So I started my cleaning routine the same way my grandmother taught me when I’d been staying with her. I shook out the curtains, cleaned the blinds, and used a wall mop to clean any dust and cat hair off.
I grumbled, like I did every week, that I wasn’t allowed to paint the ugly stark white satin finish paint that looked shiny no matter how low the light was in the space.
I tried to soften it by having several large art pieces on flat canvases in light, feminine shades.
The couch, too, was a shade of dusty rose.
This was a girl’s apartment—just Alley and me—so I didn’t care about it being too girly.
The front room had a large window that opened to a catwalk, which meant that people passed by my apartment day and night.
From the looks of the place, I was relatively sure it had once been a cheap motel for tourists but had been renovated (if you can call it that) into apartment units. Which would explain the layout: the postage-stamp-sized living room and the bathroom where the door slammed into the tub, and the sink was attached directly to the wall because there was no room for a cabinet below.
The kitchen was laughably tiny. It had an apartment-sized fridge, a sink that barely fit a plate, let alone a pot, and no oven. Just a microwave and a hot plate that was so old I was too afraid to ever actually use it.
I’d learned to be a big fan of salads and healthy sandwiches since I moved in here.
The bedroom was barely big enough for the full-sized bed I had in it, but I was glad to have a roomy closet with a mirrored door.
I’d been so used to living out of hotels in my life that the noise was something that I barely even noticed anymore. Even if I did sometimes worry about how easily strangers could access my apartment.
Or, you know, not strangers.
I had a chronic nightmare about Frank showing up at my door.
On the plus side, the minuscule space meant that from climbing off the couch to when I lit my ‘everything is clean’ candle was only about an hour.
As I showered off, then got dressed and grabbed a ride to the pet store, there was a nervous, jumpy sensation in my veins, a fluttering of my heartbeat.
I had the feeling as I walked through the sliding doors of the pet store that it had nothing at all to do with the potential danger of this situation I was agreeing to do… and more to do with the man I was going to be working with.
As much as I tried to convince myself that the nervousness was about not knowing who he really was or what his motivations truly were, and that I could fix that by investigating him a bit, some (illogical) part of me said it was something else, something more personal.
I made my way to the cat food aisle.
I ordered her litter to be delivered in discreet packaging since I was typically walking and didn’t want to have to haul that around. But Alley was surprisingly picky about her food considering she used to, I assume, eat random mice, birds, or dumpster leftovers. I could never tell when she was going to decide she suddenly hated a flavor she previously loved. I saved myself a lot of frustration by purchasing various flavors and brands to keep her interested.
My little hand basket was filling up as I kept glancing around while trying not to look like I was casing the joint.
Was he not coming?
Was this whole thing a scam?
God, did he work for Frank?
To see if I was loyal or not?
I wouldn’t put that kind of thing past Frank.
He was paranoid and didn’t seem to trust anyone.
I’d once seen him accuse one of his security guards of letting an ‘assassin’ in to murder him. When, in reality, it was someone too drunk to be able to read theEmployees Onlysign.
The guard had been fired and blackballed so hard that he had to move out of AC to get another job.
It wasn’t outside the realm of possibilities that Frank was testing out his employees. Especially one like me who always held myself just out of reach.
I was in full panic mode by the time I walked down the cat food aisle, ready to start looking out the windows for Frank or one of his men.
