Naomi nodded. “Alfred Street?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not too far from here.”
"Yeah,” Beck confirmed. “I went around there earlier today, but he wasn't there. The place looked a shithole, though, not like this.”
She smiled.
“It was an old house split into three apartments, obviously a once-derelict building that had been scooped up by some sort of property shark and renovated on the cheap. I spoke to one of the neighbours. She confirmed he did, in fact, live there, as far as she could recall from the description I gave her and photograph I showed her. She said she thought he was a drug dealer, as far as she could tell from seeing people coming and going at all hours. Men. Women. Children, even.”
“Children?!” Naomi asked, shock in her voice.
Beck nodded, grimly. “Drug dealers only see the money,” he said and took a drink.
Naomi shook her head, slowly, and did the same.
Beck continued. “The neighbor said she hadn't seen him around for a while. Maybe a month or so. She figured that he maybe just moved on to some place else. Mentioned that the apartment was now occupied by some nice young couple, said that things had quietened down, that the trouble had stopped. Even said the other neighbor seemed to have regained her sense of left and right and could tell what day of the week it was, again, like she had stopped using, probably from being cut off.”
Naomi smiled. “So, where is he now?”
Beck blew out his cheeks. “No idea. But I’ll tell you one thing, for sure. He’s not far away. He was just up on Grand Central Boulevard. At Ernesto's Bar. I only missed him by minutes.”
“You know that from one of the posts you mentioned?”
He nodded.
She leaned forward to the edge of her seat. “What was it?”
“Just a number,” he replied.
“Try me.”
Beck smirked. “11224820221302200310051.”
She blew out her cheeks and sat back. Looked at him, blankly, like she wouldn’t even begin to know where to start.
He smiled. “Good thing you look lost, otherwise I might have had to roust you.”
She grinned and gave him a smouldering look.
He relayed it back at her.
She drank some wine.
He drank some beer. Then, continued. “You see, with the numbers, it seems hard, but it’s actually piss easy. Once you work out what to look for, it all just slips into place. The first four digits are the month and date. Eleven and twenty-two. Twenty-second of November. Today. The next six digits are the zip code. Four-eight-two-zero-two. New Center area. The next eight are the time. Usually it's four digits, but here it was eight. Which means a time slot. Twenty-one, thirty, twenty-two, double zero. Nine-thirty to ten o'clock. The next four digits are the address. Three-one-zero-zero. Thirty thousand one hundred. And the last few are the price. Often in dollars per unit. Five, one, here."
He paused and took a drink, then continued.
"Which meant the deal for whatever Pink Magic is was going down between nine-thirty and ten at three-one-zero-zero Grand Central Boulevard, Detroit. And the price would be five dollars per unit."
She smiled, impressed. "Which is Ernesto's bar."
Beck nodded. "Exactly."
"But now what? You said he wasn't there."
"I did."
"So, how are you going to find him?"
He took a sip of beer and stroked the dark, bristly shadow of stubble that lined his cheeks and chin with the tips of his fingers and thumb and thought about it before answering.
"Well, it's not that he wasn't there. I just never saw him. But I saw the seller. Which means he bought whatever Pink Magic is. And that means he’s going to be dealing it. So, if I can find out where he deals, I can find him."
She nodded. It seemed logical. "Is that something you can do from this dark web?"
Beck shook his head. "I doubt it. Of all the forums I've been on, I've saw nothing about where he deals. Only about where he buys. Only information I have about his dealing is from speaking with his neighbors."
"So, what are you going to do?"
Beck took another sip of beer. "Well, he rented an apartment, right? So, he obviously paid rent," he added. "Which means he had a landlord. Now, the neighbour seemed to know about the people frequenting the apartment. So, maybe, so does the landlord? If they were renting it off-books, they would probably have known the guy was a criminal. And, as long as he kept paying, they would've turned a blind eye to whatever would've been going on. But I wonder just how much the landlord may or may not know."
