Beach Town Read Online Free PDF

rented Kia. Business wasn’t exactly booming at the Silver Sands. Ginny Buckalew was already doing the math in her head. She was hooked.
    â€œI was thinking you’d give us the AAA rate. Eighty a night, okay?”
    â€œEighty-five,” Ginny said. She stubbed out her cigarillo in the ashtray. She gave a furtive glance over her shoulder, as though she feared being overheard. “And that’s the cash rate. No credit card.”
    â€œDone.” Greer said. She suppressed a yawn and stood to go. “G’night.”
    â€œJust one more thing,” Ginny called after her. “Your people can have every unit in the motel. Except my apartment. I live here, and I’m going nowhere.”
    â€œDeal,” Greer called back.

 
    4
    Room seven was stifling. Greer fiddled with the air conditioner’s thermostat, turning it down from seventy-eight to seventy-two, but there was no appreciable drop in temperature. It was after eleven, and she was finally sleepy.
    She brushed her teeth and released her hair from the confines of the ponytail. It cascaded around her shoulders, like some wild native shrub with a life of its own. Stripped down to nothing but a pair of panties, she climbed between the sheets, which thankfully were clean and smelled like bleach.
    It was still hot. Her skin grew clammy with perspiration.
    She got out of bed, turned the thermostat down to sixty-eight, fell back onto the lumpy mattress, closed her eyes, and somehow managed to doze off.
    Two hours later she awoke, drenched in sweat, to the metallic rattling of the air conditioner against the aluminum window frame. Condensation dripped down the wall and onto the pile of clothing Greer had discarded onto the floor.
    â€œShit,” she muttered, stumbling into the bathroom. She turned on the shower and stood under the trickle of cold water for at least thirty minutes. Finally, when her skin was shriveled and her body temperature had dropped sufficiently, she stepped out, pulled an oversize T-shirt over her still-wet body, and dropped back onto the bed, covered only with a tissue-thin top sheet. She fell into a sleep that felt more like a coma.
    *   *   *
    The faintest rays of light shone through a bent slat in the metal blinds of room seven. The air conditioner wheezed ineffectively. Greer was not even half awake when she felt something brush against her cheek.
    She swiped her right hand across her face, then opened her eyes and spied a huge black roach scuttling across her pillow.
    Greer let out a scream worthy of a Hitchcock ingenue, but the roach took no notice. She screamed again, clenched her teeth, and batted at it, at which point it took flight, winging its way across the room.
    She stared at the bug in open-mouthed horror as it lighted atop the nightstand. A flying cockroach? When the roach flew onto the foot of her bed, she’d had enough.
    She opened the door of her room and groggily considered her next move.
    Squinting into the blinding morning sunlight, she spied a male figure three doors down from her own, pushing a laundry cart mounded with linens.
    He was wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt with cutoff sleeves, baggy shorts, and flip-flops. His hair was as rumpled as the linens on his cart, and a pair of tortoise-shell glasses perched on the end of a nose that was sunburned and peeling.
    â€œHey! Do you work here?”
    He rolled the cart toward her. “Huh?”
    She grabbed a handful of his shirt and dragged him toward her room. “Get in here and get it.”
    He poked his head in the doorway. The room was dimly lit. “Get what?” He didn’t seem to understand the urgency of the situation.
    â€œThat!” Greer pointed at the roach, which was now perched on the lamp on her nightstand. “That thing. That roach. It flew. It flew directly at me.”
    â€œThat? That’s just a little ol’ palmetto bug.”
    â€œIt’s a roach. But Jesus H. Christ on