“Sure.” She stares at me longer than a person should stare at someone. “Uh, you know you’re bleeding, right?”
“Yeah. I know.” I touch my forehead and inspect my finger. She wasn’t kidding. “I’ll go clean up. Call Javier.”
I don’t know why I’m bleeding, but that’s okay. Sometimes people bleed. Sometimes people bleed a lot. Sometimes I am a person, but only sometimes.
I wet paper towels and wipe my face. I must be presentable. I must give the impression that I am someone who doesn’t currently have three corpses in his car. What if a guest sees them and calls the police and ruins everything? It won’t happen. It can’t. Nobody sees someone in a car and thinks, “Oh, hey, that person is probably dead.” Someone sees two people in the backseat of a car in the middle of the night and they assume they are lovers. They assume someone’s getting jerked-off. Only a lunatic like me would automatically think they’re oozing maggots.
“Has the little league group showed up yet?” I ask Yas once I return to the front desk.
“No, but they called me about twenty minutes ago, said they’d be here around midnight or so.”
“And they’re paying cash, right?”
“Yeah, I think so.” She laughs. “You’re in for a hell of a night. Good luck.”
She tosses me the keys and walks out of the hotel despite the fact that there’s still a good half hour until eleven. It doesn’t matter. Gives me more time to carry out my plans. I clock in and sit down in the back office, psyching myself up for what awaits. I go over my to-do list:
Check-in little league teams.
Steal their room payments.
Frame the Hobbs brothers for three separate murders.
Do my audit.
Get breakfast ready.
Close my shift.
Should be easy enough. I’ve had rougher nights at the hotel. If I survived the night Yates died, I can survive anything.
And, as if rising to the challenge, the front desk phone rings. I answer it and a lady says, “Yes, I need some help.”
“What can I do for you?”
I know I watch too much porn because every time I ask someone this question, the dirtiest responses come to mind. Yet they never use any of the ones I imagine. I know I watch too much porn because life is a constant disappointment.
“I’m a guest at your hotel, but I’m trapped down the street.”
“I see.”
“I’m at this bar, and I called for a cab over an hour ago, but they still haven’t shown up.”
“Okay.”
“What are you going to do about this?”
“Uh. Well. Nothing?”
“Nothing?”
“Correct.”
“I don’t think so, mister. I am a guest at your hotel. I paid for a room and I expect to sleep in that room.”
“Have you called the cab company back and asked what’s going on?”
The lady pauses. “Okay, so here’s the thing. When I first talked to them, they told me they’d have a driver out in no less than twenty minutes. Then forty minutes pass and still nobody has shown up, so I called them and raised hell. They tried telling me some bullshit about how they been trying to call me for the last half hour, but I ain’t pickin’ up. Well of course I ain’t pickin’ up, my cell was at the bottom of my damn purse. How the hell was I supposed to know they was calling?”
“By the sound of the ringer?”
“Not if it was all the way at the bottom of my purse I wouldn’t! Don’t you know how big my purse is?”
“Well…no. I don’t.”
“Believe me right here and now when I tell you it’s big. Real big. Now how am I supposed to hear my phone ringing if it’s all the way at the bottom? Why didn’t those stupid assholes think to tell me they might be calling me again? If I had known something might unexpectedly come up, I would have had my phone out ready for them, but they didn’t tell me that. They didn’t tell me anything of the sort.”
“Those bastards.”
“So now I’m still at this bar, waiting to be picked up, and I am just so sick of this shit. I need someone from the hotel to come get me.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m the only employee at night, and I can’t leave the building.”
“That is unacceptable.”
“It’s really not.”
“Let me speak to your manager.”
“Once again, I am the only person here.” I hang up the phone. Someone’s at the front desk, pounding on the marble. I come around from the back office and find a lobby full of men and women wearing various baseball fandom T-shirts and sweatpants and trying their absolute best to look tough. They are sort of succeeding. Running amok through the crowd of coaches and parents are a thousand tiny ten-year-old boys flying on an apparent sugar-high. The woman trapped at the bar down the street had done such a grand job of screeching into my ear that I did not hear the little league group enter the hotel.
