Motel

The sun found the one crack in the blinds and inched it’s way up my body until it sat firmly on my eyelids. It’s the worst time to open your eyes in the morning, the piercing light like a launched spear straight from Apollo's hand into my retina. The sound of a sickly air conditioner is sputtering nearby, I was sure I had set it to “more cold” last night before I packed up and lay my head down. It was sounding like it had solidly landed on “barely alive with a slight chill.”

Motel rooms always felt like the necessary evil of my job. I’m a private detective, but not a highfalutin one that goes out and checks up on the rich and fancy. Nope, I handle real people with real questions they have no other way of finding out or solving. I have noticed there aren’t many detectives for the rich and greedy. I personally think it’s due to the fact that most well-to-do people just assume the worst of people and that they are in fact doing whatever it is they would hire me to find out. Sort of like an unspoken bond between them all, I don’t want anyone to know what I’m doing, so if you don’t go looking, I won’t go looking into your affairs. It’s the only thing that made sense to me anyways.

A repeating plunk sound from the sink pulled me out of my thoughts and back into the room. One would think that they would fix that, water can be expensive, but then again they hadn’t fixed the air conditioner, so why start now? It was a standard room with two small beds in it. A carpet that had long ago had a royal pattern on it, but now mostly boasted a thread bare pacing pattern in the room of where most people slowly lost their minds. There was a television in the room, but it basically gave you three scratchy channels and the audio kept cycling from too loud to near mumbled sounds at random intervals.

The door looked like it had been pried open, more than three times. Which made me wonder how many were the management trying to get in, and how many were “other” people trying to get in. Neither option made me feel any better, but most Motels were like this. They always felt like the toy that one abused as a kid, something you could just throw against the wall when you didn’t know what else to do.

The pièce de résistance of the room lay in the door in the back past the sink leading to the bathroom. I wonder sometimes if housekeeping cleans the rooms in these places, I never wonder about the bathroom. I swear they just run in, take the towels and used soap, if you get any soap that is, and throw new towels in. Most of them are more terrifying than horror movies. It’s a wonder there aren’t more horror movies set in motel bathrooms.

-V-