Desperate

by Daniel Palmer

“Where did you get all those pills?” I asked. I was watching a little piece of rubbish roll down the alley like a paper tumbleweed spinning toward the darkness. Since I was involved, I wanted to know as much about the operation as I could. A good quality manager was always on the lookout for potential pitfalls, and knowledge was power here in this alley same as it was at Lithio Systems.

  “Nicky has a supplier, a rogue pharmacist up in Canada who siphons off the pills,” Roy said. “A middleman trucks them down to Nicky, who uses mules like me to distribute to the buyers. We’re the wholesalers. The Moreno brothers will put the pills on the street. They’ve got distribution to move the product.”

  “So these drugs will end up where?”

  “Everywhere, man,” Roy said. “Don’t get all righteous on me, Gage.” Did he know I was thinking about school-aged kids popping pills I helped put in circulation? “You back out on me and it’s a shit storm for you.”

  Roy looked at me like I had somehow forgotten what he had threatened to do without my cooperation. With or without me, one fact remained—these pills were going to find a home in somebody’s bloodstream.

  “I get that you’re nervous, but good sight lines or bad, this is an easy drop.”

  Roy sounded very convincing, or at least I wanted to be convinced. Either way, I was looking for the fastest and easiest way out of my predicament. That was what my ears were telling my brain this would be.

  “What about the cops?” I asked.

  “Between Nicky and the guys the Moreno brothers work for we’ve got half of the East Boston blues on payroll. We got more to worry about from the bad guys than the good guys. That’s just the nature of things in this line of work. Trust me.”

  “Trust you?” I said. “Yeah, sure. Roy, there’s nobody I trust more.” Despite my sarcasm, I believed what Roy said about Nicky.

  Roy gripped my arm hard as he dragged me deep into the alley.

  “Now listen close,” he said. “The Moreno brothers are going to enter the alley by boat. We’ll get here thirty minutes before the drop and case the place. If we see anything different than what we’re seeing now, we walk. Assuming nothing is out of the ordinary, when the brothers show, I’m going to hand them the case. They should just take it and give me the cash. They’ll leave by boat and we get back in the car. Simple as that.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “You’re going to stand right here,” Roy said, stomping his foot on the ground, making an X with his heel of his big black boot. “Right on this spot.”

  “What if I just run?” I suggested.

  “Then things might get ugly. Let’s go. Anna needs those papers.”

  We walked out of the alley together, and soon enough Roy and I were again seated in his Camaro. Rather than pull out, Roy leaned over and reached for something tucked under my seat. When his hand came free I saw he was holding a gun, a pistol of some sort.

  “Ever fire one of these?” Roy asked, flashing me a quick glimpse of the weapon before tucking it back underneath the seat.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s a gun,” Roy said. He wasn’t being condescending, even though he had reason to be.

  “No, I know it’s a gun,” I said. “What kind of gun is it?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “To me.”

  Brad owned a gun, which he kept in his basement, locked in a gun safe, adhering to all the safety protocols with same attention to detail that Karen and I used when fussing over the proper installation of Max’s car seat. I’d held his gun before but never fired it, though I’d been meaning to take Brad up on his offer to join him for an afternoon of shooting at the gun range. Despite my curiosity, I knew a lot more about lithium ion batteries than I did firearms.

  “It’s a Glock 17,” Roy said. “9x19 caliber.”

  “9x19? What kind of caliber is that?”

  Roy sucked down a breath to keep in his frustration. “Nine is the bullet diameter in millimeters. Nineteen is the case length in millimeters,” Roy said.

  “Right,” I said.

  “Shit,” Roy said.

  “What?”

  “You really are clueless.”

  “Why are you showing it to me?”

  “Because I want you to carry it.”

  “I thought you said this wasn’t dangerous.”

  “It isn’t, but I still want you to carry it.”

  “Why?”

  “Just think of it as backup in case something absolutely crazy goes down—which it won’t, but I prefer to have my bases covered. If something unforeseen happens you’ll want to be able to protect yourself, or me.”

