Stacks’s manner, the tone of his speech, walked the line between peremptory and bellicose. One wrong word or misinterpreted gesture could tip the scale toward his more volatile side. I had a strong suspicion it was a side of him few people saw without next seeing their blood.
“I need to do the job,” Roy said, his tone almost apologetic. “At first I thought I didn’t, but now I do.”
“Who do you owe?” Stacks asked.
Roy popped a toothpick into his mouth. His whole demeanor shifted slightly, like he was disappointed to admit his failings to Stacks.
“Some guys in D.C. You don’t know them.”
“I doubt that,” Stacks said matter-of-factly. “But either way, I can’t help you down there. How much?”
“A hundred grand,” Roy said, fully shamefaced. Before I met Nicky Stacks I never imagined Roy toadying to anybody. Couldn’t very well blame him, though. If Brad were here, he’d see an aura around Nicky blacker than any ink.
“You’re into some guys for a hundred grand?” Stacks said, shaking his head. “What were you thinking? What the hell were you dealing?”
Roy grimaced.
“Cigarettes,” he said.
Stacks did not look surprised. I wasn’t either. I also wasn’t about to say that I’d read an article in the Wall Street Journal not too long ago about an increase in cigarette smuggling. We weren’t drinking beers and swapping stories, but still I knew something about the topic.
Cigarette trafficking is one of the most lucrative businesses for organized crime and drug smugglers. The profit margin on illegally trafficked cigarettes exceeds that of heroin, cocaine, and most guns, and it’s all because of the discrepancy in state tax rates. Thanks to my weird memory for useless numbers I recalled from the article that Virginia had one of the lowest tax rates in the country, at thirty cents per pack. Every state to the north has a higher tax per pack, especially New York, where the tax runs over four dollars.
Again the numbers: 1,500 cartons could net a profit of a hundred grand. A car could hold six hundred cartons. Rent a U-Haul and you’re moving hundreds of cases, worth more than half a million dollars. Something like 30 percent of all cigarettes in New York City are sold on the black market, and more than 70 percent of those come from Virginia. No fancy equipment needed. No laboratory required. All it took for a criminal to make a few hundred grand in a day was a supply chain, the smokes, and a working vehicle.
“Who’s smurfing the smokes?” Stacks asked.
I knew from the article that Stacks wasn’t talking about diminutive blue people rolling smokes in their mushroom houses. Smurfing is the criminal practice of buying large quantities of cigarettes legally to then sell illegally on the black market for a hefty profit. Sad to think that newspapers are struggling to stay in business when you can learn so much from reading them.
“Like I said, some guys from D.C.,” Roy said. “You don’t know them.”
“You had to ditch your ride?”
“I got jumped when I stopped for gas,” Roy explained, sounding disgusted with himself, embarrassed by his failure. “These three guys must have been following me for miles. Pulled a gun on me soon as I got out of the U-Haul. One guy drove the truck and the other two put me in the car. I had a gun on me the whole time. They brought me to some neighborhood miles away and just left me there. Cops found the U-Haul, but the product was gone. Now I’m in for a hundred grand of missing smokes and if I don’t get the money to my boys in D.C. soon, I’m going to be a dead man. I’d do some more smoke smuggling, but I’m shut off now. Unreliable, they say. So I need the cash and I need it soon.”
“You haven’t done a job for me in a while, and now you’re bringing me a new guy?” Stacks said, looking over at me, seeing me the way Brad sees spirits. Something was there, but not anything concrete—nothing important, anyway.
“You can trust Gage. I’m vouching for him.”
“So you’re cutting Johnny out because you need the extra cash to pay off your smoke buddies, is that it?”
“Something like that,” Roy said, snapping the toothpick in half with his tongue and replacing it with a fresh one.
“Okay,” Stacks said. “We’ll do it. But just remember this. If my deal goes south like your smoke run, I ain’t gonna wait weeks to take your fucking head off.” Stacks was looking at me, seeing me for the first time as a physical presence in the room. “And I’ll fuckin’ take your head off too,” he said, pointing his index finger at me like it was the barrel of a loaded gun.
