Sitting at Sand’s slight desk, Kazu ate the sandwich and bacon and drank all three cups of deliciously cold milk. Seeing that the apartment didn’t have a single window and breathing in the dessert-flavored cool air, he felt himself slumping in the chair. Looking to Sand’s bed, he spoke to it.
“In a second,” he said as a hazy list of concerns formed.
“Where is Billy?”
“Find a med kit…” He rose from the chair.
“Get a job.” He lay down.
“Stay in the shadows.” He closed his eyes.
23
Kazu was in the chaos and danger of his last kill—it had all gone wrong in the dream. The betrayal of his employer, Señor Ochoa, had been discovered, and his boss’s men had him trapped in an airport restroom, the door blocked off. Ochoa was very much alive and very loud and very angry.
Waking and guessing it was nighttime, Kazu stepped to Sand’s desk and set out his drawing pads, pencils, pens, and pastels. The story for the new image-novel had fleshed out further in his sleep providing him with enough ingredients to begin inking over the pencil strokes of the two main characters. Leaving off from the Jappy the Avenger character, he worked with the female partner, still unnamed. He drew her wonderful rounded and upright breasts and hardened nipples. Feeling his own lustful reaction, he thoughtfully chose an oversized and loose tank top and added it, partially covering the breasts with their amazing curves spilling from the sides.
Before adding her face and the rest of her body, he penciled the background, his pencil telling him that the girl and Jappy were imprisoned in the lowest bowels of the pirate ship. They were at the base of narrow wood steps in a room with barrels and fishing nets and wood crates.
‘Mutiny.’ He wrote quickly off to the side, the theme coming to him without consideration. With a tight grin of satisfaction and the focus of the image-novel then in place, he added enough wood tools and saw parts to enable their eventual escape.
Like a gift from he knew not where, he decided to give Jappy and the girl a few ghosts—the spirits of people Jappy had killed before being captured. He decided that only Jappy could see them. He would talk to them, confusing the girl, and they would give him clever and sarcastic advice. Instead of transparent ghosts, the sidekicks would appear real to Jappy. The girl would also begin seeing them at some later point.
With more than enough of a premise to kick off the story, he alternated in pencil and fine- tipped pen, letting the story begin to tell itself.
He worked for what he guessed was a couple of hours before taking a break. Finding a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in Sand’s bathroom cabinet, he soaked his foot in the shower pan and used a washcloth splashed with the chemical on his shin and hip wounds.
To distract himself from the stinging pain, he took his old Nokia flip phone from his backpack as well as the last ziplocked Jappy the Killer image-novel. He flipped through to the last page of his illustrated murders. Embedded in the crisscross lines of a building’s shadow were the twenty-four digits of his account numbers as well as the bank id number. With cell service from the hotel, he scrolled to the saved telephone number for his bank. After dialing, he tapped in all the digits carefully and listened. Hoping to hear his balance, the call was terminated. The Nokia battery had died. Frustrated, he stowed the phone and looked at the six-button one on the desk.
There was a courtesy knock on the apartment door. Sand stepped inside with a very drunk and clinging girl in a wet swimsuit.
“Just checking in on you,” a sober Sand said. “We’re off to her suite. Got you cleared for a job. Constance doesn’t want to waste her precious time with a meet and handshake. Lucky you. I’ll be by for you at 5:00 a.m. or thereabouts. Teach you how to make some quick cash. Get some sleep.”
When the door closed, Kazu still had money in his thoughts. Using the room phone, he heard that he hadn’t been paid for the airport double-cross, no surprise there, but his savings were intact.
He worked on the new image-novel for two more hours. When his imagination and drawing needed a break, he took a long shower instead of a nap.
At five in the morning, Sand re-entered the apartment.
“Ready?” He held a clipboard and a flashlight.
Kazu pulled on his shirt and decided to go barefoot like his new friend. They passed through the humming and overheated basement and took the steel stairs up to the lobby which was early-morning empty.
