Road Kill

by Hanna Jameson

  ‘Two or three weeks.’

  We stopped outside Trent’s old room and exchanged a look.

  You go first.

  No, you.

  Then Eli let us in.

  The room was tiny and smelt stale; the kind of smell you’d get in an old peoples’ home. A bed, a chair and a small TV. That was it. He must have been using a communal bathroom.

  It was one of the most depressing places I had ever seen. Looking back and seeing the four deadbolts on the door just compounded the misery. I ran my hand over them and wondered if Trent had watched them from his bed, feeling as unsafe as I did now.

  ‘Because when someone knocks on your door at the Cecil, it isn’t room service,’ Eli had said, while reading an article on the Internet.

  He pulled the grubby covers from the bed, turned the pillows, checked the empty drawers in the small table, but there wasn’t enough stuff in the room. If Trent had left something here, it would be in plain view.

  I looked behind the TV. Nothing. I checked the drawers Eli had already opened, but found nothing but a Bible.

  He opened the window, which didn’t have a lock, and peered at the fire escape.

  The tile from the hallway had been replaced by carpet; greenish brown, scuffed. There were burn marks on the walls.

  ‘Drug dealers used to rent these rooms for clients to shoot up in,’ Eli told me, sitting down on the bed. ‘I read that paramedics used to be here all the time picking up people who had accidentally overdosed.’

  ‘I’d OD if I had to stay here.’ I leant against the small table, trying to see the room through Trent’s eyes again, but it was as blank and featureless as the man himself. ‘I don’t think Trent would have left anything. Not that would still be here after this long. I mean, what would be the point? Unless he knew someone would be searching for him. We’ll be better off talking to the guys downstairs.’

  It took a long time for Eli to say anything.

  ‘It has to mean something,’ he said eventually, still sitting.

  ‘What? That he stayed here?’

  ‘Yeah, of all places, he stayed here in the fucking murder hotel. Then he disappeared.’

  To feel as though I was contributing, I got on my hands and knees and checked under the bed, but there was nothing there either. It was madness to think there would still be a trace of him here when he had left virtually no trace anywhere else.

  I ran my hand along the sombre radiator, scratches there and scratches on the wall behind, parallel and frenzied, almost like a tally.

  Eli saw them too.

  I wanted to say, ‘Fingernails’ but it seemed too speculative, so unnecessarily morbid, that I didn’t.

  Fingernails.

  ‘Come on, let’s go downstairs,’ I said, getting up.

  Eli nodded, turning the key over and over in his hand again, then he got up and followed me out. At the last moment I went back and took the Bible with me. It didn’t seem like the sort of place to provide the word of God.

  *

  Eli tried to order some bourbon while we were waiting for the manager but the Cecil’s bar only served tea and coffee. It was nearing six in the evening and I knew we both wouldn’t sleep, but we sat with double espressos anyway, in brown armless chairs.

  ‘Salvation.’

  ‘What?’ I started when Eli broke the silence.

  He nodded at the floor of the lobby and at the stained glass ceiling. ‘You should know that, right? It’s a Christian sign of salvation and deliverance, the eight-pointed star.’

  I stared at the gold star encircled in black and white on the floor and at the red star depicted on the ceiling.

  ‘No idea,’ I said, bracing myself for one of his caustic remarks, but he didn’t elaborate.

  The manager of the Cecil, a man who tried to walk with a commanding sort of presence but who only succeeded in making himself look neurotic, joined us after twenty minutes or so. He’d probably had to deal with a lot of shit, I thought as I looked him up and down, being the manager of a place like this.

  ‘Edward Saxon,’ he introduced himself to us, with a weak handshake.

  ‘Elias.’

  ‘Mark,’ I said.

  We all sat and Saxon crossed his legs, one thigh over the other like a woman.

  He said, ‘You’re here to enquire about—’

  ‘May I have a spoon?’ Eli interjected.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘A spoon, for my coffee.’

  Saxon jerkily stood up again. ‘I, er… of course. I’ll find one for you.’

