The Great Below

The Hotel Job: Part 2

Alex couldn't get the door closed fast enough. He was pushing at it, back turned, when Nick fired a suppressed round into the target and then crouched low to muffle him with the handkerchief from his lapel pocket. "What are you...?"

Nick glanced up at him, one hand gripped tight over Kline's reddening mouth.

"This was supposed to be my job."

Nick shrugged. "If you think you're getting any better at this, I have bad news for you."

Alex glared, opening his mouth to argue when the sound of splashing water came from the bathroom. A voice floated in from around the corner and farther inside the hotel room. "Who was it?" it asked.

Alex took a breath and stepped over Kline's limp arm to turn the corner. In the bathroom door frame stood a slim young man with a hotel towel wrapped around his waist. Alex raised the Walther and he needed time, just a little more time. He tried to guess who the man in Kline's hotel room might be; if he had any option but to shoot him. There was only a moment to process this new development and then the man in the towel lunged for the courtesy phone on the bedside table. Alex squeezed the Walther's trigger twice, the recoil pushing the second shot into the man's throat and he stumbled backward, collapsing, head bouncing off the porcelain tub.

Alex lowered his gun but wasn't ready to let go of the trigger yet, in case anyone else planned on jumping out at them. "What in the hell is going on here?" he asked. Nick rose from Kline's prone body in the entrance and approached, leaning over Alex's shoulder and looking into the bathroom at a new mess.

"I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, the first half of a Harle-queer romance novel."

Alex approached the bathroom, wondering if he'd missed some obvious clue, and that was when his tunnel vision receded and details came back into focus. There were lit candles on the bathroom counter top, one a few inches from his own hand, which was vibrating and clung to the edge. Steam rose from a full bathtub. Florence + the Machine poured from the tiny speaker of a cell phone, perched atop a pile of folded towels.

"Wipe everything you touched and let's go," Nick told him.

Alex fumbled the Walther back under his jacket and thanked God when he didn't shoot himself with it. He took his own cotton handkerchief and wiped the spot where he'd rested his hand on the bathroom counter. He had to take great care in stepping over the bodies, in not dragging any part of his shoes through the blood. As they returned to the hallway, Nick took the clean edge of his handkerchief and moved the do not disturb sign to the outer handle.

Stony silence in the elevator, going down.

Nick said, "It was still kind of your job after all."

"If you're suggesting that this went well because I killed an innocent man, please stop talking."

"Dominic wouldn't call that an innocent," Nick reminded him. "He would call him collateral damage."

"What would you call him?"

"Well, if I didn't know you so well, and had just walked in on it fresh like the cops will, I'd probably call it a hate crime." Nick reached into his jacket to retrieve his cell phone.

"Wait," Alex commanded, looking for his own phone. "I'll call Dominic." At least one part of tonight's job had gone the way he wanted it to, and Alex needed the small glory of calling their boss and telling him the good news. Nick would understand; his success rate was far higher. Plus, Nick wasn't the sort of guy who always felt he had something to prove.

The phone began to ring and Alex simultaneously hunted in his pockets for a cigarette, realizing how desperately he needed one. He found the crumpled pack of Camel Menthol Lights in his pants pocket and removed the last one, relishing the familiar scent of the box. It would have been yet another lost sensory detail, if his panic hadn't begun to dissipate. Dominic's phone went to greeting-less voicemail.

Nick watched him, gesturing for Alex to take the lead when the elevator doors opened to the lobby. "We'll be home soon," he said. "Don't worry about it."

And as the cold night air hit them and they returned to Nick's sedan in the parking lot, Alex was painfully aware that success didn't feel as good as he'd hoped. Still, an overwhelming relief washed over him. He would never say it out loud, even to Nick, but he was just so damned grateful that the surprise lover they'd encountered in Kline's room wasn't a girl.