Sunday, July 31, 2016

Quandary 14



It was set. Tonight I was going to pull off a daring robbery of a man who would surely kill me if the plan was real. King wouldn’t be anywhere near the crime scene I assured myself. The only thing I needed to make sure of was that none of the three idiots came inside the bus station with me.

I secured my valuables to the underside of the sink again with duct tape, and exited my room. I drove to the station to check the place out and to drop off a brief case that I would carry out later. I had seen in movies that they often have long-term lockers at bus stations and I hoped that was the case here. This was all feeling like some sort of terrible B-movie, or a work of fiction by a brilliant, well-versed, attractive, smart, author. Most likely an author with a giant penis.

Anyhow, I pulled up to the place and was a little thrown off by how small it was. I guess in a town of only 100,000 people, you don’t need a bus depot the size of an airport, but this place was like a damn fishing shack. It would complicate things, but I thought it would work for what I had to do. The important thing was that I could not see the inside from the outside.

I parked and strolled through the door. I realized immediately that I had forgotten about my face. Everybody turned and looked at the same time like I had walked on stage. Fortunately, everybody that worked there was just three people. There were maybe another five or six people wandering around looking at signs, and I assumed waiting for the next bus to Vegas. The walls were painted in many layers with the highest-gloss white enamel I’d ever seen. Every ten feet or so were signs pointing out the dangers of riding or being near a train including my favorite, “Never stand on tracks when a train is approaching!” Brilliant. I guess this was a former train station. I didn’t want to appear any more suspicious than I already did so I went to the counter and inquired about tickets to Florida. She asked, “Train or bus?” I guess this still is a train station. Now the signs made sense, I should heed their warnings. I bought a train ticket to Miami for the following morning and asked if there was any place I could put my case overnight. She pointed to a small bank of lockers and said, “It’ll cost you one token to get the key out.”

“How much for a token?” I inquired.
“A dollar.”
“Do they have any monetary value?”
“Yeah, about a dollar.” She smiled at me.
“Can I use the tokens anywhere else, like, say, Chucky Cheese?” I asked.

She replied, “You could try, but they don’t take kindly to token fraud.”

“Hmmm. I guess I’ll just take the one for now then.”

I put the gun in the case in the locker with the token that actually cost $1.07, and I left the small building. I didn’t see tracks anywhere, which was confusing at best, but I didn’t have any plans to take a train anywhere anyhow.

I hopped back in the car and pulled away from the station. I decided I would need a clever disguise for my face for when I came back. I had to get a fake mustache, that would throw everybody off.

I needed to get high. I already felt the effects of sleep deprivation again. I had left everything illegal back at the room because I was carrying a gun, and the two never mixed well with police. I had to go back. So I went.

Just the excitement of knowing I was going to get high was enough to give me a small adrenaline rush. I took the flight of stairs in two leaps and found my room. I opened it up, went inside, and chained it, bolted it, and even clicked the little button the knob just in case. I looked at the door. Even with all of that security I could still see light through the frame. What a joke. I didn’t really care; it was just something to be negative about.

I grabbed my pipe and a small bag of crystals I kept separate for private use, and loaded it. I spent the next half an hour alternating between breathing air, and inhaling noxious meth fumes. I could feel a layer of shit building up on my teeth, and my mouth went dry. This is probably about when most people would throw up, but my tolerance was high, and I didn’t even bother to brush my teeth; I could lick off the layer of grime later and maybe get a small residual buzz from it.

I sat in the quiet, poorly lit room. My foot was tapping the floor at an alarming rate, and my mind was making sense of nothing and everything. I had to call the bad guys and lay down some kind of plan that would get me and them somewhere far away, and alone. I picked up the phone.

Driver answered, “What’s up?”

“I need you to be my driver tonight, I can’t risk having King see my car anywhere.”

“Alright, that makes sense.”

“And after it’s done, we need to get out of town fast. Somewhere safe, like where we had our first talk.”

There was a moment of quiet. “Yeah, I guess we’ll want to make sure you aren’t trying to fuck us over. We will keep you with us until we get there and see what you have for us.” Fuck, this was too easy.

Saturday, July 30, 2016

Quandary 13

This is the 13th in a series of posts that starts here.


I don’t like violence, and I hate guns. In this case, I believed the two were necessary to save the lives of many innocent people. I held the heavy steel revolver in my hand. “What is this like a 9mm?” Seth stared at me and shook his head. He knew the extent of my knowledge of guns and I could tell he was unsure if I was serious or not. He said, “Yep, and it’s fully automatic so be careful.”

