4.
 In the morning, she pulled the curtains apart and gasped at the breathtaking vista of blue sky, the rolling distant mountain ranges, and the crisp sunlight that glittered like chrome on the motel sign and on a few cars parked in the lot below. Trucks and cars fled past on the highway nearby. Korinta made herself a cup of coffee with cream and sugar, not the good latte brands she was used to from the sidewalk stand near NBI’s office on a tiny side street in lower Manhattan, but like this Edward Hopper motel room and landscape it would have to do. She went on the little balcony, brushed dust from a white plastic chair, and sat with her feet up on the railing enjoying the clean morning air.
Just a week earlier on a rainy night, she’d arrived at NBI’s brownstone façade in a long red taxi. Wearing her dark green felt hat, trenchcoat with buckles, and charcoal business suit, she’d hurried across the street avoiding puddles. She’d hugged her purse tight under her arm, and flicked out her umbrella even if just for a minute in this downpour. The taxi sizzled away on neon-streaked asphalt, joining the evening din of the city. She ran up concrete steps and waited a moment in the Victorian-style white confectionery marble doorway with its scrolls and cherubs and triangular capital above. She folded her umbrella back up as she watched a six inch square patch of marble with circular motifs in the doorframe. A reddish glow appeared in the stone pores, heating up to a faint vermilion. She held her left palm an inch before her eyes and her right palm an inch before the square. Satisfied after scanning her identity, the house relaxed its security net and released the front door lock. The door opened a tiny bit as if the whole house were breathing a sigh of relief, but of course it was just the wind, pushing against the suddenly unlatched door in a major gust of rain and wind.
She hurried up a stale, musty smelling flight of dark wooden stairs. A single dim light at the bottom cast an amber glow that petered out halfway up, and she grasped the hand rail to guide herself in the darkness from old familiarity.
She came to a dark blot surrounded by a hairline of fine yellow light, and knocked.
“Come in,” a man said in an irritated tone.
She entered and shut the door behind her. He sat behind his desk in a puddle of light, with the window behind him dribbling with rainwater and occasionally flaring with lightning. Thunder growled in the distance. He was her boss—Dorio Fleming—a paunchy man in his fifties with a gleaming brassy dome on which a few strands of greasy black hair still gleamed. His white shirt looked gray with sweat and worry and looked as though it could use a washing. His lined face, with its squashy nose and jowly cheeks, looked as though it needed a shave and a good night’s sleep. He had his shirt sleeves rolled up and looked as though he’d been working a lot of hours. “Come in and sit down. Want some coffee?”
“I’ll make myself some hot tea,” she said. She laid her coat and hat on the thickly upholstered brown chair facing his desk and went to the little kitchen area that came with the offices. She flicked on a fluorescent light under the cabinets, and looked at the mess in the stainless steel sink. “Don’t you ever do your dishes?”
“I’ve been away,” he said. “Marta was going to clean up before she went on vacation, but obviously she didn’t and I don’t have time right now. We have a major problem.”
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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