  “Look,” I said, coming up with this suggestion on the spot, “why don’t you bring Lily in on this deal as your lookout and don’t tell Nicky. Just leave me out of it?”

  Roy nixed that plan with a shake of his head. “It has to be you. Trust me, I’d bring Lily along if I could because I trust her a whole lot more than I do you, but Nicky’s got a thing against girls and drops, which is why I arranged for him to meet you. If he found out she was there instead of you, I’d be in deep shit. Now I’ve vouched for you, so he’s expecting you’ll be a part of this exchange. It’s either you do this job, or you’re fucked by me. You decide how it goes down.”

  I nodded, showing my commitment to this plan as much as I was committed to getting rid of Roy and Lily. I got it, really I did. Roy had to bring someone along as a lookout who wouldn’t take a cut of the deal—either Lily or me—and thanks to Stacks, who didn’t strike me as big into gender equality, we had reached this particular moment.

  Roy reached under the seat once more. When his hand emerged, he was holding Anna’s folder.

  “See,” Roy said, dropping the folder in my lap. “I’m a man of my word.”

  It didn’t take long for Roy to bring me to the FedEx store in Boston. I called Anna on my mobile from the store. Roy was parked across the street, sitting in his car, watching me through the front glass window. At this point, I just wanted them both gone, and I was willing to do whatever it took to get them out of my life. I wasn’t going to bail on our agreement and Roy knew it. Trashing my apartment was bad enough, but imagining Lily telling Anna we had slept together, showing her what they had fished out of my trash, and then having them play Anna the tape recording of my bribe was motivation enough. The best path forward, at least for now, was for me to do Roy’s bidding.

  “Hey, babe,” I said when Anna answered my call, “guess what I found?”

  She sighed with relief. “Thank God. Where was it?”

  “Took forever to find it,” I said. I needed to explain what happened in the hours since we last spoke. “I turned the whole apartment upside down looking for it, and then found it in all places on the dining room table, buried under the manual for the rocket I’m building. I guess I thought I put it in my workbag.”

  The lie sounded good in my ear, still Anna made a displeased noise.

  “You’ve got to get your head on straight.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “Really, do you get what’s at stake here?”

  “I do. I’m sorry, sweetie. Blame it on the Adderall I forgot to take. I can still get it to you by tomorrow afternoon. Does that help?”

  I got the deep sigh again.

  “Can you fax me some of the pages right now?” Anna asked in a hard-edged tone. “It’s obviously not going to come in time for my meeting tomorrow morning, but I could use some pages for another meeting I have this afternoon.”

  I looked at the folder, all half a pound of it.

  “Sure,” I said. “But I have to do it from a store.”

  “You can do it from my office. I have a fax machine.”

  “I’m not at home anymore,” I explained.

  “Where are you?”

  I glanced out the window at Roy in the waiting car. “Coming home from a dry run for my first drug deal,” I wanted to say. Instead of a confession, I took the safe road. I lied a
gain. “I forgot about your fax at home. I took the folder to FedEx and if I go home I’ll be late to meet Brad. I’ll just spend the money to have FedEx fax the pages. It’s my bad. I’ll take the punishment.”

  Part of me knew I was going to get caught in a lie.

  I just didn’t know when.

  CHAPTER 36

  We had full attendance for the morning standup meeting. Patrice seemed to be in an extra-chipper mood because it appeared we were ready to test again. This time there wouldn’t be any repeat of the last smoke-filled/fire-tainted demonstration. No, CEO Peter would have nothing to fear. We’d start the timer. Amber II would hold the phone in her unwavering plastic hand like a true champ. CEO Peter, looking distinguished in his signature blue suit, would make his appearance; he’d see time ticking away and he’d smile, not broadly but just enough for us to interpret the look as one of appreciation, like a wink with his mouth. We’d all stand around nervous, waiting for the final nod of approval, and when he announced, “Job well done,” we’d break into rousing applause.

