“Pro tip, buddy: Never let a stranger tie you up.” He nudges the customer’s fleshy shoulder with the muzzle of… I guess it’s a silencer? I’ve only seen them in movies.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. “Really? Is that a pro tip? No fucking kidding.” I jerk my arms again, wincing at the pain. “I didn’tlethim do anything. He gets me on the bed and starts kissing me with more slobber than my old church’s youth pastor, and next thing I know he’s got these loops tightened around my wrists. Must’ve set them up before I got here or something. A little help, by the way?”
I don’t care if he’s holding a gun. Right now he’s the only help I’ve got. My phone is out of reach on the bedside table, and God knows how long it would take a hotel employee to find me.
“Right. Fine. Keep your pants on.” He glances down at my decidedly pants-less body and has the nerve to grin even wider. “Well. You know what I mean.”
“Is this funny to you?” It’s difficult to give a man with a gun an intimidating glare when you’re naked and trapped under a dead guy, but damned if I don’t give it my best effort. I’m bigger than him for sure. Which doesn’t mean shit right now.
The blond guy still has a gun. I’ve got raw wrists and a dead body. Oh, and this line of blood on my chest. It’s not bad-bad, but it’s still a knife wound. God knows when I got my last tetanus shot, but I think it was when I fell over a barbed-wire fence in middle school. Is that good or bad?
Blondie shoves the limp pile on top of me, shifting it so the client’s sightless eyes face me. I swallow against a sickening surge in my throat.
“Oh my God.” I’ve never seen anyone dead up close before. There’s a trickle of blood and God knows what else going down kind of behind his ear and into his neck. “If he drips on me, I’m going to fucking scream.”
“Definitely don’t do that. Geez, dead weight, am I right?” Another shove lands the body with a thump on the floor.
“Fuck’s sake.” I’m too grateful to breathe again to give him shit about his disgusting joke.
He unties me with surprisingly careful fingers; long and graceful, not that I’m paying attention.
Glad to be untied, that’s all.
Once I’m free, I go to rub my wrists and regret it immediately. I bite down on a yell, but a hissing noise escapes through my teeth. “Shit.”
“Yeah, that’s a bad idea. You want to clean those, or they might get infected.”
As soon as I’m off the bed, I run for my clothes, deciding to call it a day once I’ve got my suit pants and undershirt on. No way can I handle a jacket or dress shirt touching me right now. Although… Dammit, there’s blood seeping through the thin fabric.
I duck into the bathroom and do what the guy suggested, gently soaping my wounds and rinsing them with warm water. I’ll need to figure out how to do better later. The hand towel I press over my chest is only going to soak up so much.
It isn’t until I’m finished that I realize there’s still a dead man in the hotel room, and a man who somehow got into our room with a fucking gun.
“Wait, how did you get in here, anyway?”
When I leave the bathroom he’s on the floor, poking at the body with a gloved hand and pulling a wallet from one pants pocket.
He holds up a room key that has Premiere Hotel written on the front. “Master key. Borrowed it off a housekeeper.”
He opens the wallet, frowning at the driver’s license.
“Christopher Mercy. That gotta be fake. Right? Sounds fake.” He looks to me as if I’m going to actually answer him. As if it’s completely ordinary for two guys in a hotel room to be chatting over a dead body.
When he continues to look at me with an expectant raise of his eyebrows, I shrug and say, “He told me his name was John Smith.”
Blondie huffs a laugh. “Bet you get a lot of those.”
“I’ve only been doing this for a few months, but so far it’s about eighty percent John Smiths.” Too late I realize I’m twisting my borrowed suit jacket in my hands. The fabric’s all wrinkled now. Lucky thing Dean, the escort I borrowed it from, said it was too big for him.
Only now it’s occurring to me that this room isn’t the best place to be. I inch toward the door.
The blond guy puts his hands on his hips and nudges at the body with his toe, shaking his head. “Shit. Tough break on this dude.”
“What did he do, anyway?”
My question brings the blond guy’s attention back to me, which suddenly seems as if it might have been a mistake. His friendly smile drops away, and his eyes narrow. “Do?”
Right then is when my stomach growls, and it isn’t subtle. The guy I borrowed the suit from shoved some waffles at me this morning when I went to pick it up, but at this point breakfast was a long time ago.
