TEN
“There you go.”
Exitus blinked. “Sir?”
Officer Welsh pointed out of the car window at an old and derelict building fast approaching. “Your motel.”
Exitus was back in a police car after the rather uncomfortable shopping excursion to Tough Break, Kid (even more uncomfortably, across the street and eight buildings away). He leaned across the backseat of the car to look out of the far window at the building Officer Welsh was now parking catercorner to.
“You’re kidding me. Isn’t there a Holiday Inn or Super8 nearby?”
“No. This is it.”
Wronki’s one and only motel was housed in the old town jail. The windows still had their iron bars and no one must have thought to remove the markings harking to the building’s sordid past. On the left side of the motel, its paint faded but still recognizable, was a massive relief for the brothel the building must have been before turning into a more respectable motel, partly covered by the advertisement of “WRONKI JAIL”. It was even named “The Slammer”.
“Can’t I get my hearse back? You can’t impound it for no other reason than I was the person who called in the crime.”
“You wouldn’t be able to sleep in your vehicle even if we were to return it to you; there’s a no homelessness law here.”
Exitus sputtered. “That’s unconstitutional! Besides, Genevieve is my home, so technically….”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Quick, but you’ll be staying here until we see fit to let you be on your way.”
‘See fit? See fit?’
His hands were on his lap, fingers entwined painfully. “I didn’t do anything.”
Exitus sighed. He frowned and sighed again, having nothing else to do but sit in the backseat of a police car and stare out at the fortress he was to reside in until—until whenever these people “saw fit”.
He never should have stopped in this town. What he should have done was starve to death, however slowly, and resort to eating the leather upholstery of the hearse—his own chest hair—anything to spare him the horrid decision of pulling into the parking lot of Lidia’s Diner (a woman who was somehow, crazily, permitted to be around living things).
He, like anyone alive, dead or in between, should have done a lot of things differently.
“Shall we go in, then?”
At the risk of being melodramatic, Exitus sighed once more. He only wanted Genevieve back in his possession, he only wanted to be far away from his whole mess, and Officer Welsh was not helping at all Exitus’s desires.
“Can’t I just get my hearse back?” he asked for a second time.
Officer Welsh met Exitus’s eyes in the rear view mirror. “Once those boys look her over, yes. In fact, I’ll drive her over here myself if you like—” and he did not pause long enough for Exitus to bring sound to his horrified expression “—But until then, son, you’re simply going to have to keep a low profile.”
That certainly wasn’t going to be a problem; right up to the prom incident back in high school, hardly anyone had even known Exitus’s name—given or otherwise. Some of the kids in his own class wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a line-up.
Was he going to be placed in a line-up?
Dear Lord, Aunt Lily was going to have a heart attack when she heard about this.
“I’ll do what I can, sir.”
Officer Welsh nodded. “Atta boy,” he said, as if his passenger was a newspaper-fetching dog and not a suspect in a mur-der. And by murder he didn’t mean a group of crows. This murder was the act, the malicious killing of a human being, a crime subject to capital punishment—and if there was one thing the majority of people liked, it was capital punishment. The courts sent people to death row every day, even if they knew Dead Man Walking was innocent. It happened all the time.
Aunt Lily was going to kill Exitus. Then she would have her heart attack. Oh, what he wouldn’t give for her to drop her overbearing, suffocating, anxiety-laden invigilation.
The door beside Exitus opened unexpectedly, Officer Welsh having left the vehicle at some point during Exitus’s anxiety attack.
Exitus gathered his bag of thrift store items and slid out of the car.
The Slammer was a small building as far as brothels-cum-jails-cum-motels went, though no less imposing in its stature than, say, a phial of deadly toxin.
He wondered if his room was going to be a jail cell, complete with iron bars and slamming metal door.
He wondered if he was ever going to be able to keep all of these Wronki citizens straight, he was meeting so many of them, and so many of them women. The town was like a microcosm of the world’s population. He’d read somewhere, on the back of a pamphlet for a medi-spa, that the world was becoming more decidedly female, which made sense; all humans begin as females. Of course, those people at the medi-spa might have been lying in order to create profit.