  This was going to happen because Matt Simons made it so. He was all done sabotaging the Olympian project.

  A standup meeting, or standup for short, provided real-time status updates to team members without a lengthy agenda. The meetings were time boxed, five to fifteen minutes, and we stood as a reminder to keep the meeting short and to the point. Three questions were asked at every standup: What did I accomplish yesterday? What will I do today? What obstacles are impeding my progress? With those three questions we could keep the meeting simple, brief, focused, and effective.

  This was the leadership group, so we had one member at the meeting to represent each of the six main project disciplines: engineering, manufacturing, quality assurance, documentation, materials science, and program management, with our leader, Patrice, making a surprise guest appearance. We all looked like marathon runners with the finish line coming into view. Our eyes were elated; our bodies ached for the end. Matt Simons stood in the circle directly across from me.

  Throughout the meeting, I kept looking at Matt, making brief eye contact and seeing myself in his shoes. We were not all that different, Matt and I. We both had made questionable choices to do what we believed had to be done. For Matt it meant being in charge of Olympian, forcing Adam out of the way, to ensure project success. For me, I needed to rid myself of Lily and Roy to ensure my marriage, my future.

  Maybe Matt felt the end justified the means, but in my case I wasn’t so sure. My heart was broken for Anna because I knew how she’d react once Lily was gone, while I was sure Simons hadn’t lost a breath of sleep over Adam’s plight.

  I kept thinking about how what I’d done would impact Anna. The runway to having a baby was illuminated full and bright, and yes, it was Lily flying the plane, but Anna was her copilot who believed we’d soon become adoptive parents. She could help navigate the craft, act as a support and guide for Lily, be her friend and confidante throughout the pregnancy, form a bond that would last a lifetime, but a crash was coming and I was the saboteur.

  Even though we had different motivations, mine being far less ignoble, I was still Matt Simons in a different disguise.

  Patrice kept silent during the standup, but when her turn came to speak, she stepped into the center of the circle, something she’d never done. She looked like a woman relieved of an incredible burden.

  “I have a few words to share,” Patrice said. She wore the uniform of engineering management—jeans and a polo shirt. The wonks doing the heavy lifting, the hard-core engineers, considered themselves dressy if they wore toe-covered shoes to work. Most preferred loud Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts during the hot summer months.

  “First, I want you to know how much I appreciate all the hard work you’ve put into the Olympian project,” Patrice began. “I know at times it’s been unbelievably frustrating, the hours long, the task rather daunting. Now that the end is in sight, and I’m a thousand percent confident we won’t see a smoking battery this time around, I want to share a little something with you. This is for your ears only, but as team leaders, Peter wanted you to know what’s really at stake here.”

  The air in the room got saunalike heavy. We waited.

  “Lithio Systems is in deep financial trouble,” Patrice said.

  This came from nowhere—a sucker punch to my gut. I’d assumed the business was healthy. But as a private company, partially funded by government grants, the financials weren’t broadcast to us via Yahoo stock quotes. We simply went about our daily tasks believing every day we came to work the doors would be unlocked and we’d be open for business.

  “Project Olympian is going to save the company,” Patrice said, her voice a little flat in an impartial third party observer kind of way. “I’m not spinning hyperbole here,” she continued. “This new product will give us a three-year advantage on the competition at a minimum. We’ve done the due diligence and nobody is even close to what we’ve created. Nobody.”

  Girish, a jovial Indian fellow who happened to be amazing on the tennis court, spoke up first. “What if we didn’t deliver on time?” He asked the question I was thinking, the question in everyone’s eyes.

  “We were on the verge of filing for Chapter 11, and I don’t think we could have emerged,” Patrice said. “Without Olympian, Peter was considering a wholesale liquidation of the company. Now, because of you and your efforts, we’re talking expansion.”

  I swallowed hard, thinking of twenty-five hundred people suddenly out of work, myself included. Some would find new employment, but I doubted it would be in this industry, not with contraction taking place. A lot of the Lithio Systems employees, especially the techies, were the midlife career types, the kind who were getting squeezed out of the workforce by younger people willing to do more for less. The upheaval would be enormous, in a make-national-news kind of way. The thought of the disaster we’d averted put a lump in my throat.