Sand led the way across to the open-air elevator of white painted steel on the south side of the yellow hotel. He pushed the number four for the top floor and the lift climbed the outside of the building. The elevator rose with lots of ratcheting and grinding.
“You’ll be reporting to the groundskeeper,” Sand explained. “Casimir, the midget… don’t repeat that. Starting tomorrow at 6:00 a.m., you’ll do pool cleaning and beach cleanup. But starting today, from 5:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., you work with me.”
Kazu stepped to the waist-high rail for his first look at the seaside of the Surf Or… Hotel. Directly below was a construction yard of heavy tools and machinery supporting the rebuilding of the southern decks and base of the hotel. The predawn air carried two pulses of sound from below—the echoing boom of crashing waves and calls and laughter from the glowing blue swimming pool.
Reaching the top floor, Kazu followed Sand around the corner of the building on the white-railed walkway past two white room doors to a service door hidden by its paint, the same shade of yellow as the body of the hotel. The two of them eased through the narrow supply room to a second locked door. Sand unlocked it and pulled on the handle of a rope above the single toilet and sink. Wood folding stairs lowered.
Kazu followed Sand up into a tight space, a narrow channel between the walls leading to steps back down to the level of the top floor.
“There are only two donators on this floor.” Sand examined the clipboard in the flashlight beam. “Both spent last night seriously drinking. Both scheduled for departure later this morning.”
Sand leading the way, they slid side by side in the tight space to the second of four metal boxes bolted to the exposed beams. Sand opened the back of the box and pulled out a wallet and passport, handing that to Kazu. Opening the wallet and sliding out three credit cards, Sand lay them in a row atop the clipboard.
“Room safes. Always cash, but it’s the cards we want. When the donator gets his bank statements, he’s going to see he spent last night with two escorts including champagne bar tabs and a private boat to a secluded beach. Hopefully, he’s not married.”
Sand wrote the card details slowly, carefully capturing all the numbers on both sides. That done, he slid two fifty-dollar bills out and handed one to Kazu.
“Look for a PIN.” He handed the wallet to Kazu. “Some fools do write them down. Check the back of photographs if there are any.”
Kazu did as asked searching all the side pockets of the wallet in the flashlight beam. He shook his head, and Sand put the belongings back inside and closed the door. “The next is at the end,” he said leading the way along the inside of the wall.
They worked the last room on the top floor before climbing down a narrow ladder to the third floor.
“Only the very drunk and soon departing,” Sand reminded Kazu.
Working the notes on the clipboard, they opened and stole from a single safe before descending another ladder. Forty-five minutes later, they had worked their way back down to lobby level. The service door opened to the elevator alcove.
“Well done. Get some rest. You have the rest of the day off.” Sand handed Kazu a room key. “Your apartment is two doors down from mine. Might have to share it with another employee later on, but for now, it’s all yours.”
Sand pocketed the flashlight and walked off to the long bar to the right of the lobby, leaving Kazu gazing out on the surf side of the hotel. Smelling salt and surf in the morning breeze, he stepped to a tall potted fern and looked out across the decks past the all-night partiers in the pool. The d
ew-beaded lawn was stroked with the first angled blast of golden daylight. Where the grass ended and the white-shadowed beach began, a woman was walking alone in his direction from the beautifully formed waves breaking a hundred yards out.
“That’s a saunter.” He studied her. “Like in the movies. She’s in a movie. Her movie,” he added seeing that no one else was watching the woman. She passed a group of men and girl surfers and their boards. They were sitting on the sand with a liquor bottle set in a brass ice bucket.
The woman held a long-stemmed cocktail glass in her right hand. Her head turned this way and that, languidly, as she crossed the lawn and gracefully ascended the steps to the first deck. Only when she had reached Kazu’s level, did her gaze rise. Her lovely large eyes took in the shadows before her.
