Room 348: Death at the Inn - Ch # 1

Greg Fleniken traveled light and lived clean. After so numerous a long time on the street, he would take off his rolling bag open on the floor of his lodging room and utilize it as a drawer. Messy dress went on the closet floor. Shirts he needed to keep unwrinkled hung over. Toiletries were in the pockets of a cloth collapsing case that snared onto a towel rack in the washroom. At the conclusion of the day he would slide off his worn brown calfskin boots and line them up by the bag, drop his blurred pants to the floor, and put on lightweight cotton pajama bottoms.

Most nights he never cleared out the room. He would wrench up the discuss conditioner—he enjoyed a cool room at night—and sit on the bed, inclining back on two pads propped against the headboard. Chivalrously, to maintain a strategic distance from ruining the cover, he would lay out a clean white hand towel, on which he put his ashtray, cigarette pack, lighter, BlackBerry, the TV farther, and a sweet bar. He smoked and broke off sweet bits whereas observing TV. This is where Greg was on the evening of Wednesday, September 15, 2010, in Room 348 of the MCM Eleganté Lodging, in Beaumont, Texas—lounging, smoking, snacking on a Reese’s Firm Crunchy bar, tasting root brew, and observing Press Man 2.

He missed the ending.

Greg was usual to singular evenings. As a youthful man he had worked as a chief design on oceangoing vessels, investing months at ocean. In center age he had re-invented himself as a landman, a commonplace occupation in South Texas, facilitating the abuse of mineral rights on private property for gas and oil companies. Slim, with a close-cropped white whiskers and the weathered skin of a deep rooted outdoorsman, he had joined forces with his brother, Michael, in a flourishing oil-land renting commerce based in this little city east of Houston.

Each Monday morning he would make the two-hour drive in his pickup from Lafayette, Louisiana, heading west on Interstate 10 through scruffy Gulf-shore farmland broken as it were by cell-phone towers, oil derricks, and bulletins promoting motel chains, bayou eateries, “Adult Superstores,” and other nearby attractions. It took him through the stink of the huge ConocoPhillips refinery at Lake Charles, a woodland of channeling, monster tanks, and towering chimneys. The inn was fair off the cloverleaf exterior Beaumont. His company leased him a room in the “cabana,” a three-story wing that wrapped around a little swimming pool surrounded by pruned palms.

That Wednesday night, observing his motion picture, Greg got an email from his spouse, Susie, in the blink of an eye after seven. Susie was utilizing a computer program to record for a charge expansion. After she detailed her advance he composed back, “You’re doin’ great, babe.”

At a few point amid the uproarious, computer-generated standoff at the conclusion of the film, in the midst of all the fake viciousness, Greg was struck from no place with a exceptionally genuine and shattering blow. A blow so savage it would daze a man with torment. He overseen to get off the bed and move toward the entryway some time recently he fell, legs spread and face-first.

He was likely dead by the time his confront hit the green carpet.