He stood there, still holding the chair for a moment, before he slowly dropped the heavy wooden item onto the deck. His hands shook with adrenaline as he fought to regain control. Growing up, he had dealt with bullies, so he knew how to defend himself. But that brute would be a problem. Warren realized he surprised Harry this time. He would have to watch his back.
Warren glanced at a shadow coming from a person standing by the porthole across the room. Carefully, he moved closer to the opening, and he recognized the person. It was the same woman in the green and yellow dress sitting behind him at breakfast. Silently stepping away, he hurried to the cabin door. By the time the man reached the outside, the deck was empty. The auburn-haired woman had disappeared, and he could hear the echoing sound of footsteps coming from a nearby staircase to the next deck below. He reentered the cabin, his head swimming as he felt like he was doing a high-wire act, blindfolded, with no net.
I’ve got to get organized and figure out this puzzle soon.
Warren forced the cabin door closed. It took a couple of times to get the door shut, and he even locked it to ensure no distractions. Pulling the chair upright and dragging it back to the secretary, Warren pulled out a small notebook from his coat pocket where the original owner left it. Somehow, it didn’t surprise Warren that the notebook contained mostly names and phone numbers of women. He saw the name Cassidy at Douglas 36 on the same line with two stars next to it, which made him grin.
She must be a looker!
The other four female names only had addresses below their names. On the next page, he found a scribbled, cryptic line.
“At 460 Laverne Terrace, real riches are the riches possessed inside,” he read the words aloud.
The next line made even less sense.
“If you wish to avoid seeing a Spanish fool, you must go behind the mirror.”
Seriously?
“Great, this guy likes motivational quotes,” Warren muttered sarcastically. “What the hell does this get me?”
Stuck on the back cover and last page, he found a red luggage ticket. It had a passage code stamped in black on the back, AML TO BTM with 460AA. Then, Warren came upon a receipt for two leather steamer trunks delivered to the ship from a store in Boston. It was stuck between two pages. He remembered old movies gave their characters only a few clues, along with plenty of red herrings. Then again, he recalled how much he disliked solving mysteries. It was a tough spot because he was fighting for his life in the middle of one story, which appeared to have subplots.
Warren made notes to himself in the notebook. After he had written out the essential items of his current story, his mind wrestled with other tidbits he learned. Cliches and obvious plot devices like MacGuffins revealed themselves in every story. His first life never showed such things.
Too bad I can’t figure out more about them out before someone kills me!
As he went through his time in this purgatory, it became obvious he was part of a script from an old film. Warren stumbled onto the idea when he realized people he interacted with would reply with familiar lines. Plus, the events used classic cliches. He found himself on a horse in a black hat while surrounded by men in white hats. They quickly took him to the sheriff and Warren found himself assassinated by another man in a black hat with a black mask.
Another part of his netherworld showed him that minor characters or unseen people on the screen created his small universe. Now he was in the long-forgotten films which he never saw. From experience, Warren knew that when he went down into the engine room of the ship, he would find a crew of fire stokers. The men keeping the old freighter moving through the ocean existed as real as some of the lead characters he mingled with. As Warren interacted with the extras, he might learn about their lives, fears, and ambitions. Millions of subplots between characters that never revealed themselves on a movie screen. Still, each character had flesh, bone, and blood, along with bad breath and body odor.
Still, he insisted his existence was real, quite unlike reality television shows that he flipped past with the remote. No cameras were filming him. No soundstage existed to walk away from when the scene finished. In fact, there were no make-believe locations.
When they reached Boston, Warren could grab a cab to Spencer Street in Boston, where he would find his mother waiting at his home. It did not matter that he would not recognize either his mom or the house. If he told the cabbie to just drive past the house and into the country, he also knew he would still be in the same purgatory world. It was a reality now, no hope of just escaping.
I tried leaving once and learned the hard way.
At one point, Warren decided to just drive right out of the scene, to leave the film behind. In a small town called Bay City, located somewhere in California, he woke up as a gas station attendant. It wasn’t long before he knew two gangsters, dressed in flashy and expensive suits, were gunning for him. Instead of hiding and waiting for the killers to find him, Warren took a car from the garage where he worked. Heading north and following signs away from Los Angeles, Warren drove all night. Just as the sun rose the next day, he smiled while telling himself that he would ditch the car and walk away into a new life. Warren figured the grim reaper would have a hell of a time trying to track him with a new name and a new town.
