Moonlight City Drive 3

1: Day of the DeadThe Vertigo Motel’s flashing sign outside its glass front doors made the vacant lobby pulsate with neon red, then blackness, then neon red, then blackness … The shadows from the discarded reception desk and the overturned chairs joined in a staccato dance to the beat of the light. Smith bent over and gripped the back of a toppled chair to set it upright. Dust plumed from underneath the legs when he got it situated. He glanced behind him and noticed his single line of shoeprints embedded in the dust atop the floorboards leading from the front door to where he currently stood. He had no recollection of entering the motel, nor how he had gotten here in the first place. The faint buzzing from the neon sign made it difficult for him to collect his thoughts and to recall what had happened to him. He coughed, and the sound ricocheted down the barren first-floor hallway. Noise from his own body and not the incessant buzzing from the sign outside jolted his brain into overdrive. He rubbed his palm over the shirt at his chest as he remembered the tightness in his heart he had felt just moments earlier. “Am I dead?” he asked the empty motel. A Polaroid photograph drifted downward from somewhere in the ceiling, gliding, like a feather, until it landed half on the toes of his right shoe and half on the dust-blanketed floor. The picture was of him, standing in front of this motel years earlier—an era long forgotten to the stains of time. It resembled the same photograph Eva/Anya had given him in his PI office so many years ago of George Covington standing in front of the Vertigo. Only this time, Smith was in George’s spot. Smith pocketed the Polaroid and noticed a crumpled package of Smolens cigarettes on the reception desk. He grabbed the pack and peered inside; it was filled with bits and pieces of something that may have been the semblance of a cigarette in another lifetime. He threw the package onto the floor and sighed. A high-pitched scream erupted from behind the first door on the right, and Smith stumbled backward. Then silence. He strained his ears, tilting his face to the left, toward the hallway, and swallowed hard. He scanned the floorboards in front of him leading to the first-floor rooms and realized the dust was devoid of prints, other than his. No one has walked these floors in decades. “Help me!” a woman screamed. “Is someone out there? Please be out there!” Smith dipped his hand into his pocket to retrieve the Polaroid for another glance before he decided his next move. However, his fingers first grazed something round and hard. As he removed his hand, a shopworn pocket watch attached to a chain revealed itself. “What in tarnation?” he mumbled. It had been lost forever. “I can hear you out there! Please help me!” Smith stepped forward, creating a new set of prints in the untouched and age-old dust. “Please hurry! I think he’s dead. I think … I think he had a heart attack.” Smith halted, gripping his shirt over his chest. His knees buckled, and he collapsed to the floor, sending a wave of dust against the walls. Is she talking about me? Am I having the heart attack? Wasn’t I having a heart attack earlier? The image of his granddaughter Melissa jumping from her first-floor bedroom windowsill as the police and his son barged into her bedroom flashed through his mind. Smith put both palms on the floor and pushed himself upright. “Are you f*****g going to help me? Hello?” “Yes …” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. “I’m coming.” Smith shuffled toward the first door in the hallway and tried the knob. It turned with ease, and he swung open the door. A woman with a gag wrapped around her chin, where she had spit it out, and half-naked in tattered clothes sat against the far wall, chained to the steam heater. One leg was bent underneath her, and the other laid straight forward. She jerked her head from side to side to flit her brown hair from her sweaty face. She raised both arms to highlight the handcuffs. “You got a key to this?” Smith squinted and peered at her from the corner of his eye. “Who are you?” “Who are you?” Smith shook his head. “How long have you been here? There are no prints on the—” “How long have you been here?” “Good gravy, woman. I’m asking the questions here. You’re the one tied to a radiator who needs the help.” She scrunched her lips and nodded once in agreement. “I followed my husband here. He was f*****g that b***h from the tennis club. She’s, like, a freshman in college or something. Works there only on the weekends. College kid, hands out towels to all the yuppies. I knew he had a thing for her. And I had suspected he was bringing her here to bang her for quite a while now.” Smith scratched an itch over his right eyebrow as his brain fell right back into his old detective thinking. Some tricks just couldn’t be forgotten or ignored. He stepped farther into the motel room. “Do you know where we are?” “Are you asking because you’re confused or because you’re trying to see if I’m a nutjob?” Smith eyed the