X: The Hotel Maravilloso: STUMPY
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“Did you ever get in touch with Ernesto?” Creek asked. The words came after a seeming eternity of silence had enshrouded the three men in the basement of Stumpy’s house. It was what he’d intended to ask when he came downstairs in the first place, but the message from the radio had displaced his thoughts.
Stumpy looked at Creek, puzzled by the question because it seemed to come out of nowhere. “Uh, no…I didn’t. I was thinking about trying to reevaluate what’s going on out there,” Stumpy said, nodding his head to the outside wall, “and maybe stop by the hotel and check on him.”
“Ernesto, he’s a good friend?” Creek asked.
“Yeah, he helped me get back on my feet. Literally,” Stumpy said, rolling up his pants to expose a prosthetic leg.
“I guess that’s why they call him, Stumpy,” Jake said mostly to himself.
“Indeed,” Stumpy chuckled, “because of that and what I keep in my stump.”
Stumpy tilted his prosthetic leg to reveal an integrated holster with a .45 sunk into it. “It keeps a low profile, to say the least,” He chortled through a wheeze.
Jake looked at Creek with wide eyes and said, “It’s a good thing Stumpy here is a good guy. He was packing that thing the whole night last night.”
“Pardon me for not frisking his fake leg to see if a gun was hiding in it!” Creek returned in mild defense.
Stumpy broke the mounting tension, “Look, boys, why don’t we head upstairs? I’ll warm up some of last night’s grub, and we can fill up. After that, I’m gonna go to the hotel, see if I can find Ernesto.”
“We’re going with you,” said Creek, Jake nodding in agreement. “We gotta figure out a way home.”
Stumpy’s Cadillac rolled over the uneven desert road. Thick bands of smoke billowed slowly off of some tall buildings in the distance, like eerie burnt offerings. For a while, no one spoke. Eyes were glued to the windows, and every turn of the wheels carrying the men closer to the hotel and the city of Tijuana brought new levels of uncertainly into focus. Jake reached for the shotgun lying next to him in the back seat for reassurance. He double checked to make sure it was loaded and ready—just in case. Both he and Creek had packed up their stuff and brought their packs and guns. Not knowing what to expect, they wanted to be ready for anything. Stumpy even brought a few supplies of his own in a backpack.
After a while, the emptiness of the desert became a forlorn landscape dotted with rundown shacks and small cinderblock houses. The bleak dirt road became cluttered with empty bottles, crumpled newspapers, and food containers. There got to be more and more shacks and buildings in closer proximity to each other, some completely abandoned and dilapidated while others looked lived-in and somewhat kept-up.
“Shouldn’t we have at least passed another car or seen a person by now?” Jake asked from the backseat
“I woulda thought so,” Stumpy replied, “but in the last 12 hours, logic seems to be on the backburner.”
Jake could feel nausea trying to take him over. Partly because of the bumpy ride, but more for the tension mounting in his own mind from being unable to reconcile what was happening with any kind of reasonable explanation. “Not a soul,” Ernesto had said. He hadn’t seen anyone. And from what Jake could tell from looking out the window—Ernesto was right.
Stumpy’s Cadillac crossed the threshold of a massive, open metal gate that had a green and red shield with the silhouette of a lion’s head overlaid on it. Below, the words “Hotel Maravilloso” were emblazoned in black lettering on a large, bronze-colored plaque. There was an empty guard shack to the right. After a short trip up the main drive, the car rounded an ornate fountain. Creek looked out the window, sizing up the monstrosity of a building that sat before them. Stumpy brought the car to a halt and killed the engine. It was quiet for a moment. No one spoke or even moved. Jake took in a deep breath and exhaled hard, “What’s the game plan?”
Stumpy pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and popped one in his mouth. He lit it and took a long drag. After blowing smoke from the side of his mouth he started, “Look guys, this place is big, but it’s quiet. Judging by the total lack of encounters we had getting here, I’d say no one’s around. That whole situation is something we can mull over later. For now, I just wanna find my friend. He’s got connections that could help you get home. You help me find him, and I’ll see to it he sets you guys up.
“What kind of connections?” Creek asked.
Stumpy turned to face Creek, “The kind that can help you or hurt you. But you’re good guys, so there’s no need for the latter.”
“What are you getting us mixed up in here, Stumpy?” Jake spat out from the backseat.
“Take a look around, kid. I’d say you’d be hard pressed to be in a worse situation than the one you’re already in. If I had bad intentions for ya, I’d have left you in the desert.”
“Let’s just get this over with, okay?” Creek chimed.
“Fine,” Jake begrudgingly agreed.
“Look, we’re all armed. I think we’re good to split up and cover ground faster and get this thing done quick. Jake, you take the first-floor east wing with offices and some rooms,” he said while drawing an invisible map of the building with his finger in the air, “Creek you take the north arm through the casino and to the kitchen, and I’ll take west toward the convention center and meeting rooms. We’ll meet in the lobby in 10 minutes. If something happens, holler, and the other two come running. If something bad happens, that’s what the guns are for. We’ll take this place just like that—floor by floor—until we find Ernesto.
With that, the three men exited the vehicle, strapped on their packs and readied their weapons as they walked up the stairs to the main entrance of The Hotel Maravilloso. It was massive, grand, and lifeless. There were no inside lights on, no movement in the towering spread of plate glass windows of the individual rooms, and there was no sign of Ernesto. Once in the lobby, there was a shared look among the three, and each went their separate ways.
