The evening was winding down. Having finished a full days filming, I had just stopped by my favorite bar to drink a cold English bitters. My weekend had been long, three hard days of filming, with some minor disappointments along the way. But I had finished filming for the day and was preparing myself for having to return four hundred dollars worth of equipment at eight in the morning, cash on the barrel-head. It was already midnight.
There were a few customers in the bar, I leaned around my bar stool to have a look at the patrons present. In the corner, I was able to spot three gentlemen sitting alone by themselves, appearing somewhat sinister. Two of them stirred me in the wrong way. The third figure was beyond my recognition. One of them looked up and our eyes met for a single moment. Like lightening, my chest seized up in knowledge of who they were. At one point I had done several music videos for a hip hop group for a few years. Things turned sour between the group and I, two years back. At one point they threatened violence against me and I refused to answer their calls or emails. The last email I received had ended with the warning that '...we could do something that you would regret, but we wouldn't." I took the threats seriously, one of the members of the group had been shot five times and lived. This man was the one whose eyes had met mine.
Reverting my gaze in front of me, a flood of questions filled my mind. Had they recognized me as well? Were they there for me- had they found me somehow? How long had they been in the bar. Sweat immediately began pumping from my pores. Instantaneous reaction. The bartender inquired what was up; apparently I was white as a ghost. Thinking became hard. Fight or flight kicked in and the latter seemed more apt to me. Kicking the stool away from me, I bolted to the back of the bar, to the storage area. Grim thoughts only seemed to grow faster when by yourself in the back of a bar. Lighting a cigarette, I opened the back door to let the smoke out, and provide myself with an escape route should they attempt to find me. There came a sense of inevitability in my mind, the nicotine was working. I put my back up against the storage room entrance door and prepared myself for any sort of pushing, ready to leg it out of the room as fast as I could. Minutes passed and nothing happened. Perhaps things had not been as bad as I thought.
With lights turned off and back to the door, my only visual perspective was out the storage room exit; into the parking lot, and through a small crack in the wall. I kept my eyes out into the parking lot and waited. Abruptly, the three men that I had been trying to avoid entered the parking lot. I held my breath and remained still. They entered a dark car in the lot. I took a small lungful of air and waited for the car to start. It didn't. It merely sat in it's spot, with the three figures lingering inside. My mind shifted to atrocious thoughts once more. Ten minutes passed and the inertia draped me with a near death inducing atmosphere.
Voices. Movement. But not from the car, to my right, through the hole in the wall, I could see two other figures conspiring. Their words were inaudible to me, but it did indeed seem like something illicit was transpiring. To my reckoning, it appeared as if some kind of small drug deal was taking place in the near area of the parking lot. For a few moments, my attention was taken away from my former disgruntled clients, and on the two other shadowy members of this twisted circus.
Without warning, I heard profane screaming and my attention was drawn back to the car. The three men were outside of their car, holding hand guns pointed directly at the other men. I fell to my knees and attempted to get as low to the ground as possible. The screaming continued. Something terrible was happening right before me. Whether it involved me, I still didn't know. The question was quickly answered. One of my former clients suddenly noticed the open storage room door. The former client who had previously felt five small segments of blazing lead rip into his body. And he noticed me. Or did he really. He noticed my person, but perhaps not my identity. Maybe in the thick of things, he really didn't care. My mind was half way to shutting down completely. What happened next only occured to me in segments. I could see him approaching me with gun pointed, I could sense the other two men still shouting profanities as they moved towards their target, and I could hear my aggressor telling me to turn around, which I did. On my knees, I could see the door that I was previously leaning against. The paint had faded, there were scratches. No conclusions to my situation could be drawn. Perhaps for the first time in my life, I was living every single second. Each sensation felt new, fresh. I could sense somebody close behind me, somebody who I had once put in front of my camera; somebody who paid me money to make them look good. It's hard to make a thug look good.
A crushing force impacted the back of my skull. I was surprised how little pain I felt as the butt of his hand gun struck me. Truthfully, I sensed very little as I slumped against the door. Being knocked unconscious isn't nearly as frightening as expected. It lasts a few seconds, before everything gets extremely hazy and mellow- and uncertain.
End of Part I
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