the watch

            I woke up sweaty and cold.  The air-conditioning had been left on for hours, and I had burrowed deeply into my blankets while I slept. 

            The afternoon sun peeked through the holes in the black posterboard, nudging me into full consciousness.  What time was it exactly?  Hard to tell, as I threw the little alarm clock across the room when it went off the first time.

            Compelled by a powerful urge to piss, I stumbled up the stairs to the bathroom.  After whistling through ‘Peter and the Wolf’ a few times, I stood in front of the mirror, inspecting myself through glazed eyes. 

            I hadn’t shaved in days, and my dingy white t-shirt was tinged with dirt and blood.  I remembered nothing of the day before, and my brain throbbed.  I felt the back of my head and there was a large bump, the hair over it matted with blood.

            I walked back down the stairs to my basement room and put on the pants I wore the day before.  I went outside and sat on the bench in my front yard and sparked up a cigarette, taking deep, cleansing puffs.

            I was happy to see that my car was in the driveway, at least.  It didn’t even appear that there were any dents.  Bonus.

            Had I gotten drunk?  I wasn’t sure.  Alcohol usually didn’t have amnesia-inducing powers over me, but I didn’t rule it out as a possibility.

            I walked back into my room and emptied my pockets onto the floor, hoping I could find some clues.  Wallet, lighter, orange tic-tacs.  So far nothing unusual.  At the bottom of my right pocket I found a folded white piece of paper.  Just a receipt for the cigarettes and tic-tacs.  On the back of it, though, there was a phone number and a name.

            Angela? 

            I didn’t know any girls named Angela.  I reasoned that she might have been the cashier at the gas station where the receipt came from, so I decided to go there once I got cleaned up.  I would have simply called the number, but cringed at the thought of how the conversation might go:

            “Hello, is this Angela?”

            “Yes”

            “Who are you?  I was so messed up last night that today I don’t even remember how I met you.  Are you cute?”

            Click, then silence.

            No, better to hold off on making any phone calls for now.  I shed my clothes and started the water for the shower.  As soon as I did this, I could hear the faint ringing of the phone over the noise.  I donned a towel and raced for the phone.

            “Hello?”

            “Do you still have it?”  I did not recognize the man’s voice.  It definitely wasn’t Angela.

            “Have what?”  I asked.

            “Don’t play dumb with me, monkey.  I’ll send someone for it tomorrow.  If it’s not there, well…let’s just assume that’s not an issue.”

            Click, then silence.

            I wasn’t very optimistic about that man’s tone.  He sounded cranky and dangerous.  I hate cranky and dangerous people.  As soon as the first hot droplets of water hit the back of my head, I forgot all about it.

After I got out of the shower I got dressed and searched for a sock hat to cover my bruised melon.  My room was in a complete state of disarray, but this was nothing unusual.  I found the hat under some clothes and headed for the car.

The gas station wasn’t open.  The police tape and the shattered front window made this obvious.  I drove by the deserted building, confused.  I was so focused on the building, I didn’t see the man walking across the road right in front of me.      

I slammed on the brakes, making stinky clouds of smoke.  The disheveled fellow barely paid attention as I stopped, just inches in front of him.  He crossed a busy road without a second thought.  As far as I was concerned, the incident was entirely his fault.

I demonstrated this with a hand gesture and a beep, but he didn’t even look back.

There was no time for fuming, though, as the cell phone rang in the backseat.  I was a little put off by this, since I didn’t have a cell phone.  I answered it anyway.

“Howdy, what can I do for you?”

“Hello?  This is my phone.”  This time it was actually a female’s voice.

“It was in my backseat.  I would be more than happy to return it if you tell me where to meet you.”

I agreed to meet her at the mall in twenty minutes.  I wondered who she was and how I happened to obtain her phone.  Maybe she knew something helpful.

Maybe.

There was a brown-haired girl with a green skirt waiting in front of the pretzel cart.  As I approached, I held up the phone and she smiled. 

“Thank you so much for bringing me my phone.”

“Really, it’s nothing.”  I replied.

She smiled again.  “Actually, I have a confession to make.  I left it there on purpose so I could see you again.”

“Very crafty,”  I laughed.  “Now that I know that’s the case, I believe some kind of reward is in order for me locating your lost phone.”

Even more smiling.  “How about lunch?”

We got sub sandwiches from the food court and exchanged idle banter.  The whole time we were talking, I was trying to think of a polite way to explain that I didn’t remember anything from the day before, even her name.  Finally I just came out and said it.

