Chapter 21

Joel was only just waking up when there was a knock on his door. He was wary until he heard Jack.

"Joel, wake up. Lang's here!"

"Already?" Joel asked, getting out of bed.

"Already? It's nearly ten. You're sleeping the day away."

Joel opened the door and there was Jack, looking far too awake.

"Lang is here before his shift starts, so if you're going to talk to him, it needs to be now."

"Oh..." Joel was suddenly hesitant to do this. Maybe it was a mistake to let more than one person know about what was going on. "I don't know... Jack, maybe..."

Jack shook his head. "Nope. You already decided. Get your clothes on and come down and if you're not down in a few minutes, I'll be back up here and I have a key. I'm willing to haul you down if I have to."

Joel laughed a little and rubbed one hand over his head, feeling nervous.

"Hey, don't worry. Lang will treat you right."

Joel took a deep breath and nodded.

"I'll be down."

"Good."

Joel closed the door and walked back to his bed. He sat down for a few seconds. If he was going to be telling a cop stuff, he should show him what he had with him. He'd need to know that kind of detail probably. He reached under the bed and pulled out the bag he'd had with him eight months ago. He pulled out the button, the piece of paper, the key on the keychain, and after a moment of hesitation, the knife in the sheath. Langston would need to see all of these things, not just the ones Joel felt comfortable showing. With a deep breath, he put them all back into the bag and then quickly got dressed.

He didn't want to do this, but he kind of figured that it was his only option.

So with one final deep breath, he left the apartment and went down to the bar. He knocked on the back door and Jack let him in quickly.

"Lang's right in here," Jack said.

"Okay," Joel said, apprehensively.

Jack led him into the bar and there was Langston sitting at a table, obviously waiting.

Joel sat down and didn't say anything. Langston raised an eyebrow at him

"Jack said you weren't sure about telling me whatever you have to tell me but I can't help you if I don't know what's going on, Joel."

"I know."

"You seem like a good guy, so tell me what you need to tell me."

"It's just that... I know how this is going to sound. Even Jack is skeptical. ...but I promise it's the truth as far as I know it."

"Okay. I'll keep that in mind. Go ahead."

Joel tried to maintain eye contact, but he couldn't. He didn't want to see the disbelief he was sure that he'd see in Langston's eyes.

"I don't know who I am. My ID is fake. My name isn't really Joel... well, maybe it is, but I don't know if it is. My memories go back about eight months and that's it...except for the music. That was all I had in my head, really. I know it sounds like I'm lying, but I promise that I'm not. Everything I'm telling you is what I know."

"Actually, the music part makes sense to me if you're telling the truth," Langston said.

"It does?" Joel asked in surprise.

"Yeah. I read this thing once about a guy who had Alzheimer's or some kind of dementia. He'd been an organist but he didn't recognize anyone anymore. He didn't know anything. Until they put him on an organ bench. Then, he would play and play without any problems. It was like he was his old self again. When they took him off the organ, he went back to being the guy with dementia. What they said was that music is something that's more than just memory. It's beyond that and people know music more than they know other things. So yeah, if this is real, then, the music part really doesn't contradict you."

"Oh." Joel wasn't sure what else to say since he had expected that part of it to be the hardest part to believe.

Langston smiled for a moment and then got down to business. "Okay, so if this is true, and I'll admit that sounds like a bad movie or something, but I want to know if you have anything that could get me started on this."

Joel nodded and looked up. "Yeah. Not much but a few things that I had when I woke up back on the East Coast."

"East Coast? Where?"

"I don't know. Virginia, I think. I didn't know where I was and I didn't dare ask anyone. I just left."

"Okay. So what do you have?"

Joel pulled out his wallet and slid it across the table.

"Here's the ID that I had. That city doesn't exist. I looked it up."

"Holbeck, New York," Langston read. "Sounds like it could be real."

"It's not. I looked it up. There's a Holbeck in England, but not one in New York, but would you guess that's a fake ID?"

"No. That's pretty legit. What else?"

"I apparently had this button in my hand and I wouldn't let go of it. It looks like it got torn off someone's clothes. But it wasn't from the clothes that I was wearing."

Langston looked at it and nodded.

"Then, there's this piece of paper," Joel said.

Langston's expression was a little incredulous.

"Okay. Why keep that? There's nothing on it but smudged ink. I would have tossed it myself."

Joel shrugged. "I had it when I woke up. I don't know what it says. It was wet and I couldn't read it. I kept hoping it might mean something to me."

"Has it?"

"No."

"Okay. What else?"

"This key," Joel said. "There's tape on it, but if there was ever anything written on it, I don't know. Maybe a key to an apartment or something."

Langston looked at that, too, and then nodded.

"Is that everything?"

Joel looked over at Jack for a moment.

"No, it's not. I'm sorry I lied to you, Jack. I was carrying a weapon. It just wasn't in my bag."

Jack looked surprised when Joel pulled out the knife and set it on the table. Langston picked it up and looked at it closely. Then, he looked at Joel with an unvoiced question.

"It was in a sheath strapped to my ankle. That's not normal, is it."

"No, and this is a switchblade," Langston said. "Those are illegal in most states."

"Oh. Uh..."

