He spent an hour grinding and mixing and pressing pills. Partway through, Nate pointed at the laptop showing video above the workstation.
“Did you see that?”
“What?” I asked. Neither of us made a move to stop the video. We had noted time and date to review the entirety of the incident later.
“I think he just added color to the pills.”
“What does that tell us?”
“Depending on the color, he’s probably imitating a different pill. That could narrow our search a lot,” he said.
“Oh, so we might be looking for a hydrocodone dealer, not a fentanyl dealer or something, right?” We’d known that was a possibility, but the field was relatively broad. Fentanyl was close enough to be used as a replacement for a number of opiates. It could also be used as filler. It was so potent that it could double or triple a batch of existing painkillers—or heroin. If we knew what he was cutting or imitating, we would have something to go on.
“Exactly.”
Sunlight started to filter into the lab as the guy finished up. He cleaned the station and tucked his supplies into the leather satchel he was carrying.
We spent a few more hours finishing out the videos, but he didn’t return. Nothing else that was worth noting happened. Nate set his long-empty coffee mug on the table.
“You order food. I’ll queue up that video on the big screens so we can watch it a thousand times and crack this baby wide open,” he said.
“Why do I feel like you don’t think we are going to crack this baby wide open?”
“Because we’re not. But I thought I’d try out optimism. People fucking love that shit. Maybe we are doing it wrong.”
“Solid. Got it. What kind of food?”
“Thai. Do you have more beer?”
“Nathan Xiao, you wound me.”
“Huh?”
“I may not remember to buy frivolities like food, but I always have beer and coffee.”
Nate rolled his eyes. He pushed up off the couch and started rearranging cords. Nickels finally took the invitation. She shot out from the kitchen and landed, claws out, in Nate’s lap.
“Jesus Christ.”
I laughed. “Good job, Nickels.” She meowed.
“She’s a hellion.”
“She’s perfect in every way.”
“A perfect hellion.” Nate held out his arm and wiggled his fingers. Nickels jumped for his hand, freeing the wires on the floor. Nate scooped up the cords and dumped them on the shelf next to the TV. Nickels spun back and lunged for the pile.
“Nickels. Hey, sweetheart.” I grabbed a mouse toy and tossed it in the air a couple of times. Nickels tracked the movement up and down. I launched it down the hallway. She meowed and gave chase.
“Will you order extra scallops in mine? And no shrimp. I’m over shrimp,” he said.
“You’re over shrimp?”
“Yeah. It’s whatever.” He started unplugging and wrapping up cords.
“People don’t get over shrimp. Everybody likes shrimp.”
“I don’t. I’m over it. You know what I like?” He stacked the laptops on the coffee table. “Scallops.”
“You’re strange.” I grabbed my phone and punched in our order. Nate was still fucking around with the TV. It had taken me months to dial in my system. If he screwed it up, I was going to be pissed.
I went into the kitchen and grabbed two beers. When I brought them back, Nate had the video paused on one TV. It showed a dark table. The TV on the ground had the camera above the door. Less detail, but hopefully we would get a face from it. Nate was skipping through video at a rapid pace.
“You want me to pause this one so we can watch them one at a time?” he asked.
“Yeah. There’s no point rushing it now.” I handed him a beer.
“Thanks.” He paused the second video and switched remotes.
We started watching at normal speed. Which was riveting. The food was delivered before we even finished our first run-through. The pills he was making were round, which was common enough. This time I caught the moment he added color to the compound. We leaned forward and studied his movements. Nate paused, ran the video back, and started the segment again.
“Black?” I finally said.
“That can’t be.” Nate ran through it again.
We watched until he left. Nate ate his scallops. We finished our beer. Grabbed another. The video didn’t change.
“Can you think of any pills that are black?” I asked.
“Technically, I think they were more charcoal than black.”
“Fine. Can you think of any pills that are charcoal?”
“No. Never heard of charcoal pills. Or black. This is weird,” Nate said.
“Okay.” I pulled my feet up on the couch and turned to face him. “What if he isn’t imitating a pill? What if he’s creating his own color?”
“Like branding himself?” He imitated my stance. His feet were bare and his toes were weirdly long. Boy bodies are strange. Or maybe just tall bodies.
“Yeah. Similar to dealers at raves.”
“Okay. So we are looking for a fentanyl dealer with black pills? That’s abnormal. Kallen and Reyes better fucking love us,” Nate said.
“Technically, they are charcoal.”
He laughed. “Whatever. So what’s our game plan?”
“Call the detectives. Give them a description of the pills.”
“And Aryan Nations.”
I busted up. “Yes.”
“Right?” Nate started laughing too. “’Cause he’s Aryan Nations personified.”
“Gee, thanks for explaining the joke.”
He shrugged. “I know you’re a little slow.”
“Okay, so we call the detectives. And we’re basically the golden boys of CIs, right?”
“Totally,” he said.
So why didn’t I feel like that was enough?
