Scenes from the Hallway

You know who I am.
I swear too much, I crack too many jokes, and I got a thing for Kat Tanner; a messy thing, a distracting thing, a getting-in-the-way-of-everything thing; a thing that makes being in the same room with the woman torture. Sometimes it's the good kind. Mostly, it's not.
What you don't know is how it all started. You don't know how we met, you might not know what happened in Vegas (or the morning after), and you definitely don't know what happened after that.
You want to know the story before the story? Well... here you go.
But be careful what you ask for. As I've discovered the hard way, you might not like it.
"The elevator went ding, the doors opened, I strolled out. First thing I noticed was the narrowness of the hallway. The next thing I noticed was the open stairway to my right, the smell of damp, and the water stain on the ceiling. What a shithole. “Check the locks on the windows.” “Got it.” I moved the cell to my other ear, rolling my eyes. Quinn was barking orders over the phone. And when Quinn barked orders there was nothing to do but say, Got it, or, Right, or, Sounds good. What did he think? That I didn’t know enough about security procedures to test the integrity of window locks when checking the perimeter of an apartment? Give me a fucking break. He wasn’t thinking clearly because lately he was only thinking about one thing—or rather, one person. I hated these old apartment buildings, the ones built in the late fifties, early sixties. The elevators hardly ever worked and the stairways were too tight. Without fail, a pipe in the ceiling leaked on every single goddamn floor, making the whole building smell like the cellar of my Uncle Zip’s place."