I woke up in an unfamiliar bed. That's nothing new. I spent most of my life on the road

staying at one dingy hotel room after the next. That's the life of a reporter, especially

when you're unemployed and relying on whatever blogs and freelancing gigs you can find online.

What can I say? Hotel managers react a lot less angrily than landlords when the rent is late.

Well, that, and they're easier to skip the bill on. Not that I try to make a habit of doing that,

but desperate times calls for desperate measures. The lights are all wrong. Long fluorescent tubes instead of the fat bulbs at the

bluegrass bungalow. I turn on my side and notice that the ugly horse wallpaper is missing.

Instead, it's just bare concrete. I sit up in my bed. It's just a standard issue caught, but really not much more uncomfortable

than the bed at the hotel. My skull feels a couple sizes too small for my brain. I run my hands

through my long hair and massage my temples, but the pain refuses to subside. Book? My heart

starts to race as I realize he's not here.

I've made a few enemies over the years, but surely they wouldn't hurt Book.

I stand and look around the room.

There's not much else to see besides a mirror and a table with a flashlight resting on it.

I walk over to the mirror.

My pale, chubby cheeks look the same, as well as the bags under my eyes.

I follow the tenderness in my neck to a small red welt just below my ear.

Well, that's one mystery solved.

Someone tranked me, but who and why. Usually, at this point in the movie,

the villains show up to reveal their master plans. I wait a couple of minutes, but nothing happens.

As my old journalism instructors used to say, you never learn anything sitting around on your ass.

I pick up the flashlight.

...