Langston smiled even as his expression was serious.

"I'm not going to arrest you for that, Joel. But that means something. I just don't know what. You not only have a blade that is more-or-less illegal for people outside of law enforcement, but you admit that it was concealed."

"Yeah."

Langston looked at him and the skepticism was gone. In its place was an expression that Joel couldn't really identify, but he could tell that Langston wasn't dismissing his statements now.

To his surprise, Langston slid the knife back across the table to him. Joel hesitated and then took it.

"All right, Joel. I have two things I want to do, but they require your cooperation."

"What are they?" Joel asked, feeling a little wary.

"First, I want to take this piece of paper and see if we can clean it up enough to read whatever was written on it. No guarantees, but maybe we'll get something. Second, I want to take your picture and see if you've been reported missing anywhere."

"I looked once."

"Yeah, but you're not finding some of the stuff we have as cops."

"Oh."

"Well?"

Joel shrugged. "I... I don't know. I mean, it's one thing to tell you about it. It's another thing to have it be plastered all over creation."

Langston laughed. "I'm not suggesting we contact the evening news with your story, although if we did that, we'd probably have someone pop up who knows who you are. I'm suggesting that I use some resources I have access to that you don't to see if we can figure something out."

Joel still felt unsure about that. He was still nervous about sharing his problem with a cop, even though he didn't know why he was.

"Okay. You think about that while we take care of the last thing."

"You said there were only two things."

"Well, this last one isn't negotiable."

"What?"

"I need a description of the guy you said talked to you and seemed to know who you are. Regardless of anything else, you need to know if this guy is dangerous or not. I mean, what if it's the guy who shot you who's here?"

"Oh." Joel was surprised to realize that he'd never even considered that possibility. He wasn't sure if that meant something or not. He'd wondered how the guy knew him, he had wondered if they were friends or enemies, but he'd never thought of that as an option.

"How about security footage?" Jack suggested. "My cameras aren't the best, but if he came in here, he should be on the cameras."

Langston nodded. "I'll still need a description unless he got up close and personal with the camera. I've seen your security cameras."

"Some of us don't have a lot of disposable income to get the fancy stuff," Jack said.

"Description first," Langston said.

"Okay." Joel thought back. "He didn't look like he was... really healthy. I can't really explain it, but he looked like he'd been through a lot."

"Drugs?'

"No, I don't think so. He was pretty skinny and about my height. Blond hair. Green eyes. He didn't say his name."

"Okay. Can I see the footage?"

"Sure," Jack said.

They got up and went into the back, but Joel stayed sitting at the table. He looked at the piece of paper he'd been carrying with him for so long. What good was it doing him to keep it when Langston might be able to get something from it? He might as well hand that off, but if he did that, he was asking Langston to do something more than listen and he'd have to accept having his photo taken as well. Sure, he could pretend that he didn't know that agreeing to one was agreeing to both, but he knew it was.

So... what was he going to do?

To distract himself from that decision, he walked over to the piano and sat down. He plinked around for a little bit, but then, he started to play.

Billy Joel, of course.

But it was the same song that the man had requested the night before.

"Summer, Highland Falls."

It was mainly the first couple of lines that really hit him hard every time he played it.

"They say that these are not the best of times,
But they're the only times I've ever known,
And I believe there is a time for meditation in cathedrals of our own."

Over and over, he heard them repeated, wishing that he could escape these times and find the better ones.

x.x.x.x.x.x.x

Tim sat in his hotel room, his mind running relentless circles, trying to figure out if his plan was going to work or if he'd have to admit that he was failing miserably and get someone more competent out here to figure out what to do.

The only reason he hadn't done that yet was because he still felt that he should be the one to fix this. He felt like it was his fault Tony was here, like if he hadn't done whatever he had done in that apartment, none of this would have happened.

He had to clean up his own mess, and no matter how many times people told him that there was a different interpretation, he didn't believe it.

So now, he pulled out his phone and started looking at the street where the bar was located. He got onto the street view and noted that there was a second floor that could easily be apartments. If that was the case, then, Tony wouldn't need to come out onto the street at all. He could just be living above the bar. If so, he'd be hard-pressed to catch him out on the street unless Tony was going a lot of places, and Tim just couldn't rely on managing to be there unless he was literally there all day long. It might come to that, but if he was playing in the bar every night, he'd have to get down there somehow and Tim was skeptical that any apartments would have their entrances right in the bar itself.

He looked around a bit more in the maps on his phone, but he couldn't get back into the alley with the street view. So there was no way to see what this was like unless he went back there.

For some reason, he felt really worried about doing that. Was his feeling from the night before simply influencing him or was there something else that he hadn't consciously processed yet?

Well, he knew that Tony didn't play until later in the evening. Maybe he could go there before it got to be fully dark and catch him on his way down. He'd just have to go back into that alleyway and wait.

He'd try that tomorrow.

For today, he'd try to plan out what he could say to get Tony to listen to him, to explain what was going on and why he'd been here for so long without contacting anyone.

Decision made, Tim reluctantly called for room service. If he started neglecting himself too much, he wouldn't be able to tolerate a long day as he was planning to have.

He had to do this and he had to do it right.

Somehow.