I had accidentally stopped petting the dog and she stood up and whimpered to remind me to continue. I obliged with my free hand, and I started laying down the plan I had developed in my head on the drive to Fountain. I had gotten away with a few small lies to the three idiots as I had cleverly nicknamed them, and I would need to get away with a few more in order for this plan to work. It was all going to go down tonight I decided.

I left Seth’s house with a pistol and a loosely knit plan of attack. I pulled out the phone that I had been given the night before and dialed the only stored number. Driver answered, “What’s up?” I hated how he answered like a friend would. I couldn’t wait to smash his face open with the butt of the gun. “I just got a call saying I have to bring all money I have over to my friend’s house A.S.A.P. You can probably guess what that means.” That seemed to rattle his cage a little bit. “You mean he’s going tonight?” I replied, “I don’t know, I just know that I need to bring a bunch of money to a certain spot right now. If I get there and I can’t leave with any more shit, that means that he’s going tonight I would imagine.”

We exchanged a few more words and I left it at me calling when I knew more. I really didn’t know anything at all, I just had to make it look like I did. I called another friend that I knew worked at the bus station as a janitor and asked if I could borrow his uniform for a little trade of meth. He was all for it. I made up a story about a costume party or something but he didn’t care, he was just excited to get high for free. I wanted to wear the uniform when I went into the station to take the brief case from King. I knew the three idiots would be watching from somewhere, and I knew they would like that I had come up with this much of a plan.

In reality, I had no idea how much money King had, or where he was, or even if he had any more drugs. With a little luck, Mason and King would never even know about this whole thing, and life would be back to as normal as it ever got for me, which was pretty fucked up. It was hard to think that all of this was set in motion just two days ago, and that already I had made these guys move up their plan to suit my desire to be done with them.

I drove around the city in circles for a while. As always, the road helped me clear my head. I needed to get another hotel room to set up in for a night or two. I had been running out of options for a while switching up spots every few days. I longed for the days of resting my head on a pillow that I owned and having friends that came over to hang out, not just for the drugs. Seth was the only friend I had left and I decided right then that I couldn’t drag him any farther into this. He would be tremendously upset with me if he wasn’t able to put a beating on these guys, but I knew I was going to take it all the way, and I couldn’t risk having him lose his life over these idiots.

I found a dump of a motel along Highway 52 and I found a place to park in the back. This place was the classic dope hot-spot. As I turned the mirror away from the shattered face I didn’t want to see anymore, I could see drapes parting only slightly in the ground-level rooms behind me. This was a betraying sign of a tweaker inside checking me out. You never know when the cops are coming, but they normally don’t drive a ’97 Sunfire. My only thought was that if this were a normal day, I could strum up some quick business here. Not today, I had a gun and I wouldn’t risk doing serious time over a $20 bag. I put the pistol in my waist band and stepped out into the afternoon sun.

I walked around to the front office and a clerk cheerfully greeted me. False. He buzzed me in through a solid steel door only after I passed $200 through a small slot in a thick glass window. This motel, unlike most others, ran on a cash-only basis. Of the $200, $150 was a deposit that I would get back if I didn’t trash the place. I thought it was funny that there was only $150 worth of damage I could possibly do in the room. I collected my key and headed back to my car which I had already parked close to the room I had requested. I got my bag out of the trunk, and continued up the stairs to the second floor.

The first thing I noticed was that I could never do $150 worth of damage to this place. There was no T.V., no air conditioner, and only a twin mattress on a queen box spring. This would do. I flipped a switch that activated somewhat of a strobe light effect, then a constant buzzing light. It was at least as bright as the dome light in my car. By contrast, the light in the bathroom was bright enough to be the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. I’m glad it was bright enough to show me that this was not the proper place to shower or have a bowel movement. No matter, I only needed a place to store my things while I went to take care of business.

I pulled the phone out of my pocket and dialed. Again, Driver answered. “Hey!” Fuck you.
“Listen, I just left my friend’s house empty handed. King was there and the last thing he said was ‘See you in four days.’”
“Holy shit. So he’s leaving tonight? Are you ready to do it?” He asked.
“Look, I just want to get this over with. I already checked the bus schedule and there’s a bus that goes down to Arizona tonight, and it leaves at 7:00pm.”
There was a moment of silent reflection on his end and then he said, “Well. Let’s do this.”

And Counting

I remember vividly waking up at 5:19am, one minute precisely before the lights would come on; the indication that it was time to stand a...