Left on St. Truth-Be-Well (12 page)

Carson was not going to win this one, so he stomped gracelessly to the other side of the truck and got in so they could drive to the hotel. When they got there, he grabbed all three bags of groceries before he slid out, though, and glared at Dale as if all of his disgust would hit the guy like a medicine ball.

Dale arched an eyebrow. “You gonna give me a kiss good-bye?”

“No. That would imply I’ll be happy to see you again.”

“You
will
be happy to see me again.”

Carson pouted. “Yeah, maybe, but I don’t want to imply it.”

Dale’s laugh rumbled through the cab of the pickup. “If you give me a kiss now, I’ll be sweet to you later.”

Carson felt the beginnings of a very wicked smile. “You get any sweeter, I may just die.”

And suddenly there was no air and very little laughter. “Sure, Chicago. I’ll pick you up and you can die in my arms again. Is that a deal?”

Heat washed his cheeks, and Carson had to look away. “Yeah, sure.”

“Then kiss me, and we’ll seal it.”

Carson looked up and leaned forward, and Dale put the truck in park, captured the back of Carson’s head easily in his big hand, and pulled him forward long enough to stick his tongue down Carson’s throat and maul him senseless.

When Dale came up for air, Carson tried to remember simple things like oxygen intake and how to look at stationary objects. After a breathless second, he said, “I’ve got to check on Stassy,” and then grabbed his stuff and slid out.

“Same time as yesterday,” Dale said as Carson shut the door, and Carson nodded like he had a choice.

He turned away from the truck as Dale pulled out, and spent some time fumbling with the groceries and the key card before he burst into the hotel room.

The first thing he noticed was that one of the beds had been slept in, as in
slept in
slept in, as in, it smelled as rank as Dale’s had before they’d done laundry that morning.

The second, and probably more obvious thing, was that Stassy was gone.

Carson dropped the groceries on the floor and pulled out the two-pound bag of M&M’s, then ripped a corner with his teeth.

“Fuck.”

Then he saw a note in the corner on the counter:

Toby and I went across the street to get my stuff. Uncle Ivan says if we don’t get our asses home in three days, you’re fired and I’m disowned. Back by one.

S

Carson looked at his phone.

It was one thirty.

Stassy should have been back by now. It was only across the street. Carson had a bad feeling about this.

He turned on his phone and dialed Dale’s number, hitting voice mail, which was good, because it meant Dale wasn’t talking and driving.

“Hey, Dale. Stassy went across the street this morning and he’s not back. I’m gonna go fetch him, but, you know. If you don’t hear from me in half an hour, send the Marines, right?”

He ended the call, put away the perishables in the minifridge, and walked outside, spotting the hotel across the street as he closed the door behind him.

Damn. How did a pink stucco hotel manage to look so damned sinister in the daytime?

Resolutely, Carson started across the street, formulating a plan of attack. He’d just go ask the lady at the front counter, right? Because seriously, how mad could she be? Stassy had to ask someone where his shit was. And by the way, wasn’t that just the dumbest idea ever? Because there’d been a dead guy with all that stuff, and wouldn’t you want to, maybe, steam clean it? Wouldn’t it be with the cops? Oh Jesus, Stassy—all your shit would be with the cops! Was there any possible way to get your shit from the cops without letting them know you’re in town? For God’s sake, seriously?

Carson had worked up a nice foamy head of irritation by the time he got to the lobby, which was good. He’d need it to not wet his pants every time one of the birds squawked.

He burst through the doors and resolutely glared at the cages, and then had to catch his breath.

The birds were all dead.

Wait, no, no, that couldn’t be right. Who’d kill all the damned birds? They were worth a fortune! But they were all lying strangely still in the bottom of completely clean cages. Carson moved a little closer and eyeballed the big blue one that had delighted in scaring the piss out of him when he’d been there two nights before.

He dangled upside down from his perch, claws locked around the bar, eyes closed.

Very gently, underneath the blue plumage, the delicate little chest rose and fell, and Carson took his first deep breath in ages.

Okay, the birds weren’t dead, but they seemed to be drugged. That wasn’t so bad. It was still creepy, but dead would be, well, dead, and psychotic, and, okay, mostly just
final
, because all those feathery bodies, some prone, some with claws still locked around their perches, did not seem much better than dead.