  He walked in the direction of the kitchens, next to the bar. After a minute or so he returned and handed Eli a teaspoon.

  The second time Saxon sat down he looked in serious discomfort, watching Eli stirring his coffee as if it were disturbing behaviour.

  He said, ‘You’re here to enquire about one of our former residents?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Eli took the photo out of his coat again and handed it across the coffee table. ‘This is him, from about ten years ago. He probably looked very different…’

  ‘No, I know him.’ Saxon held the photo up to his face. ‘You’re right, he changed a lot but this is undoubtedly him. Who exactly are you, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  Eli made to take the photo back but Saxon kept hold of it. ‘I’m an old friend of his. He disappeared a while ago, and I’ve been trying to find him. He hasn’t left any forwarding addresses. It’s as if he’s vanished off the face of the earth.’

  ‘How did you find out your friend stayed here? If he didn’t leave any forwarding address?’

  ‘He mentioned to someone that he was staying here.’

  ‘You know, we have to respect a customer’s right to privacy, to a point.’

  ‘But what if a customer’s life was in danger? Or he had disappeared in suspicious circumstances?’ I said, raising my eyebrows. ‘You’d want to cooperate, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Are you with the LAPD?’

  We both shook our heads.

  ‘Private investigators then?’

  ‘No, we’re just friends of Trent’s,’ Eli said, in an over-pronounced tone that no one but me would recognize as a sign that he was about to lose his temper. ‘Something bad may have happened to him and we just really need to know what he was doing here and whether he gave any indication of where he was going.’ He added, for good measure, ‘His family are going out of their minds with worry.’

  Saxon frowned and adjusted his suit. ‘He didn’t strike me as a man who had any family. Or friends, for that matter.’

  ‘How did he look?’

  ‘He looked… in the most polite way I can put it, like any other transient. We weren’t sure if he was a drug addict or not quite there in the head, but he wasn’t right. We had the impression he was someone who might have fallen upon hard times, lost his job or something and needed a place to go.’

  ‘Did he look different to that photo when he was staying here?’

  ‘Yes.’ Saxon glanced at it again. ‘He had a small beard, greying. He was very lined and was pale, almost like a meth addict. He was very polite, though, kept himself to himself and didn’t leave the hotel very much. After a while he had befriended the doormen and most of housekeeping. They all liked him. He was strange, but I liked him too.’

  ‘Can we speak to any of these people?’ I asked.

  ‘Penny, in housekeeping. She got to know him well. Better than any of us. She won’t be in again until tomorrow morning though. If I tell her to come in half an hour early, you can come back and speak to her then? About eight-thirty?’

  ‘That would be great, thanks.’ Eli had relaxed now that Saxon had opened up.

  ‘You said he never left the hotel much?’ I added, wired from the espresso.

  ‘No, he’d emerge every few days. Sometimes he wouldn’t come out at all. But security said he used to walk around the halls a lot.’ Saxon gestured upwards at the tower block above our heads, the eight-pointed star. ‘Maybe he did it for
exercise or to gather his thoughts, I don’t know. But to my knowledge he never bothered anybody.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t the sort who ever bothered anybody.’ A sharp line had appeared between Eli’s eyebrows. ‘You haven’t got any footage of him, have you? From the corridors?’

  ‘I can… see if we have anything.’

  I started flipping through the Bible on my lap. ‘Do you provide these in the rooms?’

  Saxon pursed his lips. ‘No. Why?’

  ‘No reason.’

  Someone had written in this Bible, scribbled in the margins.

  Eli glanced at me, saw some of the writing, but didn’t mention it in front of Saxon.

  There was a sugar bowl on the table between us. I took the spoon out of it and, when Saxon wasn’t looking, put it in my pocket.

  We left not long after that.

  Walking back to the car, a homeless guy grabbed Eli’s arm.

  He wrenched it out of the man’s grasp, thinking he was about to lose his watch, but the guy wasn’t armed. He was gibbering through swollen and cracked lips, eyes rolling in his head; a mental.

  I took Eli by the shoulder and steered us both around him.

