The eyelids withdraw to disclose two sea-blue pools, each with a tiny pupil adrift, struggling in the morning light to enlarge, focus in on and transmit to John Smith’s mechanical brain the contents of this place where he’s awakened.
The ceiling’s chalk-white and hangs low like the lid of a shoe box.
There’s one window to the right, lightly curtained and located somewhere between the third and fifth floors, judging by the angle of the sun rays that penetrate the small room.
Smith lies still.
And that’s a nightstand to the right, walnut, double-drawered, with a Baby Ben alarm clock still humming just inches from his head.
On the other end of the bed stands a floor lamp made of wrought iron with a reading shade. In the dead of night, it could just as well be mistaken for a prowler rifling through the personal items of a man suddenly awakened from a deep sleep.
Smith’s been covered up with a king-sized plaid quilt, reversible, from what he can gather without stirring to lift the covers, taking care not to creak the bed springs and alert any other occupants to his awakening.
Instead, he’s able to just poke free the large toe of his left foot from a heavy clump of bedding.
His trousers as well as his shoes have been removed. And that’s his suit jacket hung over the back of a wooden armchair guarding the corner behind where the door would open.
No telling where his shoulder holster’s been put.
There’s no report of footsteps from beyond that door. Its little brass knob shows no sign of movement, as if it’s asleep or just recently awakened and thus not fully conscious of its surroundings, like Smith.
But that’s not the way things were last night.
There was that girl with the dark auburn hair and green eyes. She said almost nothing, and Smith only noticed her face thanks to the mirror behind the bar.
He’d heard the word ‘detective’ spoken from the other side of the club, but it somehow reached his ears despite a thick din of cheap dance music and raucous man-talk that should have intercepted it along the way and smothered it silent.
Memory couldn’t offer him much more than that.
His tongue was tied in a thick paste of spit. At least his head didn’t hurt.
But there was a pain in his armpits as if he’d been dragged by them for some distance, heels bumping behind up and down stairs, across the pavement, over the door stoop and finally through the thick carpet laid out on the floor beneath him.
It must have been something put into his drink, left alone on the bar in front of him while he surveyed the smoke-choked barroom of butt-naked dancers and drunken men’s faces all lit up in neon…
The doorknob rattles but the door’s wooden frame remains fixed in place. Then a woman’s hushed voice is heard from the other side: “Good morning, Agent Smith.”
Filed by – a Coward without identifying Himself; Undated, of course