CHAPTER 34
Roy asked about the details of the transaction. All Nicky offered was a single word that meant nothing to me: “Eagle.” That was it. End of discussion, time for us to go, or so his glowering eyes conveyed.
Needless to say, Nicky Stacks didn’t order us any food. He didn’t buy us any drinks, either. Not that I could have swallowed a bite. My throat had gone dry, my heart was racing, and the palms of my hands had turned slick with sweat. It was like a triple dose of Adderall. I was beyond jittery. My body was like radar warning me of an enemy on approach, advising me to seek shelter from Roy, from Lily, from Nicky Stacks and his drug dealing ways immediately.
I followed a silent and sullen Roy back to his Camaro, got into the passenger seat, buckled my seat belt.
“Okay, the meeting is over. Give me the folder.”
“No, not yet. There’s something else you need to do.”
“That’s not the deal.”
“Tough titty. It’s the reality. I’ve got to go check out Eagle right now. Then I’ll give you your stupid folder.”
“What does Eagle mean anyway?”
“It means don’t worry about it,” Roy said, firing up the car’s engine.
I glanced over at Roy, studying him for a moment. Though he told me not to worry, the same instruction did not appear to apply to him. The car rumbled back to life, sounding angry for having been left dormant for even a minute. Roy pulled the Camaro out into traffic, making a little squelch of the tires that seemed to please him. Next he turned on the radio, classic rock, and upped the volume when the Stones came on. The tune was “Sympathy for the Devil.”
“Ironic,” I said to Roy.
“What is?” Roy asked.
“Never mind,” I said.
Roy shot me a look.
I’d seen how our meeting with Nicky Stacks had left Roy shaken. Maybe it was just a flash, but in the course of our meeting with Nicky I saw the boy hiding out inside the hard man’s body. It made me feel sad and sorry for Roy—just a bit, a pinch perhaps. Somehow, God help me, I sympathized with his plight. He was a guy desperate for money to survive, who came up with a twisted plan to extend his life—at the expense of my own.
“It’s ironic that I’m helping you out and this song is on the radio,” I finally said.
“What does that mean?” Roy slipped a toothpick to the left side of his mouth as he made a left-hand turn.
“It means I can partly understand why you’re doing what you’re doing,” I said.
Roy got quiet for a moment, evidently mulling this over. Then he got a look on his face like he’d just figured something out.
“Does that mean you’re calling me the devil?” he asked.
I hesitated. “Yeah, I guess it does.”
Roy appeared pleased as he turned up the volume on the radio and punched the accelerator.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Roy turned to look at me. He lowered his shades until they rested on the bridge of his nose. He winked, gave me a devilish grin, but didn’t answer my question.
When Roy pulled the car to a stop, we were at Logan Airport. Well, we were near the airport—maybe a mile from the runways. A short distance to the north was the Chelsea River and if we crossed that we’d be in Chelsea, a city next to Boston. Gray clouds, ugly as this concrete landscape, hung low in the sky and seemed to soak up the diesel fuel scenting the humid air. I heard the plaintive cry of seagulls stalking the murky river for a
meal. It sounded like they wished to be elsewhere as well.
I knew we were in Eagle Square only because that was what Roy had told me. I figured that was what Eagle meant but didn’t ask for confirmation. Oil tanks to my left poked out over some squat concrete buildings, and closer to where we parked was a large, single-story red brick building with an attached loading zone. The loading zone had three truck bays, each big enough for an eighteen-wheeler. An alley separated the loading zone from a fenced-off enclosure that held a dozen decommissioned school buses. The side of the alley with the fencing was lined with trees, while on the other side was the warehouse itself, a massive structure several hundred feet long, storing whatever got loaded through those big bay doors.
