Repo Men by Eric Garcia Page B

and a complete lack of standard facilities. There is a lobby with the customary broken chandelier, a shaky staircase leading up to rickety hallways, and six bathrooms for every twenty-four so-called “suites,” two of which are currently functional. This would have been considered a “European style” hotel, which means, on top of everything else, that it was dirt cheap. None of the actual Europeans I know would have ever stayed in this place longer than the time it took them to don a respirator and haul their ass back out to the cracked parking lot.
    On the ground floor, a long, narrow room with ash-covered walls and crumbling support beams represents what may have once been a coffee shop, but it’s hard to tell in its current charred, decrepit state. There were fourteen floors to the Tyler Street Hotel once upon a time, but they called the thirteenth floor the fourteenth and the fourteenth floor the penthouse, so the fact that I’m living on the sixth floor means little, except that I’m about halfway up the place, with a stellar view of the brickwork on the high-rise next door.
    My room is a good 4 meters square, and I’ve got ample space to walk around, squat, do my morning regimen of push-ups, crunches, and lunges, as well as a cozy corner in which to bed down for the night. The walls, formerly orange and beige, have been tarnished with the ash of some long-forgotten blaze, but the original color peeks through in spots now and again, so that the whole wall resembles one side of a monstrous cheetah.
    My weapons are stashed in what remains of the hallway closet, haphazardly hidden beneath a rotting tarpaulin I found in the trash heap of a sporting goods store down on Savoie Street. The guns are tucked within a double fold, as if that were enough to buy them any type of added protection, but I make do with what I’ve got.
    The same tarp that covers my only means of self-defense also serves as protection against the elements. It is my mattress, my quilt, and my pillow, and sometimes, late at night, I can almost pretend that I’m not sleeping on the hard, cold floor of an abandoned hotel, but instead resting the night away in an uncomfortable but well-kept bed-and-breakfast. My security blanket is the crossbow; some nights, I’ll grasp it between my arms, cradling the wooden stock like a child.
    And this typewriter is kept as near to the middle of the room as I can get it. A nearby portion of the floor has rotted away, and I take great pains to keep the typewriter away from that spot, in fear that I will come back to the hotel one day to find it, smashed, three floors down, a gaping rabbit hole leading the way. But it’s close enough to the center that the relative distance from all walls should afford me some type of auditory block from the rest of the world while I jot down these notes.
    But here’s the point of all of this: As I’ve said, the Tyler Street Hotel is burned out, abandoned, an empty husk of a building that now serves no purpose other than to shelter me and my sins. The lobby is empty, the rooms unoccupied, the elevator long since crashed to the bottom of the shaft. The Tyler Street Hotel is mine and mine alone.
    Or so I thought until this evening.
     

    I returned from the Mall via a serpentine route, making sure to drop any and all tails that I may have picked up on my rapid departure from the Credit Union. Odds were slim that I’d been followed—most repo men don’t wait until their client returns to the relative safety of their home to finish the job; an alley will usually do just fine. So the very fact that all of my major organs—artiforgs and regulars—were inside and intact a hundred yards down the road was a good sign.
    But it didn’t stop me from traversing the town, dropping in and out of parking garages, hot-wiring cars as a matter of course, slipping through culverts and washouts every time I got even the slightest glimpse of the law. The boys in blue aren’t aligned with the