Page 20 of Violent Possession

I open the minibar. I grab one of those little hotel vodka bottles and weigh it in my hand. Cold, small, perfect for a projectile or a shiv. I press it to my forehead, listening to time pass.

Ten minutes. Punctually. Two light knocks.

“Room service,” a muffled voice says.

A lie. I didn’t order a damn thing.

I hold the vodka bottle, position my body behind the door, press my ear against it, and listen to the sound of a key turning in the lock. Of course. The room isn’t mine, never was. The hotel is theirs, or at least, the entire floor is. The handle turns slowly. When the door opens four inches, I make my move: I shove it with all my might, grab the arm of whoever is entering, and pull them into the room.

I advance, using my body weight to pin him against the hallway wall. My left hand grabs his throat, and I raise the vodka bottle, ready to smash his skull.

The man lets out a scream that dies in a wheeze. He’s a middle-aged guy, with glasses, wearing a wrinkled white lab coat and holding a medical bag that fell and burst open, scattering gauze and vials across the carpet.

“Doctor! I’m the doctor!”

I maintain the pressure for a few extra seconds, just to watch the panic in his eyes. This guy just looks like he’s about to piss himself. He’s probably legit.

I let him go. He slides down the wall to the floor, coughing and gasping, trying to gather his things with trembling hands. If he were a hitman, he would have reacted by now. If he were a cop, he would have drawn his gun. If he were crazy, he would have bitten me.

(A small part of me is disappointed he didn’t.)

“Go on, do what you have to do,” I order.

He obeys. He sets up his station on the bed and signals for me to sit like a dog being told to stay. While he cleans the blood from my stump, the antiseptic sting barely registering, I break the silence.

“Who sent you?”

The doctor flinches without taking his eyes off my wound. “The investor.”

I roll my eyes. “Does this guy have a name, or should I just call him Daddy Warbucks?”

The doctor’s mouth clamps shut. Got it.

“The guy I beat,” I continue. “The one with the face full of my arm. Is he alive?”

He nods quickly. “Yes. Multiple facial fractures, a severe concussion... he’ll need reconstructive surgery. But he’s alive. Stable.”

“Shame,” I mutter.

He decides, wisely, to pretend he didn’t hear me. He begins to stitch the torn skin with the precision of someone who’s donethis under pressure before. He says nothing more, asks nothing more. He just works.

When the doctor is finished, he packs everything up with impressive speed, hands me two vials—one of painkillers, another of antibiotics—and leaves in a near run. I don’t thank him, don’t tell him to go fuck himself. I just let him go.

When the door closes, the silence returns. Is someone waiting for me to do something? You don’t stitch a person up just to kill them later, do you?

I stand up. My vision is still spinning, but I ignore it. I stumble around the room, looking for anything. A clue, an answer. Some hidden message in the pattern of the paintings on the wall, or a microphone hidden in the light switch.

I search everything.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

Except there’s a smoke detector on the ceiling, but it has a black dot, almost invisible, in the middle of the lens. A glassy glint. A hidden camera. It’s not a small one, not state-of-the-art. It’s old, looks like it came from a cheap spy kit. But it’s there, working.

I smile, because it has to be it, and they didn’t even bother to hide it well. I look closer—in the frame of the painting above the bed, there’s a pinhole. Another camera. On the flat-screen TV, the infrared sensor is another disguised lens. And on the digital clock next to the bed, one more. They’re everywhere. All pointed at me.

I think about putting on a show. Jerking off, making obscene gestures, pissing on the carpet—but the performance is wasted if the audience is bored, and I can only imagine the poor bastard on the other side of the screen, sentenced to watch me breathe for the next eight hours.

I stop inches from the black screen of the TV. I stare into the lens, see my reflection, and press my face against the cold plastic. My breath fogs it up. I poke the camera. I smile at it.