Isabella shook her head. “You are wasting my time,” she said. And turned to walk away. I saw her nod towards the men with guns and there were three clean, crisp metallic clicks as the guns were cocked.
It was time for my Hail Mary pass.
“Six hundred thousand for the weed,” I said, “...and something better.”
Isabella took another few steps towards the plane and, for one horrible moment, I thought she was going to ignore me. But then she lifted her hand. No bullets came, so I assumed she’d put the gunmen on hold. “What?” she asked, irritably.
“Me.”
Isabella slowly turned around. “Explain. But do it in the next thirty seconds.”
“I increased the THC content of that crop at least thirty percent above normal. I did it through a combination of custom fertilizer mixes, lighting cycles and precise watering. It’s complex, but replicable. Maybe the crop isn’t worth $600,000 to you, but the value is in the process.” I offered up a silent prayer of thanks to Stacey. “I can teach your farmers the same method. How much money could you make, if you can grow stronger weed? Millions. Tens of millions, over the next decade. And I don’t even want a percentage: all I’m asking for is $350,000. A one-time fee. Plus another $250,000 for the crop itself, which you already agree it’s worth.” I was ready for her to haggle me down to $500,000, which was the amount we actually needed.
Isabella studied us for a long moment. “Risky way to make an offer,” she said at last, nodding towards the gunmen.
“If we’d just told you on the phone, would you have taken it?” asked Sean. “We had to promise you cheap weed so you’d come here and sample it, see how good it is.”
Isabella stared at him. “I don’t appreciate being tricked, Mr. O’Harra.” She turned to Francisco. “Do you believe she can do it?”
Francisco tilted his head to one side. “I believe it’s worth three-fifty to find out.”
Isabella sighed. “I’d need you in Mexico,” she told me. “You’d have to visit our farms, teach them individually. It would mean several trips.”
I nodded quickly. “Anything. Sure.”
Sean stepped forward. “Me too. I don’t leave her side.”
Isabella sighed again. “Yes, yes, you can bring him.”
“And I want a month, before I start,” I told her. “One month. Then you can have me for as long as you need me.”
Isabella pressed her lips together in a tight line and nodded at Sean. “This one said on the phone that you needed the money to save your sister. That she’s sick. Is that true? Or was that another trick?”
I looked right into her eyes. “That’s true,” I said.
She stared at me for a long time, searching my face for any hint of a lie. I stared right back at her. And at last, after the longest time, I saw the briefest flicker in those ice-cold eyes. “Family,” she said, “is very important.”
Then she slipped her sunglasses back on and she was back to brutal efficiency. “Transfer the money,” she told Francisco. “Load the drugs,” she ordered the men. They scurried to do her bidding. A measured nod of farewell to us...and she was gone, her heels clicking across the runway to the plane.
Francisco pulled out his phone and muttered into it in Spanish. After a few minutes, he scrawled something down on a piece of paper and then passed it to me, pointing to each line in turn. “The name of the bank in Switzerland,” he said, “your account number and your password. Six hundred thousand dollars is in there now. Call them and they’ll transfer it anywhere you want.”
Six hundred thousand dollars. It hit me that Isabella hadn’t haggled. We had a hundred thousand dollars more than we needed. I took the piece of paper and folded it very, very carefully into my jeans pocket.
By now, the men had loaded the drugs into the plane. We watched as Francisco boarded and the steps were pulled up. Moments later, the plane taxied and roared off down the runway, then climbed towards the sun.
I turned to Sean. “Is that...it? Did we do it?”
He nodded slowly, then pulled me close. He gazed down into my eyes, dumbstruck.
“What?” I asked, worried.
“Just...you,” he said, brushing a lock of hair from my cheek. “You’re amazing, you know that?” And he kissed me.
Sean
The truck was empty but it still stank of weed and we decided we’d probably used up our quota of luck and then some. So we played it safe, taking the truck to a scrapyard and then buying a couple of cheap plane tickets to LA. For the first time in a long while, money wasn’t an issue.