“I have a confession to make too,” I began.  “Something…weird happened to me yesterday and I can’t recall anything from yesterday, even meeting you.”

“Oh.”

“Could I ask your name…again?”

“My name is Erika, and after all the things we did last night I’m a little offended you don’t remember anything.  I’ll never forget it.”

My face lit up.  “What did we do last night?”

She gave a mischievous grin.  “This is just some little joke on your part to make me talk dirty, isn’t it?”

“No, I really honestly don’t know what happened yesterday.”  I took off my hat and showed her my injury.  “I don’t even know how I got this.  Do you?”

She shook her head.  “That must have happened after you took me home last night.”

“Did we go on a date?”

She shrugged.  “We went driving in your car, but I wouldn’t really call it a date…unless you consider the church parking lot a date.”

“Church parking lot?  Wow…how blasphemous.  Did I get lucky?”

She stood up to leave.  “Guess you’ll just have to wonder about that one.”  She gave me a kiss on the forehead and started to walk off.  Almost as an afterthought, she turned and said, “I’ll call you at home later.”

And then she was gone.

How could I forget about Erika?  I pondered this as I finished my sandwich.  I didn’t think she knew anything about the angry phone man.  But I did think that man had something to do with my head and the gas station.  Maybe even Angela.

I had to know.  I went to a payphone and dialed the number.  I held my breath as I thought of a way to explain myself.

But there was no answer.

These are not things a happy-go-lucky young man should be concerned about, I told myself.  I decided to let the matter drop and maybe things would come back to me in time.

I smoked three cigarettes on my drive home.  When I pulled into my driveway I was upset to see the door ajar.  There was no other car in the driveway, so I couldn’t be sure if the person who opened it was still around.

I crept stealthily into my own house, first going to my room.  After a quick scan, I could tell it was empty.  I took this advantage to grab the bat from my closet.  I heard the floorboards creek above my head and went into a blind rage.  I flew up the stairs ready to clobber the blonde young intruder.  I dropped the bat and my jaw.  She was really cute.

“I’m sorry,”  I said. “I thought someone had broken into my house.”

She stood there, shaking for a few seconds, but she eventually regained her exposure.  “I knocked at first, but there was no answer.  I grabbed the key from the plant and came in, like you said to do yesterday if you weren’t here.”

Did I say that?  I had to take her word for it.  “Something happened to me yesterday and I forget everything I did in the last 24 hours.  So I kind of don’t even remember your name.”

She seemed unfazed by this.  “Yeah, they probably drugged you.  That’s one of their specialties.”

“Drugged me?” 

“Yeah, the men who came and took it.  They probably drugged you and then got tired of waiting for it to kick in so they just knocked you out.”

This girl seemed to know a lot about what was going on.

“And how do I know I can trust you?  You might be on their side.”

She laughed and gave me a kiss that would make a porn star blush.

Angela!  I remembered her name, even though she was still only vaguely familiar to me.

“What else did I tell you yesterday?”

She seemed to be thinking.  “You said you were going to hide it and that I should meet you here today and we would leave town.”

“Hide what?”

“The watch, silly.”

“The watch?”

She went on to tell me story of the watch.  It was a super-valuable trinket from some foreign country, and even the numbers were indecipherable.  The reason for its value was the material it was constructed from, some nearly indestructible metal alloy nobody had ever seen before.

The owner of the gas station where Angela worked had purchased it at a pawn shop, or so he claimed.  He left it in the store safe while he went on vacation.  Yesterday, someone had robbed the gas station.  The robbers left everything in the drawers, taking only the safe so they could crack it, presumably to get the watch.

What they did not know at the time was that Angela knew the combination to the safe and was inspecting the watch at the time of the robbery.  They didn’t even notice it hanging cumbersomely on her petite wrist.

Apparently, I arrived directly after the robbery, before the police even got there.  She told me the men were after the watch and that it was extremely valuable.  She said that since the safe was gone, the owner would assume the watch was gone. He would report it to his insurance company and get the money back, so she wasn’t going to tell him she still had it.  I suggested that I take it before the cops showed up and started asking their questions.  I told her I would hide it and we would sell it and split the money and live fabulously.  Then I bought cigarettes and tic-tacs, and she wrote her phone number on the receipt.  I gave her one of my business cards and left.  (Side note:  I carry business cards because I play guitar and sing in bars.)

A good story, but it didn’t really explain why my head hurt, or why someone drugged me.  It also didn’t explain the current location of the watch. 

“So where do you think it is now?” I asked.

She shrugged.  “Likely it’s still where you hid it, even though you don’t remember where that is.”

“What makes you think so?”

