But his gut told him to wait. To check out the address on the car registration. Get some more clues to whether he really was Eric Tobin or if he just, for some reason, had Eric Tobin’s car.
Nothing looked familiar as he drove through the deserted streets. He was far from The Strip, driving into an area that got progressively rougher with each passing block. Graffiti covered the concrete walls of buildings with broken out windows behind bars. Padlocks hung from many doors. This part of town was industrial and failing. Not the sort of place you listed as a residential address.
A few more turns and he found the street listed on the registration. He slowed the car, eyes shifting over building faces, searching for street numbers. On the second pass, he found one and began counting the buildings until he came to the right point in the sequence for the address on the registration. Set between an apparently abandoned warehouse and a plant of some kind, all that remained was a vacant lot with a few piles of rubble. Weeds grew haphazardly from cracks in what was left of the foundation.
He sat, engine idling, for a good fifteen minutes, staring at the empty space and struggling to remember… anything. But the effort was fruitless and made his head ache. Eventually he put the car back into gear and wove his way back through the dark streets.
Because he didn’t know what else to do, when he saw a sign for a hospital, he followed. Several blocks later, he swung into the drive of St. Rose Hospital, following the signs for Emergency.
The first set of automatic doors slid open with a quiet whoosh. He passed a set of payphones and some restrooms. Then came the second set of doors. As soon as they slid shut behind him, he felt his chest tighten. The scent of too many bodies combined with the hospital smell made him want to puke. As the walls seemed to press in, he squeezed his eyes shut and fought to level out the sensation he recognized as panic.
Hospital phobia. Okay, that’s something else I didn’t know before.
“Can I help you, sir?”
He opened his eyes and looked at the nurse who spoke from the reception counter. She wore hot pink scrubs and had her sandy hair up in a perky little ponytail. Brown eyes studied him with a mixture of concern and polite inquiry.
He started to say ‘No’. To turn around and walk back out. But where would he go? What would he do? And there were the burns on his hands. So instead he blurted out, “I don’t know who I am.”
Her face didn’t shift into lines of shock. Instead she gestured with one hand to a little clipboard. “Sign in please.”
He blinked at her. “Did you hear what I said? I don’t know who I am.”
“Yes, sir, I heard you.” She wrote something on the pad herself. “Have a seat. We’ll be with you as soon as we can.”
Shoving the frustration down, he moved into the waiting area, a twenty by thirty foot room decorated in a fugly combination of white and orange. The center was dominated by a big ass tropical fish tank with rows of linked chairs spiraling out like arms. There were thirty-three people in the room. He sat where he could see the fish and one of the two wall-mount TVs playing muted reruns of Gilligan’s Island.
I know every character on this stupid show, and I can’t write my own name on a form. What the fuck?
He picked up a stack of magazines and checked out the dates. The most recent he found was an issue of Reader’s Digest from March 2000. Of course who knew how far out of date it was.
Eventually the nurse came back. “Sir, if you’d come with me.”
She hadn’t come out for anybody else, but since he didn’t have a name to call, he guessed that made him a special case. He rose and followed her to an area behind the reception desk. A sign on the wall read triage. Moving past her into one of the two rooms, he sat. She leaned against a counter, pen poised over a chart.
“Have you been drinking?” she asked.
“No.”
“Have you used any other drugs?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t feel high or drunk or impaired. I just don’t know who I am.”
She made some notes. “Okay, what’s the last thing you remember?”
“Waking up six hours ago in a hotel room about two hundred miles north of here.”
“And before that?”
“Nothing.”
The nurse stopped writing and arched one brow. “Nothing?”
Frustration simmered in his blood. “Nothing. Not my name, not where I’m from, not what I do. I remember nothing before six hours ago. It’s like I didn’t exist.” His voice had risen with each word, such that by the end, the other nurse working the reception desk had stuck her head in the room. “Everything okay?” Miss Hot Pink waved her away.
He rubbed his palms on his jeans, hissing when the pain reminded him of his other injuries. He wished his sour stomach would settle.
“What’s going on with your hands here?”