Kazu watched her make a theatrical gesture of setting the delicate stemmed glass on an empty table. He analyzed her face, a habit from his artwork, noting the curious lines and curves of her almost beautiful face.
“It’s a composite,” he whispered, realizing that her face had been modified with scalpels and some kind of skin plaster. He could make out the face’s origin—a once bland beauty with big eyes.
He noted her frumpy and wrinkled tropical dress before looking again at her face—her eyes. They were locked on his. She added an arch to her back enhancing the firmness of her ripe breasts. Her left hand appeared stiff as though frozen.
When she was a few steps away, she spoke to Kazu with her eyes turned.
“I’m Constance. You must be the new thief. Good haul this morning?” Her voice was blurred by alcohol. Not waiting for an answer, she glided past and turned to the hallway behind the registration desk.
24
Two mornings later, Kazu parted company with Sand, sliding a single twenty-dollar bill into his black shorts pocket. The two of them had opened two safes during the past hour.
“Tuesdays are the worst,” Sand explained earlier while they slid between the walls on the second floor. “No one leaves then. Wait until you work your first Sunday.”
Sand walked off to the lobby bar while Kazu stepped outside on the top deck in the predawn darkness. Before heading out to find Chaz—his new boss in charge of pool maintenance—he opened the Lost and Found box which was decorated like a treasure chest.
“Here’s hoping.”
Stirring through expensive misplaced shirts and bikini tops, bottles of sunblock and other pool and beach party flotsam, he came up lucky. His fingers traced a thin black cable to the nipple end of a phone charger. He pocketed it and looking pleased, also lifted a nice pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses. Inside the ear stem, the model name ‘Gatsby’ was stamped. The right lens was cracked and spider webbed. With his black and gold lettered cap on, he finally felt sufficiently disguised.
In the tinted view, he scanned the top deck and lower swimming pool with a new confidence. Here and there, he looked straight into the sagging, flush faces of the few all-night partiers at the top deck bar and the others in the water. None of the people paid him any mind, which was just what he wanted—the invisible pool boy and assistant gardener.
He spied Constance, the owner, sitting in the row of tiled barstools before the swim-up bar. She was dominating a conversation with an arm on two portly, tan-and-gold-necklaced middle-age men. There was a stir of drink glasses and a full ashtray out before them. The man on her left was nodding along to the rhythm of her tale, the other on her right enjoying her scantily covered breasts. Constance’s exact words were unclear, but Kazu heard her add icing to her own joke with a throaty, “Ar ar ar.”
Looking away to the south, he saw the first stripe of purple dawn across the dark sky over the construction site.
At the base of the service stairs off to the right, he found Chaz inside the tiki-styled pool supply hut, eye measuring a plastic jug of pool chemicals.
“Bueno,” Kazu smiled, using Spanish, trying to get off on a better start with Chaz. It had been rough going so far. The rail-thin, chocolate-skinned Chaz had shown an instant dislike of Kazu and his forced employment in his crew of pool and grounds cleaners.
“Use your English, half Jap,” Chaz chewed the words in Spanish before heel kicking a black garbage can in Kazu’s direction. “Do the beach first. Anything valuable comes to me before the Lost and Found, comprende?”
Chaz elbowed past, grabbing the skim net pole off the hooks on the wall. Carrying a bucket of pool chemicals, he left.
Down on the beach, Kazu dragged the garbage can to the southern yellow property line flags on the mile-long beach. He worked northward, traversing to and from on the edge of the surf wash to the lawn at the base of the hotel decks, finding the same kind of belongings already in the Lost and Found treasure box.
The garbage can was heavier by a third an hour later. Kazu was just beyond the centered steps of the hotel. An hour and a half later, he reached the north yellow flags with a full load. Wet with perspiration, he pulled off his black shirt and tucked it into the back of his shorts. Leaving the can in the relentless sunlight, he walked up the sand to the row of ornamental banana trees at the hotel property’s north side. Finding a pool of uneven shade, he turned his raised cheeks to each gentle breeze of the ocean.
