The motel was called the Pine Tree. It was not made of pine. It was not a tree. It was a long low building with eighteen rooms and a sign that had lost half its letters so it just read PINE _REE, and the _ was a bulb that had burned out in 1987 and nobody had replaced.

I worked the night shift. That meant I sat behind the front desk from eleven to seven, drinking coffee that tasted like it had been brewing since the Reagan administration, watching the parking lot, making sure nobody trashed room six again.

It was 1994. The town had lost its factory two years ago. Nobody talked about it but everybody knew. The diner on Route 24 had closed. The bank had closed. The Pine Tree was hanging on by a thread and a landlord in Omaha who did not care enough to foreclose or to invest.

The phone rang at two in the morning. I picked it up.

A voice on the other end, slurring: Hey. Uh. Yeah. I got something in my cold storage that's, uh, kinda suspicious.

I sighed. Another drunk. They always called at night. Sometimes they wanted a room. Sometimes they just wanted to talk to someone who would listen. I was good at listening. It cost me nothing.

What's in it? I asked.

A body, he said. Or, like, a dead guy. I hit him with my truck. He was standing in the road. I didn't see him. It was dark and I'd been drinking. A lot.

I took a sip of the coffee. It tasted like burnt water.

So you killed somebody, I said.

Yeah. I guess. I mean, I didn't mean to. But I did. And I put him in the cold storage at the back of my job. I work at a place that has a cold storage. It's a, uh, I don't know what it is. A warehouse or something. I don't really know. I just, I started working there and there was a cold room and the body was there and I didn't know what to do.

So you called me.

Yeah. I called, like, a bunch of people. Nobody answered. Then I called you. You picked up. So.

What do you want me to do?

I don't know. I just, I needed to tell someone. I'm not a bad guy. I just, I drink too much and I made a mistake and now there's a dead guy in a cold room and I can't, I can't sleep.

I looked at the parking lot. A pickup truck was parked in front of room twelve. The owner was probably snoring inside with the TV on. The neon sign flickered. Somewhere a dog barked and then stopped.

Listen, I said. You should call the police.

Yeah. I know. I know I should. But I can't. Not yet. I need to, I need to think about it first.

Think about it.

Yeah.

I drank the coffee. It was still terrible.

You know what? I said. Yeah, I don't know. I just sat there. I had my own problems. My own mistakes. Two divorces. A mountain of debt. A job I hated. None of it compared to what this guy had done. But none of it made him wrong to have done what he'd done. Life was just a series of bad decisions and the people who made them and the people who paid for them, and usually they were the same person.

I'm gonna hang up now, I said.

Okay.

Good luck.

Thanks.

I hung up. I sat behind the desk. I watched the parking lot. The neon sign flickered. The dog barked again.

In the morning, I turned on the motel's little transistor radio while I poured the old coffee down the sink. The local news was on. Something about a fire at a warehouse on the edge of town. One fatality. A body found in a cold storage unit. The owner also died. Fire investigators were calling it accidental. An electrical fault, maybe. Or maybe the drunk had done more than just park a body in the cold room. Maybe he'd done something else. Something he wouldn't tell anyone about, even to me.

I drank a cup of fresh coffee. I locked the front door. I flipped the sign to OPEN.

Another day. Another shift. Nothing had changed. Nothing would change.