Lost Girls by Andrew Pyper

Author:Andrew Pyper [Pyper, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Thriller
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2009-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SIX

Someone entering the hotel and climbing the stairs toward my room. I don’t hear this although I’m still certain, like knowing you’re being watched while sitting alone in your room. And now it occurs to me that maybe I’ve been alone in the upper floors of The Empire Hotel too long altogether. I’ve come to know all of its yawnings and groans to the point that there is now an unsettled intimacy between us. This is why I feel the footsteps on the stairs before I hear them, deliberate and hollow. Sharp knuckles through the wood.

I don’t ask who’s there, don’t look around for something heavy or sharp just in case. Instead I go to the door without thinking and pull back the bolt.

“Hey, Mr. Crane.”

Eyes open to a soggy Laird Johanssen, the threequarter length sleeves of his Meatloaf T-shirt dripping Murdoch rain down to his fingertips. It’s the Bat Out of Hell album cover with a demon biker blasting out of his grave riding a flaming Harley.

“Laird,” I sigh, and realize that I’d been holding my breath. “How did you know this was my room?”

“Guy downstairs,” he says, shaking back the jellied cables of his hair. “Told him I was your associate.”

I stand back to let him in and immediately Laird’s presence in the room feels absurd. Nobody else has been in here the whole time of my stay and now that I have a visitor it’s the doughnut shop kid with the glasses permanently stalled at the pimply precipice of his nose. I walk back to the desk and sit down but for a moment Laird remains fixed just inside the door. Looks around the room at the pages of The Murdoch Phoenix on the walls, his head slipping into a slow nod.

“Ve-ry in-teresting,” he says in a German-psychiatrist voice.

“Well it’s a pleasure to see you again too, Laird, but what can I do for you?”

He looks at me directly, the shiver gone.

“Actually it’s more like what I can do for you.”

He moves over to the bed and sits on the edge of the mattress that barks loudly at having to bear his sudden weight. Then he pulls his arms out of the straps of his backpack and zips it open, a vicious grin playing over his lips.

“Forgot to give you something the other day,” he says, and pulls out a pink folder, waves it in front of his face as though fanning himself.

“What is it?”

“What do you think?”

The grin, now less vicious than merely lopsided, stitched onto his mouth as though by some botched surgical procedure.

“I can’t guess, Laird.”

“I liberated it after word got out at school that Ashley and Krystal had gone missing. It was only a matter of time before Principal Warren would come down with the pliers to break open their lockers and hand everything over to the pigs. So I beat her to it, and managed to preserve this little beauty.”

He waves the folder again, and I resist the urge to jump up from my chair, snatch it from his hands and smack him across the face with it.

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