water-stained ceiling. “Maybe a little of both.” The woman rocked her body left to right to readjust her angle against the radiator. “The Hawthorne.” Smith’s eyes flitted from the ceiling to her tear-stained face. “The Hawthorne?” “f*****g Hawthorne Hotel. In Salem, you dunce.” Smith took a step backward, enough to peek around the doorjamb and survey the hallway. “Um, look, doll. This might be hard to swallow, but we’re in the Vertigo Motel. In Vegas. But …” He furrowed his brows as he studied the chained woman again. “But that burned down decades ago.” “Either you’re smoking the crack pipe or you’re senile, old man.” Smith took a handful of quick steps toward her and stopped. “Humor me for a moment. What do you see around you? What does the room look like?” The woman chortled. “Sure, the hotel is beautiful and a tourist trap, but I think their rates don’t match their service. It’s certainly pretty to look at. I completely get why he takes her here to f**k her. It impresses her. Mr. Always-One-Step-Ahead can play the bigshot, up-and-coming attorney to the little college girl. I’m sure she just swoons”—the woman exaggeratedly batted her eyelashes—“when he pulls up in that new, red T-top IROC of his. So, what are you anyway? Room service or something? You’re too old to be a bellhop. Took you long enough to hear me.” “Wait a minute. Always one step ahead? And he drives an IROC?” “That’s what he says his catchphrase will be when he gets his own practice. It’s a play on his last name. His is spelled with two Ps. S-T-E-P-P. So are you gonna get me out of these—” “Your husband is Attorney Stepp?” “Ha! If you can call what he does being an attorney. More like a lying, cheating, sad excuse for a lawyer. Now can you please get these off me so I can give him a taste of his own medicine?” She raised her arms and jiggled the cuffs. “Thinks he can beat me up, after I walk in on him and Ms. College Perky Titties. Before I leave, I’d like to speak with your manager. I want to file a formal complaint that I could be held in here, getting my ass whooped and screaming, and not a single one from your staff came to see if there was a problem.” Smith cleared his throat. “Yes, ma’am. Right away. I’ll get those removed and will find my manager posthaste.” “Damn straight, you will.” She harrumphed and proffered her wrists. “I hope you have bolt cutters or something.” “Yeah, because room service always stows a pair of bolt cutters for these kinds of situations,” he mumbled and walked farther into the room. A cat meowed loudly as it ran past the opened door to this room, and Smith startled. He turned in time to see its long black tail disappear from view at the corner of the doorway, heading farther down the hallway. Damn stray … He turned back to the woman, his heart pounding. “Let me ask you something. Are you married?” Smith scratched the back of his neck. “Yes.” “For a long time?” “We have grandchildren.” “I bet you would never do this to her—cheat on her, then beat the snot out of her when she caught you.” “Ma’am, I think we all have our own demons, in our own ways. Let me see how thick those cuffs are.” Smith approached the woman, noticing again how his tracks were the only impurities in the layers and layers of dust covering the floor. She raised her wrists above her forehead so he wouldn’t have to bend over to inspect their quality. “Hold on. Let me scoot up a bit.” She wriggled her waist and hips so her back straightened against the wall furnace. Smith grabbed the metal chain connecting the two cuffs and slightly tugged them closer to him. He felt the tautness of the connecting chain slacken, then he stumbled backward, still holding the chain but also the woman’s two arms, severed at the shoulders. The momentum spilled him to his back on the floor, and both her arms—still cuffed at the wrists—fell on top of him. “Look at what you f*****g did to my arms, you dickhead!” The woman, now free from restraints, rose. “It wasn’t enough that my good-for-nothing husband beat me up, but you have to take my arms!” She strode toward him and stopped directly over him. “I’m going to f*****g eat you alive, old man.” Smith raised his hands in defense—the woman’s arms flopping onto the floor next to him. As she leaned forward, her mouth now open for human feasting, her chin hit her chest and didn’t stop there. Her head rolled forward, disconnecting from her neck, and landed on Smith’s chest. He frantically swatted at the decapitated head and scooted backward to get away from it. The woman’s body crumpled to the floor, her gaze fixed on Smith. “I will eat your soul, you sonofabitch!” Smith spider-walked backward from the room and into the hallway. As soon as he was clear of the doorway, the door slammed shut on its own. He let his backside fall to the floor, giving his hands and feet a rest from crawling backward and upside down. He gripped his shirt over his chest again and focused on his breathing. “Help me!” the woman screamed from behind the closed door again. “Is someone out there? Please be out there!” The buzzing