I looked at the screen. All we could see was the top of Aryan Brotherhood’s head. His pale blond hair was parted severely. The stark white line of his scalp shone in the fluorescent light. This was the guy who had killed Pedro. Because he snuck into a lab and played at scientist long enough to make a cocktail that killed people. He hadn’t paid enough attention in class to figure out proper dosage, but he had taken notes on how to make pills look cool. It made me want to do more than tattle.
“I still kinda want to nail this fucker.”
Nate studied me. “Why?”
“We’re drug dealers. So we’re bad guys. Whatever. I get that. But this asshole is just selling shit. He doesn’t care if he kills someone.”
“You’re still upset about that kid.”
“Yeah. Aren’t you?”
“We’ve spent the majority of my grad school career cultivating a reputation around safe, responsible pill usage. That’s not normal, man.”
“Yeah. So?”
“Of course I’m fucking pissed about a bunch of dead kids. Like, yeah, my reputation is at stake, but my reputation is built on being the antithesis of this asshole.” Nate pointed at the screen.
He made a good point.
“So you want to take him down?” I asked.
“Hell yes.”
“I like your enthusiasm.”
“So what’s the plan?” Nate leaned over and grabbed his beer off the table.
“We need to find out if he follows a schedule or just makes pills when he runs out. Tell Kallen and Reyes to arrest him. Preferably when he’s making pills.”
“What if he’s not the right guy?”
Shit. “That did not occur to me.”
“What if we buy pills from him? If we make contact, we can confirm that he’s selling fentanyl. And you should still tip off your girl about the black pills.”
I nodded. “She and Reyes might be able to confirm some of the details with people who knew the victims.”
“So how do we buy from him?” Nate asked.
“Follow him. Make contact. What’s the best way
to watch the building?”
Nate grabbed his phone and tapped the screen. “There’s a parking lot right next to it, but it’s staff only. We’ll get a ticket if we park there.” He showed me the screen. It was a map of the school.
“Can you see the entrance from the lot?” I hadn’t bothered to look at my surroundings when we were there. Which was probably a bad thing in life or whatever.
“Yeah.” He pointed at the necessary spot on the map.
“Are there any other entrances to the building?” I studied the outline of the building.
“On the other side, but I’m pretty sure they lock it at night.”
“Don’t they lock both entrances? How’s Aryan Nations getting in?” I asked.
“His keycard to get to the upper levels. It unlocks the front entrance.” Nate closed out the photo and dropped his phone in his lap.
“Okay, I have a plan.”
“Okay?” Nate waited.
“We’re going to buy a van.”
“While I’m sure that’s good for surveillance, it’s still going to get ticketed in the staff lot.”
“We aren’t going to park it until three a.m. Then we’ll leave at seven. I doubt the campus police will ticket us. Besides, if they do, I’ll just pay the ticket,” I said.
“Oh.”
“As long as they don’t tow us, it will be fine.”
“All right.” He unlocked the phone and pulled up Craigslist. “Van.”
“Work van, not mini.”
“Got it.” He typed.
“Preferably white.”
“So you don’t want one with a mural? Because I’ve always appreciated a good van mural.”
“Of course I want a fucking mural. But only if it lights up.” I grabbed my phone and typed in Craigslist too.
He chuckled but didn’t look up from his phone. “Built in lights. That sounds classy.”
“We are classy motherfuckers.”
“You’re goddamn right.”
“Where are you looking?” I asked.
“Yolo County. You should look in Sac.”
We started combing through ads. Nate switched to Placer County and I switched to El Dorado. After thirty minutes, we’d sent five emails and just as many text messages. I got a response as I was sending my last email.
“I got a text back,” I said.
“Cool, which one?”
“White, ten years old, two hundred thousand miles. Looks mildly sad, but in a nondescript way.” I pulled the ad back up and handed Nate the phone.
He scrolled through the ad. “Looks boring as hell. Set it up.”
I texted the owner and told them I was available. They didn’t judge me for van shopping at six o’clock on a Friday. Then again, I didn’t judge them for responding so quickly on a Friday evening either. We both clearly made poor life choices.
“We have an hour. The van is in Orangevale.”
Nate scoffed. “There is nothing sad about what you just said.”
“Huh?”
“Isn’t Orangevale that depressing little town that’s not as charming as Fair Oaks and not as shiny and new as Folsom? It’s just cheap smog checks, cheap tires, and cheap car stereos.”
He was right. Orangevale was bookended by suburban towns that were better at being suburban. Which was a pretty sad race to win at, but an even sadder race to lose.
Chapter Twenty
Nate smacked my arm and I jerked awake.
“Hell no. I am not doing this alone,” he said.
“I wasn’t asleep. I’m fine.”
“Sit up. Eat this.” He handed me a bag of Lemonheads.
I pushed myself into a more upright position. “I don’t want to eat that.”
“It will keep you awake.” He shook the bag.
“My teeth already hurt from the amount of candy I’ve consumed. I told you to get stakeout food.” I rummaged in the grocery bag between our seats. “All of this is candy.”
“I don’t understand the problem.” Nate ripped into a bag of Red Vines. “Sugar is the perfect food for a stakeout. It’s not filling. It keeps you awake. And it’s tasty.” He punctuated each point with a whip of his Red Vine.
