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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old Drew Id" data-source="post: 992098" data-attributes="member: 12175">Session 3 (5/21/2003) News at the GriffonSession 3 (5/21/2003) News at the GriffonCrystal always enjoyed Friday mornings. She was done with classes and done with teaching for the week. Sure, she still had to pull a shift behind the bar tonight, but she didn’t mind that. She considered Friday morning to be the beginning of the weekend. With the spring sunlight beaming through her bedroom window, Crystal donned her best bike gear and a light little travel pack, and hopped onto her mountain bike for her Friday morning ride. Four hours later, she finished her route by riding back up through Southside. The hills were always a killer, especially at the end of a long ride. The heat was also much worse now near the middle of the day, when the sun was directly overhead, and the humidity was a nightmare. She hopped the curb and swung into some shade on the sidewalk in front of Griffon Comics. Putting a foot down to steady herself, she stopped, panted for a minute, and then took a long drink from her sports bottle. Crystal saw someone inside the shop. It looked to be a teenage kid behind the counter. It was difficult to get a good look inside, with the view all cluttered by flyers and posters all over the front window. She spotted a bike rack a couple of stores down and locked her bike up before heading in. The place smelled like three-day-old pizza and ozone. A pimple-faced teenage boy was behind the register, and a couple of kids were playing some card game on a table between two rows of comic books. A set of stairs led up in the back to a second floor, with a little sign that read “Off Limits.”Crystal removed her helmet and sunglasses and walked over to the gangly teenager behind the counter. He was wearing a T-shirt with some muscle-bound spikey-haired cartoon character on the front, and he had a yellow Post-It note stuck to his chest that said, “I work here. My Name is Ronny.” As she walked over, she couldn’t help but notice his complete lack of subtlety in staring at her chest. And she would be the first to tell ya, she didn’t have much up there to be proud of, but this kid couldn’t tear his eyes off ‘em.“Are you Ronny?”His eyes bulged and he swallowed hard. His voice cracked like Peter Brady, “Yes, ma’am.” Spoken straight to her chest, no eye contact needed. “Do you work here, Ronny?”“Yes, ma’am.” The little Post-It note on his chest unpeeled itself and fluttered down to the floor. He didn’t seem to notice. Still no eye contact.“Is Joe here, Ronny?”“Yes, ma’am.” She wondered if this kid had even actually seen her face. “RONNY, I TOLD YOU!” Joe yelled from the stairs as he entered the room carrying some kind of space ship model, which he set down on the counter, finally breaking Ronny’s concentration. “Jeez, Ronny, how do you know that she’s not a federal agent? Or one of those women stalking me? Never tell anyone that I am here…and you dropped your name tag again.”Ronny looked down and noticed the missing Post-It note. He scrambled to the floor to pick it up and re-apply it to his chest. Crystal rolled her eyes at Joe, but couldn’t help noticing that he looked like hell. He looked like he had not slept in two days. Still, she couldn’t let him continue in his fantasy world, “What women do you have stalking you?”“What? You mean besides you? Hey, I’m sorry baby, but I’m a popular guy. I can’t have you coming around here all the time wanting---”“Right, whatever. And Ronny, stop staring at my chest.” Crystal was already irritated, and she hadn’t been here sixty seconds yet. “Jeez, Ronny.” Joe said, exasperated and shaking his head. “They’re not even that nice.”Crystal cracked her knuckles. “He’s right, Ronny. Joe’s are much bigger than mine.” Joe’s brow furrowed. “You ought to watch it, Crystal. There’s places where I could put you in jail for saying things like that to me.”“Oh really? Like where?”“Qo'nos, for one. There’s probably others.”Joe started to continue and she cut him off. “Hey, I’d love to spend here all day with you and the social elite, but I need to show you some information I found and then I have to go.”Joe stopped, looked at the kids playing their card game at the table, nodded, and pulled a megaphone out from behind the counter. Ronny grabbed the megaphone from his hand and whispered, “Sir, remember? You said since I am working here--”“Right…um…okay, Pocahontas, you and me can go upstairs,” and Joe turned and started back up the stairs. A moment later, Crystal was picking her way through a room covered in half-empty food containers, dirty clothes, and shredded up comic books. The smell was already strangely sweet and sour just getting up the stairs, so she stopped breathing through her nose long before she made into the actual living quarters. “Actually, I was doing some more research online this morning myself,” Joe announced, as he picked his way over to a desk where his laptop was waiting. “I was gonna show Willie and Preacher-Man this afternoon. More proof of the conspiracy.”Crystal kicked a pizza box out of her way and made it over to the laptop. Images of old newspapers filled the screen. Joe had several windows open showing various headlines. He clicked through them as he explained. “So I was looking up some of those guys from South-Medical. Specifically the top four guys, the ones that moved up through the ranks too fast. And I found this stuff. Look at this. All of them were inducted into the Ward Numismatic Society in the eighties, right when South-Medical was really taking off.”“They reported this in the paper?” Crystal saw the headlines and pictures of a gala event with women in ball gowns and men in tuxedoes.“Yeah, they publicized it and everything. That’s what took me so long to find. This was all in the Social pages, with the, ya know, debutante parties and crap like that. And that’s not all. Look at the picture, the one here on the left.”Crystal squinted at the picture. It took her a minute to recognize the face, some twenty years younger than she was used to seeing it on TV. The picture showed a young Dick Scorse, smiling and standing arm-in-arm with several other young executives. “So Dick Scorse is in the Ward Society?”“No, that’s what’s weird, or at least, that’s part of it. Nobody else is in the club. Just these four guys, as far as I can tell. Even our guy Jack Bolling and Rich Hall are not in it. Maybe they just work for them or something. I don’t know.”“Well, add this to your file then.” Crystal pulled a folded up printout from her travel pack and set it down on Joe’s desk. “What is this? Anaconda, Colorado? Look baby, I don’t have time to go on a trip with you. Maybe next weekend--”“This is the town from my dream. It’s a real place. I’ve never been there, and I’ve never heard of it before, but this is the town I dreamt about last week.”Crystal could see that Joe wanted to make a smart remark, but he either couldn’t think of one, or he was caught not wanting to interrupt her. She knew that he had mentioned his strange dream from last week as well, and he apparently wanted to hear more about hers. She continued, “So I spent some time in the university library between classes, and did some internet searches too. And the guy in my dream? The old cowboy sheriff in the black hat? Turns out he was a real guy.”Joe was hooked. He was even looking her in the eye. Speaking of which, his eyes looked a little dilated.“His name was Hal Runyan. He lived in the Old West. He was like a famous lawman at the time. He was a U.S. Marshal in that town when it was first founded back in 1894. Apparently he was really old at the time, just like in my dream.”</blockquote>

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