Naomi nodded and finished the rest of her wine. "OK. And who's the landlord?"
"Don't really know, yet," Beck answered. "The rental property wasn't on the official register, so I couldn't pull any concrete information. And its down as being owned by a holding company based out in the Cayman Islands, operating from an address that turns out to be nothing but..."
"Palm trees," Naomi said, finishing his sentence.
"Yeah," Beck confirmed. "And so is the apartment across the way. But the neighbor I spoke to in there said it belonged to a guy called Jerry."
"Jerry who?"
He pulled an unsure face. “Pass."
"OK, then, suppose you find this 'Jerry,' what happens if he knows?"
"I ask him where I can find him."
"What happens if he doesn't know that?"
Beck looked her the answer.
"OK. And suppose he does know. Suppose he leads you to the guy. Then, what?"
"I rock up at wherever he deals. Pretend like I'm there to buy. Say a quantity and ask how much. Then, I smash his teeth down his throat before he can even think to work it out. And, after that, I haul his ass down to the third precinct and check him into the pot-to-piss-in motel."
"That sounds like it could be dangerous."
"Yes," Beck said. "For him."
She nodded slowly and looked at his neck, lifted her left hand to the side of her neck in reference to a scar on the left side of his neck. It was a long, thin peachy jagged line of skin, darker and thicker-looking than the skin around it, that began just under his jaw and ran down his neck to the collar of his shirt. "Chasing drug dealers," she said. "Is that how you got the scar?"
"No," he said and shook his head. "That happened at a nightclub in Omaha.”
She looked him the question.
“I got into an altercation with three guys. Two of them had knives."
She raised her hand over her mouth, a horrified look on her face.
"Oh, no," he said, shaking his head. "Only one of them got me. And, even then, he got lucky. It was just a graze."
"Doesn't look like it was just a graze," she muttered, under her breath.
"Yeah," he continued, nodding. "I put two of them down pretty quickly. Forearm smash to the chin. Broke each of their jaws. But, the guy who got me, I reached around and grabbed a hold of his head. Snapped his neck right there and then, in the middle of dance floor."
"Jesus Christ," she said, a look of disbelief on her face. "Didn't you get arrested?"
"No," he answered. "Not for that, anyway. I was there on police business. I mean, they pressed charges, and it went to trial and everything, but the jury saw it as a life-threatened police officer acting in self defense. Not guilty. Unanimous decision."
She nodded, slowly, whilst collecting some thoughts. "So, you were a cop?"
"Yeah," he answered. "Lincoln PD. Thirteen years. I did it all. Community officer, SWAT, detective working vice. Put away some real bad motherfuckers, too."
"Like that Adamzek guy?"
"Adamczuk," Beck corrected her. "Yeah. Just like him. And worse." He paused and finished what was left of his ninth Bud. "Anyway, enough about me. What about you? You said you had a son?"
She downed her last mouthful of wine and sat her glass down on the coffee table. It clanked against the wood. Then, she moved across the sofa toward him, catching a stronger whiff
of his woodsy cologne, and glancing deep into his emerald green abyss-like eyes. "About me doesn't matter," she whispered and placed her right index finger over his lips. She felt his breath warm on her fingertip. “Not right now.”
He smiled and allowed her to ease the empty beer bottle from his grip.
She placed it down on the hard mahogany floor beside the others, then drew her finger from his lips and moved her face in toward his and kissed his lips softly. She eased her head back and flicked her eyes toward the bedroom, then locked her gaze back on his. "Let's go," she whispered and took hold of his big shovel-like hand.
Beck leaned forward and kissed her, then allowed her to pull him up from the sofa. They quickly undressed, kissing, as they made their way across the lounge to the bedroom door. His black shirt hit the ground first, exposing his stallion-like, muscular torso. His abdominals were rock hard. They were ridged like a washboard. His shirt was followed by her cream silk blouse. He eased it from her body, careful to pop all the buttons through the holes rather than just ripping it apart. Her blouse off of her torso, he unclipped her cream lace bra and let it fall off of her arms to their feet, exposing her grapefruit-sized, soft, tanned breasts. His belt was next. She undid its buckle and whipped it from the waist of his pants, then let it fall from her hand to the hard wooden floor. After that she undid the zip of his pants and pushed the door open with her left hip, then pulled him half-naked into the bedroom, her hand gripped around the white waistband of his black Calvin Kleins.
