My roommate’s girlfriend Claire called, and asked if he was around. I said that I’d go get him, and she said not to bother as she would drop by in a few minutes. When she arrived, she asked me to help carrying something in from her car, but it was a pretense to talk privately with me. She said that she was breaking up with my roommate, and wanted me to help her with her college classes. I didn’t mind helping her out, but I didn’t understand why it had to be kept secret from my roommmate until I found out how she wanted to pay me. I told her that she didn’t need to pay me, but she was very insistent.
I was at her apartment tutoring her on differential calculus when there was a loud knock at the door, and a yell “Police! Open up! We have a warrant!” I went to open the door, thinking that there must be some mistake, but they broke it down with a battering ram before I got there. They handcuffed both of us, and put us in the back of a police car. They carted out several marijuana plants that she was apparently growing in a closet. I was really pissed off, since I’d known nothing about it, and don’t even like marijuana, but the police just said “Tell it to the judge.”
Bail was set very high because the police claimed that I was a flight risk. I wasn’t able to raise bail, and spent two months in jail. Eventually I was convicted of felony posession with intent to distribute, and Claire was acquitted in a plea bargain arrangement by agreeing to testify against me. I was sentenced to a year in prison, but this was reduced to time served and five years of probation.
When I met my probation officer, Denise, I quickly found out that everything Claire had done had been carefully orchestrated to blackmail me into doing various kinds of illiciit work for Denise, as apparently Claire herself had been blackmailed previously.
A lot of the work involved a group of us being driven in Denise’s pickup truck to southern California. On one particular trip, the driver (another member of our group) wasn’t going to return with us. Denise grumbled about not liking to do the driving, and since I hated riding in the bed of the truck with the dog, I offered to drive. However, she had other plans. She had tickets for everyone to fly to Honolulu, apparently for another job there.
Unfortunately there was some problem with my ticket, so I didn’t get to go, and ended up dogsitting for Denise until everyone else returned. In Honolulu they had obtained a map showing the location of a big cache of stolen artwork. It was hidden in a series of secret underground tunnels beneath the theatre of the university. Unfortunately the theatre was continuously in use for performances and rehearsals, 24 hours a day. It became my job to infiltrate the theatre staff to get our group in, and to find the entrance to the tunnels.