“Not really. I work the graveyard shift, and he was pretty old, so he’s usually in bed long before I clock-in.”
She narrows her eyes on me and I think, did I say ‘was pretty old’?
“Have you ever seen him with anybody?” she asks.
I start to say ‘no’ but bite my tongue, remembering the text messages I discovered on his cell phone seconds before the owls tossed him off the roof. An idea forms. “Just his wife,” I say, my stomach uneasy with regret.
The detective pauses, clearly caught off-guard. “Mrs. Yates informed me she’s never been in Texas, so I don’t think that was his wife you’ve seen.”
I force an expression that I hope shows confusion. “Oh…”
“Any idea who that might have been?”
“I don’t know. They were pretty friendly. I assumed she was his wife.”
Detective Garcia shifts her position on the desk chair. She steadies her grip on the pen she’s using to take notes. She must be thinking, wow, this fat piece of shit might have something of importance to add, after all.
If only you knew…
“Can you describe what this woman looks like, Isaac?”
I struggle, emphasizing the wince my face makes as I attempt to recall some foggy memory. The truth is, Yates could have brought a different girl to the hotel every night, but it doesn’t mean I actually noticed. If they’re not calling for help, they don’t exist. I try to be away from the front desk as much as humanly possible. Hell, the guy could have brought in a dozen clowns and took turns fucking them in the lobby—if they were quiet enough, I wouldn’t have known. But still. She wants some kind of answer. I can’t give her anything too specific, because if she does track down this girlfriend and she turns out to be a four-foot-three redhead, the detective may have some questions concerning my credibility.
I finally shrug. “Honestly, I don’t remember. I think maybe she’s blonde, kind of youngish?” Basically, your common mistress. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen her.”
“So you didn’t see her last week?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t here. I don’t see a lot of people.”
“Mmm hmm.”
“Do you think maybe he ran off with this girlfriend? Abandoned his wife?” I’m planting a seed, but my lack of gardening experience is obvious.
She closes her notepad. “Everything’s a possibility at this point. If you remember any more details, here’s my card.” She hands me her card. It’s dull and beautiful.
“I’ll do that, thank you.” I slide the card in my front shirt pocket, thinking the next time she tries to contact me I’ll be long gone. Gone from Texas, gone from the U.S. Hello, Mexico. Hello, slightly optimistic bullfighting career. Hello, bottomless bottle of tequila.
Detective Garcia stops at the office door and looks over her shoulder. “Oh, one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“What happened to that handicap sign on the side of the hotel? Looks like it took some real damage.”
I blink at her, unable to respond. Then my mouth opens and some alien parasite inside me commands my vocal cords to rub together and release a string of syllables. “Deer hit it.”
“A deer?”
“Uh, yeah, ran right into it, it was pretty crazy.”
“And it just walked away?”
“It was very tough.”
“Huh.” She turns to the door, then stops again, hand curled around the handle. “You know, it’s funny. The other day, I asked your manager about the sign, and he told me a slightly different story.”
“Oh yeah?”
Javier, you utter piece of shit, you’ve ruined everything.
“Yeah, he said a drunk driver crashed into it. Didn’t it happen during your shift?” She squints. “I could be misremembering his words.”
She isn’t misremembering anything and she knows it. I make a face that is universally recognized as “ohhh, oohhh yeah” and say, “No, no, that’s true, but you see, what happened was this drunk driver almost hit a deer, but he swerved out of the deer’s way and hit the pole.”
“Oh. I see.”
She’s onto my bullshit, but she isn’t calling me out on it—just standing there, waiting for me to dig my own grave. So I oblige and grip the shovel. “Sorry for the confusion. I’m just, you know, pretty tired. Sometimes this shift makes me go a little out of mind.”
Her eyes say, Out of your mind enough to murder a guest? but her mouth says, “Sure, I can understand that. Happens to the best of us.”
After she leaves, I’m a mess until the 7:00 A.M. shift arrives. I run out of the hotel, leaving the keys on the front desk. I’m in my car and gunning toward the Other Goddamn Hotel and notice George entering the access road in his crappy jeep. I lay my hand down on the horn and increase my speed. He gives me the finger without looking back, probably figuring I’m some guest he’s pissed off for whatever reason. I continue honking until he pulls off into the IHOP parking lot along the highway.
“George!” I shout, running up to his jeep.
“Dude, what the fuck?” He opens the door and steps out, expression reminding me of a bystander in a horror movie.
“We gotta talk, man.”
“You look like hell. Are you back on crack?”
“What? I’ve never smoked crack.”
“Spoken like a true crackhead.”
“I’m not fucking around, George. I’m in deep shit.”
“Okay, well.” He pauses, sighs. “Are you going to tell me or do you want me to guess?”
A pair of elderly women pass us as they get into their car. The IHOP parking lot is packed with arrivals and departures. “No, not here. Somewhere private. Follow me to my apartment. We can talk there. No one will hear us besides the owls.”
“Well, you certainly sound more insane than usual.”
“Please.”
His eyes bounce from his jeep to me, then his jeep and back to me again. He sags in surrender. “I have a burrito at my house that I’ve been thinking about all night, so this better be worth it.”
