The Girl in the Hotel
Gregory French
Contents
Important!
Description
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part II
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Part III
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
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About the Author
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To Nicki Kuzn, a brilliant, creative and professional editor, who has breathed so much grammatical lucidity into many of the Danser novels.
In Memory of:
Edward Gorey
Alfred Hitchcock
Edgar Allan Poe
Robert Bloch
Thanks to:
Sheila Psaledas
Jeff Lindsay
Tom Waits
The criminal poetry of James Ellroy
Billy Hamilton - Renowned surfer and shaper who gave the world a fine, alternative lesson in grace and style.
Description
Welcome to the secluded Hotel Or, deep in the jungles of coastal Mexico. The hotel is a criminal money-making machine, a sausage grinder processing elderly retirees for their savings and pensions. In walks Ed ‘Never Ever Eddie’ Rang, a young and resourceful fourteen-year-old girl, who first explores the deadly hotel before being trapped in its claws.
She is up against the hotel’s owner, Constance Snapp, a cruel and clever megalomaniac with a deadly clan of gypsies assisting in her evil and murderous profiteering. The hotel is rife with murderous misfits and its permanent residents, an assortment of wealthy recluses, some still sane, others as dangerous and mad as the hotel owner.
Ed teams up with Kazu Danser, a twelve-year-old Niños Asesino (Child Assassin) on the run from the Federales. Together, the two are hell-bent on destroying the hotel and its menagerie of ghastly crimes. Vengeance fires their young hearts as they wade deeper into the mysteries of the hotel.
Lives need to be saved.
The Hotel Or needs to be closed down. Permanently.
Can they put the wrench to the machine, killing it forever?
Can they survive?
Part I
Ed ‘Never Ever Eddie’ Rang
Lust and greed are more gullible than innocence.
- Mason Cooley
1
Starting out at dawn, Ed walked the thirty-five kilometers alongside the highway, sometimes dragging her carryall, sometimes tilting the handle so it rolled on its one remaining caster. There was little traffic, but when a cargo truck passed or a forlorn, colorful bus packed with hotel workers went by, she hid from view in the overgrowth. Twenty kilometers along, one of the tourist rentals went by, crowded with young blond-haired men, the roof racks holding surfboards and luggage atop the wine-colored, four-door automobile.
She walked barefoot with her four-inch black stiletto shoes dangling from the side of her carryall. The suitcase rolled on the uneven pavement of cracks and ravines. Ed was headed south along the winding highway for the Hotel Or, a small square of stone set down in the thousands of miles of Mexican coastal jungle, nearly twenty-two miles from the nearest village—the harbor and resort of Puerto Mita.
Her golden speckled party dress clung to her body, her entire frame slick and sticky from the heat, it being another day of one hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit with the oppressive ninety-eight percent humidity. Her makeup had run and was smeared, her hairdo was a riot of undoing, and her bare feet screamed. She no longer had the summer feet of her childhood, so her town feet weren’t calloused but soft and inviting to every sharp stone and grass blade and the wicked hot pavement.
“I’ll have summer paws soon,” she said out loud and breathed away a damp fall of hair from her brow.
She stayed most of the time to the dry grass and weeds on the shoulder, dragging her carryall until her arm and lower back cried. She would then take to the pavement with her shoulder torqued, so the suitcase rolled on its one good wheel.
She stopped walking at the first turn-in after many miles. A single sign advertised the location, reading simply, ‘Or.’ The sign was crudely hand-carved and hung at an angle from two twisted limbs of an Amapá tree with its dusty pink blossoms.
Fourteen-year-old Ed stood in the stagnant, still air under the tree and opened her cocktail purse. She took out the twice-folded telegram invite, which she kept secreted in the side pouch of her even tinier and empty wallet. The telegram was more than a month old and finger-smudged with a round drink stain in its center. It read:
“Estuvo de acuerdo. Cuatro noches a la semana. Apresúrese.” Agreed. Four nights a week. Hurry.
Rubbing her chin, she looked up the turn in the road of crushed rock full of tire ruts and dangerously deep and misleading puddles full of suspect rainwater.