Stumpy rounded the corner of a darkened hallway leading to the meeting rooms on the perimeter of the hotel’s large convention hall. He’d already cleared two other rooms. Flipping the switch on the wall only revealed that the power was certainly out. Light breaking through the windows in the meeting rooms flooded through open doors and cast pale, intermittent shards of light into the hallway—just enough for Stumpy to barely see all the way down it. He squinted, thinking he might have seen the faintest tinge of silhouetted movement from at the other end when a loud blast of mariachi band music started up in one of the meeting rooms he had already cleared. It shocked Stumpy to his core in such a way that he froze in place, which was unusual for him and not how he liked or desired to react to fear.
Breaking though his body’s involuntary hesitation, Stumpy ran toward the music as quickly as he could with his .45 in hand, outstretched before him. The closer he got to the room, the clearer the singer’s words became:
En la lluvia te olvidarás el calor del sol pero con el tiempo recordarás de donde viene el fuego.
In rain you will forget the warmth of the sun, but in time you will remember from where the fire comes.
Once Stumpy singled out the room where the music was coming from, he approached it slowly. It was the conference room. The door had been closed when he first went in, but after he had cleared the room, he remembered making the distinct choice to leave it wide open, as a mark that the room had been swept. The door was pulled up, now—only open by a tiny crack. The music blasted through from the opening in the door. Stumpy crept so slowly and quietly toward the door that the intensity of his own heartbeat almost drowned out the music.
There was an office chair that sat on the outside wall, just by the door. It was broken by the look of it—one of the wheels was missing on the bottom and it looked like the wood was split there, as well. Stumpy grabbed the chair and put it in front of the cracked door. He looked through the crack trying to see who might be inside. The only thing he caught a glimpse of was that it looked like the projector hanging from the ceiling had been turned on. It was running through a picture slide show, but he couldn’t make it out through the crack. As the music felt like it was growing more deafening, Stumpy grabbed the chair, kicked the door open and hurled the office chair into the middle of the room, breaking it in two as it smashed against the conference table. Stumpy drew against the outside wall, out of sight from within the conference room but just beside the open door. He was hoping his actions would have surprised whoever was in there to do something. But nothing happened.
Stumpy whipped around the edge of the door frame to find that the neat, and freshly cleaned room had cleared just minutes before looked like it had been ransacked. Papers were everywhere, cabinets and drawers were opened, the trash bin was overturned, the massive phone that had sat in the center of the table was smashed into pieces and littered the table. The music continued to play. Stumpy walked over to the stereo and flipped it off. He’d hated the sound of the music in such a tense situation, but he immediately discovered that silence was far worse. He leaned against the wall next to the stereo, catching his breath and his thoughts, when a quick flash in the corner of his eye caught his attention. It was the projector quickly rolling through a slideshow of photos. The images were transitioning from a pitch-black screen, to lighter shades of black, until Stumpy could see the shape of something emerging at the corner of the projector screen. He walked closer to the images being displayed and realized the shape at the bottom corner of the screen wasn’t changing. The picture wasn’t changing—it was evolving—with each transition it was the same image, just becoming clearer. Stumpy edged his way closer to the screen, using the table to bear some of the weight off his tired leg. Sweat rolling down the side of his face, Stumpy furrowed his brow to try and bring the image into focus for himself. With a few more transitions, he’d realize that the blurry object at the bottom of the screen had materialized into a clear image of himself—lying face up against the hard, tan desert ground with eyes wide open and blood spilling from the corner his mouth.
A gunshot resounded from the east side of the hotel, shaking Stumpy again to his core and breaking his concentration on the image before him. “Jake,” he said, letting out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. He raced from the conference room and retraced his steps back to the lobby, moving through the deathly quiet hallways so quickly he thought he might lose his balance because of the strain on his prosthetic. When Stumpy got to the wide-open lobby, he could hear the muffled shouts of two distinctly different voices coming from the east corridor. He paused for a moment and turned to toward the casino doors that Creek had gone through earlier. He hobbled over to it, listening for movement. There was nothing. “Creek!” he shouted into the dark, cavernous expanse of the game room. He waited, but nothing returned his call. Stumpy cursed under his breath and returned to the center of the lobby. He switched the safety off his .45 and ventured into the darkened arm of the Hotel Maravilloso’s east wing, toward the shouting.
The hallway looked as though a brutal street brawl had taken place in it. Overturned housekeepers’ carts with shampoo and bars of soap were scattered everywhere. Broken glass from destroyed light fixtures on the wall littered the hall floor. There were suitcases and other pieces of luggage strewn about from overturned luggage carts. It looked like some had even been opened and rifled through. All of this gave Stumpy a sick feeling in his stomach. The shouting was becoming clearer to him—two distinct voices—one was Jake’s, the other belonged to Ernesto. Stumpy pushed himself against the wall as he approached the opening door from where the heated conversation was taking place. He heard Jake shout, “No, give me a good answer or I’ll make it so you won’t answer anyone ever again!” With his gun drawn, Stumpy moved inside the door frame to find Jake standing, with his shotgun pointed downward at Ernesto, who was sitting between a desk and a filing cabinet with his back against a wall and bleeding from the corner of his left eye. He had his hands up and palms toward Jake, as if he could stop the slug if Jake decided to shoot. About five feet above Ernesto’s head was a hole in the wall, from a shotgun blast.
Stumpy tightened his grip on his .45, and about the time that Jake noticed him, he also noticed the barrel of Stumpy’s gun was pointed directly at him. Jake transferred the same snarl he’d been giving Ernesto to Stumpy. “What did you bring us into!?” Jake shouted. Stumpy’s eyes narrowed and he returned Jake’s tone, “ Since you seem so keen on giving people choices today, I’ll give you one—either put that gun down and let my friend be, or I will put you and it down together.”