Shadow Memories: A Novel (The Singularity Conspiracy Book 1) Read Online Free

the trailer. But the occupants didn’t come out, so we kept pushing up. Pretty soon, my back was flush against the front, right next to the door, Johnny beside me.
    “Remind me why you came,” I said, fumbling in my pocket, “if you’re not going to do shit.”
    “Distractions, man, distractions.”
    “Yeah, don’t do that.” I took out my snake rake and tension wrench, clutching them between my fingers. Time to start. With a nod back at Johnny, I snuck over to the door. The ten feet felt like about ten miles, but I made it.
    Then I was in my element. I slid the tension wrench in the bottom part of the lock. I could already feel that this was going to be easy; trailers didn’t sport the gold standard in security. A single rake from the pick and a twist later, and I was peering inside the hazy confines of a double-wide.
    One being used to convert store-bought cough suppressants into addictive stimulants.
    And I always thought of Seaside Heights as such a quaint place. I suppressed a snicker, remembering Otto’s small talk. I slipped inside and eased the door shut.
    The two idiots were hunched over a table at the other end of the trailer, which was about thirty feet down. I peered over the countertop, straining to make sense of their voices. No dice; just a murmur, obscured by surgical masks and goggles straight out of high school Chem class.
    I had to get closer.
    Cursing my own stupidity—Bledsoe and Ramsky weren’t going to split the atom, but they could hold their own in a fist fight—I crouch walked closer. I was right in the middle of the hallway, in plain view. If they turned, I was done.
    For some reason, my feet kept moving further, until I was only about ten feet away. Now I could hear them just peachy.
    “Ya goddamn dummy,” Ramsky—at least, I think it was Ramsky—said to the smaller guy, “ya put that one in first, then you turn the heat up.”
    “We ain’t making medicine,” Bledsoe replied, throwing his mask at the wall, “just crystal. Hell, the tweakers around here won’t know the difference.”
    “I ain’t poisoning no one. That’s murder one and twenty-five to life in the pen. Put your damn mask back on before I hold you down and tape it there. Don’t want to be breathing this shit. Get that emphysema.”
    This would do. I sucked in my breath as Bledsoe went to gather the fallen mask, but he never turned around, instead doing a crab-esque side shuffle to the wall and back.
    I dialed the burner phone Johnny had handed me earlier, muting the microphone. The call connected. I placed the cheap plastic device on the counter above me, and backed up. My luck had just about run out.
    Ramsky and Bledsoe were still having a spirited conversation about the quality of their product and other issues of respect as I retreated.
    I started running once I was outside.
    “You do it,” Johnny asked, galloping up alongside me, “you set it to 911?”
    “Yeah, I did. Where’s my cash?”
    “Hot damn Desmond,” he said, slapping me across the back, sending the air scooting from my lungs like a runaway train, “I knew you were the right guy for this.”
    “Glad I could help out. Money.”
    “Deal was, the cops had to get ‘em.” Johnny looked around. “You think they’ll come? They can locate them with the signal, right? That’s not just in the movies?”
    “Your plan. You tell me.”
    Johnny shrugged and knelt down behind a tree. From our vantage point, the trailer was a comfortable distance away, and we were hidden—from any assailants or potential police presence.
    “That’s what it said on the internet. I used Google.”
    “Big day.”
    “You’re some sort of prick, you know that?”
    “You and Cassie should start your own little group. Bitch about me to each other.”
    “Yeah, well—hey, check it out.” Johnny leapt to his feet like a kid who’d just seen that the toy store had something he wanted. “Those are lights, all right. Thought that was all pretend, just in the