What was still an issue was Malone. And I needed to deal with that on my terms. Louise had solved one half of our problem with brainpower. Now it was time for what I did best: brute force and intimidation.
Fortunately, Malone was predictable. Every Sunday, he ate lunch at a fancy restaurant downtown. He was driven there and back in a huge, glossy black BMW that I suspected was tricked out with bulletproof glass. But that was fine: I wasn’t going to use bullets.
I’d picked out a spot: the exit of the restaurant’s parking lot. As the car cruised towards the exit, I could see Malone in the back, taking up most of the rear seat. A guard was with him, a second guard in the passenger seat up front, and then there was the driver. All three guards, and possibly Malone, too, would be armed.
As Malone’s driver paused to wait for a gap in the traffic, I stepped out from behind a wall...and, with all my strength, swung the sledge hammer down into the center of the car’s hood.
The whole car sank on its suspension a few inches and an airbag went off inside. The hood caved in and the engine died instantly as it took the full force of the blow.
It took the men in the car a few seconds to react. Their first instinct was to open the doors, but the restaurant entrance was narrow: a concrete wall blocked the doors on the driver’s side. And just as they started to open the other set of doors, I slammed the hammer into the pillar between front door and rear door, caving it inward enough that the doors couldn’t open. Another airbag went off and the men inside shied away from the doors, coughing and choking on the smoke the airbag released.
“Shoot him!” I heard Malone yell. Two of the guards drew their guns.
“Good plan,” I snapped. I nodded behind the car. There’d been a line of cars waiting to leave the restaurant behind Malone’s car, but now their owners were panicking and screaming and clutching their cell phones to their ears as they called the cops. “The cops arrive and I’m lying here dead...and you’re sitting there holding the murder weapon.”
The guards hesitated, looking at one another. They were starting to realize that I’d turned their safe, secure car into a prison...potentially, a tomb.
I jumped up onto the hood of the car and swung the sledge hammer again, aiming for the very front of the roof. It bent down and the windshield shattered. Another swing did the same at the back. The men huddled together in the center of the car as the space inside got smaller and smaller. When I jumped down behind the car and looked through the hole where the rear window had been. Malone was twisting around to glare at me...but there was panic in his eyes. He wasn’t sure whether I was going to just keep going and flatten the whole car like a pancake, with them inside it.
I leaned close to him. “Here’s what’s going to happen, if you touch one fucking hair on Louise’s head,” I growled. “I will come and I will fuck. Your. Shit. Up. Every business you’ve got an interest in. Every house you own. That boat you keep in the harbor. Every one of them: destroyed. And then I’ll find you and do the same to you. I’ll smash you bone by bone, you fucker, and I won’t put you out of your misery for a good long while.” I indicated the car. “I can get to you. Remember that.”
He scowled at me...but he was scared. For years, he and people like him had thought he could control me: I was a dangerous attack dog, but they held the leash. Now I’d slipped my collar and that terrified him.
There’s nothing scarier than a man with a big hamm
er.
I knew it had worked. I could see it in his eyes. We weren’t going to have any more problems from him. But he couldn’t back down completely. “You’re finished in this business,” he spat. “No one’s going to hire you again, not after this!”
“Fine by me,” I said mildly. “I quit.” I tossed the sledge hammer onto the roof of the car, making him flinch...and I walked away.
Louise
We were nearly too late. While we’d been away, Kayley’s condition had worsened and Stacey had rushed her to hospital. I ran up the stairs and burst into Dr. Huxler’s office just as he was telling Stacey something about keeping her comfortable right up unto the end.
“Louise!” He looked up, startled. “Sit down. We should talk. It’s...time.”
“You’re goddamn right it is,” I panted. “I got the money. We’re going to Switzerland.”
