Page 46 of Room Serviced
“Libel, then.”
“Did you write anything down?”
“What?”
“Libel is written,” Zach explained, sounding very patient and not like he was ignoring the point he knew Max was trying to make just to fuck with him.
Max turned, stared at him, and wondered if you could microwave a person’s brain inside their skull with the power of your mind. You couldn’t. Zach sipped his beer and stared back, unaffected.
“You probably mean slander,” he finally said. “Slander is when you maliciously besmirch in speech.”
“Okay, then,” Max said, speaking slowly. “Are they going to sue me for slander?”
Zach sighed, propped one ankle on the opposite knee, and contemplated the ceiling because he’d been a difficult smartass since the moment Max had met him their sophomore year of college. Max considered, not for the first time, that he might have terrible taste in best friends.
“You know I’m not that kind of lawyer, right?” Zach finally said, instead of answering the question.
“I’m starting to wonder if you’re any kind of lawyer.”
“I work in estate planning! Go ahead, ask me about probate.”
Max sighed and crossed his arms in a way that, he thought, communicated You dickhead, I don’t have any questions about probate.
“They probably won’t,” Zach said, after a long pause, when he’d gotten bored of hassling Max. “Slander is pretty hard to prove, even when it’s way worse than this, and I don’t think they have much of a case. What are they going to say, that you drew a pentagram in their attic and then showed it to a quarter of a million people in order to hurt their business? People will love that shit.”
“They’re not gonna love the rats.”
“True,” Zach conceded. “But there aren’t any rats on the screen. I don’t think either of you even say ‘rat.’”
They didn’t, because Max had edited that out.
“It’s pretty clear what we’re getting at, though,” he said.
“Probably less clear than you think. Plenty of people won’t put two and two together,” Zach said. “The hotel will, for sure, and you’re probably not gonna get invited back. But other than that, I wouldn’t worry.”
“I just don’t want to get sued,” Max said, still pacing back and forth. His own beer bottle was three-quarters empty. “I can’t afford to get sued, and also if I got sued for rat-related slander, my job might start caring about my side hustle.”
Currently, the City of Sacramento’s Environmental Planning office couldn’t be bothered about his extracurriculars. Max didn’t want to find out if they’d mind him getting sued for slander. Probably not, but still: It paid the bills, let him take his vacation time whenever he wanted, and he liked it well enough.
“Look. In my professional opinion,” said Zach, who was not that kind of lawyer, “I think you’ll probably get a pissed-off phone call at first. Then they’ll get interest and money from the sort of people who want to experience a haunted air-conditioning unit, and it’ll be over.”
Max drained the rest of his beer, thought about this for a second, and then nodded.
“It’s not obvious that the peanut butter footprints are even from rats,” Zach said, but he leaned forward, frowned at the laptop, and hit a button. “Total deniability, probably.”
Max heard his own voice coming from the computer just as his phone buzzed in his pocket, which was a relief. If he watched this video again, he was going to lose his mind.
Sloane
I’ve been asked twice today and once yesterday if we took a ceramics class
Max
what
Sloane
and got felt up by a ghost? Like in the movie?
