“Latte, right? No sugar.”
“Ah, yeah,” I say, looking around. There’s no Mark. No doctors or nurses. No secret alien luna base. No tentacles, which is good. I’m happy about the lack of tentacles.
The cafe is packed. People bustle about dressed in drab, dark coats, fighting off the cold. The chatter is surprisingly loud. Everyone’s talking at once. A truck rumbles by outside and I find my senses overwhelmed—stunned.
“I’ll see you later.” Sharon says, kissing me on the cheek. Her lips are warm. She’s wearing a police uniform, only this isn’t a sexy Halloween costume. She looks like one of New York’s finest, complete with a gun, radio, pepper spray, and cuffs on her stiff black leather utility belt. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail.
Before I can react, she’s gone. I blink and she disappears into the crowded coffeehouse.
I sit there for a few seconds, cradling the coffee in my hands as people bustle around me. The cafe is vibrating with warmth and life, while I’m sitting here as cold as a marble statue.
A sip of coffee excites my senses, and I get up, making my way through the crowd to the door. Outside, the sun is bright. Vapor forms on my breath in the cold air. Snow is piled in the gutter, slowly deteriorating into a grey slush. Patches of ice cover the sidewalk, but someone’s sprinkled salt, and puddles are forming on the concrete. I’m about a block from home, so I wander along the chewing gum covered sidewalk, past business men and women racing to get to work in a stampede of energy that seems more focused on staying warm than actually going somewhere.
I trip over a homeless guy sitting against the marble entrance to a fancy hotel. If I didn’t have such a death grip on my cup, I would have drenched him in coffee.
“Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” the elderly black man says, looking up from his torn cardboard sign: Will dance for fun, food, or money.
“Joe?” I ask, recognizing the bus driver from last night.
“Can you spare an honest Abe?” he asks, referring to a five dollar bill with Abraham Lincoln’s grave face and his distinct chin-curtain beard printed in lifeless zombie green.
“Joe? Do you remember me?” I ask, rummaging around in my pocket for some money. I pull out a crumpled note, not sure what denomination it is, but it doesn’t matter. I drop it in his cup, looking for some kind of recognition from him. Just a glimmer of remembrance will help me understand whether I’m going crazy or not. Was last night a dream? A nightmare?
Joe unravels the note, saying, “For one lousy buck, I don’t remember nothing.”
Double negative, but that doesn’t count as a positive in this context.
“Joe,” I plead, raising my voice while simultaneously trying not to draw attention to myself. “Please, tell me I wasn’t dreaming. You were there, right? You saw us. You know Sharon.”
“For five bucks, I’ll remember anything you want,” Joe says, grinning with a toothless smile. He laughs, cackling at me.
I fumble with my wallet, pulling out a twenty.
“What about Andrew Jackson?” I ask. “How good is your memory now?”
“Oh, yeah,” he says, snatching the note from my freezing fingers. “I remember you. You were with that pretty girl. The blonde.”
“She’s a brunette,” I say impatiently.
Joe laughs, saying, “Oh, yeah, I remember her now. Thin girl, right? Nice bust.”
He’s guessing. He could be describing the girl walking past behind me. I turn and storm away.
“Movies,” he calls out after me. “You were going out for dinner, right? And then a movie.”
Joe’s no help.
What the hell is going on? Last night was ridiculous, absurd. If it wasn’t for the dark bloodstains on my jacket, I’d question my sanity. Although, the bloodstains have me questioning my innocence. I didn’t do anything illegal, did I? Honestly, I just don’t know. I could have done anything while high on drugs.
This is not a good look, I decide, and despite the cold, I take off my jacket, draping it over my arm as I hurry along the sidewalk.
I round the corner expecting to see police tape cordoning off the area where Mark lay bleeding in front of my building, but there’s nothing beyond the hustle and bustle of every day life in the Big Apple. Everyone’s in a rush.
The tiny bathroom window in Sharon’s ground floor apartment is still open. I stop where Mark fell. There’s no blood. There should be bloodstains. And tire marks, revealing how the police cruisers cut across the slush to face the building, but the icy road looks normal, with two sets of tracks running in either direction, marking where car tires have compacted the snow and ice.
Turning around, I retrace my steps into the brownstone, expecting to see brilliant scarlet red drops in the snow, but the filthy grey sludge disappoints me.
Inside the lobby, bright yellow tape covers Sharon’s door—Police Line: Do Not Cross. So I wasn’t dreaming. For a moment there, I was wondering if I was suffering from a mental breakdown.
The door’s open. I can’t help myself. I have to peer inside. I have to convince myself of what’s real, but I don’t dare step into the apartment.
“Can I help you?” a pretty police officer asks from the shadows.
“Sharon?” I ask as the officer strolls toward me wearing disposable plastic gloves. Her standard issue police belt looks oversized on her dainty frame.
“You know this guy?” another police officer asks, following her out into the lobby with his right hand resting on his holster as though he were a gunslinger in the Wild West.
“Nope,” Sharon says, holding out a photo for me to look at.
“You live here, bud?” the male police officer asks. He’s all muscle and could have easily come straight from a body building competition. His radio squawks with some unintelligible mumbo jumbo and he responds, rattling of a bunch of buzz words and numeric codes that seem all too primetime TV cop show for me.
“Sharon?” I ask again, speaking under my breath as Mr. First Place in the Heavyweight division talks on his radio, but Sharon ignores me.
“Have you seen either of these people before?” Sharon asks, holding up the photo that was taken from the stairs. There’s Sharon and me—Bonnie and Clyde. I’ve got Mark draped over one shoulder. Water drips from his ice-bound head. We’re wearing tinfoil hats roughly mashed over our foreheads. The photo is blurred, obscuring our facial features, and the reflection coming off the tinfoil has caught the light, flashing back at the camera and washing out the image.
“No,” I say, looking deep into Sharon’s eyes.
Her eyes dart to the side. She’s trying to point at her partner without making it obvious.
“Where do you live?” Officer Could-Be-On-Steroids asks.
“I—I, um. I live upstairs,” I say, answering the officer’s question.
“And you don’t recognize either of these people?” he asks, clipping his radio handset back on his shoulder.
“Nope.” I frown, shaking my head.
“How long have you lived here?”
“Two years.”
I answer so quickly I’m almost cutting him off. I’m nervous. I’m coming across as guilty as sin.
How did Sharon get here so fast? Why is she impersonating a cop? I’m distracting myself. The musclebound cop leans to one side slightly, ensuring we maintain eye contact and keeping me engaged. He looks suspicious.
“And you’ve never seen either of them?” he asks, probing deeper. “Not even once?”
“The tinfoil would be a dead giveaway,” I say, trying to make a joke, but he doesn’t laugh. “No. People around here keep to themselves. I work odd hours. Shift work.”
That’s a lie, and I’m aware I’m making the classic mistake all liars fall for, trying too hard to be convincing. I’m saying too much. My eyes dart around. Everything about my body language screams, “Liar!” I might as well hang a sign around my neck.