“Four!”
“Five!”
I gritted my teeth. Despite my fear, the rage was building inside me, clouds of roiling black smoke shot through with red fire. At these prices, Malone could have easily afforded to pay us six hundred thousand dollars and still made hundreds of thousands of dollars for himself. We really had made the quality crop we’d promised...and we weren’t going to see a cent of the money. Not unless we could pull off our miracle.
After a while, Malone called a break, told the dealers to have a beer and a smoke from the sample packet he’d opened and swaggered over to us. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he asked. “If you’re gonna appeal to my better nature...I ain’t fucking got one.”
Sean stepped forward. “Talking’s not my thing,” he told Malone. “This is.”
And he ran at Malone, shoulder-charging him backwards into the table. The table crumpled under the combined weight of the drugs and the two muscled men, its legs collapsing and the packets avalanching onto the floor. Sean only got in one good punch before he was hauled off Malone, but it was a good, meaty crack to Malone’s jaw that looked like it had all of his anger behind it.
The guards hauled Sean upright...but, as soon as he was on his feet, he grabbed both men and cracked their skulls together. Then he was free and diving at another group of guards, punching one and head-butting the other. He opened his mouth and screamed like a Viking berserker, wild and terrifying, his eyes wide and every muscle hard as iron.
A space cleared around him. Malone’s guards were taken by surprise—no one had thought that Sean would be crazy enough to go on the attack, when he was unarmed and so obviously outnumbered. And no one wanted to be the one to go toe-to-toe with The Irish. That gave Sean an advantage and he made the most of it, grabbing guards and throwing them, smashing them down on tables and causing as much chaos as possible.
Most of the dealers backed the hell off—this wasn’t their fight. A few tried to grab the fallen packets of weed.
Sean was like a tornado in a confined space, hurling chairs and tables at his opponents. At one point, he hurled a chair directly at the bottles behind the bar, bringing them down in an alcohol-soaked rain of glass. The guards pulled out guns...but put them away again at a gesture from Malone. “Alive!” their leader spat, touching his lip and finding blood there. “I want the fuck to suffer!”
Sean screamed a battle cry and tackled two more guards, bearing them down to the floor and unleashing a flurry of punches. But by now, Malone’s guards had shaken off their surprise and were surrounding him. In seconds, Sean would be overwhelmed.
But with everyone watching the crazy Irishman, no one was watching me. I started to sidle closer to Malone.
Sean had a man on each arm, now, and one trying to grapple his legs, but he was still managing to move, twisting those broad shoulders to hurl off his captors, kicking away the man on his legs. As soon as he escaped one pair of hands, though, two more grabbed him. Eventually, he was pinned: six men had his arms and legs and another had his arm across his throat.
That was my cue to step right up to the distracted Malone and slash the piece of glass right across his chest.
Louise
At first, there was no blood, just a jagged tear across his shirt. I actually thought I’d missed.
Then, as hands grabbed my arms from behind and the shard of glass fell to the floor, the blood welled up in a scarlet arc, soaking through Malone’s white shirt. It went right across the curve of one big pec and into the other.
“What the fuck?” Malone pawed at himself. “Jesus, I’m bleeding!”
I heard the metallic click of a gun being cocked and cold steel pressed against my temple. I closed my eyes.
“Wait!” snapped Malone. “Bitch does that to me, she’s going to die slow.” Strong fingers caught my jaw and pushed on my cheeks, popping my mouth open like a goldfish’s. I opened my eyes and Malone was right in my face, sneering at me. “That the best you got?” He drew back his hand and slapped me hard across the face. My head snapped to the side and the room spun for a second, pain blazing across my cheek. I saw Sean, held tightly by a small army of heavies, growl and try to lurch forward to protect me.
Malone grabbed my jaw again. “If you’re going to knife someone,” he told me, “you gotta stab that motherfucker.” He looked down at his chest. “Slashing away like that don’t do shit. Hell, I might not even need stitches.”
