound sleeper most nights, but he had a hard time believing an intruder could have broken into his house and dumped a corpse on his couch without awakening him. Aside from that, he rarely neglected to arm his alarm system before going to bed at night. He clearly remembered doing so last night. In fact, he hadn’t yet disarmed it, as he always did shortly after waking each day. His eyes widened at this thought and in another moment he spun about, racing out of the living room and into the kitchen. The alarm system’s keypad was mounted on the wall just inside the archway.
The system was still armed. This gave rise to a fresh slew of troubling questions. The only explanation was that someone had somehow entered his house without setting off the alarm and had then temporarily disarmed the system before resetting it. He could make no sense of the notion. Only someone with a key to his house and knowledge of the alarm code could have done such a thing. Unless, of course, the perpetrator was some kind of master thief straight out of a Hollywood heist movie. This was another thing that fell into the category of the highly unlikely. Then again, there wasn’t a lot to work with in the realm of more realistic scenarios, either. The only keys to his house were his own. He knew this because he’d changed out the locks shortly after moving in and had not opted to have duplicate keys made. Nor had he ever shared his alarm code with anyone. There was no one he trusted enough for that.
Pete frowned as he scratched the side of his head. Unless he was somehow missing something obvious and crucial, there was no way an intruder could have gotten into his house las
t night without him knowing about it. And yet that was exactly what seemed to have happened. It was a conundrum. There was a missing puzzle piece he didn’t know about. All he had to do was identify what that was and the whole mystery would unravel.
Easier said than done, but he had to try.
The first step in that process, he decided, was to definitively rule out a break-in. He did a quick tour of every room in the house in search of any signs of forced entry. There was nothing. All the windows were locked down tight the way they always were. There were no marks in the wood indicating that anyone had tried to jimmy their way in. He was also belatedly able to rule out the possibility of a fiend lurking in some other part of the house, which was a massive relief in one way. In another way, it only further deepened the mystery.
He reentered the living room in a daze, mind reeling as he struggled to figure out what had happened. Although the idea of someone having forced their way into his home was a disturbing one, he almost wished he’d discovered evidence to support the possibility. At least it would have been something he could make sense of and wrap his head around. As far as he was concerned, the lack of an obvious explanation for the dead woman’s presence here was far more disturbing than the reality of the corpse itself. He tried forcing his mind in directions beyond the obvious. This soon caused him to examine the situation from a perspective that at first struck him as absurd, but it was one he was forced to consider because it was the only thing that fit the available evidence.
The question Pete Adler was forced to ask himself was this—was he, after all, the person behind this woman’s murder? It would account for the absence of break-in evidence and the mystery of the alarm system.
The idea made no sense on any level. He wasn’t a violent man and never had been. Though he’d had decidedly mixed luck with women on the romantic front most of his life, he’d never harbored hatred in his heart for the opposite gender. He respected them. He simply couldn’t imagine himself doing something so vile as murdering an innocent woman, not even in the midst of some kind of blackout or psychotic fugue state. Again, though, this was unlikely in the extreme. He was mentally stable. Always had been. He drank only in moderation. Last night he didn’t have so much as a single drop of alcohol. Not only that, but he clearly remembered crawling into bed, turning off his bedside lamp, and slowly drifting off to sleep. This morning he woke up feeling physically and mentally refreshed, the way he always did after a good night’s solid sleep. This seemed to rule out the outlandish notion that he’d suffered some kind of bizarre psychotic break in the middle of the night and gone out prowling somewhere for a victim. Not that he’d seriously believed it possible in the first place. Given the circumstances, the possibility had merited consideration. Well, he’d considered it, and now he was rejecting it out of hand.