A short man with a long gray beard stands at the front desk. He smiles and reveals a set of black teeth. “We’re a bit late, but we finally made it. We should have fifteen rooms reserved. We’re the—”
“—little league group, yeah, I figured.”
I pull up the reservations, hoping that housekeeping hadn’t fucked up and we actually have the rooms available. For once, it looks like they did their jobs. I calculate the cost for all fifteen rooms throughout the weekend and tell him how much he owes me: $3,118.80. He doesn’t even seem to blink at the amount. He hands me over thirty-two one hundred dollar bills and says to keep the change and for a moment I almost feel bad about pocketing the entire sum, but only for a moment.
The coaches and parents in the lobby laugh and shout, drunk and ready to party. The leader of the group takes all the room keys and distributes them, then asks me where the swimming pool is located.
“Outside, but it closed at ten. It’s locked up now.”
He stares, unfazed. “I just gave you an eighty dollar tip.”
“The fence is short. If you hop it, I doubt I’ll notice.”
The leader grins. “You want to join us? We got moonshine and weed.”
“Maybe later. My, uh, work is not yet done.”
The leader holds out his hand and indicates for me to slap it. “I fuckin’ love that book, man.”
“What.”
“You think because I coach a little league team, I don’t read? Man, me and Ligotti once snorted lines of cocaine off a stripper’s titties together.”
“That…that isn’t true.”
He winks, then spins around and punches a random kid in the arm. “You motherfuckers ready to party?”
The lobby erupts with celebration. I flee to the back office as they finish entering the hotel. Their drunkenness increases in volume and I realize now why management reserved the entire first floor for this group. At least there shouldn’t be too many complaints. It’s my last night at the hotel, anyway. Fuck it. After tonight, I’m done. Either I’ll be free of all charges and the Hobbs brothers will be behind bars, or I’ll be the one with cuffs around his wrists. Either way, it’s better than one more fucking shift in this pool of quicksand. After tonight, I will sleep better than any man has ever slept. I will be free.
Something made of glass shatters in the lobby and I run from the back office to investigate. A nude man stands above a broken beer bottle. He apologizes and quickly cleans it up with his bare hands. Once the glass has been disposed of in a trashcan, he returns to the puddle of beer and proceeds to lick it off the floor. Elsewhere, a woman screams, “You stretched his cock all to pieces, ya damn floozy!” Down the hallway, a group of children have created a human pyramid. The kid on top attempts to eat the tiled ceiling.
Little league coaches are insane, and the players’ parents are even worse. They aren’t of this world. I’ve learned this on more than one occasion.
Any other night and this group might be stressing me out. Any other night and I might be contemplating suicide. But it’s not any oth
er night. It’s tonight. Everything is zen. There are three dead bodies out in my car and everything is going to be okay.
But first, I have to convince Hobbs to momentarily abandon his room. But why would a sketchy shoe counterfeiter abandon his sweatshop? Why would an owl leave its nest? To hunt. To feed. Maybe if I offer to pay, he’ll make a trip to McDonald’s. I call the room but nobody answers. Might be too invested in his needle and thread. Might be dead. This is a monster who sleeps probably less than I do. How long can you go without sleep before dying? How long can you work until combusting?
All questions I’ve been trying to answer for some time now.
The phone rings. My hopes rise then fall once the caller ID reveals a room other than Hobbs’s. “Front desk. How can I help you?”
“Hi, uh, yes, there seems to be multiple men and women down in the jacuzzi. They’re naked and…appear to be performing various sexual acts on each other.”