I saw one of the guards frown as he heard Malone slur, but everyone was too scared of him to point it out.
“You gotta go deep,” he told me. “That’s what we’re going to do to you, bitch. Go deep. You understand me? And we’ll make that Irish fuck watch.” He grinned, but there was something not quite right about his eyes. He kept blinking. And he kept swallowing, as if—
“Mouth getting dry?” I asked.
Malone swallowed again, forcing his throat to work. He frowned at me.
“Am I getting blurry?” I asked.
For the first time, he looked scared. “What did—” He pressed his lips together and then opened them again, trying to make them work properly. “What did you do to me?”
“It’s belladonna,” I told him. “Deadly nightshade. I’d say you’ve got a minute before the convulsions start. Maybe less. Next will be your heart.”
A ripple ran through the crowd. A gun pressed against my forehead.
“Wait! WAIT!” snapped Malone. He was breaking out in a sweat, now, little salty beads gleaming across his dark skin. “How do I fix it?”
“We’ll get you to hospital,” said one of the heavies. “Come on, let’s get you in the car.”
Sean’s voice broke out, loud and clear and full of authority. “Nearest hospital’s five minutes away. We checked. He’s got half that.”
There was silence for a second.
“Bullshit,” said one of the heavies.
“Really?” asked Sean. He nodded towards the crop. “You want to bet against her when it comes to plants?”
I wanted to hug him. There was silence again as Malone and his men debated it. Meanwhile, the dealers were looking at each other, unsure of what to do.
The indecision ended when Malone’s body gave a jerk, as if he’d been touched by a live wire. It was enough to send him staggering backwards into one of his heavies...and then they found themselves supporting his weight because his legs had started to fail. “Bitch,” he croaked. “Fix it!”
“This is how it works,” I said. “There’s an antidote: here, in the club. We walk out of here with our drugs. As soon as we’re gone, we’ll call you with where the antidote is.”
The guard pointing a gun at my head slowly lowered it and I breathed a silent sigh of relief.
Then Malone shakily pulled out a gun and pointed it right at Sean. “You tell me where the antidote is right now,” he croaked, “or I’ll kill your boyfriend.” He glared at me, waiting for me to break. I was only some stupid civilian, after all, the good little girl who’d wandered into the big boys’ club.
I closed my eyes for a second. Opened them...and glared right back at him. I wasn’t good anymore. I’d had enough.
We glared at each other for several long seconds. I saw Malone’s finger tighten on the trigger...and then he broke and lowered the gun. “Let them go,” he said, his voice a dry rasp.
The hands holding my arms let go and I pulled away. Across the room, Sean was doing the same.
“You got a van?” Sean asked the nearest heavy. He nodded. “Good. Load up every packet. Every fuckin’ packet”—he turned to the dealers—”including the ones you took off the floor. We find one missing, no phone call.”
“Do it,” Malone growled. “All of them.”
His men formed a human chain, moving the packets of weed from the pile on the floor to the door and outside. The dealers who’d swiped packets for themselves in the confusion hastily put them back. No one wanted to be responsible for Malone’s death. Even the packet Malone had cut open to giv
e samples from was loaded up.
Walking down the line of Malone’s men to the van was one of the scariest experiences of my life. Every one of them was armed. Every one of them wanted to kill us. If they sensed weakness for a second, they’d pounce.
Sean took my hand and, immediately, I felt better. Most of this shit is just attitude, I remembered. And forced myself to walk with my head high and my back straight. The doors to the van were open for us, the keys inside. We climbed in.
“You’re dead,” said one of Malone’s guards, just before he slammed the door. “We’ll find you, even if it takes a year.”
I tried to look unafraid, however much I wanted to throw up. We pulled away, Sean behind the wheel. “You okay?” he asked immediately.
I nodded weakly. “Did we do it?” I looked behind me, into the back of the van. “Tell me we did it.”
“We did it,” he reassured me. “Now hang on.”