She turned in with a shrug and cooled and assuaged her feet in a dank puddle before starting out for what would be an additional two miles of walking. The road, such as it was, became crushed white rocks near the end of the seco
nd mile. Because the road was headed westward to the sea, the insects increased in number—the tiny and vicious and the big and poisonous larger ones. Her passing at times stirred up panicked flocks of birds—some black, most vibrantly colored.
The sound of an approaching vehicle caused a large upward explosion of fowl, the engine sounding like a motorbike with the additional chip and click of stones ripping through leaves and clipping tree trunks. A riding lawnmower rounded the narrow turn with a man seated under a makeshift canvas Bimini. She watched him pull a lever beside the steering wheel. The spinning blades and flying rocks stopped as the mower came closer.
A warm bead of sweat ran down between her ripe, languid breasts. A tangled fall of careless, curly blonde hair brushed her cocoa thin shoulders.
Seeing the lawnmower driver, Ed’s left eye opened wide. Her habit for learning people was to study their head shape, size, and face and assign an animal.
Chocolate gecko, she decided when the man pulled back the mosquito netting from his pole hat. He dropped the throttle and stared at her. Not exactly a midget, but close—full grown, looking to be in his fifties and around four foot tall. His green-stained boots rested on blocks of wood atop the pedals.
“Is it a good afternoon?” he called in anger with an unfamiliar, perhaps European accent.
“I’m hoping,” Ed replied loud enough to be heard over the idling engine. “I’m looking for the Hotel Or.”
The right side of his gecko face crunched upward.
She stepped closer and handed him the telegram from her purse.
He read slowly, perhaps three times, his reptilian eyes sweeping along the words. Handing the telegram back, he said, “Want a ride?”
Ed looked the lawnmower over.
“Sure.”
With her feet on the hitch bar at the back of the vehicle, she balanced her suitcase on a fender and grabbed ahold of the top of his seat.
The mower turned on a dime and he steered it up around the turn and along the skinny road with jungle leaves brushing along both sides. After a half mile of tight curves, the mower stopped at the entrance of a clearing.
Looking right to left, Ed saw a diner, gas station, and three dusty, newish cars parked in the weeds, all three with bright red signs—two read ‘For Sale’ and the third read ‘For Rent.’ A windsock hung damp and futile on a ninety-foot pole at the hem of the tall jungle wall that blocked all view of the coast.
“Thank you, I didn’t catch your name,” Ed said, climbing off.
“Casimir-Senior,” the dark gecko answered before he drove off and entered a different opening in the high jungle, the distant clack and sparks of flying rocks trailing him.
Above the diner, a gray-blue wood sign with no lights read, ‘Or Petrol y Restaurante.’
The wine-colored surfer’s car was parked at the single island of pumps where five women were moving about it. They spoke to one another in a language Ed hadn’t heard before though the accent was familiar—Casimir-Senior’s.
Assuming the surfers were in the restaurant, Ed rolled the carryall in that direction. The scents of cooking drew her as though the flavors of sizzling bacon and warm sugary-sweet cinnamon were floating out to her from the restaurant’s two rooftop blowers.
Before entering, she looked over the clearing for a suggestion of the hotel’s whereabouts. Seeing none, she watched the women begin rolling the surfers’ car from the pumps to the service bay. Pushing the car, the women looked able and experienced as they coordinated with calls between the driver and the pushers.
All five women wore colorful layers of vibrant silk with bejeweled necks, ears, wrists, forearms, and ankles. Their deeply-tanned faces and head shapes said to Ed, Birds, and she chose stubbed-beaked finches. The women wore identical sandals as though outfitted by a single source. Sadly, one of the women was missing her right hand. It had been chopped off at the wrist. She used the stub end to push without any apparent pain.
When the metal rolling door came down, fluorescent lights inside flickered before becoming a white strob. She looked away to the flaking worn wood and glass front door of the diner.
Entering, she first scanned the tables for the surfers. The only sign of them was on a table back in the corner by the window where four blue plastic cups and four bottles of Jarritos Mandarina soda had been served along with cloth-rolled silverware.
