Tenants

by Christopher Motz

  Linda pulled her phone from her purse and frowned. Did she really need to spend the money on it? Who was she going to call? The damn thing would end up being an expensive paperweight, charging endlessly after nights of playing Words With Friends or watching animal fails on YouTube. She put it on the table and opened her Facebook app, unsure of what she hoped to find there. When her arms touched the table, she groaned and pulled them back. The surface was sticky and covered in crumbs, many of which now clung to her skin. She brushed them off with a grunt and once again thought of getting up and leaving. This would be the last time she came to Abruzzi's. At this point, she didn't care if her frittata was made by Emeril Lagasse himself.

  She put the phone back in her purse and looked through the dirty window into the street. It had started raining.

  Of-fucking-course it's raining! Why should anything go right?

  She wondered how people survived in Washington, when two-thirds of the year were set aside for rain, gray skies, and deep depression. No wonder that guy from Nirvana blew his brains out. If it rained twice a week, Linda's mood suffered. It seemed like it was raining all the time since she'd moved into the Blackridge. Cloudy with a chance of bullshit and scattered regret.

  Linda stared into the wind-swept street when her waiter dropped her plate on the table and left without another word. Apparently, the service was just as bad as the housekeeping, but the frittata looked and smelled wonderful. She wiped her fork on the napkin and cut a small piece of the omelet as aromatic steam tickled her nose. She raised the fork halfway to her face and stopped, mortified.

  Hair. Not just one hair, but a large clump, like something you'd pull from the drain in your shower. Linda gasped and dropped the fork on her plate, covering her mouth with her hand to keep from gagging. She looked at the greasy black lump tangled in the tines of her fork and felt her stomach flip.

  "Excuse me," she yelled. "Hello?"

  She heard noises in the kitchen, but no one replied to her angry call.

  "Jesus Christ! I am not paying for that! Hello?" Still no response.

  She hung her purse over her shoulder and stomped to the counter where she drummed her fingers on a stack of yellowed menus.

  "Could someone please come out here?" she shouted. "This is ridiculous!"

  She waited thirty seconds before taking matters into her own hands and circling around the counter to find someone she could file her complaint with. She was absolutely repulsed, and every second she waited to take out her anger on someone was another second she had to become even more irritated. She was never this bold before, but with her nerves already on edge, impulsive decisions had become the norm.

  She pushed through a swinging door and entered a kitchen that hadn't been cleaned in years. Every surface was covered in moldy scraps of food crawling with green bottle flies. The deep fryer was full of brown sludge and chunks of floating, coagulated grease. The industrial sink was filled to the brim with dirty dishes and half-eaten meals. A rat scurried past Linda's foot and squeezed beneath a dented, battered refrigerator that leaked stringy muck onto the floor.

  Forget it, she thought. It isn't worth it.

  She spun and bumped into a stainless steel counter covered in an assortment of crusty utensils. When she thought it couldn't get any worse, she saw the man sitting on the floor. He was easily four hundred pounds of pasty, quivering flesh. The only thing he wore was a stained adult diaper with excrement leaking from around his giant thighs. In his stubby fingers he held a white plate smeared with thick sauce that may have once been gravy. He raised the plate to his mouth and ran his tongue through the brown jelly, dribbling several dollops across his sizable chest. He looked up at her and smiled as he placed the clean dish in a stack and grabbed another from the nearby pile.

  "I wash the dishes," the man said, spitting clumps of gravy from his mouth. "Do you want to help?" He held out a plate covered in dry, cracked marinara as he shifted his weight and smeared feces across the tile with a wet squelch.

  "You're licking the fucking plates!" Linda screamed. It was the first and only thing she could think to say. No horror movie she'd ever seen could come close to this; no slaughterhouse or crime scene could ever reach the heights of vileness she saw in this kitchen.

  "What are you doing back here?" a voice boomed. The waiter who had brought her hair omelet appeared through a door in the back of the room, scowling and clearly angry. "You don't belong in the kitchen."

  "What are you people doing?" Linda cried. "He's cleaning the plates with his tongue! All this filth... the hair in my food... he's wearing a shitty diaper!"

  "Go home, Linda. Now!"

  "How do you know my name? Who are you? What is this?"

  "Leave! Now! And don't come back."

  "I'm calling the police," she said. "You can't run a business like this. I think I'm going to be sick."

  "Be sick outside," the waiter rumbled as the 'dishwasher' devoured a clump of gray meat from the tip of a filthy knife.

  She couldn't take her eyes off the fat man sitting in a lake of his own shit.

  "STOP LICKING THE FUCKING PLATES!" she wailed.

  The waiter placed a firm hand on her back and pushed her through the door and into the dining room. His touch made her wince and utter a brief squeal as she was shoved toward the entrance. She clutched her purse as he thrust her through the front door and onto the wet sidewalk.

  "Don't ever come here again," the man warned. "Not for any reason. Stay clear if you know what's good for you."

  "Are you threatening me?"

  "It's not a threat, it's a warning. Stay away."