He put his foot down and the buildings started to flash past. He switched between roaring down main streets and cutting down side alleys, until we were sure we weren’t being followed. Then I made the call. Malone answered on the first ring.
“The antidote is the Physostigmine you use to treat your glaucoma,” I told him. “It’ll counteract the Belladonna. You probably want to chug the whole bottle.” I waited, every muscle screaming with tension, listening to the plastic cap unscrewing and the gulping as he drank. I was terrified that it wouldn’t work. However much I hated the guy, I wasn’t a murderess.
After long minutes, he spoke. “I’m going to find you,” he whispered. “I’m going to find you, bitch, and when I do….”
I took a deep breath and tried one last attempt at reason. “Look, we have our drugs back. You’re going to be fine. No one got killed. We can just walk away from this and never see each other again.”
Sean was glancing across at me, his expression halfway between pity and adoration at my naivety. I didn’t expect it to work either, but a little part of me held out hope. That was crushed in seconds. “I’m putting the word out,” Malone said. “Everyone is going to be looking for you, all over the city, all over the state, I will fucking find you—”
I ended the call, my stomach twisting.
We had the crop back, but no one to sell it to. No other dealers would dare touch it, not once they heard it had been stolen from Malone. Even if we could find a buyer, Malone would hunt us for the rest of our lives.
Our problems had only just begun.
Louise
We didn’t dare go back to the mansion: Malone knew that place. For the same reason, I’d asked Stacey to take Kayley to her apartment.
We headed for the docks, where we could disappear among all the other vans and trucks. Then we prowled around for somewhere to put the van where it would be out of sight. Eventually, we found some long-abandoned garages, the windows broken and the white paint nearly invisible behind a coating of graffiti. “But the door’s chained shut,” I said.
Sean climbed out, wrapped the chain around his fists and heaved, the muscles of his back standing out in the moonlight. There was a sudden crack and clang as the chain broke and snapped against the metal door like a whip. He hauled the door open so that we could back the van in.
We didn’t dare leave the van, so we wound up climbing up on a dumpster and then onto the flat roof of the garage. We sat on the edge with our legs hanging down, looking out over the black water of the harbor and the reflections of the lit-up cranes. Sean put his arm around my shoulders and, for the first time since we left the jazz club, we stopped.
It hit me, then, how much had changed. Six months before, I wouldn’t have even run a red light at an empty intersection. Now I was on the run from a drug dealer whose life I’d threatened, sitting on the roof of a graffiti-covered derelict building at midnight. Beneath me was a van containing half a million dollars in weed and beside me was the scariest, most badass man I’d ever met.
And then that badass turned my head to face him and kissed me, long and deep, and I felt my body relax. Just having him close made things seem better. That was the biggest change of all. For the first time since my parents died, I didn’t feel like Kayley and I were on our own.
We sat there in silence while both of us had a very long think. But however evil and devious I got, I couldn’t come up with a way to turn the van full of marijuana into cash, not without going through dealers.
The worst part was, it had worked. We’d pulled it off. The van was loaded with a bumper crop of high-grade weed that was easily worth the money we needed—probably more. After all the months of effort, we’d done exactly what we’d set out to do...only to be defeated by a problem further down the chain—Malone’s greed—that was nothing to do with us. It was human nature that had got in the way. The science—the process—had worked just fine.
And then I had a revelation. Something Stacey had said to me. All along, I’d been thinking about the crop—that was the product of all my hard work - that was what I’d created. But maybe I’d created something else, as well.
“We need to stop thinking like criminals,” I said. “And start thinking of this like a business.”
Sean frowned. “The whole fuckin’ drugs game is a business. Supply and demand, distribution...it is a business.”
“Not completely. There’s still a few things real businesses do that these people don’t.” I thought again. “We need to contact a dealer.”
He sighed and rubbed my shoulders. “We can’t. No one below Malone’s level is big enough to handle this sort of volume. No one at Malone’s level is going to side against him. They don’t want a war.”
“That’s why we have to go up. Above Malone.”