When I pulled out my phone to organize everything, though, I started to panic. It hit me that I hadn’t considered all the things that could go wrong: what if it took days of paperwork to organize the treatment? What if the clinic in Switzerland didn’t have space for weeks? Everything we’d been through might be for nothing.
Fortunately, I’d completely underestimated the yawning chasm between the world of the super rich and the rest of us.
When I dialed the clinic, the phone was answered on the first ring—despite it being the early hours of the morning—by the most efficient woman I’d ever met. The conversation went like this:
Hello. My name is Stephanie. Please let me know if you would prefer me to speak in French or German. How may I help?
Um...hello. I need to arrange treatment for my sister at your clinic. I’m in Los Angeles. I gave her a brief history of Kayley’s leukemia.
We will require a fee of five hundred thousand Swiss Francs, payable in advance. She gave me some bank transfer numbers and I scribbled them down. Would you like me to arrange flights for you?
Flights? Um...yes. Yes please. You mean today?!
(The rattle of a keyboard) Can you be at LAX by 3 p.m.?
The entire conversation took less than four minutes. I called the magic number Isabella had given me and asked them, in a disbelieving tone, to transfer the money to the clinic. Moments later, Stephanie called back to say she’d received the money and gave us our flight numbers. I sat back in my seat, stunned.
Sean, Kayley, and I barely had time to pack our bags. I was about to call a cab to the airport when my phone rang to tell me that our limo had arrived. I winced, thinking of our rapidly-diminishing funds. Then winced again when we got to the airport and were told that we were flying first class. Of course the clinic’s clients would be the sort of people who would always fly first class. But when I saw Kayley’s face as she sank into her huge leather armchair and cued up a whole list of movies to watch, it was difficult to stress about it too much.
When we landed, there was another limo to whisk us from the airport to the clinic. The place was nothing like the huge, bustling hospital in America. It was neat, compact, and, like Stephanie, very, very efficient. Kayley was examined and tested within an hour of our plane landing. Two hours, and she’d started her first round of treatment.
While we waited, I checked my email and started going through the information Stephanie had sent me. Since Dr. Huxler had last heard about the clinic and its $500,000 treatment, the exchange rate had plummeted. 500,000 Swiss Francs wasn’t half a million, anymore: we’d saved almost fifty thousand dollars. Plus we’d sold the weed for $100,000 more than I’d originally intended. We had about $150,000 left in the account.
Stephanie wanted to check us into the same super-luxury hotel all of their visitors used, but this time I managed to reign her in. “We have very simple tastes,” I told her. She rattled away at her keyboard for a few seconds and checked us into a modest but comfortable place instead, frowning in confusion as she did it.
By the time they said we could see Kayley, she was sleeping. I sat down by her bedside, reached out, and touched her cheek. It was the first time I’d been able to stop and think for days and it all hit me at once: this was it, everything we’d been building towards. Either this would work, or….
Sean sat down beside me, wrapped his arms around my waist, and lifted me onto his knee, the warmth of his chest pressed against my back. We didn’t speak. We just sat there in the dimly-lit room, watching Kayley sleep, and hoped.
Louise
Her eyes. That’s where I saw it first. On the eighth day of treatment, the gleam came back to them, the one that had disappeared even before I’d taken her for those fateful first tests. It was like she was becoming her again.
She was still pitifully weak, of course. She’d have to regain all the weight she’d lost in the last few months and her body would take a long time to get back to full strength. But that gleam in her eyes was the tipping point. I told Sean and he pulled me close, wrapping me up in his arms.
On the tenth day, the doctors started to agree. The test results were good enough to be cautiously optimistic, they said. What reassured me wasn’t the numbers but the sight of her chowing down on a breakfast of croissants and hot chocolate.
On the twelfth day, she started to quiz Sean on his history, his tattoos, and his intentions. Sean flushed and looked at me, lost for words. That’s when I knew she was back.
On the fourteenth day, the doctors said the words we’d been waiting to hear: reversal of disease and remission. I pulled Kayley into an enormous hug and, for once, she let me hang onto her good and long. But then she pushed me gently back.
