Tarah drove faster than I anticipated she would. Maybe because she was even drunker than I was. I had to really do some serious maneuvering to keep an incognito pace with her, and I feared it may have given me up as following her before we even got too far onto the desolate highway which led out of town in the northwest direction. I worried she would pull over and call the cops if I was too obvious. A young girl being tailed by a bearded guy who smells like campfire and J&B scotch is enough to spook a girl at 11 p.m. on a dark highway.

I had to be aggressive though. Brian wouldn’t pay me if I wasn’t able to track this girl down and actually do my job. He offered to pay me about four times what I had ever made for a job right when I really needed it. The lump which recently started swelling underneath my tongue from years of chewing Copenhagen fine cut told me I needed to start bringing in some money or my time was running out.

Speaking of time running out, I was still far enough behind Tarah’s car to where she could lose me pretty easily and I had just realized I made what could be a potentially-fatal error back before the start of the party.

I was supposed to place a tracking device underneath the hood or bumper of Tarah’s car so I could build out a network of her locations – i.e. home, work, boyfriend’s house – without having to traditionally eyeball stalk her, but had forgotten. I had spent 15 minutes sitting in my truck listening to Soundgarden to try and psych myself up to go into the party and pushed my biggest task out of my head somehow. Now, I was going to have to find a way to get that tracker on Tarah’s car and was running out of options.

Drunk and desperate, I mashed on the gas. My truck made massive gains on Tarah’s car within just a few seconds and in a flash, I was right up against her bumper. Shit. I hadn’t meant to do that. I was just a few feet away from rear-ending her.