“I’m sorry. I have food at my place.”
“Yeah, but it won’t be no burrito.”
Ten minutes later, we’re walking into my apartment and he’s going through my fridge, ignoring what I’m trying to tell him. He eventually settles for a handful of stale Cheerios. “I was right,” he says. “This isn’t no burrito.”
“You mean, ‘this is no burrito.’”
“What?” he says through a mouthful of food.
“Double negatives, you know? Very unattractive.”
“Inviting me over and insulting my grammar is unattractive. Asshole.” Then he grimaces and spits out the cereal. “What the fuck is that smell?”
“Maybe you should sit down.” I guide him to the couch, but stay standing as he sits. I pace back and forth in front of him, aware of his confusion and annoyance.
“Dude, this reeks. Seriously. I’m gonna leave.”
“You can’t. Not yet.”
“Then hurry the hell up. For fuck’s sake, it smells like something died in here.”
“Well…”
“Wait, did something die in here?” He scans my studio for a corpse. He doesn’t look hard enough.
I lick the roof of my mouth, dry and doubtful. “No, something didn’t die here, but…”
“But?”
“But someone did die at the hotel, and he is now in my closet.”
It’s like he wants to laugh but his face is broken. “Shut up, Isaac. You’re currently too crazy to start making jokes.”
I point to the closet. “Go ahead and check if you think I’m joking. What do you think that smell is?”
Hesitant, George rises and approaches the closet. He glances over his shoulder one last time, waiting for me to confirm what he wants to hear, that this is all some stupid joke, that he’s still at work, asleep at the front desk.
He opens the closet and screams, then slams the door and attemp
ts to flee from my apartment. I wedge myself between him and the front door, hands held up as a pathetic peace offering. Dude just saw a badly decomposed corpse in my closet. The concept of “peace” has clearly left the table.
“Please, let me explain.”
“Who the fuck? What the fuck? How the fuck? What. The. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!”
I push him and he backpedals until his ankles hit the couch and he sits down. His mouth keeps moving up and down but no words come out, just a series of unintelligible mumbles. He motions to the closet over and over like a toddler terrified of the monster underneath his bed.
“Just let me explain, okay? Please.”
“Fuckin’ explain what? Who the fuck is that? What did you do?”
“That’s Mr. Yates, a former guest of my hotel.”
“Holy shit, you actually killed a guest, holy shit, Isaac—Isaac, holy shit.”
“My neighbors are going to hear you. You gotta be quiet.”
“Be quiet? Dude, I can’t be quiet. You fucking killed somebody.”
“I did not. I…just have the body.”
“Then why do you have it? Who killed him?” He stands up, sits down, stands up, then sits down. If he leaves in this current state, he’ll head straight to the police station and tell them about what he’s seen in my closet. Detective Garcia herself will make it her duty to personally slap the cuffs around my wrists.
“Just—will you calm down? Let me explain what happened.”
“You fucking calm down. I’m too hungry and sober to deal with this shit, man. I can’t do this.”
I sit down on the coffee table across from him, ready to tackle him to the floor should he attempt an escape. “Okay, so you remember I took that guy’s wallet a while back, right?”
“Yeah, then you got mugged, and he came back asking about it.”
“Well, the story didn’t exactly end there.”
In the end, I don’t tell him one hundred percent of the truth. Instead of owls throwing him off the roof, in this retelling of events, Yates just stumbles and trips off the edge. I try to save him, but I’m not fast enough, and he falls. Everything else, mostly, is what happened. I try to avoid discussing Chowls and Owlbert, because even I know that’s fucking crazy. And besides, they’re not relevant to Yates’s story.
“I don’t understand why this guy is still at your apartment. Why haven’t you dumped him someplace?”
“Someplace like where…? If I knew of some magical corpse disposing store, don’t you think I would have tried it?”
“I don’t know, but it shouldn’t be as complicated as you’re making it sound. You could bury him in the woods.”
“But what about dogs?”
George raises his brow. “What about dogs?”
“They might dig him up.”
“Then dig deeper.”
“I don’t own a shovel.”
“Buy one.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“Steal one.”
“I’m not a criminal.”
“There’s a dead body in your closet, dude. You sure aren’t not a criminal.”
I bury my face in my hands and groan. “What am I gonna do about the detective? She knows something’s off. She’s gonna come here with a warrant or something.”
George stands and opens the glass door to my patio. “I doubt she’ll need a warrant. The smell alone will grant her plenty of probable cause.”
“Gee, thank you for that glimmer of hope.”
“It’s why you dragged me here, right? Wait, why did you drag me here? I was perfectly content living in ignorance. I could be eating a burrito right now.”
“Because I don’t know what to do. I’m going out of my mind and I can’t hold it all in any longer. I needed to tell somebody with less morals than myself.”
“I know you meant that as an insult, but I’ll take it as a compliment.”
“George. Please.”
“Please what?” He spins around, face squinted. “What do you think I can do? Do you think I am experienced when it comes to shit like this? Maybe I have an uncle on the force? Something like that? Well, I don’t. I would have mentioned that a long time ago. I would have convinced him to let us drive his squad car and pull over stoners.”
