Ken Bruen - Bust

“See? Now tell me that isn’t a bullshit name. I’m telling you, stick with me and you’re gonna go places.”

Bobby got off the elevator on the eighteenth floor. He wheeled himself one direction, took a few towels from a maid’s cart, then went back the other way to room 1812. He could hear Mr. Brown’s moaning from two doors away. Fuck, you could of heard him in Queens. After making sure the coast was clear, he slipped the keycard Victor had given him into the lock and slowly pushed the door open.

Room 1812 was long and narrow, with the bed against the wall at the far end. The light on the night table was on so Bobby had a clear view of the action, which was good because the light from the hallway didn’t make it too far into the room. Bobby went about halfway over the threshold and gently let the door rest against his chair. Then he raised his camera with a towel over it, the lens peeking out underneath.

Mr. and Mrs. Brown were going at it, but all the noise was coming from Mr. Brown – Mrs. Brown wasn’t making a peep. As Bobby snapped a few quick shots, he had a feeling that he knew Mr. Brown from somewhere. Then he remembered seeing him pass by in the lobby earlier in the night. But downstairs the guy had had curly blond hair and now he was nearly bald. He almost muttered, The fuck happened to you?

Mr. Brown must’ve heard the snapping camera or seen Bobby out of the corner of his eye because he looked up and after staring at Bobby for a couple of seconds said, “Hey, what the hell?”

Bobby let the corner of the towel drop over the camera’s lens.

“Jeez, I’m sorry, mister,” he said. “I’m really, really sorry. I just came to bring you your towels-”

“Get the fuck out of here!” Mr. Brown shouted.

Wheeling toward the bathroom, Bobby said, “It’ll only take a minute, mister. I gotta put fresh towels in every room two times a day or they get really mad at me-”

“Just get the hell outta here!”

“You don’t want your towels?”

“Get out, you fucking moron!”

“What about your soap?”

“Leave!”

“Please, Mister,” Bobby said, wheeling back toward the door. “Don’t get me fired. I need this job. I need it real bad.” He took a last look at the blonde, who’d pulled the sheet up around her tits and turned her back to him. “I’m real sorry about bustin’ in on you, I didn’t see nothing…” He scooted out the door and let it shut behind him.

Riding the elevator down, camera tucked in his bag, Bobby was smiling, proud of his performance. He was better than fuckin’ Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Maybe he should’ve listened to Isabella, gone on some auditions. Maybe it wasn’t too late. There had to be roles for guys in wheelchairs, right?

Nah, he decided, acting was too fucking boring. He needed the buzz, the action. Crime was where it was at.

As he wheeled out into the lobby, he started thinking about Mrs. Brown.

She was a good-looking girl all right. She had to be a pro – why else would a girl like that spread her legs for some middle-aged bald guy looked like that?

In the lobby, Bobby met Victor near the Thirty-second Street exit, said, “So far, so good.”

“Yeah, sure” Victor said, all panicked, like he didn’t believe it for a second. “What the fuck happened?”

“Stop shitting your pants, will ya?” Bobby said. “I got some good pics. Now we just gotta get the payola.”

Bobby took the Eighth Avenue bus uptown. When he got back to his apartment, he developed the film as fast as he could. Two of the shots had come out blurry and one had the towel in the way, but two were clear as fucking day. In the one he was going to use, you could see Mr. Brown with his mouth open, staring at the camera, while Mrs. Brown was just starting to cover those big knockers of hers. Bobby thought for a moment, trying to come up with a good name, then on the back of the picture he wrote a note telling Mr. Brown to leave ten thousand dollars at the hotel’s front desk for “Tommy Lee.” He stuck the photo inside a manila envelope and sealed it.

When he arrived back at the hotel, Victor said, “I got some bad news for you. The guy and the girl – they both took off.”

“Fuck, when?”

“Half hour after you left. Why don’t you keep your fuckin’ phone on? Goddamn phones – everybody’s got ’em, but nobody’s got ’em turned on.”

“I thought you said they were staying the night?”

“That’s what they told the girl at the desk, but that doesn’t mean they’re gonna do it. It’s not like they’re obligated to.”

“Shit.”

“And that’s not all – the cops were here.”

“The cops?”

“There an echo in here?”

Wanting to smack Victor, Bobby said, “What the hell’d the cops want?”

“Got me. When I first found out I thought, That’s it – I’m fired. F ‘n’ F. Fired and fucked.”

Now Bobby remembered seeing a big black guy in a gray suit in the lobby earlier in the night, thinking the guy had a cop look to him. Bobby had always had great cop-dar.

“Was he asking about us?” Bobby asked.

“No, that’s just it,” Victor said. “It was the couple. He was asking all kinds of questions about them. Who are they, have they been here before, what’s the girl’s name – shit like that.”

“The girl? Not the guy?”

“That’s all I know,” Victor said. “Then when the girl left the cop followed her. Look, Bobby. I mean I like working with you again and everything, but we can’t do this shit no more. Now with the cops coming down here, this is getting crazy. I can’t lose this job, Bobby. It has nothing to do with you – I just can’t lose this fucking job, I’ve too much riding on my paycheck.”

Bobby, starting to wheel away, said, “The whole thing was a dumb idea anyway. Forget about it.”

“Hey, come on,” Victor said. “Don’t be like that. Wait up a second.”

During the bus ride home, Bobby was thinking about the cop, wondering why he was asking questions about the girl. He also wondered why Mr. Brown arrived at the hotel wearing that blond wig. Then he thought, What the fuck difference did it make? Even if the guy had paid the money it wouldn’t’ve changed anything. Right now Bobby had enough money. He owned his apartment outright and had some savings safe with loan sharks. What would an extra ten grand do for him? It wouldn’t get him outta the goddamn chair, wouldn’t let him get up and walk to the deli or whatever. He wasn’t doing this for the money. The money was, like, a bonus. Just to show he wasn’t completely fucking useless.

A few months after he was paralyzed a vocational counselor at Mount Sinai Hospital asked Bobby if he was planning to return to work and Bobby said, “Hell yeah.”

The woman went on about the different services available to him, how he could learn how to use a computer and maybe get some bullshit office job, and Bobby said, “I don’t wanna do that kind of work – I wanna do my work. Can you guys help me do that?”

“And what kind of work do you do, Mr. Rosa?” she’d asked.

Bobby had mumbled something like, Never mind, and hightailed it the fuck out of there.

Bobby was lost in thought and suddenly realized that the bus was passing the Eighty-ninth Street stop. He started screaming at the driver, “Hey, what the hell’s wrong with you, asshole! Didn’t you hear me ring the goddamn bell? Jesus Christ, what the fuck does a guy gotta do to get off a fucking bus these days?” If he’d been packing, he might have shot the fuck.

Bobby continued to curse as the driver lowered him on the wheelchair lift. He heard the driver shout after him, “You’re welcome.”

Yeah, Bobby would have shot him.

When he got home, Bobby tried to relax on a tub chair in the shower. Then he flipped around on the TV awhile, but nothing was on. He ate a couple packages of Cup-a-Soup and then hit the sack.