“It’s not often someone tries the whole ‘messing with your nose’ thing,” he says. “You’re a clever one, sport.”
Eddie eyes me for a long time, sizing me up. He’s thinking deep on something, but it’s tough to get a readon exactly what thatsomething is when his expressions are partially hidden behind those big, heart-shaped sunglasses. He steps a little closer, savoring the methodical invasion of my personal space.
My body is rigid, a coil ready to spring. I keep thinking that Eddie’s about to explain my whole plan back to me with a knowing smirk, to reveal he can sense when someone’s faking their commands. I’m ready for Eddie to call me a liar.
He clears his throat with a loud, rattling gurgle of mucus and shattered bone. “Your eyes are red,” he observes, then leans in close and gives me a sniff. “Hot sauce? Damn, that’s gotta sting. Hand it over.”
I follow his orders without hesitation, reaching in and extracting the bottle.
Eddie takes the tiny container, looking it over for a moment, then tosses it into the bushes. “One little bump won’t keep me out for long. If that were the case then the eighties would’ve beenrough,” he continues. “Don’t feel bad, though. I’ve got a lot more experience doing this than you do.”
I hold, waiting for something else, but Eddie’s next instructions are simple and unrelated. “You can move now. Follow me,” he says.
The tension settles as Eddie turns away.
I trail behind, not because I’m compelled to, but because—for the first time tonight—I’m actually one step ahead.
***
“I’m torn,” Eddie says. He’s leaning back in his chair with a mai tai in his hand, the beverage sloshing in a large tiki mug and sporting a little green umbrella that pokes out of the top. “On one hand, you really fucked things up for us. On the other, that was very entertaining.”
We’re sitting at the restaurant’s patio bar, chairs facing the motel pool but angled toward each other. There are four bodies laid out in various places across the cement deck, cold and stiff in their own sticky crimson puddles. An additional corpse is slumped over in the hot tub, barely visible from here, and yet another floats face down in the pool surrounded by a red haze.
Eddie is in a hurry tonight, but it seems this moment is important enough for him to slow down a bit. His casual, let-the-cards-fall-where-they-may demeanor remains, but I can tell he’s thinking much harder than before. He’s planning now, adjusting the flow of this evening’s festivities.
“It’s like, do I get everyone in their rooms to come out and help clean this up? Then send the whole place on a permanent vacation?” he muses. “That’s a lot of shit to keep track of. We don’t have time for that. We’ve probably got five more minutes before they dispatch another squad of officers to see what the hell happened.”
Eddie takes a long sip from his drink, sucking deep from a neon green straw. He finishes, then nods in my direction. “Tonight’s a mess, but it’s a fun mess. Right, sport?”
“No,” I reply. “It’s not fun.”
Eddie ignores this, playing with his straw for amoment. “You’ve gotta consider—is a whole motel disappearing overnight stranger than six cops shooting themselves in the head? Plus, we’ve got these swimmers cutting their throats. I mean, that’s abananascrime scene.”
“You don’t seem too worried about it,” I observe.
Eddie shrugs. “You’d be amazedwhat a man with my talent can get away with.”
This could mean a few different things, but something tells me Eddie’s not merely referencing his skill as a musician.
It’s hard to imagine the evidence it would take to trump his powers of influence in the court of law. Witnesses would change their story. Tapes would get erased. Mysterious accidents would plague every step of the process. Lawyers would start arguing for the other side.
Given the hedonistic decades he came up in, Eddie Michaels has a remarkably clean public image. As a superfan, I should know. At the same time, there were always whispers, rumors of strange encounters with fans that never got much traction. A few social media posts popped up, but they were swept away in the digital tides.
The front desk clerk strolls up from behind us, greeting Eddie and me as an impromptu server. “Are you enjoying your drink? Is there anything else I can get you?”
“This is actually … very, very good,” Eddie says, pulling back his tiki mug a bit so he can fully admire the tropical beverage. “I can’t believe you’re not a real bartender.”
“Thank you,” the clerk replies.
“Is all the security footage deleted?” Eddie asks.
The man nods. “Yes, sir.”
“You cleaned up everything else you might need to take care of? Fingerprints scrubbed and all that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No witnesses?”
