Death Comes Calling by Charlie Cottrell

Author:Charlie Cottrell [Cottrell, Charlie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-03-26T22:00:00+00:00

XIX.

The safest place in the city of Arcadia is the Sleep Inn, a rundown hotel that is just as willing to charge you by the hour as it is to charge you by the day, week, or even month. The place is considered neutral ground by tacit agreement between the cops, robbers, and everyone else in between. Everybody needs a place to rest, as the old song goes, and we all sort of agreed that the Sleep Inn was as good as anywhere else for that purpose.

So, not for the first time, I got a room there. It’s not the most glamorous hotel: the carpets are threadbare, the wallpaper is about a century out of style and peeling something awful, and the whole place smells faintly of mustiness, mold, neglect, and curry. If desperation had a scent, it would smell like the lobby of the Sleep Inn.

The rooms were small and old-fashioned: no vid window projector, metal bars across the windows instead of hardened security glass, and the doors were solid chunks of wood with metal deadbolts and chains across the door for security.

I was up on the third floor, my windows even with the neon sign advertising a strip club or something similar across the street. Flashing red Girls Girls Girls splashed across my dark room in the hotel, giving everything a ghastly pall every few seconds, then plunging the room back into the twilight darkness that was as close to real dark as you could ever get with all the light pollution in the city.

I came out of the bathroom, drying myself off with a rough hotel towel. “Drying off” was maybe a bit generous; really, the towel was so rough and coarse, it was more like dragging steel wool across my skin, and about half as effective at removing water as the steel wool would’ve been. I finally gave up and walked across the room to the window, dragging it open with some effort. Some lazy painter had painted over the tracks years ago. The paint was flaking and crumbly now, and probably filled with lead. It gave way before the slightly rotten wood of the window frame did, amazingly, but eventually I had the window open and could feel the hot breeze coming in. Off in the distance, I could see massive storm clouds gathering. The weather report had focused on a cold front pushing in from the north, bringing rain and a much needed break from the oppressive heat with it. For now, it had simply whipped up a stiff breeze and brought a small light show to the horizon.

I sat down on the edge of the bed in just my underwear and pulled a cigarette out of my coat pocket. I lit it, staring out the window and thinking about abandoned tunnels, muggings gone wrong, and hidden caches of gold and blackmail files. There was a lot about the case that didn’t make a damn lick of sense, and a lot that probably wouldn’t ever make sense.

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