That was almost a year ago. That roadside bomb ended up taking my legs below the knee. What my brain showed me as I laid disoriented on the side of the road until I was brought to a base to have my life saved was much worse. Not a minute has gone by that I haven’t thought about those images. I was convinced I was shown the sequence of Bonnie’s death.

I went back to my hometown of Reno with my artificial legs and made my home back in my childhood bedroom at my mom’s house. I had plenty of time to rehab physically, but was stranded alone mentally with an absentee father and a mom who now had an amputee son just a few years after losing her daughter to an unsolved murder and a dead-end job as a grave shift blackjack dealer in the Silver Legacy Casino.

I wouldn’t stop talking about the visions of Bonnie I was given. I told my mom. She told me to stop. She had come to terms with never solving the mystery of Bonnie’s murder and dismissed my visions as PTSD. I told my friends. Same indifference and excuse. I told the Reno Police Department and called the Las Vegas Police Department and got the same treatment, but not in such words. I was mainly dismissed because Bonnie was reportedly in the Los Angeles area when she went missing and her body was found less than an hour outside of LA. No clue ever linked her to Vegas anytime around then.

The only thing I wanted to do since I arrived back in the states was to go to Vegas and conduct my own investigation into Bonnie’s murder, armed with the information of knowing what the inside of the casino I saw looked like, the name Timothy, and the look of Timothy’s face. Problem was, I had no money, hadn’t learned to drive with my new legs yet and no one I knew was signing up to escort the guy they thought had a serious case of PTSD to Vegas to look for a murderer.

I did the only thing I thought I could do. I hitchhiked the seven hours from Reno to Las Vegas, until a guy with a mouthful of Red Man dropped me off at the end of the strip by Circus, Circus. The baking, 120-degree sun greeted me with a sizzle. I felt like a pile of steak on a fajita platter.