I groan. Suddenly these little league coaches don’t seem so harmless. I got a lot of shit to do tonight and they’re just going to get in my way. But why is this my problem? Why can’t these coaches and parents screw wherever they please? I’ve already decided tonight is my last night, which means I don’t need to worry about potentially being fired. These concerns no longer belong to me, so why do I automatically own the responsibility? I am a machine with one simple set of coding, a customer service robot programmed to obtain satisfaction from all.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I tell the guest. “Thank you for informing me of this unfortunate situation. I’ll go take care of the situation right away.”
“No! No, God no. Please don’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“There’s no reason to stop a good thing, bro. I’m up in my room watching through my window. I just thought you might want to come up and watch with me. It’s pretty hot.”
“I…no. I’m gonna have to pass.”
“Ah, dang, you’re really missing out.”
Three muscular women covered in tattoos wait patiently in the lobby for me to get off the phone. The logo for the Houston Astros cover their arms in large, bulging tattoos. One of them holds a giant industrial-sized can of refried beans. The possibilities of what they intend on doing with this can are terrifying, but that doesn’t mean I don’t desperately wish to find out.
“Can I help you ladies with anything?” I ask.
One of them says, “We was hoping you had some kinda big container for us to eat these beans in.”
“We have many containers, yes.” I lead them into the kitchen. They follow close behind, giggling. It occurs to me that this might be a trap, that they might be storing something other than beans in this cartoonishly large can. Something much more deadly. But once they use the can opener we have in the kitchen to cut open the lid, all suspicions of a conspiracy diminish. Unless they plan on force-feeding me a mythological god’s portion of the musical fruit and having me fart myself to death, which I suppose is possible. At this point in my life I can’t rule out any ridiculous ways to die. Look at George. Look at Mr. Yates.
Look at me.
Everything is ridiculous. The concept of existence alone is funny enough to make a clown piss its pants. Why should death be any better?
The women cook the refried beans in the bowl and take turns taking bites from a large metal spoon I give them. When I attempt to return to the front desk, they circle me like a pack of teenaged bullies on bicycles. Except they’re passing around a hilariously large bowl of refried beans, so they aren’t exactly the most menacing bunch.
“Excuse me, ladies,” I say and attempt another escape, but they block me from passing.
One of them sniffs, then smiles. “Goddamn, boy, you smell goooood.”
“Mmmm,” another says, leaning forward and smelling me.
“Uh, what.”
“You smell amazing.”
“Seriously, what kind of cologne is that?”
“Mmm.”
I can’t remember the last time I’ve showered. I have never worn any type of body spray in my life. What they smell is death. I have been driving around for hours with three corpses in my car. They are in love with the scent of death. Fuck.
I break free of the trio of bean-guzzlers by claiming the phone’s ringing.
“We don’t hear nothin’, honey,” one of them says, grabbing my crotch hard enough to squeeze tears from my eyes. Once I’m behind the front desk, I grab the phone and pretend I’m having a heated conversation with a guest in another room about the hypothetical cleanliness of their bed sheets. The three little league chaperones linger in the lobby for a moment, eavesdropping, until something down the hallway snags their attention, and they run off toward their next adventure. On the way down the hallway, one of them kicks the pyramid of children and they all go collapsing to the floor. The kid who was on top remains hanging from the ceiling, jaws hinged to a tile.
Every ounce of me wishes to just hide up on the roof until my shift’s complete. But this isn’t a normal shift. This is my last shift, and my actions tonight will determine the outcome of the rest of my life. Well, they’ll at least keep me out of prison. Maybe.
This shift is a ticking time clock. The longer I wait, the less of a chance I have of pulling everything off successfully. As it is, the odds here aren’t that great. It’s a challenge not to pick up the phone and call the Other Goddamn Hotel. George would listen to me bitch about my problems. He’d agree with me that the world was created with the sole purpose of destroying me. But I can’t talk to George because George is dead. My only friend is rotting in my backseat. I can’t even tell him about Kia, that he’d been right, I should have never trusted her. She hadn’t loved me. Yet still, despite this new knowledge, despite these revelations, I feel no less about her than I did the first morning she snuck into the lobby and puked in our restroom. She could saw my penis off and feed it to the owls and I would still owe her my heart.
