Frozen by Jay Bonansinga

Author:Jay Bonansinga [Bonansinga, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2012-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

That’s weird, Olivia Mendoza thought as she turned off her rust-bucket Chevy Geo and sat for a moment in the Regal Motel parking lot, staring through the rain-streaked windshield at the entrance to the front office. A plump little Latina with a peroxide-blond flip and rusty brown skin, Olivia wore the trademark baby-blue pinafore of the Mighty Maids Company under her tattered down coat.

It looked as though old Pete Bowden had mistakenly put the CLOSED sign up on the door again. The old bastard had probably been dipping into that “secret” bottle of J&B he kept hidden behind the file cabinet in the back office, the bottle that nobody was supposed to know about. Olivia had stumbled upon early morning remnants of the innkeeper’s little “secret” many times before. One time a couple of years ago the maid had arrived for her shift only to find a pair of women’s panties hanging from the Mr. Coffee in the front room. Another time she arrived to find Pete Bowden passed out on the floor of the lobby, half naked, his underwear bunched around his ankles. That time it took all of Olivia Mendoza’s willpower not to just bust out laughing at the size of Pete’s shriveled little pecker.

But this time, the old coot had gone too far. Not only was the CLOSED sign facing out but the blinds were shut as well. And the lights were off. The place looked boarded up, condemned, gone out of business. Which wouldn’t be a half-bad idea, Olivia thought with a sideways grin, if I could only find another housekeeping gig in Portland.

The maid let out a sigh and reached for her umbrella, which sat on the passenger-side floor, buried beneath a pile of Adkins bar wrappers. The rains had let up a little, but still were coming down hard enough to warrant an umbrella. The Geo’s backseat was littered with cleaning products and empty cans of Slim-Fast. Olivia Mendoza had tried every fad diet known to man, and her latest fixations were the low-carbohydrate trips, which so far had only served to make her grouchy rather than thin. She grabbed the umbrella, climbed out of the car, wrestled it open, went around to her trunk, rooted out her little plastic caddy full of cleaning products, then trundled through the mist to the office entrance.

At first she thought the door was locked, but then realized it was simply stuck—or maybe stuck was the wrong word. It gave a little bit as she tried it, crackling as though something had dried and crusted along the bottom edge. She remembered when her youngest, Ramon, was just a toddler, and the kitchen door of their shotgun flat would get like that—sticky with egg and juice and stewed prunes.

The door finally gave, and Olivia entered the dark lobby.

Immediately she smelled something unusual that she had never smelled in the place before—and if there was one thing Olivia Mendoza was well versed in, it was odor. It was a harsh, mineral smell, and it seemed to hang in the airless lobby as Olivia gazed around the shadows.

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