The stoves and griddles were going behind the dining counter—the scents of meats and marinated vegetables and sweet baking filled the air. She stood on the coarse rope matt with ‘Hola’ painted in gold on a once vibrant green. Ed breathed deeply of the cooking smells, looking over the glass case snack counter and the stack of menus beside the register. That same deep breath raised a cool glow of elation in her blood and confused her. She took another breath which expanded the sense of merry floating.
She realized that her hunger was abating, which struck her as odd, while her desire and thirst were growing as though the air was affecting her appetite. Seeing the well-stocked bar off to the left, she felt a passionate need for the sound and view of ice cubes clinking into a large glass followed by juice or soda, liquor even, if she had no choice.
A woman in her mid-forties dressed in the multiple colors of silk came out through the swinging door from the kitchen. She looked Ed over and nodded to the bar to the left as though reading Ed’s desire.
Ed followed, tracing the row of stools along the counter thinking to herself, another finch.
“Your pleasure?” the finch asked, leaning against the counter with the liquor bottles on glass shelves behind her.
The same accent, Ed thought.
“I’ll have anything juicy over ice,” she asked. “Maybe a frozen gin and citrus daiquiri?”
“You’re dressed right for alcohol, but too young. How about a Jarritos? A 7 Up?
“Sure. 7 Up. And thank you.”
“You have money?”
“Not yet, no.”
“I start you a tab.”
“I have a job offer, but it’s for hotel work.”
“I’m sure you do. That dress says so. Whoring, right?”
“No. Sexy hostess. Untouchable eye candy. Where are those surfers?”
“We get some of those passing through, but it’s been weeks.”
“But I saw…”
“Not here, you didn’t.”
While the finch woman poured soda over ice in a blue cup, Ed turned to the window to her left. Sharp mechanical sounds carried from the shuttered service bay—ratcheting and gasps of pneumatic equipment along with the clack of steel on aluminum. She could also hear laughter that to her imaginative mind was the mad barking of seals.
“I’m Damara, the bitter one,” the woman complained, placing the drink on the bar. “And you are?”
“I’m Ed ‘Never Ever Eddie’ Rang.”
Damara nodded without curiosity and watched Ed take a long drink of the icy 7 Up.
The sugary sweet and cold soda was a magical delight. Ed drank deeply, savoring the instant rush from the sugar. Damara placed both her bejeweled hands on the bar, looking content to watch her customer enjoy.
After another greedy gulp, Ed reluctantly set the blue cup down. She turned slowly, her thoughts floating and discordant. She watched three gypsy-looking women roll a luggage cart from the small gas station office. The cart was loaded with suitcases, surfboards, and backpacks and it disappeared up a path that entered a narrow tunnel in a sky-high sea-grape hedge.
“Felt this before,” Ed said to no one at all, looking at the blue cup. Her knees gave, and she melted to the floor.
2
Ed woke up in a warm bath full of scented effervescing waters. The modern tub was in a low-lit bathroom that was larger than her last apartment. Black candles were lit everywhere and the tub was the size of the hot tubs that she had occasionally guided brothel customers to.
She was naked and comfortably reclined on a submerged ceramic tile lounge. The silky water was just under her chin. Music from t
he ceiling was faint—a blend of casual-paced drums and a wind instrument—perhaps a coronet, not a flute. The song was a slowed-down dream of musical notes that wandered instead of forming a melody, like a gentle musical adventure. She looked at the wonderful, thick towels inside a glass warming case that also held an assortment of black terrycloth robes.
She carefully climbed from the water testing her balance and coordination. After drying her skin, she pulled one of the clean, black robes on, noting the elegantly gold-stitched words, ‘Hotel Or.’
The bathroom had two doors—one opened to a toilet and bidet and the second into a wardrobe—a walk-through closet with shelves of nicely folded clothing and hangers deep with ironed blouses and dresses. Beyond the softly lit closet, the next door opened to a sumptuous, open-air bedroom with closed glass doors to a view of the jungle. Before turning from the view, she saw a hint of an object fly past just under the window edge. It was perhaps a bird but suggested something mechanical by the way it turned and darted.
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