  ‘Cecil means sixth,’ the guy lisped after us. ‘Cecil means the devil, the devil…’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Daisy

  I always knew on some level that Nic was going to kill me. I even considered putting it in writing somewhere a couple of times, as evidence were I to go missing and my body never found. But that seemed insane, so I never convinced myself to do it.

  Choking on blood, I spat out a tooth, rolled onto my side and scrambled to my feet to keep running.

  Where, fuck knows.

  Sucks to be me.

  I thought it would be somewhere like this; a grey concrete warehouse, the pretext of somewhere secluded to talk.

  Mental, right, the trust we put in people. Mental, that I’d fooled myself into trusting Nic when he was built to destroy, paid to destroy. Why should I be any different from the other humans he’d wiped out of existence?

  I ran at one of the first-floor windows and expected to crash through it like they always managed to do in films. I rebounded off the glass, smashed my fists on it, screaming. But no give.

  ‘Help me! Hey, fucking help me!’

  He dragged me back by a fistful of my hair and threw me to the floor.

  ‘Nic, please, I don’t know what you think I’ve done—’

  ‘Shut up!’

  I rolled out of reach as he went to kick me again, struggling to do much more than scrabble away.

  ‘I know I should have told you about Seven, I know. Fuck… please…’ I dug my fingernails into his wrists as he pulled me upright again, just to smack me back down. ‘Nic, please—’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck what you have to say!’

  I tried to breathe, couldn’t, coughed up more blood.

  Gonna die.

  He picked me up again, shaking me by my bad arm.

  Gonna die.

  Should’ve told the truth.

  I was always gonna die because of this.

  His blue eyes were slits, barely open, as mine stared into them, waiting for it… waiting for it…

  Held up by the front of my shirt, bunched up in his fist, my feet scraping the floor, waiting for it…

  I started crying. It was the worst thing I could have done in front of him.

  ‘Nic, please… Nic, I’m sorry.’

  He didn’t give a shit.

  I was blacking out, waiting for it…

  Of course he didn’t give a shit.

  *

  ‘Sleep is shite at the moment, to be honest,’ I said, spooning three sugars into my flat white. ‘Keep having nightmares.’

  Mark Chester, mine and Nic’s former flatmate, looked me up and down with concern.

  It would be easy to resent Mark, if I didn’t know him so well. He was prettier than me, had better skin, better cheekbones, bigger eyes, and being well over six foot he wore a pair of skinny jeans better than I ever could.

  He was also the only person I knew who killed with less remorse than Nic.

  ‘But the place is OK for you, no?’

  ‘Oh yeah, yeah it’s great, Mark, thanks. Beats sleeping at work.’ I snorted. ‘As long as you don’t need it for anything?’

  ‘It’s just somewhere I store things, paperwork and stuff.’ He shifted in his seat, stabbing at his green tea to enforce brewing. ‘You don’t mind that Seven stayed there?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s haunted, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘No one feels shittier about this than me, love.’

  He’d said it so many times. I met his eyes, startlingly green – so green I thought he had taken to wearing coloured contacts – and spread my hands.

  ‘I’m fine. Really, I’m fine. Like, it wasn’t pleasant getting shot but… working there, it’s probably one of those things that was gonna happen sooner or later anyway.’

  ‘You know I told her she was like me, when we were working together. I actually told her she’d be good at doing my job.’ He shook his head. ‘Should have had some clue that she already was good at it.’

  ‘It might not have made a difference. She was really fucking clever. Give her credit for that.’

  Seven had been clever, manoeuvring around us like a big cat as Noel and Ronnie suspected everyone else, even each other.

  And I’d let her go. I’d let her shoot me.

  I’d let her go and I didn’t know if it had been the right call.

  We both looked around, at faces, out of habit. Every conversation felt like it was recorded now. It was exhausting being on the lookout all the time, even in bland Hampstead coffee shops like this one.

  ‘I keep seeing her everywhere, it’s driving me insane,’ I said, with a forced smile. ‘But I’m so sure it’s her, I’m sure she’s still in London.’