“Who’s above Malone. Wait, the cartels? The Mexicans?” He shook his head. “Louise, that’s all backwards. The Mexicans import weed to the US, they don’t need to buy more of it.”
“No,” I said. “But I think I’ve got something else that will interest them.”
And I laid out my plan.
Sean
It was crazy...but maybe exactly the sort of crazy we needed. And the sort of thing I’d never have dreamed up: I was too mired in the way things had always been done in the drugs game. Only an outsider like her—with that big brain of hers—could have made the leap and come up with it.
“It might work,” I said slowly. “But do you realize who we’re getting into bed with, here? Malone’s an evil son-of-a-bitch but the cartel? They won’t waste time on speeches and intimidation. When someone gets in their way, they don’t use someone like me to scare them: they just kill them.”
Her eyes were big with fear...but then she lifted her jaw and looked resolute. “We’d better hope they like my offer, then.”
I looked at her for a long moment and then shook my head. I didn’t want her anywhere near those cartel bastards...but I couldn’t kill our only chance of saving Kayley, either. “Jesus,” I muttered eventually. “Okay. Alright. I’ll make some calls.”
The temperature was dropping so I stood up, moved behind her and sat down again, my legs either side of hers and my chest pressed to her back to keep her warm. She snuggled into me and the smell and feel of her copper hair as the wind whipped it across my shoulders made my whole body ache for her. The last six months had put us both through the emotional grinder: all I wanted to do was drag Louise into a deep, warm nest and hibernate with her for about a year. The dreams I’d had of her were coming back to me: the two of us happy in some idyllic life somewhere, rolling around in a meadow.
One more time. One more desperate play and then either we’d be dead...or free.
I pulled out my phone. Six degrees of separation: in the drugs game, everyone knows someone up and down the chain. Put enough links together and you can talk to anyone. The problem is getting them to trust you.
After an hour of pleading, threatening and promising, I finally got to talk to a guy called Francisco, who was the number two guy to Isabella Gallego, queen of the Gall
ego cartel. I laid it out for him: what we had, the ridiculously low price we were asking. “Two hundred and fifty thousand,” I told him, “and it’s yours.”
“What went wrong?” he asked. He sounded smart, and older than us. I imagined him with a gray-flecked beard. “Why aren’t you selling it locally?”
I closed my eyes and told him everything—even why we needed the money. Francisco went quiet for a long time and then said that he had to make some calls.
An hour later, he called back. “We’ll do it,” he said. “But the deal has to be done in Texas. We’re passing through there tomorrow night. Eight p.m.”
“You want us to get the weed to Texas?”
“Don’t be late.” He gave me an address, then hung up.
“Did you really just say Texas?” asked Louise.
***
If they catch you with weed, you’re in trouble.
If they catch you with a lot of weed, you’re in big trouble.
If they catch you with a van full of weed, driving across state borders, you go to jail. Go directly to jail, do not collect two hundred dollars, do not ever think about seeing sunlight again. This was the most dangerous thing we’d done so far. I’d chosen the grow house location to be pretty much off the police radar. Even the mansion had been well away from prying eyes. But out on the highway we’d be an easy target.
We couldn’t use the van: Malone’s people would be looking for it. But we had virtually no cash left. So we went to the cheapest car dealership I knew, woke up the owner and bought the one vehicle with storage space that he had.
An ice cream truck. So old that I didn’t even recognize half the ice creams on the menu.
“It runs,” said Louise hopefully, revving the engine. “And it only has to get us there: one journey. Hell, it doesn’t even have to get us back.”
I nodded, unconvinced. One little problem, one cop pulling us over and we were screwed. I double-checked all the lights and replaced a couple of bulbs that were broken. Then we loaded all of the weed into the truck’s empty freezers. Even with the plastic wrapping and the freezers shut, the smell of it still hung around in the air—there was just so much of it, in such a confined space, that there was no way we could cover it up.
Growing and Kissing Page 24