“You’re still alive.  If they’d have gotten it, you wouldn’t be.  They must think if they watch you long enough you will lead them to it.”

I looked out my window.  Sure enough, there was a black sedan parked across the street a few houses down the block.  In the waning twilight I could just barely make out the silhouette of a person inside. 

I was fuming.  I was sick of being a pawn in this stupid game.  I grabbed the samurai sword hanging over my closet door and unsheathed it.

“I will be right back,” I said.

I slid quietly out my back door and walked through backyards until I was a few blocks down the street.  I crossed the street about six houses behind the car and went into the backyard of that house.  When I was behind the house the car was parked in front of I crawled along a line of bushes until I was just behind the black sedan.  There was a man sitting in the driver’s seat.  He had binoculars, and would look through them every few minutes.  Still crouching, I took my sword and pierced the tire with it, making a small hole.  I slinked back to the side of the house to see what happened.  After perhaps a minute, all of the air was gone from the tire.  The man noticed the shift in the balance of the car and got out to investigate. 

He was visibly aggravated when he saw what happened.  He produced a cell phone from his jacket and dialed a number.

“Yeah.”

Pause.

“I got a flat tire.  What should I do?”

Pause.

“Fix it?  Can’t we just send somebody to tow it?  People will see me if I’m standing out here for fifteen minutes changing this tire.”

Pause.

“Because we don’t want WITNESSES, you moron!”

Pause.

“FINE.  I’ll change the goddamn tire.”

Once I saw him open the trunk I traced my route back to my backdoor, this time going down ten houses to cross the street instead of six.  I shut my back door as quietly as possible and raced down to my room.

Angela looked at me quizzically as I started tossing clothes and necessities into a backpack.  “So we’re leaving, eh?”

“The goon outside has mysteriously gotten a flat tire, so I figure now would be a choice time to leave.”

We nonchalantly walked to the car and I tossed my backpack into the backseat.  I spun gravel as I backed up, and the tires screeched again as I dropped it into drive.  I rolled down my window before we got to the man changing his tire and I beeped and gave him a thumbs-up.  When we were almost out of sight I noticed him in my rearview mirror, making another phone call.

“Don’t you think that was just a little excessive?” she asked.

I laughed.  “Fun, though.”

We were in town, just a few stoplights away from the interstate when it happened.  The light turned red, and I stopped.  There were no other cars around, but the light wouldn’t change.  After a few seconds, four black SUV’s came at us from each direction, surrounding my car.

“This isn’t going to end well.” I conjectured.

I was right.  About a dozen black-suited men emerged from the vehicles, all carrying guns.  We got out of the car with our hands up.  One of the men walked over to Angela and put his gun to her head.

“Time is up.  Tell me where the watch is.”

I looked at him, dumbfounded.  “I really, honestly do not know where it is.”

He pointed the gun at me and fired.  I flinched a little as the bullet pierced my arm, but surprisingly I felt nothing.  Not at first, anyway.

He pointed the gun back at Angela’s head.  “This time, I am not playing.  Tell me where it is.”

I didn’t even have a chance to open my mouth before a metal disc whizzed by my head and lodged itself into the man’s face.  We all turned around to see a large man in a blue suit standing on top of one of the vehicles.  Well, almost all of us turned.  The man next to Angela fell dead.

The others focused on the bald, blue-suited man.  Immediately they opened fire on him, but he seemed to vanish right in front of our eyes.  They looked around, confused, only to find two more from their ranks dead.  One had his head twisted all the way around and the other’s nose was smashed up into his head.  The bald man was leaning on one of the black SUV’s, whistling.

They tried to shoot him, but only managed to shoot out a few of the truck’s windows and one of the tires.  In the melee, three more of them died.

The six remaining assailants froze, scared and mystified.  It seemed like I was watching a movie on fast-forward.  The big bald man was almost a blur, kicking and punching and neck-twisting his way through the six men in what couldn’t have been more than ten seconds.  It was amazing.

And then he stood directly in front of me.  I was petrified.

“Please don’t kill me.” I pleaded.

He laughed.  “Don’t worry, I know what those guys were going to do to you.  They were bad, bad men.”

He walked over to my car’s passenger door, and said, “May I?”

I nodded and he opened the door.  He reached into the glovebox and pulled out a shining watch.  Angela and I exchanged puzzled looks.

He put the watch on and then he was gone.  I can’t even explain how he left, he didn’t teleport or anything, he was just…gone. 

       I stood there, grabbing my arm with my other hand, trying to make sense of it all.

(c) 2003 Jordan Baugher