Featured image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

“I’m not the one to have this conversation with. You or whoever can have it with the cops but I was told I had to stay here six months.”

She left again. I heard more heated discussion coming from the thin wall behind me this time. New voices. Some male and some female. Then there was the sound of a speaker phone dialing. More conversation. A few f-bombs as the conversation turned into a shouting match.

In the end I was admitted. I didn’t know it but if you survived the first person telling you to leave you were in. The rest of that theater was just to find your breaking point. Addicts break fast. All of them got the “this program or prison” deal. They all broke down grovelling and bawling. They wanted to find a person’s breaking point before admitting them. Violent patients didn’t get admitted.

I was the first non-addict ever to be admitted. Most of the people here looked like addicts snatched from the jaws of death. People had been living on the street or in shooting galleries. I’m rather certain some had AIDS from sharing needles and from the extra gloves staff put on when taking samples.

Group therapy was mandatory but the rest wasn’t. I spent my time reading most every book in the library. They had a collection of kids movies which didn’t involve drinking or drugs. Movie night happened three nights per week. It was mandatory as well.

New patients (addicts) weren’t allowed visitors for the first two months. Breaking a person down was part of the conditioning. The other reason was friends of an addict were generally either addicts themselves or people who had enabled the addiction. Other than occupy six months of my life, this program didn’t have much it could do with me.

Cigarettes were tightly controlled. Dolled out for good behavior and taken away for bad. I didn’t smoke. When the others found out I was the most popular guy in the program.

Part of the program was finding a job. I had been told to bring as much of my work history as could be verified. That was rather easy as I tended to keep my resume rather current. I did have a life outside of Lyft driving and drug dealing. Honestly it was a sideline. My sideline just happened to bring in a thousand times more income than my real job. My current employer, when notified I was in rehab said they would hire me again when I got out. It was an office job and I was good at it. The fact it was boring as Hell was pretty much why I did the Lyft dealing. Just should have set my exit date at one year instead of two. I would have been out clean still holding all the cash.

Instead cops and politicians were having a high old time spending my money. I saw a news report of them showing off all of the shiny new squad cars and equipment they bought with the proceeds of a recent drug dealer raid. Yeah, those were the squads that I bought. All 24 of them. As well as those new police vests they were parading before the camera. That’s why I was nabbed and let walk. Either someone told them how much money I had, something even I didn’t know, or they went hunting for the funds to fill the budget gap. Either way I was what they found. It was a bad bust too. Tiny amount of drugs. No Miranda and a cop punched my face during interrogation. My lawyer was simply a greedy piece of shit. That’s why I was here.

Not that I’m holding a grudge or anything.

Honestly I think he was the one who put in the agreement that I could never work for a delivery or ride sharing service again. Lots of pedestrians get mowed down by vehicles these days. He probably had a lot of things delivered to his home too.

After five months I was allowed to have visitors. They wanted to put me on work release but that always ended up with a screaming match on the phone. Someone wanted to treat me like the unwanted boyfriend who knocked up their high school age daughter. I emailed my girlfriend and she made a visitor’s appointment.

Visits had to be supervised. Didn’t want someone slipping contraband in. She looked good. In fact she was beaming. Once we had hugged and sat down the first thing she did was pull a key out of her pocket. A safety deposit box key.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It got caught in the vacuum when I was cleaning your house. They must have dropped it.”

“Don’t” I said. “Yeah. It could have eight million in cash or 15-20 million in drugs. When they crashed my accounts the annual lease fee didn’t get paid. All abandoned safety deposit boxes have their content handed over to state authorities. Contents are held for some number of years waiting for someone to come forward and claim them. After that it becomes property of the state” I explained. “Nobody can just walk into the bank and get the contents anymore and the risk is too high.”

“Don’t you want to know?”

“I’m sure someone already does, but that someone will never be me. I just don’t want to know.”

When that little story surfaced in group therapy everybody volunteered a fool proof way to get the money. Privately they all offered to try and get the contents if I just gave them the key. None could understand that only I or a lawyer with lots of signed documentation from me could ever retrieve the contents. These people were addicts who could not be cured. A million dollars wasn’t a windfall for them, it was a death sentence.

That was five years ago. The wife (yes, I married her) had an artist friend put the key in a glass block like some people do with nick-knacks. They etched the glass with the words Life’s Little Mystery. I still have my boring office job. She only waits tables a couple nights per week. She says she doesn’t want a career because she doesn’t want to be tied down when we have kids. Yeah, we’ve had that little discussion a few times, but it is the only thing we fight about. For now I’ve solved the argument by getting a really comfortable couch.

Unlike the brothers down in Florida mine didn’t screw me over. Oh, he took some of the cash I had hidden there to keep his construction company afloat during the housing crash but we both agreed to just bleed it out slowly.

I don’t miss driving or dealing. Quite a few of my coworkers drive on the side. I hear the stories. Every now and then they pick up someone from a publicly traded corporation and hear something I find interesting. Yeah, I do a small bit of insider trading. Executives really shouldn’t talk about big deals in the back of a ride share vehicle if they don’t want the information public.

The lawyer, well, while I was locked away in rehab for an addiction I didn’t have with addicts I didn’t sell to, he walked out into traffic staring down at his idiot phone.

Karma, it’s a bitch!

I’m pretty certain it was waiting for me with that key. Aren’t you?

<Previous Part