Another night on Gertrude has me waking up feeling a lot less humane about ruining Caspian Tiddleswich’s reputation.
I also might need to cool it on the copious drinks with CiCi on the nights before I hit the bricks at E-Z Storage.
It’s outlandishly cold outside today. I immediately regret my choice to dress like a normal person, thinking movement would keep me warm. Turns out sitting on my ass in a storage unit sorting through papers doesn’t do much for raising one’s body temperature. I pull my green gas station work gloves—acquired during my last visit to the mini-mart in a futile attempt to win over Rufus—over my fingerless ones and suck back the last dregs of my now-frigid bodega coffee.
It’s just a loose estimate, but I’m figuring there are seven billion boxes left in this godforsaken unit. And thanks to our discovery of Sir Tiddleswich last night, I open each new box with the same comforting feeling I assume bomb disposal officers feel when they get an unexpected UPS delivery at home.
When you add in my depressingly empty inbox with no news whatsoever on any potential job that could get me out of this soul-sucking freezer where dreams go to perish... I’m not feeling my most chipper today.
Maybe I’ll go see if Rufus is working again. Who knows—he could be the missing sunshine in my crappy day. I think I’m wearing him down.
“How’s it going?” a man’s voice sounds out.
I scream and instinctively fling my empty coffee cup toward the door of the unit.
It lands with a pathetic thlump at the feet of Charlie.
“Oh my god, you scared the heck out of me,” I wheeze, clutching at my heart.
“Thank goodness you were armed,” he says, nudging my fallen cup with the toe of his boot. “Rough neighborhood and all.”
I force out a little laugh. I’m not sure what to think about Charlie. He looks like someone’s friendly old grandpa, but I’ve been getting some serious undercover mob boss vibes from him since we met. Between his Storage King status, the fancy car, and the weirdly confident and unflappable posture he throws off—Charlie just has an air about him I can’t quite place.
He definitely strikes me as someone who sits with his back to the wall in a restaurant.
“Next time I’ll be packing Red Bull. You’ve been warned,” I say.
He snorts. “Just wanted to see how it’s comin’ along. The boys at the lot said you’ve been bringing by good loads every night.”
I smile. The landfill guys think I’m doing an okay job, at least. “Yep, I was on a roll until I hit this unit. It’s all papers. But I’m looking through them really carefully, just like you asked.”
He peers around me. “Finding anything good?”
My stomach lurches. He told me to look for anything that seemed valuable, but did he mean things like the escort receipts? Does he know what’s in here? What if he knows what I’ve got?
I left Caspian’s résumé tucked in the very bottom of one of my closet suitcases back at Tom’s apartment, but I feel like that damn thing is pasted on my forehead right now. A scarlet letter of extortion. I swallow a little too hard.
“Not so much.” I shrug, trying to sound casual. “Just a ridiculous amount of receipts so far. It’s kind of a paper-hoarding situation. But I’m flipping through everything just to be sure.”
He smiles, and his big gray walrus mustache pulls up at the ends. It makes him look like the Quaker oatmeal man. “Makes me glad I’m not paying you by the hour.”
I laugh because, honestly, what the hell else am I going to do?
Very really going to do a quick internet search on Charlie tonight, just to see if he’s ever been connected to people sleeping with the fishes in any way.
“I’ll let you get back to it,” he says. “I just stopped by to pick up this week’s payments from the deposit box at the gate and wanted to see how it’s going. Keep up the good work.”
“Thank you. I’ll sure try.”
Charlie taps the empty coffee cup with his toe once more, then turns around and heads back to his Lexus. I can’t decide if I’ve just now noticed how potentially scary he is, or if it’s the guilt of what CiCi and I have been doing in this unit that’s got me so on edge.
Suddenly I’m not in the mood to mess with Rufus, either.
I sit back down on a box in the middle of the unit and get back to filtering through invoices. CiCi has been texting me all morning demanding I look out for other fancy names, because she thinks it will be more fun to catch someone who isn’t an actor. And by more fun, she thinks I’ll actually agree to sell the person out.
Despite my insistence on morality, if I found, say, a belligerent Secretary of State on an invoice, I’d be really damn tempted. There isn’t much I wouldn’t do right now to get the feeling back into my legs. It is wicked cold.
I wonder how it would work. Would CiCi email TMZ, and then we’d have a check in a week? Because if I could get out of here... I’m pretty close to selling out my own mother.
That’s horrible. I wouldn’t. Probably.
And I don’t think I would be able to just walk away without finishing the job I signed up for with Charlie. I made a promise, and I stick with my promises.
Even if that promise is horrible and freezing and slowly trampling my will to live.
Picking up a sorted box, I waddle over to Brutus and hoist it inside. If I did make a lot of money from selling out Tiddleswich, my first priority is securing a place to put my mattress and sleeping on it for days and days.
I wriggle back into the middle of the unit and pick a new box. I fight a quiet, but very real, urge to set it on fire just to get myself warm.
This box isn’t invoices. Nor is it résumés. Thank everything. I want to get back to all the boring, unidentifiable paperwork.
I pick up a page and start reading.
#1 STANDARD ESCORT FEE: $50/hour
#2 ALL-INCLUSIVE MASSAGE: $100 for 60 minutes
#3 SNUGGLING: $100 for 60 minutes
#4 GIRLFRIEND/BOYFRIEND EXPERIENCE—An evening with the escort of your choice doing those things couples do: $350
#5 THREE IS NEVER A CROWD—You and your significant other with the escort of your mutual choosing: $500
#6 ROLE-PLAYING—Act out your deepest fantasies with the escort of your choice: $400
“Oooooooooh my god,” I whisper to no one. It just keeps going and getting more and more frighteningly specific.