“Someday. Soon.” He watched two groups of surfers in the beautifully formed, clear-blue waves. One group of five older surfers were paddling for a six-foot swell about to break. The other three younger guys were out further waiting for something bigger. Although he couldn’t hear their voices, their gestures said that they were enjoying and encouraging one another.
Wanting water, wanting breakfast, he retrieved the black garbage can and dragged it to the service walkway on the north side of the hotel. As Chaz had instructed, he set it inside the tiki-hut door.
“Yes, yes.” He drank from a side yard hose before removing his hat and sunglasses and drenching himself from the top of his bristled head to his bare feet. Soaking wet and cooled and refreshed, he pulled on his shirt and headed off for his second job.
He heard Casimir before he saw him. The ride-mower was backing out of the ground’s building next to the fenced-in chrome tanks. The din of the rotating blades and mower engine rattled the air of the otherwise quiet morning. Looking harried, the very short Casimir called Kazu over.
“Continue on the sea grapes. Don’t stray off,” he yelled.
Casimir drove away, rounding to the front of the Surf Or… Hotel.
Kazu retrieved his wheelbarrow of tools from where he had parked it the day before.
Like the never-ending painting of the Golden Gate Bridge he had once read about, his task was to cut and trim the long wall of sea grape that relentlessly grew and reached out to the tall yellow hotel.
Setting out his sixteen-foot ladder, he clipped and sawed in the north side area where he had left off the day before. He worked downward from the second to the top step of the ladder all the way to the ground before moving the ladder four feet and starting in again.
He had moved the ladder ten or eleven times before setting the handsaw and long-armed clippers in the wheelbarrow.
“Water? No, a Pepsi in ice and anything to eat,” he told the tools before walking back along the sea-grape wall to the maintenance hut. “Hose off, hit the kitchen.”
Twenty-five yards back along the green wall, he stopped at the indentation he had passed the day before, ignoring it at the time. It had looked like no more than a natural dent in the foliage. This time he saw that the round-topped opening was quite deep, and the dirt and rocks were disturbed by animal or human feet.
The soda and ice desire was strong, but Kazu stepped closer and lowered, gazing in. Sure enough, a few feet in, the tunnel ceiling rose to head height.
“Next.” He postponed his plans for the Pepsi and climbed in.
The creeping vines crossing the path were scarred and scraped, and the rocks that rose from the soil were dirt crusted from passing shoes. Ten feet in, he followed a ninety-degree turn, took five steps and entered a second.
Rounding it, he walked the tight-sided tunnel to a clearing ten yards further.
The vegetation had been hacked back, but not the branches up above, leaving a roof. Specks of green-tinted light spilled eddies onto the grass and rocks. The only sounds were the beck and call of birds high above and the distant but approaching whine of Casimir’s mower.
At first, the clearing made no sense to Kazu. The only manmade touch was a rusted steel burn box off to his right. Looking across the green grass, he saw another sign—there was a faint, orderly row of body-length mounds. Beyond, a second row had settled lower.
“Graves?”
He crossed to the burn box and lowered beside it, considering the ash and cold embers. A half-burnt fire stick leaned out, and he used it to turn and dig, revealing bits of clothing fabric. Digging and stirring along the inside of the box, he exposed larger pieces of clothing—all were once vibrantly colored. A run of lettering caught his eyes, the words across a folded and scorched envelope. He plucked it out of a blackened orange swimsuit pocket and saw it was a section of a rental car agreement, the lower half missing—burnt away.
“A clue, like in the movies,” he scoffed but pocketed it.
He stirred through the burn box for another minute, not finding anything interesting. Looking up, he saw a third row of graves on the other side of a twisted, green-mold tree trunk. They were newer, the topsoil dark. A shovel leaned against the shade side of the tree.
The Girl in the Hotel Page 14