“Pearl!” Katy yells.
Pearl shrugs, causing the pattern of her tie-dye to do a wave. “If the shoe fits.”
“It doesn’t. Does it, really?” I ask, stuttering over the words. My mother’s candle trick is going first on my list tomorrow.
“No!” Winnie yells, staring at Pearl as if she doesn’t know who she is or how she got into my apartment.
Pearl slaps me on the back and laughs, sounding a lot like a crazy old woman. We could stick her in a haunted house to scare all the children. “No, it doesn’t, but now we know for sure what you and that hunk from Ridge’s have been doing in your free time.” She laughs again, continuing on as if it’s the funniest thing she’s heard all year.
I let out a sigh of relief, but my face stays red. Being sex smelly isn’t something you want to be accused of, and I make a mental note to stop by the outlet stores on the way back from the storage unit to pick up a wall plug-in. Or five.
“Okay, out with you all. Go, have your girl fun time. I brought my radio in case I hear your codename on the walkie.” She pulls out a huge, black walkie-talkie so large it takes up her whole hand.
Katy narrows her eyes in our direction. “What do you mean our codename?”
“You know.”
Winnie shakes her head that she doesn’t.
“The police give certain individuals monikers for use on the radio so they know who they’re talking about without using names.”
“Sure,” Katy says. “But why would we have one?”
Pearl hesitates, her eyes flitting from one person to the next. “Well… you have a tendency to be talked about on the police radio.”
I didn’t think it possible, but Katy’s mouth drops open wider until Winnie steps over and closes it with her hand.
“What exactly is our name?” Winnie asks, keeping her hand on Katy’s chin so her mouth doesn’t fall open again.
Pearl swallows and shakes her head a tiny amount like she doesn’t want to tell us, but she opened this door and now she has to walk through it. “I’m not positive, but I think they’ve referred to you as The Bakery Bandits.”
“What? That doesn’t even make sense. Who started this?”
Pearl shrugs. “I’m not sure. It’s been around for a while.”
“A while?” Katy asks, stepping away from Winnie so she has use of her mouth again. “I’m so tired of the men in the state. I am moving far away..”
“You won’t find that man sitting in this apartment so you best go do your thing. I’ll keep my ear out,” she says shaking the radio.
Katy turns around in a huff, mumbling something under her breath as she walks toward my door. “You won’t need it,” she yells back before stepping into the hallway.
The mumbling and ranting continue as Katy drives us to the storage unit. I sit my butt in the back seat and pretend to not understand what’s going on. Truth is, I haven’t been in Pelican Bay for long, but at times it’s like I’ve lived here my whole life. I’m assuming there’s a history.
“It’s not that outrageous, Katy,” Winnie says.
Katy’s eyes widen, and she stares at Winnie like she’s grown a third head. “It’s outrageous. I’m always blamed for things.”
“You ran your car in that cornfield senior year.”
Katy scoffs like she can’t believe Winnie has the audacity to bring that up. “That was an accident, and no charges were filed.”
Winnie doesn’t respond, but Katy continues to stare her friend down.
“Did you know about this?”
Winnie lifts a hand to her chest. “Of course not. I’m just saying stranger things have happened around here.”
“I bet you this is Pierce’s fault.”
“Oh look, we’re here,” I say although we’re still fifteen feet away from the turn off for the storage buildings.
Katy looks to the backseat, her attention no longer trying to silence Winnie with her laser eyes but instead focused on me although her expression changes to a smile. “Do you need help going through boxes to find it?”
“No, I remember right where the box is.” It holds all my special memories from Emma so I didn’t want it to go on the moving truck and instead brought it over my car. The box was one of the last things left in the storage unit. It should be super easy to find.
Winnie makes the turn to the parking lot, and I give her directions to locker 102 toward the back of the fenced-off area. It’s not a huge storage unit, but it holds most of my belongings right now. When you think about how my whole life can fit in this little ten-by-twenty space, it’s kind of sad. I can’t wait to find some place permanent in Pelican Bay and grow roots here.
“Your neighbor’s door is open,” Katy says as she gets out of the car and walks to the open unit next to mine. The storage unit has its garage door wide open, but no one seems to be around.
“Maybe they had to go to the office for something,” I say, stretching down to the ground to unlock my door. The key on my padlock always sticks and I’m forced to pull it in and out, jiggling it around before the padlock pops open.
Winnie stands behind me, blocking my light and watching me fumble with the lock. “Katy, you can’t just walk into someone’s storage unit.”
“I just want to see what they have in here.”
Winnie shakes her head. “Katy has boundary issues.”
“Clearly,” I pant, pushing open the heavy storage door.
“She doesn’t always listen well either.”
I need Winnie’s help to get the door all the way up since I don’t want to put too much weight on my ankle. “I haven’t noticed,” I lie.
“Um, guys,” Katy yells, backing out of the storage unit.
Winnie stiffens and drops her hands, leaving me holding the weight of the door alone. “What?”
“It’s full of drugs.” Katy stands a few feet from the open storage unit, her eyes never wavering from the middle of the room. “A whole stack in the middle.”
