Edward Lee: Mangled Meat

Leon stroked his chin. “And fifty grand to gain, you say…”

“Right. How can I be bullshitting when I just handed you the first fifty?”

Leon sat down. The silk slacks hissed when he crossed his legs.

“I don’t know about this, Leon,” Oscar said.

Leon looked straight ahead when he said, “Oscar. Let her go.”

Oscar’s brow accordioned when he broke from his stance and cast a glance at Flood. He went to the bed then, and begrudgingly untied Carol aka Ann.

“You just won the lottery, cunt,” he informed her.

The girl was vibrating when she faltered off the bed and pulled on her clothes. She’d obviously urinated, and all her skin looked pasty with fear-sweat. She stepped forward, then looked at Leon.

“Leave town,” Leon said to her. “Mr. Flood here is correct. One way or another, one of my people will find you…”

The girl’s hands shook so fiercely she could barely get her dress back on. Her lower lip trembled. For an irreducible moment, she glanced to Flood…

Flood saw noting but a wasteland in her eyes.

She grabbed her wrist-purse and scampered out of the room.

“Ain’t that just like a bitch?” Oscar cracked a laugh, then slapped Flood hard on the back. “Didn’t even say thank you!”

“It’s my karma,” Flood said through a thin smile.

But Leon wasn’t smiling. He pressed his hands together and rested his chin on his fingertips, looking at Flood.

“Well, Mr. Flood? When will you enlighten us about this other fifty thousand?”

Flood lit another cigarette. “As soon as you guys finish packing…”

Flood sat in the seedy bathroom, the lights off. He’d left the door open a crack, which afforded him a perfect view of the bed. He arranged an ash tray on the rim of the filmy bathtub, and was actually sitting on the toilet seat lid.

Classy, he joked to himself.

The five-hour flight had passed like a barely recalled dream. The only reason Flood knew about the A-Top motel on Aurora Avenue was due to the time he’d had to stay there overnight when a mudslide had blocked the highway from the Seattle airport. There were no better rooms to book unless he wanted to drive all the way back to Sea-Tac. It was the kind of place that had cockroaches but at least the cockroaches were dead. $59.99 per night and very remote. The parking lot was near empty, and Flood had deliberately booked the farthest room in the complex, so they could park in back

He watched through the door crack, smoking. Leon sat cross-legged on a rickety chair; he was counting the second cash payment. The TV was turned on, the sound turned down: a baseball game.

At the airport, Flood had rented an SUV for Oscar. Then he drove Leon and himself to the motel in his Cadillac Seville.

Risk, he thought baldly. Now that he’d given them the rest of the money… They could still kill me. Certainly. But Flood didn’t think they would.

The sand-mitts lay on the dresser, along with a cord and tourniquet, a manual drill, and a soldering iron, plus pliers, a fileting knife, and some razor blades…

Maybe I’m just like them, Flood suspected. Or maybe I’m far worse…

That’s when Oscar entered, with a very unconscious Felicity slung over his shoulder.

“No one saw a thing,” the bald man bragged. “I had her snatched two seconds after she came out of the house…”

“Good work,” Leon said.

Flood couldn’t hear anything save for the drone in his head, when he stood up in the dark and lowered his trousers. His penis was so hard it hurt.

“Let’s get her tied down to the bed, and make sure the gag’s tight,” Leon advised. “Then wake her up and get to work.”

Oscar chuckled, eyeing the implements on the night-stand. He plugged in the soldering gun.

Flood broke out in a sweat when he watched them strip the clothes off his ex-wife and lash her spread-eagled on the bed. His ecstacy made his blood seem scalding.

Flood had a feeling his cure was at hand.

I got the idea for the “Room 415” story one night while standing in a dark hotel room at about 4 a.m. This was four or five years ago. I’d taken a trusty Greyhound to Orlando in order to attend a Florida-writers book signing, and then I drank too many beers at an industrial club called Independent where publisher Dave Barnett moonlights as a DJ and enjoys the Life of Riley. I had a blast, even after realizing that I was twenty years older than almost everyone in the club, after which Dave treated me and others in his posse to a preeminently grease-laden breakfast at a seedy all-night diner. When I got back to my hotel room—Room 415—I discovered to my horror that it was a non-smoking room. So I did what all respectable smokers do in a non-smoking room. I smoked. I turned out all the lights and stood brazenly in my shorts before the window, which I opened as far as it would go (only a couple of inches. A “governor” was installed, presumably to thwart jumpers. Neat.) So I’m standing there smoking, at this wee hour, in the dark, when I look down and notice a window lit in a room one floor below and caddy-cornered against my vantage point. A several-inch gap existed between the salmon-colored curtains, and in the gap I could see a bed. And that’s it.

I need to assure you all that the aforementioned is the ONLY aspect of this story rooted in truth. But as I was standing there watching my smoke siphon out my window, and periodically glancing down to the caddy-cornered window, Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW came to mind. “What if I saw someone get murdered in that window, right now?” I asked myself. “And what if it was a beautiful nude woman?” (Nudity seems to be an auxiliary ornament in most of my work.) Anyway, then I went to bed and awoke with a stunning hangover, and while Greyhounding back home the next day, all the details of the story were already in my head, with pretty much no conscious effort.

Very recently I read a Stephen King quote (in, I believe, the Cindy Margolis issue of Playboy—hubba-hubba) where King cited that he often gets story ideas simply from seeing a particular thing, after which the plot begins to create itself in his head. Though Mr. King’s bank account and acclaim have precious little in common with mine, I was enthused to discover this singular commonality: I regularly get entire story ideas that originated by my witnessing some “thing.” House, car, road, person, sound, etc. or some other essentially non-descript thingamajig that for some reason fires a subconscious creative spark. Most of the flesh in my novel THE BACKWOODS, for instance, was rooted in my glimpsing a 17-year locust through the window of a cab taking me to BWI airport in Maryland. A house right across the street from my wonderfully squalid apartment proved the initial fuel for FLESH GOTHIC (because the house is actually an office for a porno company. I live in a classy town.) The major plot device in the novella MINOTAURESS (a prequel to THE HORN-CRANKER) was incited decades ago when I was a security guard inspecting an unoccupied two story house. I was checking the locks of this supposedly untenanted dwelling when I heard a toilet flush upstairs. Ooo. Creepy. After possibly peeing my security pants in terror, I envisioned a monster sitting on the upstairs toilet. (The flusher, I’m happy to say, wasn’t a monster, it was another security guard I didn’t know was inside.) And in the case of this story—“Room 415”—it was something as simple as a hotel window that would hand me the entire plot and character line. This is my reason for cringing when asked that most cliched question: “Where do you get your ideas?” It takes too damn long to explain and is actually quite unremarkable.