(if you missed Part 1, you’re gonna be confused)

So I sent Janice off with Kevin, into the wild of late-night raves in the middle of the desert between Phoenix and Tucson. They were carrying roughly $6500 worth of product with them, plus they each had a pager. What could possibly go wrong?¹

Turns out : pretty much everything.

There was this guy Brandon. Complete nutcase, semi-anarchist, cliché bad boy, who had the worst luck in the world. I sold him a 5-strip of LSD during the month or so that I and Cheyenne got into the LSD selling business, after we found a particularly potent strain of “Mad Hatter” acid and the dealer offered us a full sheet for only $80. A sheet, sold as individual tabs, would net $500. But it was common to do bulk discounts. So, Brandon paid me $20 for 5 tabs.

He then hopped on his motorcycle (told ya he was cliché bad boy), and made his way down the highway. Cruising at speeds about 15-20 MPH over the limit, he was pulled over. The cop caught him with 2 of the 5 strips, and a small baggie of coke. He decided it would be a good idea to try and fight the cop. It was not. Luckily for him, he had hot-shot lawyer connections (through his rich parents if I recall correctly) which helped his sentence a great deal. He only did a year in jail, but was on probation for another 2 years afterwards.

Well, shortly after Janice and Kevin arrived at the rave, guess who they ran into – fresh out of jail? Our old “buddy” Brandon. Janice didn’t know him, but Kevin did. Why Kevin didn’t just high-five him and move along, I’ll never know. Instead, Kevin made the idiotic decision to tell him the details of their plan. Brandon asked Kevin to spot him 2 baggies and he’d be back in a minute. Kevin, again being an idiot, went along with this hair-brained idea. A few minutes later, Brandon returns with a few pills of high-grade Ecstacy. Which he and Janice took. Cause.. y’know, they wanted the full rave experience. Or something.

Throughout the evening, they traded away more bags for more drugs, and Brandon somehow convinced Kevin that he’d “keep track of the inventory”, presumably by doing some weird-ass druggie math on what they were trading, and what each drug was worth, relative to the bags of K. If you’re thinking “that sounds like a lot of math for a drugged-up ex-con to keep track of” – you’d be right. He had no fucking clue what was going on. Neither did Kevin, who relied on Janice to keep track of the bags she was still holding onto. But, she was relying on Kevin to take note of what he was asking her for when he took a fresh batch of baggies, and didn’t really know the Brandon arrangement. She just kept taking whatever drugs Kevin and Brandon were offering, figuring it’d all get sorted out later. Keep in mind, all 3 of them were fucking high out of their minds on several different drugs all at once. So, the details of exactly how this whole exchange went down, I’ve still not quite determined. No one remembers enough to have ever given me a full story, so I’ve pieced together the stories (through memory over the passage of time) to make sense of it all.

The best rough estimate I could get from the full exchange was that roughly $4000 of the K had been exchanged or given away or traded for sexual favors, over the course of the rave. The remaining $2500 seemed to be split by way of 60% to Janice, 30% to Kevin, and 10% to Brandon. It was getting late (err.. early?), almost 7am in the morning. They decided to head out. Because Janice was too fucked up to drive, Kevin decided to drive them all home. Why they were offering a ride to Brandon is a question I’ve never gotten a suitable answer to. How the hell Brandon got to the rave in the first place, I don’t think anyone will ever know. But, they headed out. Even though I’d paged them around 5am, they figured they’d be home soon enough (it was only about an hour long drive) that they’d just talk to me when they got back. I, meanwhile, was freaking out that they said they’d be home around 4am and no one was getting back to me. I assumed the worst.

About 20 minutes into the drive, still in the middle of the desert, they decided to stop for bathroom breaks and grab some refreshments for the remainder of the drive. Kevin takes an exit with two gas station options. Between the gas station on the left, that was a relatively new station and clean and likely well-stocked – Kevin chose the gas station on the right, which had fewer pumps, only a dirt parking lot, and a sign that was falling apart. I don’t know why he decided that was the better option, but his reasoning was “well, I figured less people would be there so we wouldn’t have to worry”.

They didn’t have to worry anyway. They’re 3 people in their late-teens/early-20s stopping for drinks on a roadtrip at 7:30am. There’s literally nothing suspicious about that. Kevin got out of the car, and went inside to pee. Brandon decided to jump into the driver’s seat, and offer Janice a few lines of one of the bags of K he still had with him. Rounding out “Night of Bad Decisions”, she agreed. They sat in the parking lot of a run-down gas station at 7am, in full view and bright sunlight, doing lines of K off the dashboard. Brandon’s bad luck reared its ugly head once again. As they were mid-snort, a cop pulled up right next to their car. They didn’t see him, of course, but he certainly saw them.

Kevin came out of the bathroom to see the two of them handcuffed and bent over the hood of the car. He quickly ran back into the bathroom and flushed all the drugs he’d traded our K for, plus all the K he had on him. When he walked back out, Janice was in the back of the cop car, Brandon was trying to fight cops again, and Kevin just stayed inside the store. Eventually, more cops came and beat the shit out of Brandon, and threw him in the back of the car. When they all drove off, a tow truck showed up to get Janice’s car.

Kevin finally called me after the coast was clear. He didn’t have much in the way of answers. Just apologies. He may have even been crying (for which I wouldn’t blame him, by the way). I borrowed a friend’s car, and drove out to this shit-hole gas station to pick him up.

Our plan had been shattered. A new series of plans, for all involved, rose from the ashes.

1. …would be the tag line if this were a trailer for a mid-80s comedy film ↩