Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
The digital clock hanging above Amanda’s TV showed it was one minute till five o’clock. Even though she’d only been home for a couple of hours, she felt each minute pass with the same speed of molasses coming out of the bottle. On top of the feelings of stress, Amanda had a litany of questions about the strange red haired woman in the funeral hall.
4:59:48 PM
What was her name?
4:59:52 PM
Why did she wear that suit of armor? Was it something important to her, or was it nothing more than an elaborate costume piece? What was she doing in a funeral hall at that time? What was the meaning behind the message on the notecard sitting on his lap? Even if there was no meaning, there was one thing she hoped for.
4:59:58 P.M.
That she could find a good moment’s peace in the chaotic day.
The clock rang five P.M. and let out a strong electronic gong sound for a few seconds before settling back to its normal silent rhythm. Amanda waited in nervous anticipation for what would happen next. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes passed by and nothing happened. The world continued on as it always had. She persistently held on to the belief that something was going to happen.
“Still thinking about the hot redhead?” Gary asked, stepping into the apartment.
“The card said that my luck would rise at five o’clock,” Amanda said with a sigh, looking up at the clock again. “It’s now 5:20 and...nothing.”
Gary moved past the small kitchen and took a seat right next to Amanda, ready to dispense some advice he felt was necessary for Amanda to hear. “You sure the phrase on the card wasn’t a fake?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Gary paused a moment to come up with the right words to say. “What if it was just a gag or something?”
Amanda let out an unconvinced chuckle. “Not a chance! Next thing you’ll tell me the beautiful redhead is a figment of my imagination sparked by my Dad’s death and a love of MMORPG.”
Gary sheepishly shrugged. It did not take long for Amanda to read her friend’s body language. “I’m not nuts, God dammit! I know something is going to happen, and—”
[DING DONG!]
“--there it is!”
Amanda got up and made her way to the door. Gary meanwhile thought about the kind of psychiatrists either he or Amanda could afford under their respective, bare bones medical plans. And if that fell through, he thought, there was Dr. Phil.
Amanda opened the door slowly. It was some damned delivery dude. She grabbed the grabbed the young man by the collar and bellowed to him, “What do you want?!”
The scared little man was dressed in a UPS uniform. He tried desperately to stick to his usual script of dialogue, lifting the package up to Amanda’s chest. “P-P-Package for you, sir.”
Amanda let go of the man’s collar when she saw the envelope. She grabbed it out of his hand and examined it. “Who’s it from?”
“I don’t know,” the deliveryman replied with a slight flinch. “No one physically came and delivered it to us. It just dropped in a flash to us.”
“The Guardian,” Amanda said looking at the envelope’s address label, ignoring the young man. “From London, the Guardian?"
“Oh, nice,” The deliveryman said in a conciliatory tone. “Look, ma'am, I’m-I’m really sorry. I would have been here twenty minutes ago. But traffic coming down the I-5 was a nightmare!”
“It’s alright, man. It happens sometimes,” Amanda replied. “I want to apologize for going Liam Neeson on you.”
“No worries!” The deliveryman looked relieved.
Amanda closed the door and slowly opened the envelope, pulling out a letter from inside.
Gary scratched his head, trying to wrap his head around the news. “Are the Editors finally giving you a story that doesn’t involve charity events or the Seahawks?”
“Nope, it’s the Guardian,” Amanda gave Gary the cover letter from the Guardian over to Gary as proof. “They’re looking for another writer to work the Arts section, starting Monday. I guess they looked at my work and thought I was the right woman for the job.”
“I guess someone up there likes me!” She added before going into a victory dance, placing the envelope back on the couch before walking to her room. Gary pondered how this whole thing came to be, and also what else would happen next as he placed the letter to his side.
“I hate to rain on your parade, Mandy. But there’s still a lot of stuff you have to take care of before going,” Gary said, walking to Amanda’s room. “There’s getting a house, a car, sending your resignation notice to the P-I. All of that takes a substantial amount of money and time to put together. Two things that you don’t really have in spades.”
Amanda poked her head out from the bedroom door. “Those are all things that I can deal with tomorrow. Tonight—we celebrate!”
She popped back inside his room to get changed, turning on her iPod. “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke was the first song to play, faintly coming out in waves from his door. Gary placed the letter down on the armrest, unknowingly knocking the rest of the package down to the ground as he started to move to the bathroom. He took two steps before noticing some more stuff that had poked out from inside the letter sized envelope.
“Hey, uh, buddy...I think you missed something.”
Dressed in a Seattle Sounders T-shirt and a pair of pants, Amanda emerged from her room. “What?”
Gary picked up the paperboard sleeve and the extra items. “It’s a plane ticket, and a deed to a flat in North London. All paid for in your name.”
Amanda stood there mouth agape and her eyes wide as saucers for a few moments, shocked at the development. “Maybe this is one of those nice lucky streaks that can’t be explained or rationalized.”
***
The following evening, Gary and Amanda traversed their way to Jillian’s Billiards Club for drinks. It was a favorite spot of theirs since college where they picked up women and celebrated momentous events like the Seahawks winning the AFC West. Tonight was a busy night with the crowd packed around the TVs watching the Sounders play the Portland Timbers at Portland. Luckily, the concentration of people there had freed up the pool tables.
“So, are you gonna bail out of the apartment or use it as a vacation spot once you’re a big reporter there?” Gary asked, taking a swig of his Molson and watching as Amanda racked up the billiard balls for the opening shot.
Amanda laughed. “In this economy? Absolutely not! I’m gonna rent out my room for some extra cash. It’ll come in handy if the Guardian job falls apart and I have to hightail it back here.”
Gary nodded approvingly, moving toward the pool cues to pick one out. “I guess that means I’ll be choosing the new roommate, right?”