As for Eagle Square, that was a bit of a misnomer. It was more like Eagle Triangle, made up of Eagle Square, East Eagle Street, and Chelsea Street. What I could say for Eagle Square was that it was busy with working folk, but at night I could imagine this was one very deserted locale, and I figured, even with my limited knowledge of criminality, it would make for a fine ol’ place to host a drug deal. I followed Roy to the entrance to the alley.
“This is where it’s going to go down,” Roy said. “This is what Nicky meant when he said Eagle. It’s one of his chosen drop sites.”
Roy, hands on his hips, surveyed his surroundings the way a master craftsman might study a block of marble before making cut number one.
“Come here.” Roy motioned for me to stand closer. I’d been in the workforce long enough to tell an order from a request. For Roy, this was all in a day’s work. It was business to him and I was just a resource allocated to his project. Not a pretty feeling, but it was a relief compared to the near crippling anxiety I felt in the presence of Nicky Stacks. Judging by Roy’s more relaxed posture, I suspected he felt the same.
I got to Roy just as a white truck, an eighteen-wheeler, began to back up into the loading zone.
“Too bad the truck’s not delivering cigarettes,” I said. “Then you could just knock it over and solve your money problem.”
“Is that a joke?” Roy asked. I couldn’t read his eyes behind the dark glasses.
“Sort of,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I almost laughed.” Roy lowered his shades, allowing me to see the smile in his eyes. “Look, Gage,” Roy said, setting his hand on my shoulder. I didn’t flinch. There was nothing menacing about his touch. “I got to be honest here, I feel really bad about all this. I mean, to use your hopes about adopting a baby and everything to get some cash out of you, well, it’s a damn shitty thing we’ve done. But I’m a desperate man and this is all just business. But I want you to know, I like you.”
“You have a funny way of showing it,” I said.
“This.” Roy motioned to the alley. “This was not supposed to be. If you could have paid me what I needed in the first place, we’d be gone already, but you couldn’t, and so here we are.”
“Yeah, here we are,” I said, a bit wistfully. Roy and I were standing shoulder to shoulder, staring down this dark, empty alley like there was actually something to see. “We’re not a we, Roy,” I said, feeling the need to clarify. “You’re doing the deal alone. Remember?”
“I will say I think you’re being very cool about all this,” Roy said.
“I’m hardly cool,” I answered. “What I want to do is take your friggin’ head off with that metal bar.”
I pointed to the ground at a rusty piece of rebar lying next to a crumbling concrete brick.
“I’d kill you if you tried,” Roy said as though it was a known fact, like water was wet and the sky was blue. I gave him a half smile. “Look, I know you hate me. I know that I’m the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.”
“You’re not the worst,” I said. “You’re not even close.”
Roy seemed to appreciate my point, as if he could read my thoughts and saw in them something much darker kicking about, the worst of the worst, the kind of pain that guys like him and Nicky Stacks, hard guys with hard hearts, couldn’t ever dream of feeling.
“Let’s just get this over with,” Roy said. “I’ve got a lot to teach you before the deal goes down.”
“Teach me? What are you talking about? This is over. Done. I did what you wanted. I met with Nicky Stacks, now you’ve got to give me Anna’s folder and go away.”
“It’s not going to be dangerous, Gage. All you have to do is be my lookout. You just have to be a presence and nothing more.”
“It’s still no.”
“Nothing will go wrong.”
“I’m not going to help you and that’s final. Now give me Anna’s folder like we agreed!”
Instead of the folder, Roy made a strange look and then let out an exasperated sigh, as if to say he was growing tired of my continued protests. From his back pocket, he took out his smartphone, the kind that one day soon would last infinitely longer on a battery powered by Olympian, tapped on the phone’s display, and pressed the speaker against my ear.
I deflated on the spot, crinkled up just like the sides of the discarded soda can at my feet. I heard Roy’s recorded voice in my ear. It was from the conversation we had in Lily’s apartment, the conversation I had no idea had been recorded.
Roy: “What kind of cash are we talking about?”
Me: “Fifty grand. That’s what I can afford. Fifty grand and that’s stretching it for me.”