Noelle Akkaya, proprietor of The Slammer, was settled at the face of the building, tending to the final throws of the vegetable garden before autumn tightened its death grip. She was a round, pleasant-looking woman of Spanish decent. Or perhaps Italian.
“Merhaba!”
Or, C.) Neither of the above.
Noelle set down her trowel beside a wicker basket filled with vegetation, pulled off her lime green paisley gardening gloves, and rose to her feet. She strode over to her visitors, calling “Merhaba!” once again. She was smiling stiffly, though not at Exitus. Noelle seemed to be pretending that, for the moment, Exitus was an invisible being.
“Bu nedir?” she said, then: “What is this, calling me and telling me that I must put a killer in my hotel?” She sounded Indian. “Why is he not in jail?”
Officer Welsh smiled softly, as if about to point out the fact that The Slammer had quite apparently once been Wronki’s jail. Instead, he said: “There is nothing to prove he’s done a thing wrong, apart from defy our Homelessness Law.”
“So put him away for that! I don’t want him here. Lidia called me and—”
“Excuse me?”
Noelle’s fierce dark eyes, the complete antithesis to her cheery build, swung to Exitus. He lowered his head and backed away toward the police car.
“Lidia has a tendency to overreact to things, you know that.” Officer Welsh was either standing up for Exitus or—and more likely—he desperately wanted to rid himself of the burden of carting the kid around.
“Üzerinde tepki? A boy was killed in the diner, Eugene. Things like that don’t happen here—at least not until he showed up.” That word, ‘he’, was spoken with such effect that it created an image in Exitus’s head of that word wearing a carefully knit sweater of boric acid.
He stepped further back from Noelle; if The Slammer still had its solitary confinement cells, there was not a single doubt in his mind that she’d throw him in one and conveniently misplace the key.
“What kind of person drives around in a hearse, anyway?”
“My uncle Mort—”
That look again.
Exitus hid his hands in the pouch of his sweatshirt, pet his bar of soap as he had done back at the diner. He felt ill. He wondered how that person could have done it, killed a man, without feeling any strong emotion willing him to do something a little less drastic and bloody. How could someone beat in someone’s head like that? How could they stand the sight of… the smell of….
There was a sudden burst of static from Officer Welsh’s shoulder, a wall of noise which knocked into the group. All fell silent.
Exitus watched as Officer Welsh pressed a button on his walkie-talkie and leaned into his left shoulder.
“Go ahead.” The officer spoke rather gravely.
His words were met by another harsh burst of static and a few codes and numbers Exitus did not understand. He gathered that what was being said was not good, however, for Officer Welsh turned a peculiar shade of green. In fact, at that moment he closely resembled the complexion of Officer Adrian Cassidy when told Adam had been killed.
“10-4.”
Officer Welsh sighed deeply, returned his hand to his equipment belt.
“Noelle?”
“Evet?”
“See that Mr. Quick gets settled.”
Noelle looked aghast. “Yerleşmiş? Yerleşmiş! You’re not leaving him alone with me.”
Officer Welsh looked pained, much like Exitus had seen when Uncle Mort had that hateful kidney stone.
The policeman took Noelle by the arm and gently pulled the innkeeper aside. Beside the tomatoes and leaf lettuce, the latter waving precociously in the Dead Fall breeze, Officer Welsh spoke to Noelle. The words were lost to Exitus, but the texture he could make out well. The conversation was rough as hemp, sharp as broken glass.
Noelle screamed, a shrill and abrupt sound which startled a flock of small brown birds from a nearby tree. The innkeeper wailed again, her small hands at her mouth and words silken with grief falling to the hardening ground.
“Tanri cenneti bize tüm korumak,” she said—or so Exitus thought; he’d never been one for foreign tongues. He had enough difficulty with English. Whatever she said, Noelle repeated herself a second time, a third.
Officer Welsh patted her on the shoulder, shaking his head. He raised his head to Exitus before leaving him and the innkeeper alone on the front lawn of The Slammer.