Winnie walks over to Katy without getting close the door and does her best to peek inside. “What is?” she asks as if she doesn’t believe her.
I forget all about Emma’s baby book and join the pair while not getting too close to the open unit.
“All those banana boxes are full of white stuff wrapped in cellophane.” Katy points at a stack of banana boxes nine or ten high sitting in the middle of the storage unit. The rest of the area around it is empty.
“How do you know what drugs look like?” I ask.
Katy looks at me like I’m the dumb one. “I watch TV. Haven’t you ever seen Scarface?”
“Are you sure?” Winnie asks, her voice filling with panic. “Huxley will freak.”
“I swear. One a lid was off on a box in the back.”
“Why the hell did you walk to the back?” Winnie yells and I panic.
I grab both of them by their upper arms and walk them back toward my unit. “What are we going to do if they come back?” I whisper.
Both women pause as if this is the first they’ve thought of it. Let’s be real. You don’t leave boxes of drugs in a storage unit with the door open and not expect to come back. Quickly.
“What do we do?” Winnie whispers, fidgeting with her hair as we all huddle over a box in my unit. That way at least if someone walks in, we won’t look suspicious.
“We need to call the police,” I say, like the only logical person in this room. What else would we do?
Katy grabs on to my arm with a death grip, her fingers pinching my skin. “No! We can’t do that.”
9
“Why not?” I ask.
Her eyes widen and she pleads for something with them, but I don’t know what. Drugs go to the police. That is the rule. “My reputation can’t handle it. We’re already known as the Bakery Bandits. What will Pearl say?”
I roll my eyes, but when I get a flash of Winnie, she seems concerned too.
“Huxley will never let me hear the end of this. We need to call somebody
and get a handle on this situation.”
“You guys, there’s a storage unit full of drugs. We need the police.”
“No,” Katy says, her eyes now bright. “I have a plan. We’ll call Tabitha.”
“Tabitha?” I ask, confused. What does she have to do with this? Are they smuggling drugs in the bakery? It would make more sense with the name, but I can’t see Ridge dating a drug smuggler.
I’m clueless, but Winnie nods her head like she’s following along. “That’s a good idea. We’ll take the drugs and put them in the back of the car and drive them to Tabitha. She’ll know what to do.”
Okay, now I’m starting to worry. What is happening at the bakery downtown? Who am my becoming friends with and why would Tabitha know what to do with a storage unit full of drugs?
“Okay, but we have to work fast so we can get the drugs loaded before anyone comes back.”
“You guys are crazy. You know that. Right? We should call the cops. That’s what they do.” Police handle drugs. It’s in the job description.
“No, it’s not. If we call the police, my cousin Anderson will show up and it will be all over town. He loves rubbing my face in it when this kind of stuff happens.”
“Do these things happen to you often?” I whisper leaning over the box of dishes we’re using as a decoy. If this has happened before, she does need a codename on a police scanner.
She shakes her head. “That’s not important. Pop the trunk.”
Both women bump fists together and walk out of my storage unit, leaving me standing alone, shaking my head and wondering when we all agreed upon the fact that we’re putting drugs in a car and to drive to the bakery downtown.
When I don’t move right away, Katy pops her head back in my unit. “Come on, Josie. Close this thing up. We have to move.”
She says it as if this is absolutely an everyday normal kind of thing. Like today is Wednesday, we load the car up with drugs and drive around with them. When did I get dropped into the Twilight zone?
I have a mini panic attack and clutch over in the middle of my storage unit trying to regulate my breathing so I don’t have a heart attack and die right here breaking up a drug stealing operation. By the time I make it outside the storage unit, Katy and Winnie each carry a covered box with the image of bananas on the side. The trunk of the car is down and both women put their boxes in the back seat.
I run over to the car freaking out. “You didn’t put them in the trunk?” I ask when I see the backseat has four boxes on the floor and seats. Katy turns back to grab the last one from the storage unit without giving me a second of notice.
“The trunk wouldn’t hold them all,” Winnie says like that’s obvious.
“I’m not riding back there with them.” Are all these women crazy?
Katy opens the back door and shoves the last box of drugs on the seat. She misses, hitting the box on the side of the car, and a rectangular-shaped white brick slips over the top of the box and falls on the ground with a thud so loud I worry someone will think it’s an explosion.
“Shit.” Katy scrambles to pick up the bag, but as she does, white powder falls from a new hole created on the end from the fall. “I’ll ride back here. Hurry. We need to motor.” Katy tosses the leaking bag on the car floor and sits down next to the stack of boxes.
Winnie slams her door and then jumps in the driver’s seat starting the car while I climb into the passenger’s seat, not at all sure what we’re about to do. The car charges off with a lurch and I’m still buckling my seatbelt by the time we make it out of the storage unit parking lot.
“Slow down,” Katy directs. “We don’t want to get pulled over.”
“Yes, please slow down. That’s the last thing we need,” I plead as Winnie reduces her speed and heads to Pelican Bay, each of us pretending we aren’t driving around with a bunch of stolen goods. Stolen drug goods.
