Gargantuan_ A Ruby Murphy Mystery - Maggie Estep [35]
“The car service is coming in twenty minutes,” Attila calls out from the living room.
“Okay,” I say, but nothing is okay right now. At first, the idea of going to a motel seemed adventurous in spite of the fact that we’re doing it to safeguard Attila from harm. Then, when Attila mentioned the motel in Sheepshead Bay that happens to be the place where Ed and I first slept together, it rattled me. I tried to get over it. I’m not, after all, doing anything wrong. I just don’t need or want reasons to think about Ed.
I start throwing clothes in a weekend bag, then trap the cats in the bedroom as I go into the hallway closet to get the carriers out. Cats are not travel enthusiasts and the sight of their carriers usually sends them darting under the furniture.
“You okay?” Attila asks. He’s sitting on the couch, looking at me.
“Yeah. Cats hate travel.” I try attributing what must be my obvious low mood to worry over the cats.
Attila’s not really buying it. “You don’t have to do this, Ruby. You can leave town and forget you ever met me,” he tells me, opening his vivid eyes wide.
“I doubt that very much,” I say, putting the carriers down and walking over to him. He reaches up, takes my left hand, and softly kisses it. “Good,” he says.
We look at each other for a long moment and I feel him reaching a place in me, a savage place filled with crippling lust and tenderness.
“I’ve got to finish organizing stuff,” I say after a few moments of thick silence.
Attila nods.
I move into the kitchen where I pack up cans of Pet Guard and two catnip mice. I also bring my tiny portable coffeemaker. It’s dangerous for me to leave home without it.
A few minutes later, I’ve loaded the reluctant cats into their carriers and Attila hoists Stinky while I take Lulu and my overnight bag.
THE WOODLAND MOTEL falls about twenty stars short of five. In fact, it’s barely a half step up from a hooker hotel. It’s a long tan vinyl-sided building gazing out over an ill-paved parking lot that butts up against the edge of bustling Linden Boulevard. Some of the room numbers are peeling off the doors and the two cars in the parking lot have seen better decades. East New York isn’t known for its swank accommodations but the one thing this dump has to recommend it is that it’s about halfway between Coney Island and the racetrack.
Attila pays the driver, then unloads the cats as I walk into the office to check in. There’s a large woman sitting behind a bulletproof window. She’s avidly reading TV Guide and doesn’t bother to look up when I walk in.
“Hi,” I say loudly, wondering if she can hear me behind the partition.
She frowns, knotting a pair of highly unnatural-looking black eyebrows before finally looking up. Her eyes are tiny and dark.
She lifts her multiple chins at me which I take to mean “what do you want?”
“I called earlier, Ruby Murphy?”
She sneers slightly, asks for payment and, after I’ve given her my forty-nine bucks, hands me a key.
“Thank you.” I smile at her. She frowns again and goes back to the TV Guide.
Attila is waiting outside, obviously lost in thought. He’s staring down at his ungloved hands, picking at one of his cuticles. He doesn’t seem to register that I’m here until I’m two inches in front of him.
“Where do we go?” he asks, looking up abruptly.
“Room eight,” I tell him, taking Lulu’s carrier.
Room eight is decorated in a disturbing brown. The pressed-wood dresser is brown. The thin bedspread is brown and the dirty wall-to-wall carpeting may have once been tan but is now brown.
As Attila comments on what a very brown room this is, my entire