It sounded like the kind of crap Briggs used to say. “Sounds like generic shop talk to me. If a shrink can’t dish out the feel-good platitudes, then who can?”
Anita looked around the restaurant. Her sunglasses flashed in the greasy fluorescent light. The entire breakfast, Anita had been acting shifty, as if fearing someone would approach her table and ask for an autograph.
Not that the consumers of her films would have much chance of recognizing her. Her hair was now its natural light brown instead of blonde, and she’d had her boobs deflated down a cup size from their heyday.
Besides, Chapel Hill was a sophisticated university town, not a place where people expected to encounter a porn queen in a bacon-and-eggs joint.
Wendy followed Anita’s gaze. An unkempt man sat at the counter near the register, talking loudly to himself while the wait staff aggressively ignored him.
“I’m kind of worried,” Anita said. “The pills worked great, but I stopped them. They reminded me of the stuff we took during the trials.”
“Did the new psychiatrist give you something else?”
“Effexor. Started Saturday. She said it might take a month before the effect kicks in. I could go nuts before then.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Wendy’s eyelid twitched. A dark shadow crept from the corner of her memory, but it vanished when she turned her mind’s eye toward it.
“We talked about it yesterday.”
“No, we didn’t.”
“You don’t remember?” Anita’s grin was frozen in the mask of one who wasn’t sure if she was the butt of a joke. “Jeez, maybe you’re the one who needs drugs. You’re getting senile.”
“I plead post-traumatic stress disorder,” Wendy said, disturbed by Anita’s delusions.
“Well, I get crazy when I don’t take it. Almost like the monsters are waiting in the dark, and when the medicine goes away, they all come crawling out of their holes.”
Wendy noted a crease had formed in Anita’s forehead, the only vivid mark of time or distress on her perfect skin. Wendy had first drawn Anita’s caricature after the long-ago modeling session, when the two had roomed together for a semester.
Anita Molkesky, or “Anita Mann” as she had been known in the trade, had experienced little change to her most prominent facial features. The full lips, rounded chin, and thin nose made her face bottom-heavy, and though she was attractive in every measure, Wendy’s exaggerating black marker had helped shape Anita’s self-image, and she was forever complaining about her “micro-nose.”
“You’re not going to take my advice anyway,” Wendy said.
“Sure I will, if I happen to agree with it.”
Sassy country rock erupted, Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” Wendy tested the coffee once more. Still awful. “Okay, then-”
“Holy fucking salami,” Anita said, staring through the plate-glass window.
While mired in the lurid straight-to-video world of Los Angeles, Anita claimed to have seen everything twice, including midgets copulating with canines. But the shock in her voice was enough to cause Wendy to follow her friend’s gaze.
A blue sedan streaked toward the restaurant across the parking lot as if shot from a monstrous cannon, tires throwing smoke. Its roaring engine and squealing wheels drowned out the jukebox, and conversation in the waffle house died except for the monologue of the self-absorbed schizophrenic.
The sedan was gathering speed, aimed straight for the front window. It miraculously dodged a parked SUV and closed the gap, now less than thirty feet away.
Someone screamed, and Wendy grabbed Anita’s buckskin jacket by its elbow fringe and pulled her from the booth.
Their waitress, a mousy-looking chain-smoker, screamed out, “Bobby!”
The cook came bounding over the counter, his mottled apron flapping across the schizophrenic’s face. Anita’s retreat splashed cold coffee on Wendy’s leg.
She wondered which of her fellow instructors would cover her noon class, because she had a feeling she was going to be late. Then the plate glass exploded.
CHAPTER FIVE
The fog lifted, though Roland’s eyeballs still felt like wads of cotton. His heartbeat galloped.
He thumbed other cards from the stack. A Visa, with “David Underwood” in raised print, sporting an approval date from two years earlier. A card from AAA promising lodging discounts and emergency roadside assistance for David Underwood. A donor card from the American Red Cross, B positive.
At least we both have the same blood type in case I need a transfusion from myself.
A Blockbuster membership card and a Higher Grounds coffee club card, with three more cup images to be punched before he received a free refill, completed the stack.
Vertigo weaved its gossamer threads around him, and he sat on the bed before his legs turned to sand. He examined his driver’s license again.
No, not MY driver’s license. David’s. And why does that name sound familiar?
The listed address was a place Roland had lived in while enrolled at the University of North Carolina over a decade ago. The crummy off-campus apartment had been beset by cockroaches, rats, and a refrigerator that didn’t adequately chill the beer, and Roland had broken his lease after three months.
If the license was a fake, it was convincing. With the advent of the Department of Homeland Security and increased scrutiny of illegal aliens, the fake-ID business was booming, the cash flow allowing forgers to stay on the cutting edge of technology. Assuming someone knew the right people, a bogus driver’s license could be turned around in less than an hour.
The only problem with that scenario was that Roland had no close friends, much less one who would go to such lengths for a practical joke. Maybe Dick the Jarhead, his first twelve-step sponsor, who had traded in the bottle for a brand of aggressive humor that constantly bordered on violence.
But Dick had died last year from a cerebral hemorrhage. His wacky mind ended up doing him in after all.
A glance at the clock showed fifteen minutes before checkout.
Screw it. Won’t be the first unsolved mystery of my life.
He crammed the cards back in the wallet and wobbled across the room to the chair that held his jacket.
A search of the pockets turned up nothing but lint and a set of car keys. The keys, at least, looked familiar, belonging to the Ford Escort he remembered renting in Louisville, Kentucky. Nearly a week ago.
A week? Without a calendar, he couldn’t be sure of anything. Even the alarm clock might be lying. After all, in a world where your name could change, or someone with a different name could steal your face while you slept, nothing was certain.
Too bad I can’t do a switcheroo with my debt. Wonder if David has a hot girlfriend?
He wobbled to the window by the door and looked out. He was on the ground floor of a three-story building. The skyline might have been Cincinnati’s, but it was too generically midtown American to tell it from that of Huntington, Muncie, Plattsburgh, or Roanoke.
A beauty salon across the street was in need of new vinyl letters. Its sign read “air Empor um.”
Maybe I should drop off a business card. Score some points with Harry Grimes. Show I’m the go-getter type, even on a hangover.
A Marathon gas station, gray-walled warehouses, a chemical silo of some sort, and several urban condominium complexes lined the block. A blue Escort sat out front, presumably his ride.
So where the hell is MY license?
He dug into the wallet again, searching the opposite fold. He turned up a business card bearing David Underwood’s name and a cell phone number from an area code he didn’t recognize. The card bore a conservative but elegant C placed within a bordered rectangle. It was the logo for Carolina Sign Supply.