  Patrice gave us more financial information. It was a bit like sitting in the doctor’s office, hearing a grim diagnosis for the first time, and wanting to say, “Whoa, Doc, wait a second, that’s waaaaaayyy too much information.”

  We listened intently, each of us pondering possible loose ends in our work, something that might derail the project and send Lithio Systems into an irreversible tailspin.

  As Patrice answered questions, my thoughts drifted back to Anna. She had called, tickled about how her Humboldt meeting went, and reaffirmed her commitment to take a year maternity leave assuming the deal closed (which it would, she asserted).

  “After all that drama with the missing folder, everything went perfectly,” she said.

  In the back of my mind, I kept thinking how Roy’s recording could wreck everything if I didn’t do this one thing for him. But something else was bothering me, too, something all this talk of money had stirred in my brain.

  How much would Nicky Stacks pay Roy for the job? Two grand? Five? How much did a drug deal pay? Roy owed these cigarette smugglers more than a hundred thousand dollars, or so he said. I was paying him twenty, plus my cut from the deal. Was Nicky Stacks offering us each forty large to make a drop? If so, no wonder drugs continued to be a major problem in America. Maybe Roy had enough to stave off the D.C. guys he owed for a little bit longer. Still, something wasn’t adding up here.

  I checked my watch.

  Ten in the morning.

  In fifteen hours I would know if this new worry amounted to something, or nothing.

  CHAPTER 37

  Anna came home later that afternoon. It should have been a sweet reunion, but I was edgy and she definitely took notice. I picked her up at Logan. She offered to take a cab, but I couldn’t wait to see her. I needed to be close to her, hoping her presence would be enough to ground me. In just a few hours, I was going to commit my first and last drug deal.

  No matter where I was—working at Lithio Systems or driving Anna home from the airport—it seemed I was still in the alley with Roy. I’d doubled my dose
of Adderall to try to get through my workday, but that didn’t help me focus. I was so jacked up on adrenaline, I’d apparently taken in every vivid detail of the alley, memorized each possible escape route with startling clarity, soldering the information into my mind until I couldn’t look at a street without seeing where the deal would go down.

  “You shouldn’t have come to pick me up, sweetie,” Anna said. “What time is your train?”

  “It’s not until nine,” I said. “But I’ve missed you and thought we could get at least a few hours together before I have to go.”

  Anna believed I was going on a business trip (because that was what I’d told her) and that I’d leave for the train right after we ate dinner (lie number two) and I’d be home by dinner tomorrow night (not a lie; I was going to crash at a downtown hotel after the drop with plans to spend the day sequestered in my room praying for forgiveness).

  Ain’t I a peach?

  Though I wanted to be with Anna, on the drive back to our house I wasn’t much of a conversationalist. Anna didn’t like the change to our natural rhythm.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is something bothering you?”

  She gave me a sideways glance with a dimpled smile, and that one look honestly made me stop breathing. She was wearing a dark pants suit with a silk shirt underneath and her long neck was ringed by a gold chain, simple and elegant. I felt like I was seeing her through a different set of eyes, younger eyes, not yet accustomed to her beauty.

  I’d seen Karen in the same exact way when we first started dating. In the beginning, my love for her heightened my every sense—the sight, the smell, the taste, the touch, the sound of her breath, and her speech. It was that way with Anna, too, at the start of our relationship. But somewhere along the way, bogged down by the daily grind of life perhaps, dulled by Anna’s familiar presence, I lost the sharpness, the augmented reality of us, as we settled into something far more sustainable. They call it the honeymoon phase for a reason. I guess it would be impossible to go for a long period of time feeling that primal excitement, the desire to consume my partner whole because I couldn’t get close enough, a desperate yearning to become linked, fall into her arms, lock our lips, join our bodies as we made love.