They must have been following me after I left the night before. I can’t believe I didn’t keep an eye on my tail, but I was fairly distracted by visual and auditory hallucinations, and the pain covering every inch of my body. It was hard to focus on any one task or situation and it was getting worse. Keeping my eyes on the road wasn’t too difficult, but the road seemed to wobble at times and what I saw coming at me was hard to comprehend. I managed to make it back to the hote4l in one piece. I pulled into the lot and shut down the engine.
As I approached my room I didn’t see the three demons anywhere, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before they knocked on my door once I got inside, and I was right. When I opened up, all three of them were standing there smiling at me. I motioned for them to hurry up and get inside for fear the manager would see these suspicious characters and call the police. They came in and I sat on the bed. I pulled the loaded meth pipe from under the pillow and began to heat the underside.
It was a cool process watching the crystal turn to liquid then smoke. Carefully twirling the pipe with my fingers as to not burn the stuff, I inhaled and then released an enormous cloud of toxic vapor. Within fifteen seconds, the remaining liquid in the pipe returned to its original crystal form, and I held the glass bubble in my hand, staring at the new shape of the once broken shards. Repeat. Repeat. I did not pass the pipe to my assailants. I felt a tingle in my brain as the drugs began to work. Switching it up helped.
Driver broke the awkward silence, "You look like shit." They all had a good laugh at that. He continued, "We just wanted to let you know we had our eyes on you. Did you see King today?" I shook my head. "I just met him, he's not even my guy. I went to Brad's house but he wasn’t there." I made up a name in case they didn't know Mason's. “Show us your shit.” Dumpy said matter of factly. I started to remove my shirt and did a little dance, a move that was lost on them. They would want to see how much progress I had made throughout the night to judge some sort of timeline for the heist. I got up and went to the sink and reached under and with a loud tearing noise removed my remaining hoard. I softly underhand-tossed the bag to Driver and he measured it with his eyes and hand. “Looks like you’ve been busy. How much cash did you drop off this morning?” I responded, “About five.” I lied. Dumpy looked at Goggles and stated, “He’s slow. How long are we gonna have to wait?” Goggles looked at me and said, “As long as it takes.”
I knew I had some form of control over the timeline as long as I lied about weights and dollar amounts. I knew that King was in all reality probably close to $100,000 any day of the week, I just needed to delay as much as possible until the final plan came to me, something that would get all three of these beasts in the same spot, somewhere far away from prying ears and eyes. I said, “It’ll be a few days until I can go back there for anything so there won’t be much going on for a while. I can’t speed up the process or do anything out of the ordinary because I don’t want to detour from business as usual. These guys are just as dangerous as you, and I have to protect myself in all of this, too.” There seemed to be some silent form of agreement between the three.
It was a quick visit, and they opened up the door to leave. The brightness of daytime was shadowed by the short form of a hotel manager who had a key in his hand and was a second away from opening the door from the other side. He was surprised at the three guests I had leaving and pretended to feign disinterest, but he couldn’t help staring at Goggles. I shut the door behind everything and went back to the bed. This was finally time for me to recharge. I took out my phone and set the alarm for 12 hours in the future. I don’t remember my head hitting the pillow, I just remember black.
