The B&B: Sasha J & Reece E
He had other belts. He even had other jackets. But, Reece loved his boots. They were gator skin, exquisitely crafted in a rich, oily black, tailored for his feet (which were not particularly slender, thank you). He'd spent a fortune on them—almost an entire paycheck a year back—and they looked really, really nice. He cared about that kind of thing. You had to, at Tethys. And it could've been that he was just a teensy bit emotionally attached to his material objects. Either way, it was bad luck and worse timing that had made him leave one of the things in the first place, along with half of his (also very nice) jacket and his (also gator skin) belt, near the trailer park on the other side of town. He'd call it Wrong Place, Wrong Time, because he was just trying to take a late night walk, right? It was a free country and, he wanted to, you know, stretch his legs, since he had trouble sleeping now and again. It could've been the weather making his eye feel wonky in its socket or it could've just been nerves before he started over at the Top Secret Facility, but a migraine was mainlined into prefrontal cortex and spearing through the temple behind prosthetic eye. It left him too nauseous to lie still. So, yeah, he'd gone for a walk. And he'd... walked... um, he'd walked too far. He figured that out pretty quickly.
Sort of.
He wandered into the trailer park. He'd never been in one and he was meandering, feeling wistful the way one always does alone, at night, outdoors. The sky here was pinpricked with stars, brighter than he'd ever seen them, and they had the predictable effect of making a person feel small and insignificant. Reece missed his friends, and he tried to engage some of the locals drinking out front of a 1970s-era rig, metal sheeting's pukey green color clear in spite of the dark. But, he must had said something wrong (but, really, what was wrong with 'you know, I've seen places like this in the movies—people like you too!'—he was going for conversational!) and he was chased out by two men with meth-mouth and their very ferocious-looking dog. Now, Reece wasn't a marathon man, but he had long legs, and he'd beat it—at least until he... got a little bit stuck... near the entrance, on the jagged corner of a trailer, and then had to engage in a very unfun game of tug-o'-war for his arm with aforementioned dog. (Luckily, it was an arm that didn't feel anything. Though it was expensive to fix, so that wasn't as lucky.)
He got away in the end, just without boot, belt, and half of his jacket. He'd run all the way back to the bed and breakfast. And he was very certain the men would have taken his belt and shoe to--taken them to pawn... or fence... or whatever people who lived in trailers did. I mean, they'd be stupid if they didn't.—But, it turned out they were stupid and a post was up on the city forum.
It really was not that far-fetched to think someone would keep the boot. It was a really nice boot. It didn't matter that she'd posted. People changed their mind. That was perhaps corporate thinking, but it was there—a seeded lack of trust—and Reece would really only be happy once he had the boot back in his hand, supple leather warm against his palm. Sigh.—But, um, he--didn't have any weapons on him, because distrustful or not, he wasn't a maniac.
He waited for the woman outside, cold in his dressed-down outfit and, yes, one sock and one boot. It wasn't stupid. It was what he'd said he'd be doing, and he was, on the front porch of that bed and breakfast, looking up at the horrible, screeching sound of a rust bucket car coming to a stop near the curb. Prosthetic eye scanned the car, coming up with make and year, but he ignored the data projected in augmented blue, to look, eyes mismatched, at the woman who climbed out of the vehicle. He waved at her.