They Call Me...Montey Greene

Chapter One

"THAT'S a very beautiful shoe!"

The female's voice echoed off the exposed brick walls of the high-end women's boutique on Via Della Spiga in this touristy section of Milan, Italy. The man holding the shoe looked around to see who the sultry voice was referring to, when he realized the only other person in the store besides her was him. It was a little before noon on a Tuesday when he went momentarily deaf and mute simultaneously, he'd just fallen into the deep end of the pool.

A woman's stunning beauty and sultry voice can do that to a man, even a man as disciplined as Montey Greene.

If the woman with the sultry voice was still talking Montey couldn't hear her, for he had momentarily zoned out and was digging into the corner pockets of his mind trying to remember how he even came to stop in this particular store in the first place.

Montey had a memory like an elephant.

If you told him today in 2006 to meet you next year on this same day at the corner of 57th Street and Avenue of the Americas at 7:30 in the morning you would only have to tell him once. And more than likely you would be the one who was late. Right now though for reasons he wasn't in position to comprehend or explain, he might as well have been digging into the pockets of the raw denim jeans he had on since they and his memory bank felt vaguely similar—empty.

Excluding an instance a little more than a week ago back home in the States when he did the boys-night-out thing with two of his friends, Caesar and Marley, to celebrate his birthday did Montey feel void of any knowledge of his whereabouts. But that was due to a hypnotist with a bag full of parlor tricks.

Now here he was three years shy of forty and ten days removed from that fateful night in Manhattan being entranced once again, only this time it was by a woman's stunning beauty, not by some two bit joker on stage in a near empty comedy club looking for kicks.

His mind flashed back to his tours of duty in the Gulf over a decade ago. He spent more time trudging through sand while ducking mortar shells then he cared to remember, and not once did he ever feel the aridness of that desert in his throat. Now here this woman stood before him in a boutique on one of the most famous streets in Milan leaving him with his mouth parched, and gurgling on words that were stuck between the abrupt stiff dryness of his vocal chords.

At some point she must have offered him a drink as he found himself gulping down bubbles of carbonated water from a miniature bottle of Pellegrino.

"And you are?" he asked sheepishly as he wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his thermal long sleeve shirt.

"Someone who knows a little something about shoes," she quipped.

Montey glanced down at her feet to see she was wearing a pair of the same shoes in a different color.

"She must be pretty special," the gorgeous woman continued.

"Who?" Montey stammered absent mindedly.

She nodded her head at the shoe he still held in his hand.

"Oh these," he replied as he pretended to exam the craftsmanship. "Nah, I just jumped off a plane, didn't pack a lot of clothes. Was just browsing."

"In a women's boutique?"

Montey looked around. "Oh," he replied as his eyes scanned the clothes racks.

She smiled, "But then again, with men these days, you never know which side of the goal they like to kick the ball from."

"Excuse me?" Montey managed while gagging on his water.

The chimes hinged to the boutique's door sang out.

"One moment," she said as she walked off to greet the patrons filing into the store.