Too Hot to Breathe

Texan Impasse

Keeping my cool, I turned to the man and asked:

- How do you know my name, Demar?

- Well... My son warned meh. He would never betray his family for such false accusations. But he did sell me out by giving ya dis address.

- Consider yourself even. Those weren't false accusations at all.

- Really? I thought dead men told nah tales, so why would my son talk to you in da first place?

- Well, no one here is a dead man, wouldn't you say, Demar?

- Call me Franklin. And da only dead man I see is ya. What are ya doing here? - He was the one with the true Texan accent.

- Investigating Spiegel's murder, or Simon's if you will. 

- Well, dat son of a bitch got whacked off? No surprise dere... Low-tier human being, nah doubt about dat.

 - I came to check on you 'cuz your partners Simmons and Fern wouldn't give you away, but maybe Simon got a different idea... By the way, how long did it took for your plan to work? 

- It wasn't mine...

- Oh really? Because I got my girlfriend to check every little detail of your buddies' lives over the past few months, and nothing of this theft links to someone other than you... And Ulric does have a pretty big mouth, so if he wasn't covering for you, he would have just confessed. - I was taking big chances, bluffing and talking so confidently to a psychopath, but I had hope in my plan.

- Hannah, isn't it... - He said, scratching his beard and getting up from the chair. - Ya see, dis may look like an abandoned house, but it still has wah-fah. And with my trusty computer, I conducted some research on ya. Of course, it also included hacking and stuff like dat, but at least I couldah sharpen mah skills.

- Yeah, Hannah and I broke up. - I said. - She thinks I cheated on her. So nice try.

- Dat's... what I shoulda said right now. Mah research was definitely correct. - Watching that his guard had been lowered, I threw myself onto him. The shotgun pierced through the window and was thrown outside, shattering the glass. 

He punched me some times. He actually even managed to knock me down, next to the shattered glass. There were only a pieces of it there, because with the momentum of the weapon the glass went outside. Still, by knocking me down, he managed to make me land with glass on my arm. Noticing that, I picked up a piece of it and stab him in the stomach with it. He mumbled in pain but still continued to deal blows to my body. I took a sheet off of the bed and covered his face with it, using such distraction to escape from him. 

Instead of running away from him, I waited for him around the corner and pushed him when he came, making him fall through the balcony-like hallway into the living room. Again, he yelled in pain. A one-story fall must be painful. Picking up my phone from the ground, I called 911. 

Somehow, the word got to Maggie, and about one hour after the Police arrived (or half an hour of having John Atkins yelling at me if you prefer) she arrived, worried sick about me and demanding to see me. The paramedics at the scene had taken care of me already. The wound in my arm had been disinfected and was now bandaged up and they ran tests on me to determine my health state, which seemed fine. Maggie just asked what happened and so I told her the whole story behind what had happened. Even though she constantly asked me to go to a hospital, I insisted that such actions were not needed and that was fine. I just needed a night of sleep, which I did. 

The police helicopter that came took me back to the states and a taxi escorted me back to my hotel room, even though Maggie insisted that I should stay with her. But I didn't... I had important things to do in the morning. I was going to try to squeeze some more information from Ulric in the morning since the mastermind behind the robbery was now in a coma. 

From what I got from his wife, he had gone to the beach to relax, just like me a few days before. I took my sunglasses off my collar and put them on my eyes, covering the sun. I jumped over the stone bench and touched the sand with my feet.

I heard a scream suddenly, asking for help. A young lady on the sea was screaming her brains out, even though nothing seemed to be wrong with her. The lifeguard, that was on my left closer to the sea, sitting on a chair inside a tiny shack, got up in an instant and took off his shirt as fast as possible and launched himself to the ocean.

The woman was now holding someone in her arms. Someone in pink shorts. A man in pink shorts. It was him...

I, following the lifeguard's moves, also took my shirt off and launched into the ocean. He got there before me (pretty obviously... I don't swim that often since chasing people is normally on land) and dragged him across the water to the sand. I helped him out a little and watched him do CPR to see if he could be revived. But he never got up, like in the movies.

No, he was now the fourth victim... And the worst part was that I didn't know who the first two were.