Through Lethe

Chapter 1

Night Fishing

When the doorbell rang and woke him up out of his nightmare, it was just after six in the morning, maybe five or ten minutes passed the hour. This was a detail which somehow made the bell, a sound which was somewhere between a PO'd cricket and an electric shaver, that much louder to the sleeping Reid Prince. It was a great name, and it looked good on business cards, as well as the neat little flicker of tape stretched above his apartment's buzzer. The unholy buzzing bastard at the door had to be Keith, although he couldn't tell exactly WHY it had to be, but he would be right none the less.

The dream had run away from him almost the instant he opened his eyes. One thing he did know, however, was that it had been, at least in part, about Keith Holden.

"Yeah." He said into the speaker. Wind and static hissed and pissed through the line a little before clearing up to a singsong baritone.

"Heyo mandinga! You ready or should I come up and wait?"

Well, shit. Of course there would be a reason, a proper reason for Keith Holden to drop by before that relentless taskmaster of a sun revealed his nuclear visage to the sleeping world. Not to mention making a guest spot in the only nightmare he'd had in the last decade. Keith was a dork, but he was not an asshole. No...I'm an asshole. What am I missing? Reid wasn't the kind of person who made plans and then forgot. As a freelance, but the last week or so had been anything but usual. For the first time in his career he decided to take time off. It was the Narukami Deal that drove him to it, of course. In a long career managing unique situations and negotiating difficult, if not impossible, terms in a variety of scenarios, it was the Narukami Deal that made him forget that he'd made plans with his only real friend in the whole big bad wide old world and then spaced.

"Come on up." He said, then buzzed him through. His first instinct had been to confess outright, but that was better handled face to face, and most importantly it would buy him some time. There were 11 floors between the two-level corner condo and the streets of Locust Point. He had showered the night before but he rolled on deodorant, applied lotion and a dab of beard balm to his goatee, threw on a shirt, jeans, and loafers. It was a gamble, and a safe one. With the addition of a jacket and a scarf, he figured this get up was at least fifty four percent likely to satisfy the day's fashion needs.

What could it have been? What business would they have or what mischief could they scare up at this hour on a Wednesday? Business day, Reid considered. It was a business day and Keith had asked him a favor, the vague clawing force of a memory trying to pull its way out of the dark

That is...until he saw Keith.


Keith Holden was standing on the other side of the door in a charcoal grey three piece suit, and a nice one. Well, nice for Keith, whose idea of dressing up was a mix between Tweed Jacket Professor and 90's Hip-Hop artist. A fixture was the brown suede jacket that looked like something off of a Dylan album cover and he would often wear it over an assortment of what he thought of as "Street Elevated."

The man standing before him was a roughian reborn, an enterprising, strapping man about town fitted in a tailored three piece. He probably bought it just for the occasion from Schafer's. "You going for the casual look to elevate a brother? You're trying to make me look good with that, right?" Reid's first instinct was to agree, play it off like that was the plan all along but he had already betrayed too much, probably one of the side effects of a rare restless night. The suit though, if not as much as the look of impossible bemused disappointment on Ketih's face, finally dislodged the missing memory, and a few other loose kernels from the un-sleep.

The Belcher Account. The Favor he had agreed to do. And...the nightmare? Yes...YES! That had been it! The nightmare had been about the meeting! Reid recalled it almost in its entirety, it flopped into his arms and threatened to escape like a massive catfish desperate to get back into the dark waters where he had been nightfishing. Reid might have noticed that Keith's eyes had bulged with worry at his being dumbstruck while Reid's brain was in recovery mode.

"The meeting?" Reid said. Keith's incredulity tripled.

"Yes. Yes the goddamn meeting with the Belcher people. Don't do this to me man, we're still -" Keith was half smiling, but there was a rare edge of worry in his voice that made Reid put his hands up as if in surrender.

"I'm sorry, I didn't sleep well. Of course we're still on. It's at ten, right?" Reid plucked his phone from his pocket and checked the time, it was almost six thirty. "Give me fifteen to get a suit on?" Reid was already bounding the central stairs to the bedroom. Baltimore, glittering cold and lonely outside the windows threatened to pull him back to sleep almost as much as the sight of his bed.

"It's a damn good thing you're superstitious. Breakfast at Angie's, right? That's gotta be why I'm here so early." Keith said, his voice tended to carry. "So which of the Kings is it today?"

"That's a good question." Keith said under his breath. The far closet near the bathroom door was his suit closet, the palace of the Three Kings. "I'm thinking Castillo." The suit he called Castillo was a double breasted Italian pinstripe, and in Reid's opinion was the best for making good first impressions and inspiring confidence. Something about earth tones was inherently soothing to folks wi







Keith had shown up the day before yesterday, the first day of his vacation, two days after the Narukami thing, so excited that Reid had thought if the man stood still for more than a few seconds, he would have pissed himself. Keith Anthony Holden the First was a professional contractor who with a small crew of men, a lot of heart, blood, sweat, and tears - had come into a decent amount of success as a business and residential contractor specializing in renovating, restoring, and repurposing older buildings. An up and coming developer had hired him and his fledlging workforce to repurpose a dock and warehouse setup as loft apartments. The project had a lot of bumps at first and all in all the whole thing took over a year to complete, but Keith's father was determined to see it through. With the fresh capital from the development firm, bought new tools and invested in his work force. They used to joke that "only on Holden's crew did the boss drive a beater while a carpenter drove a beamer." The project was a massive success, the renovation and restoration project garnered national attention.

Big wigs from New York came to talk to them and eventually a deal was struck between Holden and Sons Construction firm and one Tagert & Duagherty, a deal that cemented a partnership that lasted seventeen years, and over a dozen successful restoration projects. That was until 2008 when the housing market collapsed and the very pillars of the world shook. Keith Jr. Was only 11 when it happened, and the superhero image of his father in those early years was challenged by a failing business, bankruptcy, loss...

Keith had only told Reid this much about the whole thing, the rest of the details were easy enought of fill in. They met in college at Dartmouth, Reid's family was in shipping