Application for John Amsterdam: New Amsterdam
The dog entered the Sorting Room first, followed by a leash, followed by a tall man in a black coat being dragged behind. "Six, knock it off!" the man said, with an accent somewhere between Noo Yawk and European. He let the leash slide from his hand and the dog took off to sniff out the corners off the room
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One look at Hogwarts' newest inmate gave Charles an eerie sense of deja vu. It also gave him the weirdest craving for peanut butter cookies.
Where had he met this guy? There'd been so many bars and dives and general holes-in-the-wall between Hampden and El Paso, Charles couldn't keep track of it all, and he hadn't exactly been in the most coherent state through all that time. He was pretty sure he'd never met anyone named John Amsterdam, but it wasn't like he asked for names, ranks, and serial numbers from everyone with whom he drank a beer or shot some pool, either.
He cleared his throat. "Ah ... hello." He smiled his charming polite Macaulay smile. Maybe this guy would help out with some clue as to where they might have met.
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He'd already seen lots of things, but this sort of deja vu was new to him. It was like he'd seen the guy somewhere before in the past, but that only happened to the people around him.
John wasn't liking this.
"Have we met?" he asked. "New York, maybe? Sometime in the last few decades?"
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"Upper East Side?" he ventured. He named a fashionable address (Olivia's building).
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He was pretty sure they didn't serve peanut butter cookies at that classy little cocktail lounge.
Or show The Flintstones on TV. That lounge didn't even have a TV.
"This is going to sound really, really weird," he said, scratching the back of his head and looking down, "but ... do you like The Flintstones?"
Maybe the guy had talked about The Flintstones?
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"I haven't seen it since it first came out," John said. "But somehow, I know I've watched it with you."
It had involved kids, which was impossible. His youngest son had been eighteen when the show first aired.
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He was also positive no kids were allowed in the bar where he could plausibly have encountered John Amsterdam.
His brows drew together a little. This situation was confusing even by the standards he'd come to expect from Hogwarts.
"I made pancakes for us one time, I think."
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He'd never been afraid of blenders before, but now he didn't want to ever see one again.
"The cookies were good, too. Peanut butter cookies." It hadn't been anywhere in Manhattan. They had taken over some designer house, out in the middle of nowhere. "The wife was the architect."
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"I was just thinking about peanut butter cookies. We had some kind of plan that involved them." They'd been partners in some kind of crime, Charles got the persistent feeling - all the weirder considering this guy had just written in his application that he had police experience.
He shook his head like a dog trying to shake off water.
"I vote you Ravenclaw." That was Charles's own house. He had somehow managed never to meet Dieter Prohl ...
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