Roy: “Fifty grand to make us go away?”
Me: “Yes. Fifty grand and you two disappear. You’ll go away and you’ll never come back.”
Roy: “You must really want Lily gone.”
Lily: “I hope Anna’s not too upset about this offer of yours. I really like her a lot. She’s been really nice to me.”
Me: “She’s not to know. You’ll say nothing to her about this. You take the money and you’re gone. That’s the deal.”
Roy pulled the phone away from my ear and said, “Lily’s got a copy, too, so don’t try to break my phone or anything. Why’d you offer us a bribe? Easy. You and Lily slept together and I was going to tell Anna. Normally, I’d beat the crap out of you for sleeping with my girl, but I couldn’t risk going back to prison. So the payout was my revenge. Only, you reneged on the deal, so Anna hears the recording, and I show her the evidence. Gage, I can screw you longer and harder than a porn star. I need a lookout on this drop and you’re my man for the job, like it or not.”
CHAPTER 35
The recording changed everything. I could talk until I was blue in the face and Anna would believe, and rightly so, that I had offered Lily and Roy a bribe to disappear. The reason? I slept with Lily. The evidence? Plenty. I seriously doubted our marriage could survive this revelation, and it wasn’t a chance I was willing to take.
While I was still reeling with this sick feeling in my gut, Roy went back to teacher mode. He asked me this question: “What don’t you see?”
Was this a test? If I got it wrong he might think I was a liability, take my twenty grand, and be on his merry little way. “I don’t see a blimp,” I said.
Roy knew I was playing games and was none too pleased.
“No more jokes, funny man.” He poked my arm hard with his long finger. “Why here? What’s good about this location for the drop?”
I took the test more seriously, looking up and all around and did notice something useful.
“Security cameras,” I said.
Now Roy seemed pleased. “What about ’em?”
“There aren’t any.”
Cameras were mounted to the roof of the warehouse closer to the loading dock, but none of those were focused on the alley. There was no need to survey a school bus graveyard. Roy appeared duly impressed.
“That’s right. Nicky has a map in his head of all the places in Boston, Everett, Revere, Charlestown, you name it, where we can make drops without being recorded. Each place is coded by the name of the nearest cross street. Eagle. Burbank. Mill. Whatever. So he sent us to Eagle.”
“Is that bad?”
I asked, thinking it was.
“It’s not my favorite,” Roy said. “Sight lines down the alley aren’t great. How many guys are really coming? It’ll be hard to tell. Is it an ambush or just a deal?”
“Why would somebody ambush you?”
“Us,” Roy reminded.
I rephrased the question. “Why would somebody ambush us? I thought you said this was a no-brainer job, nothing dangerous, just a straight drop.”
“Nobody is going to ambush us, and it is a nothing job.”
“Then why bother sending two of us at all?”
“Because if there’s only person, then it might become a temptation for our buyer to take more product than they’re paying for. That’s why Nicky always insists on having a team. He wouldn’t let me do it alone for that very reason.”
“You took me to meet Nicky knowing you were going to make me do the drop.”
“It obviously wasn’t going to be easy to convince you otherwise.”
I was curious. “Exactly who are the Moreno brothers?” I asked.
“They’re distributors. Some superconnected family controls this territory, and the Moreno brothers work for them.”
“What exactly are you dealing here?”
Again Roy looked at me.
“We,” I said, impatiently. “What are we dealing here?”
“You’re in this. Like it or not, you’re a player now.”
“I hate it,” I said.
“Yeah, I imagine that you do.”
“So what are we dealing?” I asked again.
“Oxycodone,” Roy said. “About half a million dollars’ worth. We’re talking about twenty-five thousand pills.”
I swallowed hard. I was thinking of irony again. Here I was, a full-blown, self-confessed Adderall addict, dealing in another form of widely abused prescription medication. It was difficult not to imagine divine intervention at work, the universe punishing me for my forthcoming crime, a reaping of what I’d sowed.
Desperate Page 18