Okay. This was bad. Stassy was here, he should have been back, and a bunch of drugged birds were breathing softly and silently on the bottoms of clean cages. Carson almost preferred them alive and freaking him out.

He pulled out his phone. “Dale, uhm, something really odd is going on here, okay?” He couldn’t see anything with all the damned birdcages in the way. He thought he caught some movement, but that could just be a bird that wasn’t asleep or was waking up early or something. Carson craned his neck and squinted, didn’t see anything, and stepped around two giant birdcages with six sleeping birds each. (Jesus, this was a lot of fucking birds!) Nothing. Nada. Nobody.

But he couldn’t shake the feeling this was a bad idea.

He approached the counter and squinted, because it looked like a spatter of something was dripping on the wall behind the register—oh geez, really? Was that blood? With a little hop, he looked down between the counter and the wall and gasped.

Oh Jesus. That was Glen’s deputy, wasn’t it? The blond guy who sort of hung out in the background? The one who apparently had a little arrangement with Jarred the brothel-running maid. Oh hell, had Dale ever called his brother? Probably not, he’d been busy boffing Carson’s brains out, right?

Carson fumbled for his phone and hit Dale’s number for a third time. “Dale?” he said into voice mail, backing up so his shoulder blades ground into the wall by the counter. The doorway sat to his left and the counter to his right, so he wasn’t safe, but at least he could see if someone was lurking among the damned creepy birdcages. “Dale, your brother’s deputy is here, and he worked with the brothel guy, and he’s got a dent in his skull, so I’m calling an ambulance next, okay?”

He clicked End Call even though he really just wanted to stay on the phone and gibber, then dialed the obvious choice besides the guy he’d been sleeping with.

911.

“What’s your emergency?”

“Sleeping parrots and a police officer with a dent in his head, can you send someone to the Bates Parrot Hotel, please—oh fuck!”

He saw the flatiron coming out of the manager’s office first, but it was attached to a pudgy arm in a pale pink T-shirt, and he remembered who came next, so he didn’t stick around for the show. Instead, he started sprinting toward the entrance to the lobby, just as that iron swung in an arc and hit the wall where his head had been, hard enough to embed itself in the plaster.

“Get back here, dammit!” screamed Beatrice the parrot proprietress, and Carson dodged around some sleeping budgies in a brass pagoda and turned around to see where she was. She was yanking on the iron, and Carson took a deep breath, backed up a few steps, and fell right over a big wrought iron affair with a scarlet macaw inside. He came up in a clatter of tiny parakeet cages and scrambled to get out, knocking over a rose-throated parrot and a couple of cockatoos.

Who woke up with groggy squawks, adding to the general chaos in the lobby of the Bates Parrot Hotel.

“Sir? Sir, are you all right?”

“I have got to get the fuck out of here!” Carson snapped over the girl on the phone. He waded through a jangle of cages, cutting his hand and his wrist on some sharp edges and broken spikes, and double-checked to see where Beatrice was.

“Hyooyah!” With a groan and a heave, she finally managed to extricate the iron, and as Carson tripped over three more giant parrot cages, he heard the clatter of her behind him, simultaneously trying to wade through the frenzy like he had and reassure the waking birds. “Don’t worry none, oh sweetie, Mama’s gonna be back to fix you right up. Just hang in there, I just gotta go help the guest now. Just hold your horses, babies. Don’t worry, I’m going to fix you right up….”

“Oh hell no!”

Carson crashed into the front door, only to realize she must have locked it when he’d first come in—
that
had been the movement he’d seen behind the cages. The glass fractured under the force of his body but didn’t shatter, and he grunted, shoved his phone in his pocket, and grabbed a birdcage to start breaking through when she screamed, “Don’t hurt my babies!”

Carson paused long enough to see a couple of unconscious parakeets in the cage, rolling around like marbles, and he felt a little sick.

“Oookay,” he said quietly, still keeping the birdcage over his head. “I’ll tell you what, Beatrice. You come here and unlock the front door, and I’ll put down the birdcage and get out of your hair.”

“I can’t do that!” she wailed. “You’ll go and tell everyone, and I’ll have to leave my babies alone!”

Carson kept the parakeets over his head. “Why did you drug the birds, Beatrice?” Because when you were negotiating with a psycho, it helped to get the small details down.