  He quickly turned and went back inside. He watched her through the window for a moment before disappearing into the rear of the restaurant. Linda ran home as fast as her legs would carry her. She was soaked to the skin and freezing. Once back in the apartment, she undressed and piled her wet clothes on the bathroom floor, shivering, exhausted, and nauseous from what had just happened.

  "Is the entire world going CRAZY?" she shouted.

  It wasn't just the apartment, it was the building... the whole neighborhood. Something was wrong here. She'd made a mistake. To hell with her security deposit. She vowed to be out by the end of the week even if it left her broke and living with her parents again. There was no longer a need to talk to Al Sterling about what was going on. There was nothing he could say to change her mind.

  Not a damn thing.

  She bent and vomited in the toilet, holding her stomach as a cramp tightened the muscles in her abdomen.

  "I'm done," she said, weeping. "I can't do this."

  She curled into a ball on the floor and cried.

  ***

  After Christian's run-in with Officer Scott, he drove aimlessly for several hours before returning home and flicking on the television. There was nothing on the news about the missing cop, and even if there had been, so be it. He wasn't worried. They couldn't track anything back to him. At least not yet. It wouldn't be long before they found the police cruiser and the officer's dead body lying off the road. He was positive police cars had some form of GPS, and it would only be a matter of time before the dash cam video showed the entire nasty affair.

  "What were you thinking?" Christian asked. The simple answer was that he hadn't been thinking at all. Something dark and ugly had been growing inside him for years, and when it needed to come out and play, there was no way to fight it.

  Temporary insanity, he thought. I didn't know what I was doing, Your Honor.

  "Do you know what the guards do to cop killers in prison?" he asked, but he wasn't about to find out. He'd never see the inside of a jail cell. Not if he could help it.

  He washed dried blood from his hands and arms and changed his clothing. If the last thing he ever did was find Linda and make her pay for what she'd done, he'd consider it a win. There had to be someone who knew where the bitch went. A lightbulb went on in his head and he laughed as he looked at his pale face in the mirror.

  "She
would've changed her address for work," he said. "Someone there has to know something."

  Luckily, not very many of Linda's co-workers knew him, at least not to see him. If he could make up a convincing story, maybe he could find out where she'd gone. If no one was willing to play along, he'd simply have to beat it out of them. What else did he have to lose?

  Christian knew that Wal-Mart generally had a smaller crew at night. He sat in front of the TV for hours waiting for the scotch to work its way through his system. Showing up drunk was a sure-fire way to draw attention. If there was already an APB out for Christian's Nissan, it wouldn't really matter anyway, but it was a chance he was willing to take. For all he knew, his house may have already been surrounded. At any moment the front door could swing open followed by a line of trigger-happy cops out for revenge.

  He peeked through the curtain and saw nothing. The street was dead this time of night and he'd been smart enough to put the Nissan in the garage. If they'd already found the police car, they'd be sitting out front, bathed in the glow of spinning lights. He still had time.

  A little after three in the morning, Christian pulled into the Wal-Mart parking lot and sat in his car, watching the entrance to see who was coming and going. If he could catch an employee leaving the building, it would be much easier than having to go inside and risk being recognized. There were only a dozen cars in the lot and no one had entered or exited the building in twenty minutes. It left him with little choice.

  Cautiously, Christian passed through the automatic doors and paused at the first register. Only one light was on and the cashier was nowhere to be found. He noticed several employees stocking shelves in aisle three, but they didn't turn as he passed, too wrapped up in the complexity of figuring out where to place the coffee creamer. He only saw a few other people as he made his way to the back of the store. He made a point to finger through a stack of cheap DVDs as he scoped out his surroundings.

  He hated the place. Hated it when his mother would drag him there as a child and make him try on jeans; hated it when Linda asked him to pick her up after work; hated the smells and the sounds and the tacky endcaps built by disgruntled twenty-somethings counting down the minutes to an after-work beer binge. He'd seen enough video on YouTube to know what happened in these cruddy retail stores when people thought no one was looking. The floor beneath his feet had likely been covered in vomit or shit at some point in the past... hell, there was probably someone in there right now squatting in a corner and flipping off the hidden security cameras.

  When a man in khakis and a button-down shirt rounded the corner, Christian dropped the pretense of shopping and stopped him. His name tag announced him as an assistant manager. Good enough.

  "Excuse me," Christian said politely. "I was hoping you could help me with something."

  "Sure, what are you looking for?"

  "Well, it's not a thing, it's a person. One of your other managers. Linda Gianni."

  "I'm sorry, but Linda isn't working right now."

  "Oh, I know. See, she's a very good friend of mine, and one of our mutual acquaintances has been in a terrible accident. I can't seem to reach her on the phone, and she moved recently, but I don't remember her address. I was hoping you could help me with that."

  The man eyed him suspiciously before saying, "I'm sorry, sir, but I can't give you that information."

  "I know how it must look, but I really need to get in touch with her. All I need is a street name. I can find her from there."

  "Again, I'm very sorry, but I can't give you that information. Privacy laws and all that." He made a sorry-not-sorry face and prepared to walk away when Christian side-stepped and blocked his path. He wanted to punch the smug fuck in the mouth.

  "I don't think you're hearing me," Christian said. "I need to get in touch with her as soon as possible."