“Of course, dude. You’re my best friend,” Amanda replied moving to the pool cues a few beats while Gary lined up his opening shot. “There is one thing I want you to keep in mind. If you choose a woman, please don’t date or have sex with them.”
“Oh come on,” Gary protested, unleashing his opening break of the game which potted a striped 13-ball in the upper left side pocket of the table. “I only did that once.”
“Yeah, and then you cheated with said woman a month later,” Amanda said examining Gary’s next shot from over his shoulder. “She took a golf club to your car and scrawled ’Home of the Man-Whore’ in chalk on the dorm door after breaking up with her. I had to buy $50 in paint at Home Depot to cover up that moment of embarassment!”
“Alright, I get your point,” Gary conceded as he lined up the perfect angle for his next shot. “In return though, I’m going to give you some advice when you get to London.”
“Sure,” Amanda watched the 9-ball bounce in and out of the pocket. “What?”
“If there’s a hot British chick who thinks you're interesting, do not go on about Gaelic ghost stories.”
The crack of the cue ball off hit the 4-ball and slid in to the upper right pocket slightly muted Amanda’s laughter. “A, there’s no such thing as Gaelic ghost stories. Though James Joyce comes close. And B...I only did that once.”
“And she left without a word in the middle of your second date,” said Gary, watching Amanda set up her next shot. “You see my point?”
Amanda shook her head and grumbled, assessing his options for another shot using the cue ball and its target, the 10-ball. As she did, her gaze was distracted by what looked like a man walking towards the bar. He was dressed all in black from head to toe. The exact layout of his face and clothes were hard to peg down. The same could be said of the rest of his featureless body, which was both human and not quite human at the same time.
She watched as the man in black approached the hostess and engaged her in conversation. The stranger lifted a hand to the young woman’s hair. Another smooth talker trying to get into a woman’s pants. But there appeared to be something more as she looked at the stranger.
Distracted, Amanda scraped the dark green covering of the table with his pool cue, tapping the cue ball and sending it limply away from his intended shot, hitting both the 8-ball and 3-ball respectively. She straightened in at an 80 degree angle a second later. “What the hell?”
“Ouch, tough break buddy,” said Gary, readying his next shot. “You should have saved the hostess ogling for after the shot.”
Amanda ignored Gary and stepped towards the wall to better focus on the man in black who had moved from the hostess to the bar itself. The man now looked at Amanda as if she were an animal in the wild, examining her every move. The hair stood up on Amanda’s neck. She was so focused on the stranger that he didn’t notice Gary’s missed attempt to pocket the 7-ball.
“Shit,” Gary said with a groan, turning to Amanda. “You’re up, Mandy!”
The mysterious man in black finished his drink and calmly left the room. Amanda felt a sharp and bitter cold hit her as the door closed behind the man. It felt weird to her, but she assumed it was just the air conditioner and returned to the game.
***
A few days later, Sea-Tac International Airport was busy with the usual foot and retail traffic found on a Monday morning. A pool of gray outside came into view through the massive glass windows, signaling the coming of a spring storm. Something that Amanda, as excited as she was for her new life across the pond, would miss about the city of her birth.
She moved to the back of the security line with her carry-on luggage and watched as the TSA screener moved three dozen bodies through at a brisker pace than normal. It only took fifteen minutes before Amanda reached the front of the line to be screened. The screener, a balding man looked him in the eyes as the person in front of him moved on.
“Your boarding pass and license, please.” He was all business.
Amanda promptly handed him the requested documents. The screener examined the documents for a few moments then flashed a half smile that caught Amanda slightly off-guard. “London, huh?”
“Yep.” She glanced at his watch, slightly antsy to catch her plane.
“I went to London when I was your age,” said the screener. “It was a few months after President Bush got us into Iraq. Long story short—my boxers were taken by some locals and then painted with Bush’s big head on them. I think they now hang inside a small pub in Manchester.” He grinned at the thought.
Amanda listened as politely as she could, waiting to get his boarding pass and ID and calculating the time necessary to reach the terminal in time. She pictured the type of strange, Todd Phillips-inspired-madness that happened to the guy between arrival in London and his boxers used as an anti-war flag.
Finally, the screener handed his ID and boarding pass after a thorough examination and said to Amanda, “Have a good flight, Ms. Duncan.”
She walked past the lobby and out to the row of eateries and newsstands that were across from the terminals. She thought about more of the awesome things she would miss about Seattle when he left. There was the people and there was the smell when it’s raining. The incredible coffee shop-to-human being ratio that can only be found in Seattle. And of course the true jewel of all of Washington State...Dick’s Drive-In.
Amanda looked at her boarding pass to double check his gate and flight time. She was right where she needed to be. The gate was filled to the brim with people she’d soon share a plane with for the next nine and a half hours. She thought about what he could do to pass the long flight time when—
“Watch out!” a voice shouted from nearby.
Amanda spun around and accidentally tripped somehow landing face first on the tile floor. She propped himself up on his knees. A short man stood in front of her. He looked like a young Danny DeVito—if he were dressed up as a Rugby goon. That or he had been beaten up by a group of Rugby goons outside of a pub one night.
“Dumbass!” The imp growled, showing off an ugly collection of teeth before ambling away.
O…kay, Amanda thought before getting back up on her feet. As she did though, she tripped again and landed again face first on the tile. She looked down and realized her shoes had been tied together.
“That little shit.” She tried to pry loose the knot on her shoe laces with much stress and struggle to the amusement of passers-by.
Finally, Amanda was able to wrench them off and returned onward to the gate and her flight to come. Part of her though wanted to beat the annoying...whatever-it-was with her shoes which dangled from the grip of his right hand like nunchucks. But he had a plane to catch.