Night of the Living Trekkies Read Free Page A

think about it.
    “You shouldn’t point guns at people,” he said. “The last person who did that to me ended up in a rubber bag.”
    The teen, thoroughly terrorized, dropped his toy.
    Jim reached down to pick it up, ashamed of himself for over-reacting. It’s not like this high school sophomore was a threat to anyone. He just needed a little discipline.
    “Look, why don’t you just go to your room?” Jim suggested. “Go watch TV or something.”
    “TV’s busted.”
    Wonderful
, Jim thought.
Another problem
.
    He asked the kid for his room number and then tried to clarify the issue. “You mean the TV’s broken? Or you’re not getting a clear picture?”
    “It’s static,” the kid explained.
    Jim promised to send up a maintenance person by the end of the day. “And you can get your toy back after the convention. Ask for it when you check out.”
    He was back in the lobby a minute later and emerged from the elevator to find a pretty, young woman waiting for the lift. Judging from her navy-blue suit and Coach handbag, he guessed she’d arrived on business.
    The woman smiled at him. “Nice costume.”
    Jim looked down at his red hotel jacket—and the toy phaser—and realized she had mistaken him for a Trekkie. “I’m not here for the convention,” he sheepishly explained. “I work with the hotel.”
    She stepped aboard the elevator. “Then you might want to holster your ray gun.”
    Jim started to protest further, but it was too late. The doors were already sliding shut.
    It’s going to be that kind of weekend
, he thought.
    At the front desk, he passed a member of the maintenance crew who teetered on a ladder, struggling to hang a banner reading “Wel-come Fifth Annual GulfCon” over the check-in area. Jim stepped behind the counter and through a doorway, walking past banks of cubicles until he reached an actual office with regular walls. The sign on its closed door read “Chief of Security.” Jim used the butt of the phaser to knock.
    “Enter,” came a voice from the other side.
    Jim walked into the office of Dexter Remmick and tossed the toy phaser into a large box of lost-and-found objects. Dexter’s more than three-hundred-pound bulk was wedged behind his metal desk, whose surface was strewn with the contents of the hotel’s first-aid kit. A fresh bandage cocooned his left forearm.
    “Well, well,” Dexter said. “The Assistant Uniformed Staff Manager has decided to bless us with his presence. How was your nap?”
    “Very refreshing,” Jim said. “Thanks for sending Janice after me.”
    “My pleasure. How’s that promotion treating you?”
    Jim smiled grimly as he sat down. He’d spent most of his six months at the Botany Bay as a lowly bellhop. His “promotion”—now a standing joke between Dexter and himself—happened out of the blue. The general manager called him into his office one day and said he’d heard good things about his “management style” and his ability to “energize” the rest of the uniformed staff.
    Dexter had guessed, accurately, that much of Jim’s vaunted “leadership style” sprang from the fact that he was six foot two and a muscular two hundred and twenty pounds. Which tended to produce excellent compliance when he asked staffers to do things. Like the time he cornered Ted, the pool guy, and warned him to stop leering at female guests while cleaning the filters. Ted seemed thoroughly motivated after that encounter.
    “Any more motivated and he would have pissed himself,” Dexter had joked at the time.
    “When are these people going to realize I took this job to
avoid
responsibility?” Jim said.
    “You and me both, buddy,” Dexter said. “I’m having zero luck with that today. Kevin should have had my back when I collected that goddamned mime, but he’s home sick. Right now, I’m the only law west of the Pecos.”
    “At least we’re not full up,” Jim offered.
    “Thank God for that. If this place was hopping, we’d be screwed.