SEVEN
Beck was right about Darius Adamczuk. Wherever he was dealing was the place he would have been able to find him. Except he was already there, hard at work, making a killing from revellers inside a busy nightclub.
The lights in the club were dimmed, visibility reduced to sort of dull flickering glow found in a room illuminated with nothing but candle light. Pink and purple and blue strobe lights intermittently flashed all around. And loud, fast beating techno and dance music blared from an expensive sound system fixed to the rafters high above everybody’s heads. The fog machines around the speakers hummed and roared and blasted plumes of dense white vapor down onto the dance floor like seething ice-breathing dragons.
Darius Adamczuk was right in the thick of it. He was big and tall, about six-three with the full-looking two hundred and twenty-five pound frame of a bodybuilder, and he was wearing a pair of dark boots, black jeans, a black t-shirt and a black ribbed gilet. He had peachy skin with short, clipped blond hair, a pair of piercing sky blue eyes. His face was square, macho, and covered cheek to cheek with a rugged black stubbly beard.
Clubbers danced all around him, moving on either side, swaying in front and twisting behind. They were all smiling and laughing and slamming alcoholic beverages like their lives depended on it. They were guzzling everything from beers to vodkas and wines to cocktails. Even large flutes of expensive champagne.
Everyone was dressed to impress. The men looked polished, most of them clean shaven, wearing sharp-looking, slim fitting suits with collared shirts and skinny neckties. And the women were wearing low-cut jumpsuits and dresses. Most of the women wore their hair down, nearly curled or straightened, and their faces were basking in their fullest of glory, their features accented with about fifty bucks worth of makeup.
A few women danced seductively in the middle of the floor, twisting and twerking, grinding up against men they'd either known for years or only just met in the last few minutes. And a few people were making out somewhere in the middle of the crowd, their bodies intertwined with their hands on each other's hips and their lips locked together.
Adamczuk slipped past them without batting an eyelid. Even though he was big, he was agile. He ducked and dived like a boxer in the squared-circle, weaving his way through the sea of bodies like a sea snake swimming through a rocky underwater cavern, his mind focused on the task at hand, busy tapping up the regulars.
It was the people in the know. The women wearing the pink headbands on their head or with the pink earrings dangling from their earlobes. The men wearing the pink neckties or with the pink handkerchiefs tucked into the left breast pocket of their suit. And everybody else who had just caught on, who was drinking a shot of liquor from the club's trademark neon pink plastic shot glasses.
Adamczuk made quick work of them on his way past. One by one, he slipped a dose of Pink Magic from the right pocket of his gilet into the palms of their hands, swapping it for a folded up twenty dollar bill which he stuffed into his gilet's left pocket. It was a series of trades conducted in plain site, hidden by the sheer volume of people, underneath the cover of low light and the close proximity of their bodies.
When he reached the far end of the dance floor, he turned around and ruffled through his pockets to check his progress. The right hand one was emptying, while the left hand one was filling up. He figured he was about fifty doses down and around one thousand dollars to the good. He smiled and looked ahead and scanned the crowd like a buzzard surveying an overgrown field for mice.
Some of the revellers either dropped their shot glasses to the floor, removed their headbands, pulled off their ties, or tucked away their handkerchiefs. But most of them didn't. Most of them were hungry for more.
He watched a few of them slip the drug into their mouth and swallow it down with alcohol like it was nothing more sinister than a multivitamin they were washing down with water. Then, he made his way back toward them and swept the crowd once more.
