Excerpt

I walked down into the bowels of the parking garage, thinking that the whole experience was getting the best of me. Denial had been easy at first. I mean, the only memory I had - that one fire memory told me I really didn’t like Liz. I didn’t love her, did I? Of course not. So the fire didn’t really destroy any cherished memories, at least none that Mathews could bring back. And her disappearing along with a son hadn’t really given me any sleepless nights.
I was beginning to think neither Mathews nor anyone else was going to solve this mystery.
I climbed on my gleaming antique “Duo-Glide” Harley. I suddenly felt frightened. I thought back on how little I’d been able to tell Mathews so far.
My driver’s license said I was 28 years old. I was tooling around on a very expensive bike, wearing $2000.00 suits, fishing out $100.00 bills from my saddle bags when ever I needed them, and I wasn’t any closer to finding out who I was or where my goodies came from than I was four months ago. In fact, the only thing that had progressed in those months was the diminishing balance of the $400,000 I’d found in the saddlebags and my ability to handle the Harley after all but pushing it down the street those first few days. I had learned that though you may never forget how to ride a bicycle, I apparently had lost some of my memory of how to ride my Harley.
I was certifiable, a fruitcake even by LA’a loose standards. A name, but no legitimate address. A man with a past, but with only one memory. Nothing else except all this material stuff: a luxurious hotel suite with all services paid for a year in advance, and the closet full of clothes I was supposed to own.
It had been five months since my Rip Van Winkle awakening on that November morning. I had found myself half-dazed, half-dressed in a pair of wet black pants, lying under a palm tree on the beach in a cove somewhere along the Pacific Coast. Like I’d gone for a midnight swim or done some wading in the ocean. Beside me had been an empty diary with Charles Randall written on the blank cover page. A hotel key and book of matches from the Polo Lounge had led me to the Beverly Hills Hotel and the bungalow suite that was apparently my home away from—somewhere. With no suggestion of an accident and no bump on the head, I had been clean, squeaky clean, except for a lack of orientation and a very bad headache. Charles Randall was then and still is just a name—a name at the beginning of a blank diary.
I shook off the troubling memories, revved the engine and got the hell out of there.