  "And I don't think you're hearing me," the manager replied. "I'm not allowed to give out personal information about other employees. If you need to reach her I suggest you talk to her other friends or family. Now if that's all, I have a store to run."

  Christian frowned and reached into his sweatshirt pocket, pretending to grab for a weapon. People are stupid. If he wanted the dumb prick to think he had a gun, he only had to pretend to have one. It wasn't nearly as good as the real thing, but he'd left Officer Scott's gun beneath the seat of his Nissan. The color immediately drained from the man's face.

  "I don't want to use this," Christian whispered, "but if you give me a reason, I'm going to put a hole where your nose is. Got it?"

  The man nodded and licked his lips. He clutched the clipboard in his hands in a death grip.

  "We're going to take a trip to the office and you're going to find the information I'm looking for."

  "Employee records are in HR," he said. "I don't have the keys."

  "Don't play cute with me..."

  "No, I'm not! I swear! None of the assistants have keys to HR."

  "Listen carefully. I know you have a set of master keys for every lock in this fucking building. Do you think I'm stupid? Are you willing to die to keep someone's address safely locked in a file cabinet? Think, man!"

  "What... what are you going to do to her? Linda's a nice girl..."

  "A nice girl? Is that what you think? Not only is she not a nice girl, she's not even a very good lay. It doesn't concern you what I'm going to do to her. Your only concern is doing what I say before someone notices and I'm forced to shoot them too. Is that what you want? You want me to kill your whole fucking crew over a piece of paper?"

  "No, please don't hurt anyone. I'll get what you need. Just wait here."

  "Wait here? You stupid halfwit! So you can call the police? I'm coming with you, and if you try anything, I'll put a bullet in your spine."

  The man turned and walked to a set of double doors that led to a small hallway in the back of the store. After a quick glance into the break room and manager's office, Christian pushed him through the door of the HR office as motion-sensor lights went on overhead. There was a row of small, beige file cabinets along the wall where employee records were stored. Without wasting time, the assistant manager unlocked a cabinet, rifled through several folders, and pulled out a sheet of paper. Christian grabbed it from his hand and skimmed the information. Sure enough, Linda had taken the time to update her address. It was all he needed.

  "Sit down," Christian said. The man complied, sitting heavily in a swivel-chair. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"

  "Are you going to let me go now?"

  "I was thinking about that, but I don't really like your face. I don't think I can trust you."

  "I won't say anything! I promise!"

  "You promise? That's sweet. Do I get to wear a special ring to signify our relationship?"

  He didn't have time to answer. Christian raised his right leg and kicked him in the face, sending him comically spinning out of control in the office chair. When he fell, he added insult to injury by slamming his head off the corner of a desk. His neck turned at a crazy angle, followed by a loud crack that may have either been his spine fracturing or his skull splitting open when it hit the floor. Christian didn't care either way as long as it meant he wouldn't be talking. For good measure, he grabbed a heavy hole punch from the table and brought it down on the man's head with a satisfying thunk! Blood poured from the wound and pooled around him; his fingers twitched a few times and became still. His eyes were wide open, staring into the corner, and for a brief second Christian wondered what he saw.

  Heaven? Hell? Nothing at all? Christian sided with the latter. If there was a God, surely he would have strangled Christian with his own umbilical cord. He didn't believe in a higher power, which allowed him to behave any way he pleased without angering some incompetent deity. If when he reached his own end, and found his godless beliefs to be untrue, then what choice would he have but to accept his fate? He'd rather be a heathen than some sanctimonious asshole who looked down on others for who they prayed to when the lights went out.r />
  He snickered at the irony of what his parents had named him.

  Christian left HR and made his way back to the sales floor, happy to see that nothing had changed. He'd been smart enough to tuck the sheet of paper into his pocket for safekeeping. If someone was on his trail, he wasn't just going to hand them all the evidence they needed to crucify him.

  You've been on camera more than an Asian porn star with a crack habit, he thought. You've already left more evidence behind than O.J. Simpson.

  This struck him as immensely clever. He laughed under his breath as he made his way to the front of the store and out to his car. He was still laughing as he pulled onto the highway and made his way to Delaney Street. No matter how far Linda went, he'd find her. Different town, different address, same stupid bitch.

  An hour after leaving a very dead assistant manager, he pulled up in front of the Blackridge Apartments, spying Linda's car at the curb. He watched the building for any signs of movement, questioning if he had the right address. He pulled the paper from his pocket and compared the numbers with those that had been pasted to the building's front doors. It was the right place, but how could anyone live there? It looked like it was ready for the wrecking ball twenty years ago, and the surrounding buildings didn't look much better.

  "Did you write the wrong address, you sneaky bitch?"

  Her car is right there, he thought. She's here somewhere.

  Christian pulled around the block and found a parking space that was partially obscured by overhanging trees. He needed to rest, even if only for a few hours. When he found Linda, he wanted to be at the top of his game.

  Her punishment would be glorious.

  If she was lucky, he'd let her live long enough to see the error of her ways.

  In the end, she still had to die.

  Chapter 12

  Christian sat up with a hiss as his temples throbbed in time with his heartbeat.