"Well, they're dead, so I doubt it will bother them," I replied. "Now let's roll them onto the elevator."
Bria helped me push the cart out of the suite and down to the end of the hall. I stabbed the button for the elevator. Since we were on the third floor, we didn't have to wait too long for it to arrive. Given the late hour, the car was empty. Even if someone had been inside, I was going to cheerfully say my friends had had too much to drink and that Bria and I were taking them to their room. Not the best excuse I'd come up with, but I didn't have time to be more creative or clever.
For once, my luck held, and we made it down to the ground floor without seeing anyone. Given the fact that the hotel didn't have any security cameras in the hallways, elevators, or common areas, I didn't have to worry about a guard spotting us on a screen somewhere and coming to see what we were up to.
I stepped outside and checked to make sure no one was using the pool, but the area was deserted. Even the bonfires had burned out on the beach. I craned my neck up, looking at the many stories above me, but I didn't see anyone else out on their patio. The night was as still, dark, and quiet as it was going to get.
"Still clear inside," Bria murmured from her spot in the doorway, looking back into the hotel. "But are you sure you want to do this? Someone's bound to hear the noise."
"I doubt that, given how many folks I saw sucking down mai tais earlier. They're either in their rooms sleeping off their buzz or holding on tight to their honeys right now. Even if they do hear something, they'll probably just think it's some late-night skinny-dippers out having a little fun. Besides, I don't see how we have much of a choice," I said. "As you pointed out, Sophia isn't here to clean up the mess like she usually is, and we can't exactly leave the bodies in the room with your name on the bill. So let's go. Heave-ho. These guys aren't getting any warmer."
Bria sighed with either resignation or agreement. I couldn't tell which exactly, and I wasn't sure I wanted to know.
We pushed the cart out onto the patio and up to the edge of the pool. Thankfully, the wheels didn't squeak. We started with Pete, since he was on top. Bria grabbed his legs while I took hold of his shoulders.
"One, two, three," I whispered.
Together we rolled his body off the valet's and into the deep end of the pool. Bria was right - the splash was louder than I'd thought it would be, but there was nothing I could do about that now. We quickly pushed the valet into the pool as well before shoving the cart back toward the door. Ten . . . twenty . . . thirty . . . I counted off the seconds in my head as we worked. It took us ninety seconds to dump the bodies and make it back to the door. But no lights snapped on around the pool and no one came outside to investigate, so I figured we were safe enough to do the same thing to the other two goons.
Only one giant would fit on the cart at a time, so we had to make two more trips. One by one, we hefted their bodies onto the luggage cart, took it downstairs, and dumped the giants into the pool, trying to make as little noise as possible. By the time we finished, the four bodies looked like overgrown lily pads bobbing up and down in the pool, and the shimmering blue water had turned a muddy pink from the blood still oozing out of the men's wounds. It wasn't the best or most discreet body dump I'd ever done, but hopefully no one would notice the dead men until morning. I planned for us to be long gone by then.
"Now," I said, pushing the cart away from the pool for the last time. "Let's go upstairs and tackle the room."
The suite was equipped with everything, and the kitchen was fully stocked right down to a box of rubber gloves and a wide assortment of cleaning supplies under the sink, probably so the maids wouldn't have to push their carts into the room and disturb the guests any more than necessary. I grabbed a pair of gloves, a bucket, some rags, and a bottle of bleach.
Since I'd killed three of the men right inside the door, most of the blood was limited to the marble floor there. The stone had already taken on a darker, more somber sound as the blood had started to dry on top of it. I splashed bleach over the whole area and wiped it down three times, while Bria straightened up the rest of the room, making sure she cleaned up all the melted traces of her elemental Ice blast. I also wiped down the luggage cart with bleach and cleaned our fingerprints off the brass rails.
It was after one in the morning when we finished. I stepped back and surveyed the suite with a critical eye. The area wasn't as pristine and spotless as it would have been if Sophia had been here and used her Air elemental magic to sandblast the blood into nothingness, but the bleach would muddle whatever evidence it didn't outright destroy. This wasn't the first murder scene I'd cleaned up on my own, and it wouldn't be the last.
Besides, nobody but Randall Dekes knew that the men had been sent to our suite in the first place. He couldn't exactly complain to the cops that we'd gotten away with murder, not without implicating himself. Despite how rich and powerful Dekes was, I doubted that even he would want to deal with the hassle of four dead bodies, how they'd gotten that way, and where they'd come from. When the cops got around to questioning him, the vampire would probably claim he'd never set eyes on any of the men before - even if everyone already knew they worked for him.
Blue Marsh might be hundreds of miles away from Ashland, but sociopathic ass**les were the same no matter where you went.
I stuffed the gloves, rags, and empty bottle of bleach I'd used into a plastic bag and shoved the whole thing into my suitcase to dispose of at another, safer location. I also stopped long enough to put a fleece jacket on over my T-shirt, hiding the bleach stains on my dark clothes. Then Bria and I locked the suite and left. On our way to the elevator, we left the luggage cart in the hallway where I'd first found it.
Checking out of the hotel was a calculated risk. When the bodies were found, the cops would be sure to look at the guest list and who had left when. Our departing this late at night might draw some unwanted attention, but I wasn't overly concerned. I could always manufacture some reason for why we'd had to leave in the middle of the night - an illness, a family emergency, a problem at the Pork Pit. Besides, I doubted the cops would look too hard at us. After all, we were two women. How could we possibly have had the brawn and brains to kill four men and dispose of their bodies in the pool? And the fact was that we simply couldn't stay here where we'd be sitting ducks for more of Dekes's men - or the vampire himself.
We made it down to the registration desk without any problems. I stepped up to deal with the paperwork while Bria got the night bellman to load our luggage onto another cart - one that hadn't been used to haul around dead bodies. The clerk behind the counter was a college girl who looked barely old enough to drink.