“Candy makes your teeth feel disgusting and it serves no purpose.”
“What would you have gotten?”
“Grapes,” I said.
“Grapes?”
“Yeah. They are hydrating, but don’t make you have to pee. You can eat a million without feeling like crap.”
“When have you ever seen a movie where they are getting ready for a stakeout and one badass looks at the other badass and says ‘okay, I’ll get the grapes’?”
“I haven’t. But I have seen them bring jars on stakeouts. To pee in. So I’ll pass on that.”
“You are so boring,” he said.
I stared at the time until it clicked to 4:17 from 4:16. I was pretty sure this stakeout was boring and it had nothing to do with me. The building we were watching opened into a quad ringed by other buildings. All of them were dark, including the one we were watching. In the video, Aryan had showed up at exactly four. But since we only had one incidence to go off, we had no clue if that was his norm. When we had parked, Nate walked around the building to see if any lights were on. None were.
The clock turned to 4:18. Still no sign of Aryan.
“Did you tell your girl about the black pills?”
I shook my head. “Not yet. I’ll call Reyes today. After I sleep.”
“Why Reyes? Isn’t that the advantage of screwing the detective you’re working for? You can send her messages at all hours?”
“I’m not sleeping with Kallen.”
“Okay.” He drew it out like he didn’t believe me.
“Plus, we had a run-in a couple nights ago.”
Nate turned and stared at me. Even in the low ambient light, I could see that his eyes were comically big. “A run-in? What happened?”
I shrugged. “Kyra dragged me to a gallery. It was crap so we went for drinks at the Shady Lady. We ran into Jerome.”
“What?” His tone got real.
“And then we ran into Kallen and her cop brother.”
“Are you fucking serious right now?” he asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
“You didn’t think to mention this before?”
“It wasn’t a big deal. But she’s kinda mad at me so I don’t want to push it by texting ambiguous shit that I can’t explain the origin of.”
“You need to make her un-mad at you.”
It was my turn to stare wide-eyed. “I thought you were totally against any sort of relationship between her and me.”
“No, I said I have a right to hate her. But we need you to have a relationship with her.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because her guilt works in our favor.”
“That’s wildly unfair.”
“Oh, right. As if you just hate getting cozy with her.” His sarcasm wasn’t cute at four a.m. Maybe at three it would have been fine, but this close to dawn when I hadn’t seen my bed, I wasn’t having it.
“Not that. You want me to have a relationship with her, but if it gets too intimate, that’s not okay. So either I’m lying to her or I’m lying to myself. Thanks for the wealth of options.”
“You know, Braddock, there’s this thing called friendship where you can have an intimate, honest relationship and you just don’t make out. In fact, that’s what we have. We talk. We have fun. We share our feelings. And we have never exchanged bodily fluids. You see how that works?” His level of condescension was just obnoxious.
“I’m pretty sure our dynamic is a little different. Mostly because Kallen and I have already exchanged bodily fluids. It’s weird to suddenly stop and pretend that you’re just colleagues.”
“So you admit that you exchanged bodily fluids?”
“You saw us kiss on multiple occasions.”
“I’m not talking about kissing and you know it.”
This w
as not a conversation to have at four in the morning. Which was why I said, “Why are you so eager to know that we slept together?”
“I knew it.” Nate leaned back against the door of the van and stared at me.
“Why does it matter?”
“Because it compromises the entire case they have against us.”
“Does it?” It was rhetorical. I had spent plenty of time getting busy with that question. If Nate wanted to unpack it for a while, that was fine by me.
“She fucked someone she was investigating. We are the someone she was investigating.”
“Are we? Or were we collateral damage?”
Nate looked at me like I was crazy. “Huh?”
“Everyone they’ve asked us to help investigate, what do they have in common?”
I watched the exact moment he understood. “The supplier. Henry,” he said.
“We’re just the path to the distributors.”
“When they catch him, I’m going to punch him in his goddamn entitled face.”
“Get in line, pal.”
“So how is this relevant to the whole Kallen fucking you thing?”
“She didn’t sleep with me to get information or gain my trust. Hell, she had enough to arrest us the night she first made contact. She waited to see if she could snag a distributor or two. The entire shit show would have turned out the exact same way even if we hadn’t slept together.”
Nate took a long, deep breath. “You would be less heartbroken.”
“That’s true.”
“So I can still hate her as your best friend.”
I scrunched up my face at him. “Are you my best friend?”
“I better be your goddamn best friend.”
“I don’t know. I like Robin an awful lot.”
“Whatever, man. I’m your bro. She can be your chick best friend,” he said.
It was good we cleared that up. Otherwise, things would have been confusing.
“Should we circle the building again?” I asked.
Nate shrugged and tossed his bag of Junior Mints on the dash. “Yeah, okay.” He grabbed his phone and hopped out. We had disabled the overhead lights in the van and taped over the lights built into the door so they wouldn’t broadcast our existence to anyone watching.
The Price of Cash Page 16
