As he expected he couldn’t get a single ounce of sleep. Partly because of the odd dreams he had been having as of late, the other part, him being a bit frightened by Beatrice pulling a gun on him out of the blue. He had spent most of the night and early morning after that reading Sherlock Holmes and keeping an eye out just in case Beatrice decided to shoot him. He leaned back onto the couch cushions and sighed as his mind drifted off.
“Why can’t I remember anything. It's like I get bits and pieces to a large puzzle but it’s never enough to form a concrete picture.” He glanced down towards the ground in front of him upon hearing small footprints patting on the carpet floor. Beatrice’s puppy, Spike he had come to learn his name, was sitting a couple of paces away from the man staring up at him. The man moved his head downwards and stared back at the dog. They stayed like that for a bit. Eyeing each other like they were having a staring contest.
The man wondered whether he had a dog in his past. Maybe he still does and it’s waiting out there for its master to return. The man moved cautiously closer to the dog to pet it. The dog backed away a bit and let out a low growl. The man froze a bit and backed his hand away. He decided, in his boredom, to go out for a walk. He grabbed his black boots and put them on and grabbed the spare key that Beatrice had loaned him for the time being and left.
The air was cool on his skin. It was mid-fall in Shiko. He left the plain-looking apartment complex and walked down a sidewalk not really trying to go anywhere specifically. He thought briefly about going to the old culvert but with the drain tunnel entrance being blown in he doubted he’d find any answers. He then thought about going to the station to see Beatrice and Jay but that just sounded like a stupid idea. Especially since he’s a suspect in a case and Beatrice doesn’t seem all too thrilled about his presence as is.
He continued his walk while lost in thought till he ended up in a shantytown. He stared up at an old green sign dangling from a power line that read, “Rikers District.” He stared at the sign for a bit before continuing. Everywhere he went, he saw kids in nothing but rags playing with makeshift balls in the street, sick and dirtied people littering the sidewalks and alleyways. It was his first time really seeing the shitty side of the city and it caught him by surprise. He continued walking trying to hurriedly leave this area and backtrack towards the direction of Beatrice’s home, but he was lost by this point.
“Well, this is great,” the man uttered to himself. He sighed and sat down on a nearby sidewalk. For some reason, this house across the street grabbed his attention. It was old, broken down. The wood on the house and fence splintering and rotting.
He was getting an odd and eerie vibe from the place. Like something within him was telling him not to linger. ‘There’s something, familiar about this place,’ he thought to himself. He looked on a bit before hesitantly taking a step forward, crossing the street, and stopping by the fence. He stared up at the house with his hands in his pockets.
A young boy came rushing out of the house holding the arm of an even younger-looking girl. Both had raven black hair. The girl’s hair was in a short bob that framed her delicate face, her frame adorned with a green sweater and white blouse. The boy’s hair was in messy, curly locks and he wore a simple white shirt with a cartoonish panda on the front and black sweatpants. Neither had on shoes.
He took one look at the panicked expression on the boys’ face as he ran towards him with the girl, presumably his sister, and knew they were in some sort of trouble.
“Hey! Are you guys all right,” he called out to them as they closed in on where he was standing but they didn’t respond. They rushed right past him as if he wasn’t there. He turned to call out to them once more. But they were gone. It was like they vanished into thin air. The amnesiac man turned to the familiar house once more. Confusion rattling in his head regarding those kids and an uneasy feeling steadily rising within him the longer he stayed near the house. He quickly moved on down the sidewalk passing the house by whilst trying to put his uneasy feelings to bed.
Beatrice and Jay were in a dimly lit house starring down at the mutilated body of its owner. His mouth was agape, and his head was bent at an odd angle as blood, still somewhat fresh, covered his body from multiple stab wounds along his abdomen and chest.
“Damn, that AutoDroid really did a number on his owner,” Jay uttered after puffing out a cloud of cigar smoke into the air of the man's living room.
“You’re telling me. Jeeze these rouge AutoDroids are getting even more dysfunctional as time goes on,” she responded, pinching her nose to block out the rancid smell in the air.
“Sheesh, this man was a slob. No wonder that A.D. went crazy. I'd kill him to if I had to stay in a junk house with a slob like that.” She pointed down at the man’s body whilst still pinching her nose. Jay sighed.
“Can you refrain from talking ill about the deceased, even if it is true that this guy was a bit of a slob.” Beatrice just shrugged as she began utilizing her wrist-mounted scanner to search the room while Jay stayed back and scanned the body. Beatrice felt her phone vibrating in her left pocket and ceased her scanning momentarily to check it. She saw a notification from her front door camera showing her amnesiac guest leaving her apartment. She raised an eyebrow then opened a separate application. After it loaded for a couple of minutes a map appeared on the screen. She swiped through some of the functions and thumbed a save device titled “Spare Key.” A blue dot showed up on the map and it was currently moving.
Sometime after laying down the rules of her home to her guest she gave him a spare key just in case he needed to get out or get back in. Little did he know she had it outfitted with a tracking chip.
‘Where are you off to mister amnesiac,’ she thought before returning to her work.
