Free Cracked by Barbra Leslie

burgers, and Darren and I played water polo with the boys, while Ginger and Jack played backgammon by the pool.
    I started laughing so hard at Darren’s attempts at spiking the ball that I swallowed some pool water. I started coughing, laughing at the same time.
    “Hey, Danny,” Ginger called. “Breathe, why don’t you?” The boys thought that was hysterical.
    It was a nearly perfect day.
    It was the last one I would be able to remember.
    Soon after that visit, the demons haunting Jack began to take him over, the paranoia and psychosis became more pronounced, and nothing would ever be the same again.

5
    Darren filled us in, while Detective French paced and talked quietly and urgently into her cell phone.
    A woman with my I.D. and matching my description had showed up at the facility where the boys were being housed until family could collect them. She had convinced seasoned social workers that she was their aunt, Danielle Cleary, and was taking them home. She had had identification and the correct paperwork. The boys, the social worker said, had seemed to know the woman, and were happy to go with her. She was about my height and weight, and had choppy dark hair like mine. Said social worker had even phoned the number she was given for detectives who were responsible for the case, and was told with all seriousness that she should release the boys to this woman’s custody.
    Detectives Miller and French, of course, had never heard of any of this. And after thorough checks with the Newport P.D., no one else had either. And according to the social worker, the business card was a standard-issue Newport Beach Police Department card. She knows them, sees them all the time, and didn’t see anything amiss.
    An Amber Alert was being issued. I could hear sirens in the distance.
    Ginger’s boys were gone. Somebody had kidnapped the boys.
    A part of me broke quietly as I listened to Darren. I stopped being able to take it in. I needed to get high. I needed to fuel my body with a bit of sleep and a bit of food.
    And then I would get out of this house, and find whoever did this. Whoever took the boys had to be the person, or people, who had taken my sister from me. Missing children should mean that every law enforcement agency in the state should be looking for them. They would find them, or I would find them.
    Either way, I was going to kill them.
    Half an hour after Darren told us about the boys being taken, while everyone downstairs went into action, I quietly pleaded headache and emotional fatigue, and excused myself to lie down for a moment. No one particularly seemed to notice. Darren was speaking to Miller, trying to be calm, and Detective French was talking loudly to someone on her phone.
    As soon as I got to my room I closed and locked the door and ripped my jeans and underwear off. In seconds I was in an undignified position, retrieving the balloon of drugs from between my legs. Quicker than you could think possible – and with more certainty of movement than I’d had in days – I pulled an old pair of yoga pants from my bag, and rooted around in the various plastic bags I’d thrown in for the seemingly-innocuous, disassembled parts of a homemade crack pipe: a small bottle of Tylenol (with one or two in it, in case my bag got searched) that had a hole gouged in the side, a few Bic pens (to empty the ink cartridge to use as the mouthpiece), and in my travel sewing kit, needles, elastics, a few inches of duct tape and a bit of tinfoil. I threw it all in my toiletries bag, along with the balloon, and before I could go looking for a bathroom, noticed that this bedroom had an en-suite.
    Perfect and perfecter.
    I rinsed the balloon and emptied it – two grams of coke, and a rock of crack cocaine, not quite an eightball. It was all I could get my hands on before I left, and in truth all I felt comfortable bringing. My general lack of paranoia regarding my drug use meant that I wasn’t clear on the laws around what amount