The Hotel (Amateur Heist: Part One)

The cat stared at me. Her gaze penetrated my own, so deeply in fact that I was almost certain there was a tiny person inside her. Don’t get too concerned though, the cat isn’t the main part of this story. But she did continue to stare.  

The two men at the table, who were basically giant boys in janitor uniforms, were staring icily at each other. I’d managed to convince them to leave me the hotel’s back door key for tonight. And they had separately invited me into their musky little janitorial closet for a meal. The food wasn’t even on the table yet when their livid stares turned into an argument. They were both on their feet, screaming at each other when the language took a turn down into a foreign country and I was lost. I assumed they were arguing about whose woman I was and who deserved a private meal with me. The one on the left grabbed up his plate and flung it at the other. It crashed against the back wall. Forks and spoons and raging globs of spit joined the air raid. I ducked to avoid the biological weaponry. A steak knife flew across the room and I knew it was time to make my departure. I grappled with the chair. The plate-flinging man jumped over the table and strangled the other. Gargled, painful rasps for air filled the room and my panicked, clumsy legs tumbled me right out the door.

I ran down the rich hotel hallway: an airy space with rooms on the left and on the right, an open wall overlooking a waterfall of fauna that dropped ferns and ivy from high up on the seventh floor into the planter box of palms and waxy leaves two stories below.

At the end of the hall was one of the few open doors. I didn’t care who was inside. A man with a towel around his waist and a police officer were standing inside.

 “Please help! These men are going to kill each other!”

The police officer ran out with me and I pointed to the small door at the far end. He ran down the hall while I snuck a better view through open space from the opposite end of the hall. It didn’t take a genius to realize that the man that had rushed to my aid wasn’t a real police officer, but a man in a costume, probably a stripper. There was more yelling and crashing.

A door opened nearby and a man, not much taller than myself and swimming in a blue suit, emerged from one of the doors. He raised a handgun toward the janitorial closet. Two rounds were fired. The policeman escaped and went howling back down the hallway, his arms bent at his elbows, any question to his sexuality left behind with the dead janitors. Another shot fired down the hall and the stripper spun and fell into a lump on the ground. Before he could spot me, I turned and ran to the elevator behind me. It dinged open quickly and I flung myself into its emptiness. I rammed my finger onto the “close door” button, but as the door closed, a woman appeared in the space. I screamed, dragged her in, and rammed the button again. I pressed Floor 7, but we went down first. Five more women piled on, one with a shiny gold Bellman’s Cart, until we were pressed for space.

“Has anyone here seen Lesli? I need to get a hold of her. Anyone? She’s the Head of Security. She’s remarkably tall, short-blonde hair? No one’s seen her?”  

Everyone shook their heads and muttered, confused and stupid like the mushed-in sardines they emulated.

At the bottom, everyone exited but me.

Floor 7. Floor 7. Floor 7. I pressed the button over and over.

The steel box rose straight up to the top floor where the plethora of fauna grew and cascaded down into the hotel’s centrifugal basin on Floor 1. Lesli, dressed in all-white (clearly interrupted from yoga) was standing just outside her corner office in a perfect stance with her gun aimed right at her door.

“Come on back out here and no one gets hurt!” She yelled.

“Lesli!” I’m sure I said aloud.

Through the glass windows to her clean office, all I could see were the two cushy chairs and empty desk. The remarkably tall door that accommodated her remarkable stature was closed. She handed me a handgun.

“What do you want me to – ugh…”

I unlatched the safety on the gun and threw open the door.

The second door at the back of the room, leading to a private security-only hallway, was open. I peered to the left and right. Men spoke from the right, near Lesli’s room. They burst back into the hallway.

“Did you get it?”

“Just a hundred bucks.”

“We did all of this for a hundred bucks?”

“It’s all she had in the fucking safe.”

“Come on, let’s get out of here.”

The men passed by, ignoring me, and went to the other end of the hall, to the private security elevator. I locked the door so Lesli couldn’t follow, then joined the men in the elevator. I wrapped my arms around Jack, the one swimming in his blue suit, and planted a kiss on him.

“A hundred bucks isn’t worth it. We need to boost a car or something. Too many people died on this one.”

“We’ll go with Carl’s plan next then,” (Carl was our driver), “he said he knows a good brothel where they keep all their goods right out in the open.”