“So’s no one else would complain. Don’t you understand? He was calling the board of health and the cops and everything. The cops weren’t so bad, ’cause that one had somethin’ going in room 245, but the board of health! Do you know what they’d do?”

“Uhm, take away the birds?”

“No, they’d look in the rooms on the upper floor!”

Well, that was unexpected.

“And what would they find there, Beatrice?”

Carson’s pocket babbled, and he could only hope it was on loud enough to catch some of this.

“How do you think I keep this place going? All them old people, living here, right? Well, they’re old. They got to die sometime. But I needed their Social Security!”

“Oh God.”

“And I wasn’t going to get it if people knew they weren’t living here no more! I couldn’t even bury them!”

“And that explains all the quicklime. Excellent. I’ve stumbled on Dorothea Puente By The Sea. Awesome. Holy shit. Jesus, did you assholes in my pocket hear that?”

He heard a higher-pitched warble and felt the broken door at his back jiggle. Well, hell, he’d plied his ass with enough skill the night before, right? He wiggled some more, hitting the bar progressively harder, hoping it would give before the glass pane would.

“And this cop says he can’t keep taking money now that he knows about the bodies upstairs! What am I supposed to do now?”

“You’re supposed to put down the iron, you psycho bitch!”

She swung around, iron still clutched in her hand, and faced the young deputy who had struggled to his feet. He was holding his gun, pointing it at her, but it was wobbly. Blood streamed into his eyes, and, hey, Carson was standing right behind her, so maybe firing it wasn’t the best choice the guy could make either.

“Okay,” Carson said, trying to calm things down. “That’s all really good, but where’s Stassy? He’s the reason I came down here, he’s the reason I came over tonight. The unburied bodies, they’re all between you guys, I get that. The pandering, that’s your deal too. I just want to know where my boss’s nephew is. I swear to God, you get me Stassy, I’ll be out of everyone’s hair.”

Beatrice stopped for a second, not lowering the iron even a little. Carson noticed it had the deputy’s blood on it, and some hair and bits and stuff, and he thought he might throw up when all this was done, just for good measure.

The woman looked at him as if he was crazy. “The cute kid with the boyfriend? I just sent him down the hallway to the storage room on the second floor. All the stuff the cops didn’t confiscate went in there.”

Oh Jesus. “Stassy’s still here?”

His pocket started going crazy-jangly, and at that moment, there was a sudden shattering behind him and the glass door imploded. The metal frame screeched, and Carson fell backward into nothing, squealing like a girl.

Dale caught him with one arm while wielding a crowbar with the other.

For a moment, Carson stared at Dale in shock and Dale stared back at him the same way, and then Carson remembered what was going on. “Grab the crowbar and come on!” he snapped, taking off around the lobby, trying to get as far from the concussed police officer and the crazy lady with the drugged birds as he possibly could.

“Awesome, where we going?” Dale asked as they broke into a quick run.

“Around to the other side of the building to get Stassy before he walks into that nightmare. Did you call your brother?”

“No!”

Carson fumbled in his pocket and thrust the phone behind him until he felt Dale grab it as they ran. “Well, you do that, and do it now. In fact, you hide right here.” He turned around and shoved Dale into the bushes in the corner, which was shadowed from pretty much all the light around it, even the light of the Chevron station that sat in front of Carson’s motel. It may have been broad daylight, but that little nook could keep Dale well hidden.

“Hey!” Dale protested, and Carson whirled to him, grabbed his collar, and planted a big, hard kiss on him before pulling back.

“Stay safe, dammit. Get your brother here and lay low. She knows I’ll be heading to find Stassy, but she won’t look for you here. Just fucking hide, will you? The deputy who was taking pandering money is in there with a gun, and all I want to do is get Stassy so Ivan doesn’t kill us!”

“Us?”

“He’ll find a reason to get you, dammit. Now stay here and get the frickin’ cops!”

“Bossy asshole,” Dale muttered, and that was enough to reassure Carson. He turned and sprinted around the short L of the hotel, very carefully not looking up at that second story, with the little wind chimes and the window decals and the plants in their little stands outside. He didn’t want to know how many of those rooms were inhabited by dead people. Ever. He didn’t want to know ever.