I quickly take my phone out and ignore the fifteen new texts from CiCi, take a picture of the escort services, and send it her way.
Not three seconds later, she texts back: DON’T. FUCKING. MOVE. I WILL BE RIGHT THERE.
And right here, she is. In less than the usual twenty minutes, even. Somehow, her enthusiasm has managed to bend the laws of space and time.
“Gimme, gimme, gimme!” she squeals, glomping into the unit. I’ve already moved on to another box, but I point to the stack of menus and she dives right in. “Oh my god. This is amazing. Wait—people pay for cuddling?”
“Sometimes you just really need a hug, I guess,” I say, shrugging.
She looks up at me. “Do you need a hug? Am I being a bad friend?”
“Do I have to pay you a hundred bucks an hour for a hug?”
She scoffs. “Two hundred. I’m high-end, cupcake.”
Laughing, I drag another box off to throw into Brutus. “You know, I’m actually making progress in here today. I might get this unit done before my hair goes gray.”
“See? That’s the right attitude,” she says, barely paying attention to anything but the paper in her hands. “Wait. You can hire an escort for role-playing? Role-playing what?”
My face squinches up. “Naughty nurse? Sexy maid? I’m thinking any of the usual Halloween costumes they sell for women would work.”
CiCi slaps the paper down on her lap. “You know, that’s a good point. Why are all of our costumes things like ‘Slutty Supreme Court Justice,’ but all the guy costumes are frickin’ Captain America with extra muscles sewn in?”
“We should write our congressmen about it.”
She nods, then perks up. “Oh! I spent the morning looking up Tiddleswich!”
“Don’t you have a real job?” I frown. “You’re going to get fired if you keep running away to help me find the companions of days gone by.”
“They can’t fire me—I’m awesome.” She snorts. “But okay. So this Tiddles-dude is actually all polished and cultured and Shakespearean. Like, actual Shakespeare. He’s been Hamlet and Othello and all of them. He’s even been nominated for two Oscars. He wasn’t super famous until the Poirot show, and now everyone is swooning over his cheekbones and manly voice.”
“Oooh,” I say, standing up to stretch. “He really does have a sexy voice. The cheekbones are just unfair, though.”
“Amen,” she says, scouring the menu again. “But from what I saw, he doesn’t have a girlfriend, never been married, isn’t a big tabloid guy. He doesn’t go clubbing so much as he drinks like a respectable British guy and swears a lot, but in that kind of endearing way. Not in the entitled asshole way.”
“So he’s not a Jared Leto?”
Her face crumples with resolute disappointment. “No. He actually seems like a really normal person. Outside the alien cheekbones, of course.”
“Of course.”
I settle back into sorting through boxes, and CiCi alternates between looking up potentially interesting names and actually doing her real job while sitting on stacks of escort résumés.
After a couple of hours, we take a break for lunch, hoofing it a few blocks until we find a little taco place with only three tables. As much as I suspect the questionable food safety of those tacos, I can’t deny that they were delicious. Even if we did eat them while standing outside in frigid winds.
When CiCi and I get back to the unit, she kicks back in the corner on a pile of boxes and gets back to work. I’m just dusting off my hands after flinging another sorted load of papers into the bed of Brutus when my phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Hi,” a man’s voice says. “May I speak with Clara Montgomery?”
“This is she.”
“My name is Michael Dunlop, from Feather Bound Publishing. You put in a résumé for an editorial position?”
I flail my free arm and dance in place. “Yes! Yes, I did. Thank you so much for getting back to me!” CiCi looks up, and I point excitedly at my phone.
“I’m doing preinterviews before we bring in our final potential applicants for in-person meetings. Do you have a few minutes to answer some questions?”
“I certainly do,” I say, pacing in the front of the unit.
He starts into his spiel about Feather Bound, and what they do, but I’m not listening as well as I should. I’m distracted by the sudden look of terror on CiCi’s face. I mouth the word What? at her.
“Don’t panic...” she whispers. “And don’t turn around.”
Naturally, I turn around.
There is a pigeon standing on the stack of boxes right beside me. Its little bird eyes are inches from my face.
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” I scream and scramble backward, tripping over god knows what and sending papers—and the pigeon—flying around the unit.
“I said not to turn around!” CiCi yells, stumbling over to me. She shrieks as the pigeon dive-bombs her head, and she lands on the floor next to me, flailing her arms. “What the hell is wrong with this bird!?”
“Get it out, get it out!” It’s flapping around the ceiling, trying to find something to land on or some way out or possibly plotting how to best peck out our eyes.
“I don’t fucking speak pigeon!” she hollers.
All I can hear is the sound of our terrified wailing, the fluttering of papers flying around me, and the wind-slapping sounds of the beast’s wings over our heads.
I drop my phone and grab a box lid. Waving it over my head, I try to guide the demon bird toward the entrance of the unit. CiCi grabs another lid, and after a solid minute of feathers and horror, the damn pigeon gets the gist and flaps back out into the gray sky.
We both stand there, clutching our box lids, panting, waiting for it to return.
“What. The hell,” CiCi gasps.
I shake my head and try to catch my breath. Out of the corner of my eye, I see my phone sitting on the cement floor.
“Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap!” I cry, diving for it. Hoisting it to my ear, I cry, “Hello? Mr. Dunlop? Hello?”
But the line is dead. The line is so very dead.