“What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
Then I saw she was waving Sean forward. He glanced at me to check whether it was okay, and I nodded. Then all three of us were hugging, that huge strong body of his like a warm rock face that both of us could hang from.
One Month Later
Sean
“O’Harra! Irish!”
I’d been so focused on knocking down the wall, that I hadn’t heard my boss’s call. “Hmm?”
“End of the day. Get out of here.”
Already? I looked around. Yep, the construction site was clearing out and the boss and I were the last ones there. I got like that, sometimes, when I was wrapped up in my work. Nothing else existed. Now, though, I was starting to become aware of the pleasant ache in my shoulders from swinging the hammer.
Maybe Louise could rub oil into them, tonight. She was really good at that. And then afterwards, while we had the oil handy….
“What are you grinning at?” muttered my boss. “Go on, go home already!” But he was smiling. I’d survived my first week and people seemed happy with me—every site needed a big guy who could haul stuff around or move a heavy beam into place. But what I was really good at was smashing stuff. They just had to point me at a wall and, a few minutes later: no more wall.
There were plenty of people on the site to learn from, too, and I was learning as fast as I could. A little roofing here, a bit of plumbing there. It would take years to get good, but I was enjoying it.
I rode the metro home. Working a regular job was taking some getting used to. Getting up every morning, commuting.... Even seeing numbers on a payslip instead of cash pressed into my hand was weird.
But the upside was huge.
As I walked up the hill towards the mansion, I could see bright, warm light shining out from every window. The cardboard was gone, now, replaced by glass, and the holes in the roof were fixed. The tree was still there, though cut down to size a little. Louise wouldn’t hear of moving it, so we had the only house in the world with a tree growing through it.
Yeah, we bought the mansion. Mrs. Baker didn’t want much for it, we had cash in the bank and living there—even with only half the rooms habitable—made more sense than paying two sets of rent. I was using what I learned on the construction site to do it up. It might take a year or more but, when I’d finished, we’d have a place we could sell for much more than we paid for it. Or maybe we�
�d just carry on living there. That sounded pretty good, too.
Moving in with Louise and Kayley had been another huge life change. But when Louise and I were lying there at night in the four poster bed, the moonlight making her copper hair gleam on the pillow, and Kayley was asleep in the next room, it felt like...home. The sort of home I hadn’t known in a very long time. And that was worth changing for.
Louise
I’d gone back to college to complete my final year. I even managed to score a job with the campus groundsman, helping him look after the gardens. Between that and Sean’s construction job, we were doing okay.
I’d already taken two trips to Mexico, touring farms and explaining my system with the help of diagrams, charts and a very patient interpreter. It seemed to be working: I’d seen Isabella on one occasion and she’d seemed happy (or as happy as that coolly unreadable face ever got). She’d even mentioned something about a permanent job...but I’d told her no. Doing what I’d done to save Kayley...I could live with that. Doing it for profit would be different. I was going to get my degree and then go back to my original plan of getting a job with a research company. I was back to being the good girl.
That didn’t mean I hadn’t changed, though. You can’t go through something like that and not be changed a little. I still waited at red lights, but now I only apologized when something was actually my fault. I waited patiently in line, but I’d tell you where to get off if you tried to cut in front of me. I had attitude, now. Just a little bit.
Living in the mansion was crazy, ridiculous, and idyllic. One of those decisions I’d have been far too sensible to make on my own, but could stretch to with Sean by my side. The best part was the garden, something we’d barely explored while we’d been growing there. There was enough space to grow anything I wanted, and I’d already started with some fruit trees and flowers. We’d even paid a visit to the old grow house, in the dead of night, dug up the rose Sean had planted and moved it here. Like its owner, it seemed to be settling in fine. And Kayley loved the mansion, especially her huge bedroom...although she now wanted a four poster bed of her own. Sean had promised to make her one.
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