All in all, each sweep was maybe only about fifteen minutes worth of work. But that was all he needed. In just thirty minutes, the drugs had been dealt and the money had been made. Both pockets of his gilet were now stuffed with cash. He made his way to the back wall and ducked out of sight, slipping out through an unmarked black door at the back of the club.
On the other side of the door, he walked down a corridor and slipped out the exit to the snowy loading bay where his car was sitting parked and ready. It was a brand new black Subaru Impreza with dark tinted windows and shiny copper alloy wheels that had a rustic bronze gleam. A thin layer of snow had built up on its roof and hood.
He unclicked its locks and popped its trunk, reached in and grabbed an open bottle of Polish vodka he kept in the back and took a large straight swig. It was clear and distilled, but pure firewater. It burned his tongue and throat. He liked it. He grinned and took another, bigger swig, then sat the bottle back down in the trunk beside two black holdall bags.
The bag on the left was full of drugs. The one on the right was completely empty. He opened the empty bag's zip and emptied the contents of his pockets into it, stuffing it with twenty dollar bills.
His pockets completely emptied, he re-zipped the bag and opened the one on the left. He scooped out another few handfuls of Pink Magic, restocked his pocket, then zipped up the bag and closed the trunk. He locked his car, then paused and took a breath of the icy cold air before re-entering the building and doing it all again, repeating his routine another four times before coming back out and getting into the car and setting off to his next venue.
EIGHT
The next morning, Vladimir Polanski started his day just like every other - with a flute of champagne and a plate packed with red grapes and thinly-sliced Brie cheese while lounging in his king-sized bed and casually watching Good Morning America. He lay there eating and drinking for precisely thirty minutes, tucked between the pink silk sheets, underneath the thick Eiderdown duvet, sitting up and leaning back against his heavy oak headboard, his eyes fixed on a fifty-inch curved flatscreen that was bolted to the wall. He watched the hosts talk headlines and hot topics while savoring the champagne’s light, bubbly texture and fruity taste, the sweetness and freshness of the grapes and the richness of the cheese.
After finishing the food and taking a moment to enjoy the ice cold, divine Moet & Chandon Imperial Brut, he switched off his television and took a ten-minute shower. Not an eight-minute shower, not a nine-minute shower. But a ten-minute shower. Exactly to the second. An
d with lukewarm water, the temperature dial directly in the middle. The heat of the water, just right, just the way he liked it. Just the way he always took it. He was a man of routine.
After showering, he cleaned the residue of the cheese from his teeth with a potent fluoride toothpaste, because he believed it prevented cavities and reduced decay. Then, he got dressed. He slipped on a pair of pink nylon socks and matching underwear, pulled on a pair of neatly-pressed shiny charcoal grey suit pants and a well-ironed neon pink shirt. He fastened the buttons shut with care and precision, then slotted a pair of sparking pink diamanté cufflinks through the button holes on the cuffs of his shirt sleeves. He walked through to his bathroom and smoothed his hair over to the left of his head with a comb and little wax, then squirted a few sprays of sweet-smelling aftershave from a hot pink bottle onto his neck and jaw.
Fresh and ready, and feeling every bit like the man he knew he was, he walked back through to his dressing room and slipped on the shiny charcoal grey suit jacket to match his trousers. It was fitted and had three buttons. He fastened the middle one and left the other two open. Then, finally, he slipped his feet into a polished black pair of Oxfords tied the laces shut tight in double looped knots.
As he stood from the light pink leather dressing chair, his iPhone pinged. Right on cue. He drew it from his pants pocket and glanced at its screen. It was a message from his driver. His limousine was waiting for him in the parking lot.
He tucked his iPhone back into his pocket and drew a black woolen topcoat from the closet of his dressing room and slipped it over his shoulders, fastening its buttons shut across his midriff. Then, left his apartment, locking the door behind him. He rode the elevator car down from the top floor to the basement and made the short walk through the bright white waiting area to a heavy grey fire door and stepped through it to the cold and dimly-lit underground parking lot.
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