Page 43 of Blood & Kisses

The ‘off’ feeling doesn’t leave me when we enter the house because I immediately search for the rose stem and don’t see it. My rational mind tries to make sense of it all. Maybe whoever typically leaves the rose stem got sick of us rejecting it. Fair enough. But also, because it’s still reasonably light and we can see without using the light on our phones, maybe the different time is upsetting my inner bearings.

We wheel the trolley to the basement door, and a pungent gas stench strikes me. “Do you smell that?” I whisper to Z, who pauses at the door and screws her face up.

“Yeah,” she replies, gazing down the hall to the empty bedroom at the end. “Maybe they’ve already done some cleaning.”

“That doesn’t smell like cleaning chemicals,” I argue as my feet refuse to budge because my instincts work overtime. The time is wrong. The SUV is wrong. There is no rose. The smell is wrong. If nothing is right, the best option is to flee, even if I’m proven wrong. “Z, I’m just getting bad vibes right now.”

“Eh? How can you get good vibes from cleaning up a fucking bloody murder?” she exclaims, and I flinch at the sharpness of her tone. I know she’s not being deliberately rude, but this situation is making both of us uneasy.

“I know. I know,” I cave to her commonsense. “You’re right, Z.”

“I know I’m right,” she answers, but her hesitation is evident when she doesn’t open the basement door. “That stench is pretty strong.”

“What should we do?” I ask as my skin prickles, and I keep looking behind me, expecting someone to be there.

“Um,” she dithers, pressing her against the basement door. “Stand back.” I do as she suggests and return to the kitchen while removing the mop from her trolley. “On three, I’ll push the door open with this, giving us time to duck for cover.”

“What are you expecting to be in there?” I enquire as my nerves rip my stomach lining to shreds.

“Ah, maybe a ghost. A fanged monster. Smiler himself. Greta Thunberg,” she replies comically, placing the mop head on the door. Z often uses humor to deal with stressful situations, and I laugh at how ludicrous this is.

“Greta Thunberg?” I exclaim as Z pushes the door open and hesitates as if waiting for an explosion.

“You have stolen my dreams,” Z does her best Greta impersonation. “How dare you.” Her demeanor changes when she peers behind the open door, shrugs, then glances back at me. “It’s dark but doesn’t stink as bad as down here.”

“Doesn’t it smell like blood and feces?” I enquire, finding that peculiar.

“Maybe there’s less blood this time,” she argues, opening the door wider and placing the mop back in the trolley to drag it down the basement stairs.

I feel a little better, but I am still not satisfied. “I’m going to ask Blake to come down,” I tell her, finding my phone in my pocket under a layer of PPE.

“Okay, ruin our girl’s night out, why don’t ya,” she jokes and steps down the wooden as I quickly flick Blake a text: can u come down here, please? Doing a job for Smiler. Things r weird.

I sent him the address before following Z down the stairs into the dank basement. The scent of gas is definitely fainter down here, so someone must’ve had a spill upstairs. What’s even more concerning is-

“I think you’re right. There’s something weird going on,” Z states, standing in the middle of a clean floor. No blood. No guts. No smiley face in the blood. Nothing. “Why the fuck did they message us to come here when…” she finds her phone as I walk down each step onto the floor, carrying the cleaning supplies. “Did I make a mistake?”

When movement catches my eye, I glance up at the narrow window, but I may have been mistaken. Honestly, I’m relieved if Z has got it wrong because then I can go home, and maybe Gabe will be there. That explains why there was no rose stem and the wrong vehicle parked down the road.

Her mouth drops open, utterly perplexed, holding her phone out, then glancing about the floor as if searching for something, my guess, blood. “This is bizarre,” she exclaims confused. “Correct address. Correct time. But not a speck of blood.” She turns around in a circle, searching for a splash of scarlet or even a wet patch. “Nothing.”

“Good,” I sigh, eager to leave. “Shall we grab a drink in the bar?”

She barely hears me, as it’s obvious this is haunting her, and I know why. We can’t get it wrong, we have to obey Smiler, or we’re screwed. But we can’t get paid for cleaning up blood, guts, and feces when there’s no blood and guts and feces to clean.

“I…” She is dumbfounded and dithered a few beats before concluding, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do. We’ll clean the floor and walls and then leave. If Smiler’s men ask questions, we’ll tell them the truth, right?” She looks terrified, which makes me even more nervous.

“Right. Let’s get to work,” I exclaim, forcing a cheerful tone to affirm her decision. “And then we’ll go to a bar afterward.”

“Okay,” she answers, pouring disinfectant into the bucket, then hands it to me to run back up the stairs to fill it with water from the kitchen sink.

Heavy footsteps on the floor above us force me to freeze dead on the second step. “We’ve got company,” I glance back at Z, who’s staring at the basement door, waiting for it to swing open.

Z swallows as she raises the mop to use it as a weapon. FFS. Why the fuck didn’t I bring my Glock. Every single fucking time.

“Blake?” she whispers hopefully, checking my phone to find he hasn’t replied.

“I don’t know,” I answer quietly. “You know it’s easy to break into this place, so…it could be nosy troublemakers.”

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