The Quiet Boy by Winters Ben H

Author:Winters, Ben H. [Winters, Ben H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Mystery, thriller, Suspense, Adult, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780316505444
Google: YOX7DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0316505447
Goodreads: 53369480
Publisher: Mulholland Books
Published: 2021-05-18T07:00:00+00:00

The door was old, but the handle was new. It had been switched out from the one Richard Keener had broken to get in.

The Rabbi at the threshold, taking stock. His eyes behind his thick glasses moved slowly from one end of the room to the other, from wall to wall.

“OK,” he said to himself. “It’s a room.”

A motel room, dim and ugly and cramped. One window looking out at the parking lot, where Ruben saw his car, parked next to the tawdry pink van. The colors of the room were shades of brown: beige, ecru, rust. Thin, fraying drapes. An ancient blocky television, a few ugly paintings of nothing: just shapes, colors, desultory gestures toward decoration.

The AC unit was unplugged, the cord curled into itself at the baseboard. A thin striped bedspread, laddered with thin beams of moonlight. The whole place smelled like paint and bleach and the dry, dusty odor of recent vacuuming. A room in a purgatorial state, on its way to being restored to its public function. The bathroom door was open; the toilet seat was up; no toilet paper on the roll; the shower curtain tucked up and hanging from the shower rail like a koala.

The room was dark and stale, but it was charged, too, with a shivering doomy energy. As Ruben stepped inside, he was conscious of a crouching sense of risk, which, as he began to move through the room, drew itself slowly up to full height. His dick, unpredictable bellwether of strong feeling, stiffened slightly in his pants. For God’s sake, he thought, but after all there are only so many strong feelings. Lust and darkness, murder and sex. Maybe they blur together in places like this. Murder places, with the power of high emotion still flickering in the corners, murmuring out from under the thin bedspread.

Or maybe he was a ghostfucker after all.

Ruben moved gingerly through the room, thinking what a nightmare it was to have a body. To be a body, tricked all the time into wanting whatever the body happened to want.

Most of the room was taken up by the bed. There was only one night table, jammed into a narrow space behind the wall, which separated the single room from the bathroom.

“OK,” he said, and shook his head, laughing at himself one last time, granting himself permission finally to do what he was doing. Casing a room. Chasing a phantom. Cops and crime scenes and so on.

If you’re going to fucking do it, you fucking do it.

“All right,” he said aloud, slipping off his glasses and sliding them into a pocket of his pants. “So, I’m Rich.”

He stood up tall and pulled his shoulders back and pushed out his chest. He exhaled, growling, feeling a skeptical gloominess rearrange the shape of his face. Then he backed up and came through the door again, coming in slow and heavy: walking Rich’s heavy bear’s walk, sniffing the air.

He looked down at the world from height, glowered around the room.

“I break into the room.

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