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Saturday. 10/22/05. 12:12:12 AM
The Chinese food was lousy and the fried rice yellow with some
sort of condiment, mixed in with little red specks of ham and
round green pieces of chopped up onion. The egg foo young was
now smeared heavy with the mustard brown gravy, Ryo's solution
of covering up what looked like a half-hatched egg with its
chick embryo almost fully grown inside.
This was the only Chinese food restaurant still open at this
late hour in the campus of Ohio State University, the "No. 1"
sign green and red, proudly shining its light outside onto the
street, onto the crowd of drunken students and half-dressed
girls shivering in the winter cold rain.
The Mock liked to eat Chinese food though, something that his
bone-thin figure disguises quite well, and the more MSG, the
better. "God, I love this place." He said between intervals of
slurping his chicken lo-mein and warm wonton soup. "There's
nothing better than eating hot Chinese food at the end of a
drinking round, huh, buddy?"
The Mock was Ryo's most trusted private eye, even if he always
made their meetings a sort of a nights out, bar hopping from one
side of the town to another, always ending up at some greasy
place like "La Bamba" or "Wings Xtreme".
Or tonight's specialty, "No. 1" Chinese food.
Ryo never knew the Mock's real name, since nobody ever told him
his real name, and neither one of them really cared for it, not
to mention the Mock loves using his nickname at clubs and bars,
"Makes me sound foreign and mysterious, attracts the nice
chicks" is what he says.
Looking at the size of the envelope that's by his
gravy-splattered egg foo young, Ryo is starting to wonder if the
Mock is finally losing his sharpness and starting to make
mistakes. "Is this right?" He asked as the Mock slurped down
another piece of wonton.
"You told me to get all the information about his previous
relationships, right?"
"Yeah, but..." Ryo paused as he flipped through the pages of
words and photos. "These much?" He exclaimed as he pointed it to
the Mock.
"This is a guy who never had a steady relationship, man." The
Mock replied. "The longest relationship he's ever had was about
three months old."
"Is there a reason for that?"
The Mock chewed as he thought about it. "You could always ask
the ladies." He pointed his chin towards the envelope. "I'm sure
they will know much more than I could ever dig out."
And just then, as Ryo was looking back at the pages of girl
after girl after girl, someone walked past the glass windows,
someone that looked too familiar, just like...
Turning around as quick as he could, the person was already
gone, and Ryo had already lost the mental image of who he
thought he saw.
"What's wrong?" The Mock smiled with chewed up pieces of lo-mein
stuck in his teeth. "Did you see a ghost or something?"
Of all the odd things to say. |