I bite my lip and blurt out the idea that’s been gnawing away at me all morning. “I want to rob our hotels.”
George halts. His panic seems to evaporate like smoke into a vacuum. “Both of them?”
“Yeah.”
“If you pay off that Hobbs fucker, you still have the cop to worry about. Plus, who says the shoe freak is even going to leave you alone?”
“The money isn’t for Hobbs.”
George sits back down on the couch. “You’re gonna flee the country, aren’t you?”
“I think so. Yeah.”
“Mexico?”
“It’s a start.”
“They cut people’s heads off in Mexico.”
“They cut people’s heads off here, too.”
“True.”
“Well?”
“We split it fifty-fifty?”
“That sounds fair.”
“All right. Fuck it. We’ve talked about it enough over the years, might as well get it over with. When?”
“Tonight.”
Part 23
At 1:15 A.M. I lock up the front desk and walk over to the Other Goddamn Hotel. George waits in the lobby, no laptop out, no flask, not even his cell phone. He’s shaky and bug-eyed, like he hasn’t slept at all before coming in tonight, which would make two of us. Who could possibly sleep under these circumstances? Al Capone must’ve tossed and turned every night before a big heist. Or maybe he slept like a baby. He was a professional, after all. Robbing places was his thing. George and I, we’re just a couple of fat deadbeats with no real social skills. If we walked into the casting call of a heist film, we’d be laughed out of the room before we even got a chance to speak.
“So are we gonna do this?” George asks. He’s biting his lip, hands behind his back. He’s never been this nervous around me before. This is a different George. A George with emotions.
“You sure you want to?”
“Of course I do. I’ve never wanted to do anything more in my life.”
“What if we get busted?”
“Prison can’t be any worse than a hotel.”
He raises a valid point. In prison, you don’t have to worry about bills. You don’t have to feed your gas tank. You don’t have to worry about sleeping through alarms. You don’t have to worry about masturbating at an inappropriate time, because any moment in prison is an appropriate time to masturbate. You don’t have guests, but you do have fellow convicts, and yeah, they’ll probably be assholes, but at least you can be an asshole back to them without fearing the loss of your job. What are they going to do in prison if you act out of line? Throw you in the hole? A small room with no other human interaction? Where do I sign up?
We sit down in the back office of his hotel, which is almost identical to the back office of my hotel, and share a bag of Cheetos as we discuss robbery methods.
“So, how are you thinking we do this?” George says.
“Well, right off the bat, we should empty the register, get that out of the way. Then we figure out how to crack the safe here in the back. Afterward, we go to my hotel and do the same thing.”
George clears his throat, glancing at the safe in the corner of the back office. “Uh, I don’t know about you, but I’m no expert safe cracker. I can barely crack open pistachios.”
I stand up and kneel down at the safe. It’s the same as the one at my hotel. At the top, there’s a slot to slide in receipts of each shift’s cash deposit. There are buttons next to the slot that shoots out small amounts of change whenever the front desk register runs out. At the bottom of the safe, there are two key slots. One of the front desk keys goes into one slot, and the other key belongs to the general manager. To open the safe, both keys must be inserted sim
ultaneously.
“Maybe we could smash it with a sledgehammer,” I say.
“Do you have a sledgehammer?”
“No.”
“I think I have a regular hammer.”
“That might work.”
George goes through a series of random drawers until he pulls out a small hammer. He hands it to me, eyes glued on the safe, like he’s expecting it to explode. I grip the hammer and search for a weak spot in the safe to smack. It looks pretty impenetrable. The hotel did not cheap-out when it came to protecting their precious money.
“What are you gonna do?” George asks.
“I guess I’m going to hit it.”
“You think that’s gonna work?”
“I don’t know.”
“Try.”
“All right.” I pull my arm back and twack the hammer against the safe, near the key locks. A tingling pain shoots down the handle of the hammer and into my hand and wrist. The same kind of vibration I used to feel when I was in Little League and I’d smack a ball just inches from the sweet spot. I hit it again with the same result.
“That doesn’t seem to be working,” George says.
“No shit.”
“I guess we should have thought this out better.”
I toss the hammer on the desk and sit back down, pathetically out of breath from my brief stint of exercise. “I wish we had some TNT.”
George rubs his chin. “Or some fat.”
I spin in the chair toward him. “What?”
“Fat. Like, human fat. From liposuctions or whatever.”
“Gross. Why?”
“We could turn it into napalm.”
“Uh…how?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. Brad Pitt did it in Fight Club.”
“Technically, Edward Norton did it. Brad Pitt was a figment of Norton’s imagination.”
“Whoever the fuck did it. It still worked.”
“Maybe you’re a figment of my imagination.” Somehow this makes perfect sense. “Maybe you’re my Brad Pitt.”
“I’m more of a Robert Paulson,” George says.
“We are all Robert Paulson.”
“Sometimes I think we’re wasting our lives watching all these movies, but then situations like tonight arise and, finally, they serve a purpose.”
The Nightly Disease (Serial Novel) Page 19