Page 9 of Too Many Beds

T he rain got to be too much about an hour north of Nashville, so we pulled off the highway near Bowling Green in Kentucky. I figured it was safer to steer clear of the bigger hotel chains, since they’d want a credit card for incidentals. By now, Avi had probably realized what’d happened and was watching my accounts, but I still had plenty of cash.

The Blue Mountain Inn seemed as fine a place to lie low as any, so that’s where we went. It was one of those single-story motels where the office was in one building and the rooms were spread out in a big U-shape behind it. Since the motel was empty, the attendant said we had our pick of the place and gestured to the wall of keys before disappearing into the back like he couldn’t be bothered to pick rooms for us. I grabbed two random keys from the wall and tossed one to Jasper, who caught it.

Then I had a thought. If Avi’s goons somehow tracked us, they’d know exactly which rooms to search to find us, since only those keys were missing. So I grabbed a bunch of other keys off the wall at random, passing half to Jasper and keeping the other half for myself.

My pants jingled, weighed down by all the keys, as I walked down the line of doors to select one at random. The rain hadn’t really let up, but it didn’t bother me. It took a lot more than a little rumble in the sky to make me jump.

Jasper, though, was a mess. Ever since he shot Laurent, he’d been jumpy. Guess I couldn’t blame the guy. It was his first kill.

First time I shot a guy, I threw up. That was mostly because I was stupid and hadn’t realized what a twelve-gauge would do up close like that. Anybody would throw up if they got brain matter splattered all over them.

It was one of the reasons I didn’t fuck with guns anymore. Too messy, too regulated, too mundane. This was America. Every-fuckin’-body had a gun. I wasn’t going to make a name for myself doing what everybody else did. So I thought I’d be smart, figure out ways to get my targets to do most of the work for me. I’d sneak into a smoker’s house and turn on the stove burners, let the gas seep in so that when he went to light up… BAM. Instant fireball. Take out the trash and the evidence in one move. It was fucking beautiful.

Except Avi said I couldn’t do it the same way all the time or people would catch on, so I had to keep getting inventive. I watched, learned, and waited for opportunities to present themselves. Most people were so fucking oblivious to all the dangerous shit they did all the time. It made my job easy. A shove into busy traffic. Cut some brake lines. Slip peanut powder into their protein powder and steal his epipens. Every fucking time, it looked like an accident, but people knew it was me.

I made it look easy, but it was a lot of hard fucking work.

Lazy Ducaux my ass.

But Jasper wasn’t like me. He was a good kid, even when he was being bad. Worst thing he’d ever done before he pulled that trigger was stitch up killers like me and keep his trap shut about it. He wasn’t rotten to the core like the rest of us.

It was why I liked him. He gave me hope that there was still some good in the world.

Footsteps scraped along the sidewalk behind me, and I came to a stop. Without turning around, I knew Jasper was right behind me. Of course he fucking was. He was like a lost puppy, always following me everywhere. Except I wasn’t a fucking dog person. My heart was too black for anyone sane to want any part of that, even man’s best friend.

“You know you don’t have to follow me, Jasper.” I finally turned around and dammit, the kid was standing out in the rain like a half-drowned rat, his arms wrapped around him. How was I not supposed to feel like shit when he was just so damn sad?

A good man would’ve offered some comfort, or at least a distraction. Maybe a couple of beers and a shoulder to cry on.

But I wasn’t a good man. I was barely a man.

“I wasn’t,” he lied and dug around in his pocket to pull out a random key. “I’m just looking for room…” He glanced at the key. “…fourteen.”

“Try about five doors back the way you came.”

“Oh.” He frowned down at the key before turning to go.

He shouldn’t be alone , I thought. No one should be alone on a night like tonight. Not when the blood on his hands was still fresh and his mind was a labyrinth of unexplored horrors.

After my first kill, my old man beat the shit out of me for tracking blood on the carpet. Then he drank until he passed out, and I snuck out the upstairs window to go drink myself stupid at Avi’s house. Avi was the one who helped me through it. He’d helped me through a lot of things.

And then that dumb fucker fell into bed with Laurent, and things were never the same.

I shook the thought away. I was in no place to provide any comfort or wisdom to Jasper, and I had a feeling he’d be a sad drunk. I didn’t want to see him cry, so I turned and went to the room at the far end of the row.

The room was cramped, and the décor dated. There were two queen beds separated by a worn nightstand, and a TV that had seen better days. The air inside reeked of desperation and month-old cigarette smoke. Yet the sheets were clean when I pulled back the comforter and there were no signs of bedbugs, which was more than I could say for a lot of shitholes I’d stayed in. It wasn’t the fucking Ritz Carlton, but it’d do for a stopover.

Thunder growled outside, the storm growing closer. As I went to turn up the unit throwing dusty, musty air into the room, I stole a glance outside. Sheets of rain sprayed the parking lot, one after another, while the wind howled. The next clap of thunder rattled the glass in the window, and I wondered just how much force it’d take to break it.

As angry as the sky seemed to be, this storm was nothing compared to the hurricanes we got down south. I was a boy when Katrina rolled through and drowned the whole city. It was because of that storm I’d gotten involved with the Fortiers to begin with. Big Boss Remy Fortier was one of the good ones. While the politicians in Washington threw around the blame, him and his people got to work. They had us hammering nails into new homes and set us up with jobs painting walls and running errands in no time. He was the first one who looked at me with my bruised knuckles and my bloody nose and saw potential. The Fortiers might’ve been gangsters with bloody hands, but they were the stopgap New Orleans needed.

And for a little while, I was one of them. I was somebody .

Now I’m not , I thought, and let the thin curtain fall back into place.

I didn’t quite know what that meant yet, but I did know that if Avi and his guys ever caught up with me and Jasper, we’d be dead. I hoped I’d earned enough goodwill over the years that Avi would make it quick for Jasper. Me, I deserved whatever was coming.