HAROLD was the kind of guy that believed in James Bond kind-of escapes and last minute surprises, so even when his dreams of corona-filled beaches get soaked up with cheap vodka and bloody snot, he knows deep down he’ll never run away from the bullet at the other side of the table named NICK.
The start of Harold’s story begins with a sucker punch that couldn’t be helped, a very nice jacket that apparently cost $3,000 and a satchel under the bed filled with at least 100k. That’s right, and a MAN that has the kind of laugh you love to hate. And a gun. The kind that spies have.
After coming back to the land of the living, HAROLD finds himself in a strange, existential conversation with the MAN, a likeable asshole who might as well be the devil in a hotel room whose only real features worth remembering are a gold-rimmed mirror and a neat, little-fancy refrigerator filled with best kind of shooters to wrap your lips around.
The MAN who HAROLD eventually gets to know as NICK is there to kill him. Not his decision, just his job, so there really isn’t any point in arguing that matter. What really is worth thinking about, instead of – ya know – sitting there in his piss soaked underwear, is what he would do with a few more minutes to think things over…or whatever.
Almost with amusing apathy, NICK provides HAROLD the chance to have a drink, cool down, talk movies – not that new agey garbage, but the true, real classics. And love. Goddamn it; that does get in there too. Not that anyone in the room is a softy, but when you’re going to spend your time talking movies, life, or – for god’s sake – women, they at least better be worth it.
With each 80 proof anecdote that HAROLD or NICK seem to enjoy, there is a sneaking suspicion that one last subject has yet to come up, even though it was the first one that started the whole talk to begin with. It spent time hiding between funny memories of young lust, and it deftly avoided confrontation when small world coincidences popped up, but it never left. Like the gun. The ones that spies have. But what HAROLD didn’t expect, and NICK always knew was coming, was that one last phone call.
Then NICK kills HAROLD.
