Page 18 of So Deadly
David smiled, imagining little Jayce playing with his guinea pig, pretending to be the superhero team of soft-bodied creatures everywhere avenging themselves against things with fangs and barbs.“I’ll bet you had a lot of fun adventures with Captain Commodore.”
“I did.He was a good little piggie.Lived a long time too for a guinea pig.Eleven years.”
“Wow.That is long.”
“Yeah.I was fifteen when he died.I had a funeral for him in our backyard.I’m pretty sure the little gravestone I made for him is still out there.”His smile faded.“Sure, wish he was here now.I could use a superhero.”
David thought of Turk, Faith’s brave, strong superhero.He’d risked his life more than once to keep her alive.It occurred to him that for all his years as a vet, he’d never bonded that closely with an animal.He wondered what it would be like.Maybe if he rescued Sierra…
But that was for later.The job had to be done first before he thought about what came next.
If he survived to see what came next.Children could believe in heroic guinea pigs and eternal life.Adults had to bury their dead pets in the backyard and face the reality that heroes died just as often as villains and evil sometimes triumphed over good.
But you fought anyway.Whether you won or lost, you fought.And if fate decided that they were going to lose this fight, David hoped that Faith would think of him with pride and not just grief.
Still, as he pulled into the parking lot of their hotel, he prayed to whoever was listening that he would come home to her when this was all said and done.
CHAPTER NINE
Linda Carson wasn’t exactly pleased that she was now approaching unit ten to figure out what exactly had died and left the place smelling like a rotten sewer that was now growing some unique species of jackfruit genetically engineered to smell even worse than regular Durian.
Bobby in unit twenty directly above ten had a point though.Good Lord, this place reeked.
For the five hundredth time (give or take) Linda Carson asked herself why she had taken the job as manager of the New Acres Apartment Complex.First of all, New Acres was barely “acres”, and you had to include the easement behind the complex to push it over the two-acre mark.
Second of all, she was the manager of an apartment complex.That meant that she had to deal with every single complaint brought forward by all one hundred fifty tenants in sixty units in a forty-year-old building that spent its first sixteen years as a motel run by a particularly run-down branch of the Boston Mafia.Thatmeant that when Westmoreland Property Management purchased the property, the smell of cocaine, marijuana, and prostitution was literally baked into the walls.
So, what exactly did these tenants expect?
This was aside from the fact that half of them would be a week late with their rent and five or six just wouldn’t pay it.There would be a reminder, a warning, a notice, a final notice, a notice of adverse action, an eviction notice, and then a thirty-day eviction order.Then, probably four or five months after the rent was due to be paid, the police would finally show up to find the place trashed and abandoned.Linda would get chewed out by her boss, remind him that legally, there wasn’t jackshit she could do about it, get grumbled at by her boss, and then released to repeat the cycle.
Another month, another dollar.Before taxes.
Linda took a deep breath and knocked on the door.It occurred to her that choosing not to breathe was a short-term strategy unlikely to pay off in the long run, so she exhaled and resigned herself to inhaling Satan’s most rotten farts for a little while.
“Jesus Christ, Thomas.”
The tenant in ten, Thomas Webb, was the longest-tenured resident save for a seventy-five-year-old retiree named Dolores who’d lived in this complex since the day it opened and was rumored to have been the girlfriend of one of the mafia bosses who owned the place previously.Other rumors suggested she ran a brothel out of this place back when it was a motel, but that was information Linda filed in Shit I Don’t Care About somewhere between the name of Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend and the origin of the word malaise.
Thomas was also, oddly enough, the resident who ordinarily gave her the least trouble.Rent paid on the first of every month through the online app, no complaints or work orders of any kind, never had visitors, kept his 2009 Volkswagen Jetta in his own parking spot and never anywhere else, and didn’t interact with his neighbors enough to have friends or enemies.
Except now he’d gone and…
Linda’s hand paused over the door.Whydidit smell so bad in here.
A powerful urge to not find out gripped her.Excuses raced through her mind: not my business (it was), he promised he’d clean up (he hadn’t), just get over it, Bobby (if she had to live above this, she wouldn’t get over it either).
The rebuttals came right on top of the excuses, so Linda took another deep breath, promised herself she’d find another job (she wouldn’t), and knocked on the door.
“Tommy?It’s Linda.The manager.”
There was no answer.Linda sighed and rubbed her temples.“Tommy, we’re receiving complaints about an odor.Can you come talk to me please?”
No answer.
“Oh God, don’t make me go in there,” she said to herself.
But Thomas didn’t answer, and deep down, Linda knew she’d have to go in there.Someone did, and if she found what she was starting to expect she would find, she’d have to call nine-one-one and let them take care of it.
