As David slowly opened his eyes. The sun shined through a crack in the blinds. Everything was a bit blurry for a few moments. When he could finally see clearly, he wiped the sleep from his eyes, and he got up from the bed, throwing on a t-shirt and jeans. He made his way to the bathroom to clean himself up when he notices something mid-step. He stopped. Looked around the room.
"She's gone", he said a bit surprised. Looking over at an empty bed that made the whole thing feel like a dream or some kind of allusion.
He made a slight chuckle before saying, "Well, wouldn't be the first time it happened to me." Then continued towards the bathroom.
Before he could make it to the entrance to the bathroom, he felt something was off with the room. He looked to his left to see the motel room door opened about half way. David decided to walk over and assess the situation.
He poked his head through the doorway, and when he looked up and down the hallway, there wasn't anything noticeably wrong. But his curiosity and suspicions got the better of him, as he left his room going towards the stairs that lead back to the lobby.
When David got to the last step of the stairs, he immediately realized that something was wrong. The rays of the morning sunlight squeezed through the cracks of a bullet hole in the middle of the window closest to the front desk. As David drew a bit closer to the desk, he could see a puddle that had formed on the floor around it. The strong sent hit David's nostrils that left him without a doubt in his mind that the liquid was blood.
He took a few more careful steps and saw the origin of the grim substance. It was the receptionist. She was laying of the ground on her left side where she had fallen out of her swivel desk chair. It was very clear to see that she was shot in the right side of her head. Almost dead center in her temple. David was so drawn into the moment that he began to pay less attention to his surroundings.
"Don't move. Unless you want to have a hole the size of a baseball in the back of your head", a female voice says right behind David.
He's startled by the sudden threat. And from the way the muzzle of a .45 caliber pistol was being pressed against the upper part of his neck, David know she wasn't fooling around.
"Miss, I don't want any trouble here. Okay?", he says as he thinks of a way to get out of this difficult predicament.
"Me neither. But if you decide to start some shit", she slowly pulls back the hammer on her firearm to make it seem more intimidating. "I will damn sure finish it."
David tried to think. He had his sidearm on him when he came into the motel, but he took off it off with the belt that it was attached to. Which both were now laying on the bedside table upstairs in the room. So he decides to take a gamble.
As fast as he possibly could, David turned around to take his left hand and grabbed a hold of the gun, he balled his right hand into a fist and delivered a powerful punch to the woman's left side, right underneath her rids, where it would be most effective. Fortunately for him, he was successful in doing so. Right when his fist impacted her side, the female fell to her knees, gasping for air.
David held the gun in both hands ready to shoot, amidently realizing that it was in fact was his pistol, as he pointed it at the now disarmed mystery woman. She was coughing. Continually trying to catch her breath.
"Alright. Are we gonna do this nice and comb. Where I ask the questions, you give me the answers, and we both act like civilized human beings? Or-"
"Shut the hell up! You know exactly who I am", she said as she slowly rose to her feet. Her face getting closer and becoming clearer in the light. At which David could see perfectly that this girl was the same girl he had thought had run off this morning. He had just never heard her voice until now.
David slowly pointed the pistol at the floor. "Holy shit. It's you." He gestures towards the puddle of blood that generated from the receptionist's body. "Did you do this?" He said looking deep into the girls eyes to make sure that she wasn't going to lie to him.
She looked back at him in almost the same manner. "No. No I didn't." She said confidently. As she turned around and walked towards one of the couches in the lobby, sat down and stared at the floor. "But I think I saw who did."
She began to describe how last night, she heard a woman scream from downstairs. At the time, she was still as clueless as a small child so she didn't know what was going on, much less what she should have done.
"Wait. So how did you get like this?", David asked.
"The gun shots. Following the screams, there were three gunshots. The sound echoed into my head. And it was like someone took my head, dunked it in a bucket of ice cold water, and when I got pulled back up…" She looked back at David with a slightly puzzled expression. "It was like I just… woke up."
"Anything else come back? A name perhaps?", David asked, hoping for a straightforward response from her. She wasn't making a whole lot of sense right now with this story of hers. And on top of that, he couldn't get all that good of a read on her. Was she scared? Confused? Shaken up? Well, whatever it was, he needed to find out more about her.
She shook her head no. "I still don't know anything about myself. It must be still up there swirling around trying to get out like I did." She looks down at her hands with questions filling her head. Then looks back up at David. "So, who the hell are you?"
"My name's David Cruz. I'm- Well, I was a detective for the State of California in downtown Sacramento. Using the word detective quite loosely, though. I was more like a overqualified intern in the office, that was able to do work at a computer like nobody's business. I would be assigned to help some of the other guys on small cases. Apart from that, it was all coffee runs and paperwork. Until a few days ago, I decided to do something stupid. Really… stupid."