From Her Pocket

Photo by James Yarema on Unsplash

Ronin staggered to the other side of his hotel room to grab a beer from the fridge. Cracking it, he assessed the situation. The room was a mess. Empty beer bottles were everywhere. At some point during the night, they spilled a bag of potato chips on the floor and trampled over them instead of cleaning up after themselves. A cold microwave burrito sat near his laptop.

One empty beer bottle spilled next to the pile of mixed clothes, which included his own and the jeans, yellow halter top, and black bra and panties of the woman who lay in his bed. He hadn’t known her more than two or three hours. Yet, there she lay in the bed of his shitty hotel room. Her clothes were on the floor, likely soaked in beer.

He knew the best thing he could do was try to hustle her out of the hotel first thing in the morning. Letting her hang around too long defeated the purpose of their one night fling. They had a fun night. Both managed to push their own loneliness to the back of their mind for a few hours, but it would return, as sure as the sun would rise.

For his plan to work, she would need dry clothes. Ronin reached down and pulled her jeans, top, and underwear from the pile. The top and underwear were dry, but beer had soaked into the jeans. He took them to the bathroom to hang over the shower rod. As he slung the faded blue denim up, a baggie fell from one of the pockets and landed on the white linoleum.

Ronin examined the baggie. There must have been at least 50 round white pills. Pills were not his thing, but that many seemed excessive, even for a hard partier. He felt the pocket that had contained the baggie. He could feel more small round tablets and cylindrical capsules. He fished out two more baggies.

There must have been over a hundred pills in her pockets! Who the hell was the woman laying in his bed? Ronin thought. He knew her name was Kelsey. He knew that she liked to hang out at Roosters off Route 23 in this tiny map dot he had been sent to. Was she a dealer or just a hardcore user? Had he just fucked one of the people he was supposed to be gathering information on?

He thought back on the conversations they had at the bar. It was all a little blurry. He wasn’t in evidence-gathering mode when he was talking to her. He went out that night to let off steam before starting the…