Page 42 of Room Serviced
“I’ve been recording.”
“How much editing do you do?”
“I usually end up cutting a lot, but it’s worth it,” he said, still contemplating the AC, sun blazing against his back. It had been cooler that morning, with the marine layer blanketing the hotel, but it had burned off. “I end up capturing a lot of interesting surprises that way.”
“Makes sense,” she said, and tilted her head. For a second, Max thought she was leaning in toward him, and he turned toward her, heart thumping. Instead, she pointed. “It looks like someone pried up that corner and now there’s a hole.”
Max sighed. “Maybe it was a ghost,” he said, and he hadn’t actually expected the air-conditioning to be haunted, but he’d hoped for something a little more mysterious, at least.
“Maybe,” Sloane said cheerfully as he crouched in front of the unit to get a better look. This half of the unit was a gray metal box, less than a foot square, with a fan in the middle. The fan had a metal grate over it. The whole thing protruded maybe five inches from the wall, just about as sleek and unobtrusive as these things got. The bottom corner of the metal casing was bent out just enough for a small hole. It was nearly unnoticeable, unless you were looking for it.
Max grabbed the camera off the table and gave it a good look. “Unfortunately,” he told it. “There are several kinds of small animal that could make it through this hole.”
“Rats,” offered Sloane. “An octopus.”
Max moved the camera to look at her.
“They can fit through really small spaces,” she said, shrugging.
“My colleague thinks that this AC unit has an octopus problem,” he told his eventual audience.
“I’m brainstorming!” she said, laughing. “Maybe it’s an octopus ghost. What about that?”
He swung the camera back to the task at hand, showing the AC again, and thumbed over one of the screws holding the metal casing in place. “It seems that the spectral octopus haunting this appliance used some sort of tool to unscrew the casing,” he said. “And wasn’t very precise with it.”
“An octopus wouldn’t be.”
“How do you know?”
“Call it a guess,” Sloane said, and then she was there, behind Max, her chin nearly touching his shoulder. “That looks recent, too.”
“It does,” he agreed, and he wanted to lean back against her, let her drape herself over his back. Something. “I’m gonna go grab a screwdriver.”
“Should we be taking apart the air-conditioning unit?” Sloane called after Max as he grabbed his travel tool kit and brought it back outside. On the way, he triple-checked that the AC was turned off. Ideally, he’d flip a breaker as well, but he’d have to settle for being careful.
“Probably not,” he said, and got to work.
A few minutes later, Sloane held the camera while he carefully pulled the metal casing away and settled it gently on the floor of the balcony, being as quiet as he could. Somewhat belatedly, he wondered if anyone in the courtyard was going to get suspicious, but San Diego was plenty big enough of a town that people could mind their own business.
Inside, the unit was divided into two compartments. One had wires going in and out and was mostly wrapped in some sort of black rubber. The other had a fan surrounded on three sides by compressor coils. It was currently off.
Wedged into one side, out of the reach of the fan blades, and awkwardly folded in half, was something made of cardboard with bright yellow plastic at one end. The plastic was covered in something Max very much hoped was peanut butter.
“What,” Sloane said as she crouched down behind him, “the fuck?”
Chapter Twelve
Obviously Sloane hadn’t been expecting to find a ghost, octopus or otherwise. She hadn’t been expecting to find anything at all. Some part of her brain insisted that Max had engineered the whole thing and then removed the evidence while he was alone in her room last night. If she’d been more awake at three in the morning, she probably would have said something, but it hadn’t even occurred to her until about thirty minutes ago, which was well after she’d slept in his bed and then fucked him again.
It was possible, at least. Sloane hadn’t been sure it was probable. Yesterday—no, two days ago—he’d held her on the library mezzanine while she shook from claustrophobia, and she couldn’t quite square that person with someone who’d purposefully scare the hell out of her in the middle of the night.
“Is that…” Max was saying now, staring in total bafflement at the inside of the AC unit. “What the hell is that?” He sniffed gingerly. “Is that peanut butter?”
“I think so,” Sloane confirmed. It was mostly on the…whatever it was… But it was also dotted all over the interior bottom of the unit, like something had tracked it around. Max reached toward it, but Sloane caught his wrist, nearly tumbling them both into the unit face-first.
“Sorry,” she said. Her face was in his shoulder, so she sat up. “We should probably use gloves. You never know.” Sloane actually wanted a full hazmat suit, but she was pretty sure Max hadn’t brought one.
Minutes later, finally gloved-up, Max carefully removed the mystery cardboard, holding one corner between two fingers. Sloane would have preferred tongs or something—she had a bad feeling about rats—but she took what she could get.
