Rob Thurman - Blackout

Too fast, all this was too damn fast. It was like meeting a woman’s parents on the first date. It was too much, too soon, and the cherry on top of all the strange and weird I’d woken up to less than a week ago.

“Yeah, that’s great.” I went for casual. There was nothing wrong with casual. “We’re close. Work together. You don’t let your vampire chick eat me. I’m grateful. About those candy bars …”

Goodfellow interrupted me and this time the smug, salacious, mocking voice was anything but. “Do not. Do not joke about this. Niko won’t say or do anything about it, but I will. You respect this and you respect that you are the luckiest man living to have the family you do, to have the brother you have.”

Just like that, casual was gone and I felt a complete and utter dick. I’d been so damn appreciative of what the people of the Landing had done for me, a haircut and a job, and here Leandros was telling me he practically would’ve spent the rest of his life hunting for me if that was what it took. What did I do? Asked for more candy bars. Called him a basset hound—not that there was anything wrong with basset hounds, but this was my brother. I didn’t remember it yet, but he was, and I was an idiot if I didn’t count myself lucky to have any family at all, much less family that refused to give up on me. Granted, he had kidnapped me, but, technically, it was for my own good. I’d wondered that first day in the Landing if I had friends, and I was all but spitting on a brother.

“Leandros, Christ, I’m sorry about the loyal and faithful thing. I’m sure you’re a better brother than a basset hound.” I grimaced. As apologies went, that was a concoction of frigging beauty. “Sorry about being a shit.” I could’ve said more, but, let’s face it, if he was my brother—the kind that evidently swore blood oaths and would battle armies single-handedly to make sure I got regular dental care or a yearly flu shot—then he knew what was under my outer candy-coated shell too.

The tense lines of his shoulders relaxed a fraction. “You don’t have to say that. In fact, it could start a precedent that would have you apologizing every minute of every day, and your time-management skills aren’t that impressive to begin with. Only know that you’re not alone. That’s enough.”

I was off the hook for being an ass, but more than that, I knew I wasn’t alone in the world. Not too many people could say that. It was humbling to know someone always had your back. It honestly was. I sat and “humbled” for a while before asking one more time. “I hate to bring it up again, but after cutting up that spider and flushing the pieces down the toilet, I didn’t get a chance to finish my breakf—”

A candy bar hit me in the forehead. Not particularly offended, I ate it and then napped. Concussions, evil Egyptian spiders, a brother whose code of honor was so deep he’d consider the Knights of the Round Table drunken and corrupt frat boys; it’d been an eventful day. Amnesia-man needed his rest.

When I woke up, we were in New York City, and Leandros and Goodfellow had switched positions. I straightened for a better look. Cars were bumper-to-bumper on all sides, a mighty herd of rush-hour bison headed for the cliff’s edge, too tightly packed to know their fate. I looked past them at the people on the sidewalks. People rushed along, streams of them, crabby and impatient cockroaches muttering and pushing. Late, late, for a very important date. Rude and obnoxious and everywhere.

This was a good place to hide—if you had to.

The Landing would always have a part of me for some indefinable reason, but this— this was home. I knew this city. I knew its heart and its whole, if not the details. I knew Central Park and the subway. I knew the rich places and the less than; the places you could walk alone and the places you shouldn’t. I knew graffiti and garbage-filled stairwells. I didn’t know any specific club or bagel shop, but I highly doubted I ate bagels anyway. I was hot dogs and relish down to my bones. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know where to go to get that hot dog yet. I took it all in.

“Home.”

I couldn’t stop myself from agreeing with Leandros on that one. “Yeah, it is.”

Finally we reached a smaller street and Goodfellow pulled the car halfway up on the curb. “Welcome to the Lower East Side, if you don’t recall, a very exclusive part.”

Leandros was already out of the car as I opened my door. “What’s so exclusive about it?” It wasn’t as nice as some of the other streets we’d gone down. The buildings here were more “old garage” than nice converted apartments.

He nodded for me to get out as well. He didn’t touch me, which was considerate of him. I was trying to go with the flow, but having space to think and time to do it in helped. “The privacy element,” he answered for the puck. “Promise has a deceased husband or two… .”

“Five,” Goodfellow corrected in a manner he didn’t try to pass off as remotely helpful.

“Regardless of the number,” said Leandros, able to grind his teeth with the best of them, “one owned a good deal of real estate. We moved from our last place a few months ago when it became difficult to smuggle out the bodies and more difficult to explain why the “thieves” that kept breaking into our apartment through the window did it by scaling four stories. Here it’s considerably easier to go about the business of our business, and Promise keeps the rent reasonable.”

Goodfellow opened his mouth, noted Leandros’s blanker-than-blank face, then addressed me instead. “See you soon, kid,” he called through the open window. “I’d slap you on the shoulder and say something witty and movingly eloquent, but as you’d only stab me with a fork, I’ll save it for another time.” He raised a hand and the car bounced off the curb and back into the street almost before Leandros finished closing the trunk after retrieving his duffel bag. The shirt I was wearing had come out of that bag. From the heft and clank of it, that shirt was the only nonlethal thing in there.

“I live here?” I asked. The building we stood by had a definite old-garage feel. There were flyers on the metal advertising a hundred different things. There were no garbage-filled stairwells or a homeless guy pissing on a potted bush, but that was probably because there was no potted bush. It was inside living, though, which meant monster killing paid, because I knew that no part-time bartender could afford anything but a cardboard box with wall-to-wall scrap carpeting.

There was some graffiti on the sidewalk, less graffiti maybe than long scratches scraped with something hard like metal. It read, Where are your brothers and sisters? A religious nut had been by recently, it appeared, as the scratches looked fresh. It was along the same line as “Am I not my brother’s keeper?” only more gender friendly. Gotta watch out for the sisters too.

“You live here,” Leandros confirmed. I walked across the letters to the door that had been placed off center into the corrugated metal that fronted the building. Battleship gray, the door opened without a key. You didn’t need a key when someone had taken a crowbar to the lock sometime in the past.

“Okay, that’s not right. I don’t need a memory to know that,” I said. “Great. I get amnesia, attacked by a spider in the john, and robbed. It just keeps getting better and better.”

“Hmm. It happens. It is New York.” Niko went in first and I followed, seeing that I had no neighbors. The entire building was one big space with the metal ceiling two stories high. There were windows up there to see the daylight beginning to dim. To the right was an area devoted to living. I noted a coffee table that looked cheap but brand-new, a couch that was about fifteen years past its prime with only prayer and duct tape holding it together, and beside it a small kitchen area with a bar separating the two spaces. You could eat there too and still swivel to see the TV hanging on the wall … and it was a great TV—big and flat with what I knew had to be one frigging amazing picture. I was in love with that TV.