Underworld

When Thomas Couchon first saw the ghost, he was not as startled as he thought he would have been. He had arrived at the midtown Manhattan restaurant named Rena’s an hour early, wanting to relax with a few drinks before Jerry Preciado and a couple other Coda Pharmaceuticals reps showed up to meet him. Over the course of the next sixty minutes that he waited at the bar, Thomas put away three scotch and waters while the ghost polished off a three-course meal and had started on the pasta dish, a heaping bowl of spaghetti and meatballs.

The alcohol went down much too easily and Thomas was feeling the effects. The lightheadedness alone could not fully explain the vision at the back of the restaurant; he knew there had to be more to it.

He took a deep breath and cleared his head of everything before looking back over in that direction, but he could still see it. The figure was dining alone in a back booth. The only illumination came from a single flickering candle in the middle of the table. The diner’s girth was such that the meager candlelight was not sufficient to cast its glow across both mighty shoulders at the same time. As a frequent purchaser of fine men’s wear himself, Thomas guessed that, in the living years, the dead man’s tailoring fees would have been every bit as costly as the well-made pinstripe suit itself. The brim of a black-banded white fedora that the specter wore was angled downward sufficiently to conceal its face. The plate now contained only excess tomato sauce, which the apparition sopped up with thick slices of Italian bread.

Slowly, the dead man lifted his massive head and raised one meaty hand off the table, jabbing his index finger at Thomas as if trying to alert him to something. Thomas shuddered inwardly and quickly turned away.

You know you’ve had too much to drink, farm boy, Thomas told himself, when you start seeing fat guys who aren’t there eating spaghetti and beckoning you.