Twelve Rooms with a View. Theresa Rebeck

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       CHAPTER SIX

      I was right. I mean, I was like, immediately right. Like within ten minutes of finishing the installation process. I was back in the kitchen pouring myself a tumbler of vodka grapefruit surprise when the yelling started. You could hear the guy all the way back there, he was that mad.

      “What the fuck? HEY. WHAT THE FUCK,” he yelled, starting to pound the shit out of the door. Then he started yanking and pulling at it, and pounding some more. It was enormously satisfying.

      “GO AWAY!” I yelled in return, while I sauntered back up to the front of the apartment. “I’M CALLING THE COPS!”

      “I AM THE COPS!” he yelled. “OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR.” By this I knew it was the other Drinan, the cop with the sexy eyes. Not that I was surprised.

      “I’M SLEEPING IN HERE AND I’M NOT BOTHERING ANYBODY. GO AWAY,” I yelled.

      “OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR,” he yelled back.

      “What, you got like three sentences, is that all you know how to say?” I asked him, through the door. “Open the door, I’m a cop, what the fuck, is that all you know how to say?”

      “I’d open the door, Tina Finn,” he warned me.

      “Oh yeah, why?” I said to the door, kind of bold and cocky. It was weird; all of a sudden I felt like I was flirting with someone in a bar. “What are you going to do to me, officer?”

      “I’m going to arrest you,” he announced.

      “I’m not the one trying to break in and harass an innocent citizen in her home, dude,” I retorted. “If I put a call in to 911, you’re the one who’s in the shithouse.”

      “There’s a stay on the apartment, Tina,” he informed me, through the door. “No one’s allowed to fuck with the locks. You’re in violation of the law.”

      “Except I didn’t fuck with the locks, Pierre,” I informed him back. “I put in a spring bolt and some chain guards. The locks are fine. When I’m not here? The locks work just fine. When I am here? YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED IN.”

      There was a pause, and then a kind of bump, right at my shoulder. “Shit,” I heard him mumble. He must have been right up against the door. For a second I thought, Wow, this door is thin, I can hear everything and if I can hear everything he can probably pry it open with one of those little battering ram things cops carry with them, whether or not I have the spring bolt in place. And then I thought, Is he the kind of cop who carries those things? What kind of a cop is this guy anyway? Does he have a gun on him? He didn’t have a gun, or a uniform, the last time I saw him, but obviously since I wouldn’t let him into the apartment there was no knowing if he any of those things—gun, uniform, battering ram—right now. I took a step back, because it did occur to me that if he started whacking at the door all of a sudden I didn’t want to be leaning up against it. But whacking at the door did not seem to be on his mind. For the moment, at least, he was quiet.

      And then someone else started talking, someone who wasn’t him.

      I couldn’t hear at all what the other person was saying. The other voice was much softer, more from a distance; it was a murmur, and a question. He answered it, only now I couldn’t hear him, either; he was practically whispering all of a sudden, to whoever else was out there. This should have been good news to me—let’s face it, having an angry cop screaming at me to let him into my apartment in the middle of the night was not anything like an ideal situation—but the whispering voices actually made me more anxious. I stepped back to the door, and put my ear up against it, to see if I could hear what the other person was saying, or what my angry friend Pete Drinan was saying. But while a second ago I felt like Pete was practically in the room with me, now I could barely hear him. He wasn’t up against the door anymore; he was down by the elevators. The other person asked him another question, that I couldn’t hear, and he answered again, and I couldn’t hear the answer. I thought he might be talking to his brother, that would make the most sense, but it didn’t really sound like him; whoever this person was actually talked more carefully, and Drinan was talking carefully back. I truly couldn’t tell what was going on.

      Given my options I decided I’d better go for it, and slid back the spring bolt quietly and carefully. Which was exceptionally difficult; those spring bolts hold together pretty tight, what use would they be if they didn’t? Luckily Drinan was far enough away now, and the conversation was apparently riveting enough that he wasn’t supernaturally attuned to the sound of a spring bolt being slowly scraped back into the unbolted version of its identity. He had already thrown the tumblers in the three door locks, so all I had to do then was make sure the chain guards were in place and open that door as silently as possible, and find out who the hell was out there with him. I cracked the door.

      He was past the elevators, his back to me, and he was talking to whoever it was who lived in the other apartment, 8B. Of course he was! It made so much sense when I saw it that I almost laughed out loud about how paranoid I was being. The lady—I could see it was a lady, with kind of messy brown hair—was standing in her doorway, like all the yelling had just woken her up, and she needed to come out and complain about whatever nonsense we were involved in, just across the hall from her doorway. But she didn’t seem СКАЧАТЬ