If George was still alive, this is the point where he’d laugh and tell me how pathetic I am, and I’d agree with him, but that still wouldn’t change anything.
A man in the lobby is shouting the word “penis.”
A woman shushes him. “You can’t say penis in a hotel lobby.”
“Why the fuck not? PENIS! PENIS! PENIS!”
“Stop it!”
“I can’t believe nobody is at the fucking desk.”
“You probably scared him off, penis this, penis that.”
“Oh, suck my penis.”
A few minutes pass, and just when I think the coast is clear, another gaggle of voices erupt in the lobby.
“Baby, please don’t do this. You’re gonna hurt my feelings and my feelings are like a million dollars right now, don’t spend it all at once, honey.”
Two little league coaches, drunk as hell. I peek around the corner of the back office. The man speaking is the nerdiest white guy I’ve ever seen.
“I’m a muthafuckin’ kamikaze comin’ down upon my destination, ya bitch ass nigga ho.”
Just as they leave, another set of little league chaperones take their place.
“Martha, that isn’t an elevator!”
“I’m taking the goddamn stairs!”
“Martha, that is a bathroom.”
“Fuck you, no it ain’t.”
“Fine.”
Silence, then:
“Hahahahahaha, you guys, you guys, Martha just ran into the wall, oh God, hahahaha, Martha just ran into the wall, I think she’s bleeding, hahaha, fuck you, Martha, fuck you!”
I don’t move, don’t even breathe, until I’m sure whoever’s at the front desk has given up and returned to whatever hole they crawled out of. I poke my head out from behind the back office wall to confirm the lobby is empty. It only lasts for a moment, as another group of little league monsters sprint down the hallway, shouting something about an overdose. It doesn’t sound that serious. From the laundry room, I fetch bed sheets and a bungee cord, then cautiously exit the hotel and wh
eel a luggage cart to my car. Down the parking lot, a couple little league coaches have set a trashcan on fire and are using the flames to roast marshmallows and light their joints. A small boy rests on all fours nearby, howling at the moon. They don’t seem to notice me. Or, if they do, they don’t care. These people play by their own rules. If this was a normal night and I called the cops, would there be a shootout? Or maybe the dispatcher would tell me I was on my own, that cops and little league coaches, they got themselves an agreement, and hotels are off limits.
I open the backseat door and spread one of the bed sheets over the bottom of the luggage cart. I don’t think the human body bleeds much once it’s no longer living, but I’m a night auditor, not a doctor, so who am I to start taking chances? George’s body drops like an anchor, nearly rolling off and smacking against the concrete if not for my shins acting as a temporary blockade. Next, I drag out Detective Garcia with her slit throat now dry and empty, then pull Yates out of the trunk, the stupid bastard who started it all by getting himself thrown off the roof. The bodies are stiff, which works to my advantage when trying to stack them on top of each other. Detective Garcia and Yates lie side by side on top of George’s immense bloated fat. I wrap the extension cord underneath the luggage cart and bring both ends around the stack of corpses, clipping them together where the rigid hips of Detective Garcia and Yates connect, then cover them with the rest of the bed sheets, tucking the ends under George’s arms. To an outsider, it will look like I am either transporting three corpses or a massive amount of oblong-shaped luggage. I do not need to keep them disguised for any extensive amount of time, just long enough to smuggle them into Hobbs’s room.
I don’t even make it back into the hotel before getting interrupted.
A young guy, maybe my age, cuts me off in front of the entrance, wearing a backpack and a red baseball cap turned backward. Just stands there with a big goofy smile across his face, the kinda smile that screams, “I’m about to rob you.”
“Can I help you?” I ask, both hands wrapped around the luggage cart’s handle.
“You work here, bro?” the kid asks, the words somehow leaking from his untampered grin.
The Nightly Disease (Serial Novel) Page 24