Chapter 3 - The Cold Pavement
I needed air. The suite felt suddenly airless, the walls closing in with the ghosts of a life that wasn't supposed to exist. I backed out of Room 214, pulled the heavy door shut until the latch caught with a solid thud, and left the brass key resting on the small wooden console table just outside the threshold. Let someone else find it this time. Let the hotel management sort out the dead men walking in their quiet halls.
I took the service stairs down, my boots ringing sharply on the concrete steps, past the locked fire doors and the smell of laundry detergent, until I pushed out into the alley behind the hotel. The night air hit me like a physical blow—damp, smelling of exhaust and wet pavement.
My car was parked three blocks away in a municipal lot under the orange glare of a sodium vapor lamp. As I walked, the heels of my boots clicking rhythmically on the concrete sidewalk, the shock began to curdle into something harder, a cold, sharp anger that settled right behind my ribs. Three years. Three years of memorial services, of quiet sympathy cards on the mantelpiece, of adjusting to a single side of the bed and the terrible, hollow finality of a closed casket service where the state had returned a wedding band and a wallet recovered from the wreckage of a car off the coastal highway.
I unlocked my sedan, slid into the driver's seat, and sat there for a long time with my hands resting on the steering wheel, watching the windshield wipers smear the light mist gathering on the glass.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, vibrating against my thigh. I pulled it out, expecting a client or an automated alert from the gallery. Instead, it was an unknown number with a local area code.
May you like
I stared at the screen as it lit up the dark interior of the car, the little green icon pulsing softly. I didn't answer it on the first ring, nor the second. But as the third ring began, I pressed the accept button and held the cold glass to my ear, listening to the static hiss of the line before a familiar, hesitant voice spoke my name through the speaker.
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