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He couldn’t remember. His mind searched for the details. He’d been with Itori at the lake, and then…?
He must’ve come home eventually, because he was in his bed now. It must have been late.
Early?
He groaned again and rubbed his eyes. It was strange he couldn’t remember. Strange that there’d been a few nights like this, where the details of how he’d gotten home just weren’t there.
Will forced himself to sit up. He needed a pain killer and a glass of water. Maybe some breakfast. He had some oats left somewhere, probably.
But as Will started to heft himself out of bed, his eyes caught on a white object on his bedroom floor. It looked like a sack or a crumpled package.
It hadn’t been there before.
He got up and went to it. The material looked vaguely familiar, but it took a second to place why. Then he was confused as to why it was here, in his bedroom.
He grabbed for the tough, vinyl material. When he turned it over, the DIAMOND CRUSH logo was stamped across the front.
It was what he thought it was.
Sugar.
But–?
He stared at it. These were the big twenty-five pound bags that they sold at the grocery store for farmers. Will stocked them twice a year, and the bags sat on a pallet at the back of the storage area as folks came in and bought them off them.
This bag was empty. The twenty-five pounds of sugar which should’ve been inside, wasn’t.
Will stared at the bag. He took it and walked down the hall to his living room. There was another bag there, by the door, also empty.
Dread landed in his stomach like a lead weight.
He had no memory of buying these, and no memory of where the sugar had gone.
His eyes went to the kitchen counter. His keys were there, where he always dumped them when he came home. He had a key to the grocery store on his keyring. Will rarely ever used it since Becky and Adrián were usually in before him, but he did have it. He had access to the store, day or night.
“I wish someone would do something,” Becky had said just yesterday. “...a little sugar in the gas tank of those machines…”
He stared at his keys, disbelieving. His hand opened and the vinyl bag slid out to join the other.
He didn’t. He couldn’t have.
Will would remember doing something like that, wouldn’t he?
He took a gulping breath. He couldn’t think of any other reason for these bags of sugar to be here, though. He would never buy a bag this big, had no use for it. These were for farms.
Fucking fuck.
He stumbled back to his bedroom and ripped the covers off the bed. He didn’t know what he was looking for, he just felt like he needed to make sure there was nothing else in his trailer that he didn’t know about.
He went room by room, looking under things and in closets and inside drawers. It was only as he got to the junk drawer in his kitchen that something caught his attention. In among the company branded pens and produce rubber bands, there was a keyring. It was thick metal and it contained four gold keys with black, industrial-looking key covers.
The branding stamped onto the covers left no doubt about what these keys went to.
They were for the excavators. Engine keys. Gasoline tank keys.
He slammed the drawer shut, stumbling away in shock.
That couldn’t–that couldn’t be right. How had…?