2. Lloyd Dies the Next Day.
To read the story so far, visit the Table of Contents.
Room 207
Sweat stung Lloyd Farley’s eyes as it dripped down his forehead.
He wiped it away with his right arm; the beads clung to its hair. The fresh scratch down the side of his face, right next to his bulbous nose, throbbed in the new salt. He heard the gun in his left hand tapping against the top of the desk.
tap. tap. tap.
He grabbed his wrist and held it tight, urging himself to stop with the tapping. That damn tapping. Boss never liked that. It drove him batty, he’d tell Lloyd. Then he’d say that he’d have one of the boys lop Lloyd’s hand clean off if he ever heard it again. Stop the yips, or lose the fist, Boss would say.
The taps settled.
Lloyd pulled his left hand up to his face and examined the red scrapes and purple bruising across his knuckles.
Oh yeah, Lloyd thought.
So he began again to tap the butt of his gun, the one that had sprayed the Boss’s brains against a brick wall in an alleyway between 5th and 6th Aves.
tap. tap. tap.
Years later, when researchers described this era of gangland murders, they’d call the Boss’s murder a “hit.” But it wasn’t really like that, so organized and planned. It was just one of those things.
One step too far.
Boss had been riding him all night, all week, all month really. He always had, but there’d been something different about this latest round. More taunting, more seeing how much of his power he could flaunt, how much he could get away with. Like the Boss had something to prove. And when he’d mentioned Lloyd’s kid earlier that night, well, that was the iron safe that came crashing down to break the camel’s back.
“Does Little Brian know he’s got a lousy fathead for an old man?” the Boss said. “Does he know he’s got the genetics of a verifiable white-livered piece of sh—”
Lloyd didn’t realize he was hitting the Boss until he was four or six or maybe eight punches deep, feeling those brittle cheekbones buckle inward, maybe even a squirt from a busted eye.
Boss got in a good swipe at Lloyd’s face, but just the one before he fell in a clump against the wall, whimpering. Lloyd watched as the bloodied man put a fist on the ground to get back onto his feet. In that moment, he considered his options. So, out came the gun, and out came two bullets through Boss’s head.
Lloyd walked an hour or more to give him some distance from the scene, knowing that his earliest exit from the city couldn’t realistically come until tomorrow’s first train. Once he was a few cities over, he’d call Brian’s mother. The two of them now lived halfway across the country—he could hook them up with trusted folks he still had back in St. Louis. He’d been mulling over this exit plan in the back of his head for years. Everyone in his field of work had something like this.
But he needed a place for the night before the morning train.
His basement one-bedroom on the west side was too hot. And all the usual safe joints would soon be getting word. Hence the Palmer, known for its utmost discretion with its clientele.
Lloyd set his gun on the desk and stood up. He walked the room’s length for the fifty-first then fifty-second times that night, the room dark save the single light bulb hanging in the shitter. As he paced, his head momentarily cleared.
He went to the window and took in the courtyard view. He opened it up, lit a cigarette, and exhaled outside. He didn’t like sleeping with that smell.
He saw movements in the hotel’s opposite wing—just some nobody at a window. Still, he didn’t like the exposure. He took one last drag, stubbed in on the windowsill, shut the window, closed the curtains. He grabbed his gun and went to the can. He lifted the toilet lid, dropped his pants, and sat his wide ass down.
“Tried to shit, but merely farted,” he said with a smile.
Then, beyond the bathroom, he saw shadows moving in the thin strip of hallway light underneath the door.
He pinched it off and crouched, his pants still around his ankles. He quietly pulled the light’s chain, and the bulb went out. He held out his gun, closed an eye to make a more accurate sight. After a minute of running the approaching shootout through his head, he considered the hotel room door’s hinges.
They were closer to him, so the door would open in such a way as to provide a barrier between where he was, and where they’d be. Not an ideal arrangement to pop whoever was coming in behind it. Where he was, he’d be trapped.
He lifted his pants back up quietly while doing his best to keep his muzzle trained on the door. Taking a gamble, he tiptoed out of the bathroom, across to the open closet door. Now he’d be able to see who he was shooting.
