Heartbreak Hotel

Chapter 45

I was right behind Milo when he flung the greenhouse door open. Letting loose humid heat and putrescence that would’ve repelled Satan.

“Oh, God, the things I do for God and country,” he said as he stepped in.

The floor was brick, a central walkway between rows of wooden tables.

The reek seemed to have acquired solidity, jellying the air as it poisoned.

A whole lot of visual beauty made matters worse, though I couldn’t tell you why.

Pots on the tables, glossy and patterned intricately, housed palms, ferns, bromeliads, and other pineapple-like things. Plants with fleshy leaves, spoon-like leaves, spiky leaves, others filamentous and delicate as corn silk.

I spotted one of those red, heart-shaped things they sell in Hawaiian souvenir shops. The orange flowers I’d seen through the window belonged to a squat, spreading thing with hairy, leathery leaves.

A plant that resembled a bird’s head.

A vine that reached for the ceiling, sucker-like appendages gripping glass, an herbaceous octopus.

Something that resembled nothing I could classify.

Everything healthy, lush, thriving.

As we trudged slowly, a squirt of fragrance hit my nose. Sweet, exotic, tropical, facing up to the stink but dying quickly.

Another burst: gingery. That, too, lost out to the ambient toxicity.

Milo stopped, retched, coughed. Bent a bit, straightened, resumed the slog.

I found myself teetering. Reached out for the support of a wooden table, thought better of it and forced myself to keep going.

No one behind me. I half turned, saw Reed’s fleeing form. I sympathized but found perverse pleasure in that. Good to know something could get to him.

Milo took another couple of steps. His flashlight found something and he stopped, pointed, covered his entire face with the handkerchief then dropped it just enough to undrape his eyes.

At the far wall of the greenhouse, several large yellow bags were neatly stacked.

The potting mix Binchy had seen Phil Duke bring home from the garden supply house.

To the left of the bags was a massive heap of loose dirt. Five feet high, shaped like a first-grader’s clumsily drawn mountain.

Oddly messy for this precise herbarium.

The flashlight searched, floundered.

Found something.

Sprouting from the top of the pile. Melon-shaped.

Large melon.

We got closer. The stink beat us mercilessly.

Melon with eyeholes... wet, sloughing rind.

So much bloat and rot that a first glance told you nothing.

A second glance refined the perception.

What had once been a human head. The mouth degraded to a black O, the eyeholes tiny caverns leading to nothing.

Milo retched. “I’m losing it.” He ran past me and out.

What possessed me to stick around for a few more seconds, I’ll never know.

Something was wrong with this Gehenna. Then it came to me: the silence. No flies. No maggots destined to be flies.

All at once, the silence was gone, replaced by a clanging in my head, metallic, insistent.

I took one last look at the head and walked out. Slowly, deliberately.

In control. Nothing was going to rush me.

When I got out, Milo was at the top of the driveway, sucking air.

I did the same. Thinking about Gerard Waters’s body, kept in a warm, moist place before being dumped in the Palisades.

Milo recovered enough to talk, but his voice was weak. “C.I.’s and techs on their way. I warned them. Go hazmat.”

“Considerate,” I said.

“See something like this, you aim for any virtue you can snag.”