The twenty-minute drive to Pelican Bay proper gives me a lot of time to contemplate my choices in life. I’m not sure how I ended up here, riding with two women in a car stuffed with drugs, but I feel like at some point maybe I did something wrong. Maybe I ate too many Oreos. Maybe I didn’t eat enough Oreos.
If I was a home eating Oreos right now, I wouldn’t be in the car full of drugs.
“Don’t worry,” Katy says patting me on the shoulder as she leans up front from the backseat. “We’ll make it to Tabitha and she’ll take care of everything.”
“Does Tabitha sell drugs?” I ask the question I’ve been holding in since this crazy thing started.
“No!” Katy yells, startling Winnie. She reduces her speed again as we get closer to town. “She’s wholeheartedly against drugs. But her fiancé Ridge will know what to do.”
“So you plan to drive a car full of drugs up to the bakery and then what? Tell her to call her fiancé over and get the loot?” How will this not cause us trouble?
Katy taps a finger to her chin. “Well, when you put it that way, maybe we should have called him from the storage unit.”
My eyes widen and I have to focus on my breathing as my heart thumps in my chest. “You think?”
Nate works for Ridge, and while I don’t know the man, I can’t imagine how Nate would respond if I called them up and told him I was riding around in a car with drugs. In fact, I can guarantee it would not go well. None of this will go well.
The car hits a pothole and the box on the top of the stack next to Katy wobbles and tilts toward her. She braces the stack with an arm, managing to keep it up.
“Whoops,” Winnie says, turning the car with a hard left as we get closer to Pelican Bay. The stack of boxes hits the window and Katy hugs the middle one trying to keep everything lined up.
“Shit, we’ve almost made it,” Katy says as we drive past a cop car stationed on the side of the road using a radar on cars as they pass. She smiles and waves as we pass the police car and we all breathe a sigh of relief when it doesn’t pull out into the road after us.
“I will need so much church for this,” Winnie says, stopping the car in the back parking lot of the bakery.
“I just can’t believe you did it,” Nate sputters in complete disbelief.
It’s been four hours since we dropped the car load of drugs off at the bakery and left Tabitha with a bunch of similar questions. Anessa, the smart one, refused to let the drugs enter the store. But eventually, without even being called, Tabitha’s fiancé and a few guys showed up in the back room, and magically the drugs disappeared. Ridge put the three of us back into Winnie’s car and told her to take me home.
He kept calm, but it was one of those calms where you know it’s fake. There could have been smoke coming from his ears if the bakery wasn’t so warm.
I have a feeling I won’t be hanging out with the Bakery Bandits again soon.
“Whose idea was it?” Nate asks, pacing my tiny bathroom as Emma splashes in the tub unaware the trouble her mother got into today.
“Well, it kind of just happened… a little Katy.” But I hate to put all the blame on her. We followed along. Winnie didn’t object either.
I’m not sure what happened to the drugs. The tall guy named Bennett promised us Winnie’s car would pass a drug inspection and not to worry about it. Not that I think she has one of those planned anytime soon. He then promised all of us to secrecy and told us to pretend like it never happened. After that he called some guy named Spencer and told him to wipe the video surveillance. It had been more than a little shady.
Nate paces a few more times, mumbling under his breath. The name Katy is the only word I make out on a random occasion.
“Do you know all the stories I’ve heard about her?” he asks, when he finally stops for a moment. “If I had believed for half a second, they were true, I wouldn’t have let her in the apartment.”
“Wait!” I say squeaking a little rubber ducky at Emma to keep her distracted. “Katy is nice. You weren’t there, Nate, but the situation was stressful. We had to act fast.” It’s true.
“Do you know the local police station calls her the Bakery Bandit?”
I smirk, remembering the conversation from earlier in the day. “Yes, I’ve heard.”
“Josie, I don’t know what to do about this,” Nate says, sitting down on the toilet and putting his head in his hands.
“Why you have to do anything about it? The situation is handled.” Sure, it was a stupid decision, but the result was the same. The drugs are in Ridge’s hands now. And no one will be the wiser about what happened.
Nate shakes his head. “You don’t understand. This stuff always has repercussions.”
Emma splashes her hands in the tub and then her little body lurches over and the worst baby olive-green vomit projectiles out of her mouth like my child has been possessed by the same demon who stars in the Exorcist movies. Green goo covers the front of the bathtub and I reach into the water getting the second round of puke all over my arm. The water turns the most disgusting shade of green and I gag, grabbing her out of the tub while splashing the liquid on the floor.
“Oh my gosh, Emma. What happened?” I ask, searching the bathroom for a towel.
Nate jumps up from the toilet with a towel in one hand and takes Emma from me, wrapping her up. “Drain the water from the tub and then use the shower head to wash it out. I’ll clean her up with a wipe and put her in some pajamas in case she throws up again.”
He marches Emma out of the bathroom, leaving me to deal with the sticky green cleanup as he sweetly talks to her in a calming voice about how she’s going to be okay and that he’s got her.
Lifetime Risk (Pelican Bay Security Book 7) Page 8
