Page 36 of Not That Complicated

I called Detective Nash to double-check and see whether or not they were going to come and fix it.

He informed me that the police weren’t the ones to make the hole. I was on my own.

Okay, they hadn’t made it but theyhadwidened it.

As soon as I had the go-ahead to fix it, I ended the call with Detective Nash and called Craig Henderson.

The phone rang a good few times before it went to voice mail. I left a message. I left another message the next day, and then again the next, backed up with a text.

After a full week, I’d stopped asking him to return my call at his convenience, and left a message saying that, as he had apparently finished the job, I was going to go ahead and leave him a review, how did that sound?

He called me back within ten minutes.

“Craig,” I said. “What a delightful surprise.” I wouldn’t really have left him a shitty review. Craig didn’t know that.

“Ray,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Not great. There’s a hole in my bedroom floor and a carpet waiting to be laid, and I wanted to get a timeline on when that’s going to be taken care of.”

“Uh. Sort of up to you, isn’t it?”

“It is? Oh, good.” And here I’d thought he was going to be a dick about it. You are a bitter man, Ray Underwood, I told myself. Have a little faith in humanity. He’s been waiting for you to reschedule. “In that case can you get here by nine tomorrow?”

“Uh, no.”

“Day after?”

“No as in I ain’t coming back, Ray.”

I blinked at my computer screen. “You’re going to leave me with a big hole in my floor?”

“Yes. And I don’t care what review you post.” His voice took on a belligerent edge. “No one would blame me.”

“I think a few people might.”

“No one wants to work in a murder house, Ray.”

“It’s not a murder house!” It was one thing for me to call it a murder house. When Craig said it, it was rude. “No one was murdered.”

“That we know of. Unless you heard something from the police? They say anything?”

“Are you going to come and fix the hole if I tell you?”

“No.”

“Then they didn’t say anything.”

“They did! What did they say?”

“Come and fix the hole and I’ll spill.”

“I can’t do it, Ray. I’m sorry, but I can’t. It’s damaging to my wellbeing.”

“Okay, and it’s damaging to my household budget because I already paid you a deposit, and it was for you to lay a carpet, not make a hole in my bedroom floor!”

“I only did that because you asked me to. That was me being nice.”

He had a point.

---