“Your nice jacket’s going to get torn,” Shanny said. “Can I hold it for you?”
“It’ll be fine,” Quin said, and gave another yank. He reset and tried again.
It didn’t move, but somewhere behind it, there’d been a tantalizing squawk of give. We could hear dust and powdered debris falling inside the wall.
“Third time’s a charm?” Oona said.
Quin leveraged himself again and pulled. I stood back and watched as his shoulders stretched his jacket taut and his neck turned red.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” Lumpy Jim said. “He’s a young guy but—”
The cabinet came out with a wrenching of metal. Quin hurtled backward into me and we crashed just west of the toilet, landing between the commode and the wall.
There was fluttering and shushing at the noise. Someone lifted the cabinet away. Others helped Quin to his feet and off me.
“Sorry,” Quin said, his face still red.
“I can’t believe you touched that floor with yourskin, man,” Lourey said, lending a hand to help me up.
“Hey,” Pascal called from the door. “I clean that floor.”
We’d broken the toilet seat.
“Are you okay?” Quin said.
I dusted myself off, noticing Quin had received the worst of things. He was covered in filth, jacket torn. The white cuff of his sleeve—
“Is that blood?”
The word sent a ripple through the crowd at the door. “The mirror,” Quin said dismissively. “It’s just a scratch.”
In such close quarters to Quin, I picked up the same scent I’d caught from Alex that night in the alley. Masculine. “That doesn’t seem like a scratch.”
He looked down at me. “I’m fine, really.”
“Guys,” Rooster said.
We looked over to see that our exertions had put a hole in the wall. A square once filled by the medicine cabinet now framed a section of wall guts—plaster, strips of wooden lath. But it was shallow.
My heart sank as we all stared at it.
“What happened?” Pascal hissed from back in the next room, where he was keeping watch at the hall door. “I can’t tell.”
I got up and pushed at the plaster.
“What’s on the other side of the wall?” Quin asked.
I was trying to picture it. “The alcove? The storage locker under the stairs, probably.”
Quin reached for the towel bar mounted to the bathroom wall. He gripped the bar with both hands, and pulled.
“What are you doing? You don’t have to openly destroy— Oh.”
He used the bar to poke at the plaster in the opening. “Stand back,” he said, squaring up to it like an all-star.
“They made ’em sturdy back in the day,” Lumpy Jim warned.
But Quin was already swinging the bar at the plaster. Bits sprayed out at us and crumbled loose. He reared back, tried again. Powder in the air, rubble and dust. A chunk of the wooden lath broke free and fell. And fell.