With a silly grin on his face, Warren reached the city limits of Realito. His rear tire blew out. In an instant, the big Ford swung back and forth across the road before it hurled itself over the steep drop of a ravine. As the vehicle tumbled end over end, his body shot through the broken front windshield. Warren felt the waves of pain surging through him while he slid down the side of the gorge. At the dusty bottom of the long drop, he listened to the rhythmic sound of the ocean waves not far away while the ink of death covered his eyes. The next morning, his reality was another world stuck inside the rolls of old 35-millimeter film.
Still, the experience gave him some hope. Maybe his odds were good enough for him to catch a break and avoid his pre-determined fate. After all, now he was on the ocean, aboard a small ship. Anyone trying to kill him would have a tough time. As long as he used some common sense, Warren might avoid the reaper. Heck, he could stay close to his cabin, and then even Harry would have a tough time taking him out.
While he might have already screwed up with his encounters so far, maybe he could make amends by finding out about the deal he had with Harry’s boss. In the meantime, Warren decided there would be no nighttime rendezvous for him.
Warren rejected the idea he would die from an accident. Some joker always deliberately orchestrated his death, relishing in watching him get his hopes up only to dash them. That meant he must change how he approached his actions and interaction with the other characters in this purgatory world.
First, you need to determine who might want to kill you.
His fevered mind suddenly wondered about killing those suspects before one of them acted against him. Instantly, he rejected the idea. He could not believe he was crazy enough to do that. At least, he did not think he was psychopathic enough at this point.
Keep your focus, he told himself.
Warren returned to his conversation with the barber earlier. Smiley Jack, the balding thin barber, also acted as the ship’s bursar as well. Their conversation revealed they were only one day out of their destination, Boston. The information surprised Warren since his starting point should have been when the trip began, not midway through the film.
“You can bet it will be on the clock with these Krauts running things,” Smiley said to him. He explained how the German company recently bought the route from a struggling British company.
“Aye, I’ll get a payday out of the old bucket; come what may.”
As for the passengers, Smiley gave Warren scant information about the other travelers. As he suspected, there were only a few extra people on board, nine in total, who traveled on the ship.
“That little guy, Professor Minchin, who’s in the cabin next to you, is quite the educated type. But he’s been running me ragged since we left Havana. Wants information about everything,” he told Warren. “I tells him, what am I, a bleeding library?”
Countess Helene Mara was in the cabin a few doors down along with her maid, while a honeymoon couple named Smith had the cabin next to the Countess. One of the final three passengers, according to the barber, was a fat nightclub owner named Krupin. He traveled with a blonde girl and a giant man who acted as his bodyguard. The Englishman liked Krupin, saying he tipped well. It was clear he feared Harry, which Warren could understand. When he asked about the woman in the green and yellow dress wearing glasses, Smiley’s demeanor changed slightly.
“She came on the boat after the other passengers. I saw her running up the gangplank just before we left. Just got her ticket and her porter, who was carrying her baggage, had a heck of a time trying to keep up with her. She was holding a lot of cash.”
The Bursar licked his lips as he remembered the wad of money she pulled from her purse as he pushed the reclining chair into the upright position. Smiley hinted at the extra service he was giving to Warren, who pulled a twenty from his pocket. As he handed it to the barber, he asked for the name of the woman.
“Something unusual,” Smiley told him, reaching for the money. Warren held on to the bill.
“Ah, I know, it was Amber, like the rock,” he said. “Yes, that’s it. An unusual name, I told her.”
Warren let loose of the bill. “Let me know him know if you hear anything that relates to my name,” he told Smiley.
As he left, Warren thought about Amber and decided she might be a bit of a recluse. Perhaps she only stepped out occasionally. She was listening in to his fight with Harry. Either way, the woman didn’t appear much of a threat to him. He had others on the list to monitor.
While sitting at his secretary, Warren looked for a motive behind someone trying to kill him. It was obvious that his character associated with some unsavory people and they were involved in something involving money. But, so far, Warren looked to be one of the main characters in the plot. That was the difference. One thing he knew for sure was Harry would be on top of the list of those wanting him dead, at least after the ship docked.
“Perhaps the blonde named Mary,” he said under his breath as he added a column of the names to his list. Warren knew he screwed up by indicating she was a prostitute. Then again, maybe she was not as upset as the thug told him. She might have sent Harry to the cabin for a little extortion money. Whatever the motive, he would not trust her.
When Warren considered the professor, he nearly laughed. Somehow, he could not make himself believe the nervous-looking short man could hurt anyone, let alone commit murder.
“Not unless someone tried to throw one of those Spanish paintings overboard,” he chuckled.