Half an hour later, his legs fell asleep. He stretched them out, feeling tingling pain rush into them as the blood flowed again. He had heard nothing since he took this position in the closet, so he tried his luck and stood back up. Lloyd stepped out into the room proper and examined his options.
There was the spot under the desk where the chair was, but he was too big for that cramped space. He could maybe kneel in that tiny gap between the bed and the wall, but staying in a crouch all night would be painful. Then he saw the darkness under the bed.
He dropped to a crawl and situated himself under the bed so that he was facing the front door, his gun still aimed in that direction. He squinted down the sights and, from that angle, the room suddenly seemed to clarify.
Lloyd mentally prepped for the entry of two or three men—never more, three would be the max for a job like this. They’d shove open the door and spray light in from the hallway; it would illuminate the entirety of the room except this space under the bed. The first gunman might see a muzzle flash, but if Lloyd aimed right, that unlucky guy wouldn’t be able tip off anything to the others, who’d go down next, one at a time.
Another hour under that bed and the adrenaline was gone. Lloyd allowed himself to lay his head on the carpet, and suddenly he was sitting in a rocking chair on a porch in Missouri.
The sun was setting on the horizon, past the farmhouse that had been in the family for generations. The fields swayed like a purple ocean. There was a noise behind him, and he knew right away it was Brian, back home from school. But when he sat up in his rocker and turned to look, there was no one was there.
He spun back to gaze at the field, but now the stalks of wheat had become men with guns. An army with blank eyes and scarred faces. Advancing toward him. Step by step.
Lloyd snapped awake.
From his angle under the bed, he saw twin vertical shadows. They soon materialized into the legs of a man. He was wearing brown wool trousers, and faced the door.
Lloyd’s back felt the pressure from a weight that sat on the bedsprings above. He tried to stay silent as the squeeze compressed his lungs. Then he heard breathing coming from this man.
Loud breathing. It was a painful noise.
Lloyd tried to grip his gun, then realized that his hand was empty.
He groped around on the carpet, desperately searching for where he’d dropped it. Then suddenly came a booming concussion. Feeling the blast in his teeth, he winced and thought, well, that was it for poor ol’ Lloyd.
It took him a moment to realize that him thinking at all was proof that it wasn’t, at least not yet. It took him another moment for him to realize that he wasn’t hit at all.
His fingers continued searching the carpet and found gunmetal. He collected it and aimed at the trouser-clad legs that remained still in front of him.
All at once these legs shifted and slumped to the side on their way to the floor. The rest of the body followed, and the man landed facedown on the carpet, a bullet hole in the side of his head, slick hair where it had entered. The man’s white t-shirt was stained, and Lloyd could smell fresh blood.
A sudden splash of white light as the hotel room door burst open.
Lloyd aimed at the new glow and pulled the trigger three times. The blasts rang out in his ears, and he saw three holes of light appear in the wood of the door.
“Shit!” a red-haired man with a trim beard screamed in the hallway, among the clattering of falling silverware. “Wrong fucking room!”
When Lloyd’s eyes adjusted to the brightness of the hallway, he saw a tray of room service scattered around in the doorway.
And then Lloyd realized that the man’s body that had lain dead in front of him had disappeared.
He pulled himself out from under the bed, frantically crawling to where the man had just been. Lloyd saw a deep red stain in the carpet. He watched as it lightened, faded, then vanished entirely.
He heard screaming for help in the hallway, which meant it was time to go.
Lloyd stood and quickly collected his belongings. A loud ruckus of footfalls in the hall—he would have to seek out another exit. He opened the window and climbed onto the fire escape, and then turned back once more to check for witnesses. And there he was again.
The man in the brown wool trousers and bloody white t-shirt.
He stared right back at Lloyd. Despite half his face being only mangled red gristle, he still managed to stretch out a partial, squishy smile.
Lloyd blinked and he was gone, revealing the stark shadows of approaching men in the hallway.
He pocketed his gun, descended down to the hotel’s ground floor, and exited into the city night, hoping to stay safely hidden away until tomorrow morning’s train. Hoping to see Brian again.
Artwork by Tiffany Silver Braun.
If you like Tales from the Palmer Hotel, tell a friend. If you really like it, the suggested donation for the series is a one-time payment of $6.66. Venmo (@Rick-Paulas) or Paypal (rickpaulas@gmail.com).