  ‘What, seeing her in a “I’m tripping balls most of the time” way?’

  ‘No, in an “actually seeing her” way. I swear, I’m not making it up. She hasn’t left, I’d bet my life on it.’ On second thoughts, I gestured at a businessman sitting alone by the window on his iPad. ‘His life. I’d bet his life on it.’

  ‘I’m not sure she would stay in London, considering. And I’ve had some leads elsewhere.’

  ‘Really? I mean, where have you been looking – Japan? London would be the last place you’d look for her, right. She’d know that.’

  He hesitated. ‘I’d know if she was still here.’

  ‘Like you knew what she was going to do last time?’

  Silence.

  I rubbed my eyes. ‘Gah, sorry, that was harsh.’

  ‘Not entirely unfair.’

  I wondered what it felt like for someone like Mark, with his infamous one hundred per cent success rate, to feel at the mercy of a situation.

  He put his sunglasses on, and took them off again two seconds later. He was dressed entirely in black, with long sleeves covering his mosaic of Russian prison tattoos. The ones on his hands could rarely be hidden though; the tiny marks on the backs of his fingers. They were more restless than usual, moving to cup themselves around his eyes, creating a sun visor.

  ‘Wish the weather would make its mind up,’ he muttered.

  ‘Noel’s kinda shitting himself about this money,’ I said. ‘They can’t afford you much longer.’

  He shrugged. ‘I’ll still be looking, whether they’re paying me or not. Maybe don’t mention that to them though. Can’t have too many people knowing I can be bought with a challenge.’

  ‘Gurl, please.’ I spread my hands.

  ‘A gurl gotta make rent, honey. Know what I’m sayin’.’ He rubbed his thumb and middle finger together. ‘Gurl needs her dollar.’

  ‘Can I get a Amen!’ I drank some of my syrupy coffee. ‘Well, it makes me feel better that you’ll keep looking. Has, um… has Nic talked about it?’

  ‘No, he’s really absent. I�
��m not living there at the moment.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Fuck me, love, how did things get so fucked?’

  Would things be so fucked if I hadn’t let Seven go?

  I could feel the weight of it in my throat.

  But that wasn’t coming out, ever.

  ‘What’s going on with Edie?’ Mark asked, dissatisfied with his tea, frowning at it.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Gossip.’ He grinned. ‘Ammunition. Curiosity.’

  ‘I’m speaking to her later but I think Noel and Ronnie are in for a firing, whatever being fired by Edie entails. She’s calling someone in America a lot, though that may be family stuff, I don’t know. Just think it’s a bit of a coincidence with Ronnie being out there.’

  ‘You got a number?’

  I repressed a grin as large as his. ‘Well, as you ask, I do.’

  ‘Knew you’d have something. Want me to check it out?’

  ‘Please. I Googled it but you’re probably gonna do something more James Bond with it.’

  I pushed my phone across the table and Mark copied the number into his.

  ‘Whose side are you on then?’ he asked, picking up his tea and giving it a tentative sip.

  ‘I don’t know if there are sides yet.’

  ‘But if there were?’

  ‘I don’t know. Whose side would you be on?’

  ‘Yours, love.’ He nodded. ‘Seriously. You have me on your side anytime you want.’

  It was hard not to feel overwhelmed by the gravity of that statement.

  I wanted to run some ideas by him, use him as a soundboard, tell him my suspicions that Edie might be setting me up to take over the club. But it seemed premature before speaking to her. It wouldn’t be that simple. Best to stay quiet and collect as much information as I could, then hopefully pick the option that resulted in the minimum number of people getting shot.

  ‘What have you been having nightmares about?’ he asked, putting his sunglasses on again.

  ‘You don’t wanna know.’

  ‘Maybe lay off the psychedelics for a while.’

  I looked up from my coffee. ‘What makes you think…? How do you know about that?’

  He checked his nails, palm flat, like a woman. ‘It’s still my business to know everything.’

  ‘Are you still seeing that Russian guy?’ I asked. ‘Roman?’