from the neon Vertigo Motel sign increased. Smith stuck fingers in both his ears to muffle the sound. He glanced across the lobby at the flashing sign and noticed all his footprints and any previous actions that made marks in the dust were gone—erased. The dust was pristine again, like a snow-covered field before anyone or anything trampled across it. “Yep, there’s your answer, Smith, you old fool. You are certainly dead, and this is a very real Hell.” He clambered to his feet, his old bones creaking and screaming for reprieve. “Help me!” a different person called out, not from the same room as Stepp’s wife. Smith glanced to the next door down the hallway. “Help me! Is someone out there? Please be there!” He tilted his head as he studied the door. The voice was familiar. But not one he had heard in what felt like forever. “I can hear you out there! Please help me!” Smith’s eyes widened as he stepped backward. “No. No. How could it be?” He glanced behind him at the front door to the Vertigo, calculating the distance and how long it would take him to reach the outside—that was if the motel would let him leave. “Why did you do it?” the woman asked. “We could’ve talked it out.” “Oh God,” Smith muttered. “Wendy, I don’t know what happened. I blacked out. I was suffering from a lot of blackouts during that time.” He inched toward the door as he yelled loud enough so she heard him through the door. “It crushed me when I came home and saw you two together in our bed! The next thing I remember, I was in my truck with a shovel, covered in blood, and you were buried somewhere!” The woman cackled. “You sure found it easy to move on afterward. Wynne seems like a nice piece of—” Smith growled as he closed the distance as fast as he could and barreled through the motel room door. On the bed lay Wendy, blood oozing from a hole in her forehead, a broken lamp on the floor. “Returning to the scene of the crime, honeybunches?” His dead naked wife cackled again, like the Wicked Witch of the West, and pointed. “Your expression is priceless.” Smith shook his head and shuffled backward through the door. “This isn’t real. This is just a dream.” “Or your own private hell,” Wendy added, sitting upright in the bed. “Here in the Vertigo, we all ride the carousel of truth. Truth!” Smith entered the hallway and glanced at the next door farther down the hallway, wondering what truth lay behind that door. And the door after that. And the door after that. “Mr. Arbuckle? Is that you out there?” A young girl’s tiny voice came from the room behind him on the opposite side of the hallway. Smith spun. “Oh God, no.” To the Covingtons, he had been Todd Arbuckle. “Mr. Arbuckle? Please help me if you’re out there. My skin burns, and my baby elephant nightgown smells like it’s burning.” Smith covered his mouth with his hand and gasped, tears welling in his eyes. “Rose … oh sweet little Rose. I’m so, so sorry.” “Please, Mr. Arbuckle! It’s starting to hurt, and I don’t know how to get down! Where’s Mommy? Just open the door so you can save me!” “Rose! Rose, honey! I’ll get some help! Just … Just hang tight!” Smith spun toward the lobby and galloped toward the front entrance. He passed the reception desk, and a quick movement from his peripheral vision caught his eye. The black-feathered wing of a vulture disappeared through the doorway to the back office, leaving a man standing behind the reception desk, his back turned toward Smith. Smith stopped, his heartbeat pounding in his ears, and reached into his pocket. He removed the Polaroid and set it on the desk. “I don’t know who you are or what this place really is, but I had nothing to do with Rose’s sacrifice! If you are in charge here or are the one creating these apparitions, I promise you that you’ll have no further problems from me.” The man behind the desk slowly turned to face Smith. Smith’s shoulders slumped, and he shook his head. “Oh, for Pete’s sake. You? So this is what Anya meant when she said she had one final gift for me. You’re to replace Tony.” Drool leaked from the corner of Stepp’s half-opened mouth. His chest cavity was devoid of anything—blood, tissue, muscle—from where Anya had ripped out his heart as revenge for his final act of indignity. Stepp swayed slightly, like a flower in a summer breeze. “So, you’re my new bantling. Wonderful. I don’t suppose you know how to get out of Dimension Vertigo and back to eighty-four, do you?” Stepp swayed, unblinking. “Didn’t think so. Oh, your ex-wife is in room one. I think she’d loooooove to see you again.” Stepp’s head slightly turned in that direction. “Looks like you and I have more in common than I originally thought. C’mon, twinkle toes. Let’s get out of—” Smith clenched his chest as he heard the beeping from a faraway machine and a sound that resembled someone using a cattle prod. The zap sounded again, and his back involuntarily arched while his limbs stiffened, then went limp. Afterward, he heard the ambulance siren and felt warm, human—alive—hands compressing his chest. “C’mon, Dad. Stay with us.” Travis …