Deep as the Marrow

by F. Paul Wilson

  He released her arm and she continued toward the other bedroom. He couldn’t make her stay or he’d wind up baby-sitting her and the package. He’d have to try something else, like maybe guilt. From years with Poppy he knew that guilt tended to work on her pretty good.

  “Fine. Leave me hanging. Walk out and leave me with a kid I don’t know nothin‘ about. Bad enough if it was a little boy, but this is a little girl. How’m I supposed to take care of a little girl?” She stopped at the door and turned, eye’s blazing.

  “Damn you, Paulie!”

  “Hey, quit saying my name.”

  “I oughta shout it from the goddamn roof!”

  “You oughta help me, Pop—honey. We both got sucker punched on this one. I thought we were a team. It ain’t right to jump ship as soon as the going gets rough.”

  She wandered around the room muttering, “Damn, damn, damn!” under her breath, over and over. That was good in a way… at least she wasn’t in the bedroom packing up her stuff.

  “I don’t see why you’re mad at me,” he said. “I didn’t know a thing about this.”

  She wheeled on him. “I knew we shouldn’t have trusted him! I knew it. I didn’t want to take this job in the first place, but would you listen? Nooo! You said…” Paulie let her rattle on. She was blowing off steam. In a few minutes maybe she’d run out.

  Took more than a few minutes, but finally she quieted and stood there in the middle of the living room, glaring at him.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll help you out. But so help me God, this is the last time we have anything to do with you-know-who. Is that totally clear?”

  “As a bell,” he said, reaching for her to seal it with a kiss.

  She danced away. “I gotta see to the kid. And I like totally hate kids, you know. I ever tell you that?”

  “Like a zillion times.”

  “Well, that ain’t changed.”

  “But you never said why.”

  “I just do, is all. If I liked kids I’d‘ve had some by now. But I don’t. I’ll never have kids. Ever. You understand that?”

  “Sure.” Christ, she was acting crazy. “No kids. No problem. That’s all fine with me.” He tried to lighten things up. “This one’s only on rental anyway. We get to return her in a few days or so.” Another glare, this one even meaner than the first— like she was trying to bore holes in his skull or something.

  “We’d better,” she said. “Because I don’t know no more about taking care of kids than you do. What do I do with her?”

  “What else? Make sure she can’t walk or talk when she wakes up… just like all the other packages.”

  “Great, Paulie,” she said with a venomous glare. “Tie up a little girl. Just great!”

  He watched her stalk off into the big bedroom. He was about to offer to help but thought better of it. She looked like a cranky wildcat with PMS, ready to scratch his eyes out if he got too close to her. Better to back off and let her do it her way… alone.

  19

  Poppy approached the blanket-wrapped lump on the bed gingerly, as if it might rear up and bite her. She didn’t want it to wake up.

  A kid. Of all things, a damn kid. Well, wasn’t that where the word came from anyway? Kidnapping? What were they going to do with a whiny, crybaby kid?

  Cautiously, she pulled the blanket aside to take a look. Skinny little thing. Wearing a uniform. Probably a private school. Rich kid. But that dumb red beret—where’d she get that?

  Poppy knelt so she could get a look at the face. Round, kind of cute, with chocolate smeared on her lips. Nice hair… long, dark, braided. Poppy wondered what color her eyes were, but wasn’t about to pry up a lid to see.

  As she knelt there, staring at the child, a strange thought came to her. How old would Glory be now? Probably about the same age. Would Glory have looked like this little thing? She’d had dark hair and…

  Poppy leaned forward and pushed up one of the kid’s eyelids—just far enough and long enough to see the color—then let it drop.

  Blue eyes…

  Just like Glory’s…

  Poppy shook herself. This was doing her like no good at all. She hadn’t thought of Glory—hadn’t allowed herself to think of her—in years.

  Glory was gone. Long gone. And there was no coming back from there.

  She busied herself with trying to find a way to bind, gag, and blindfold a six-year old. All their supplies were geared for adult sizes.

  20

  “Damn!” Snake slammed the heel of his palm against the Dataphone—in the Mayflower Hotel this time—nearly dislodging it from the wall.

  He glanced around. One passerby through the lobby stopped to stare at him for a second, then passed on. Probably thought he was talking to his stockbroker.

  He shackled his rage. After all, he went online through these hotel phones to avoid detection. The last thing he wanted to do here was make a scene. But damn, he really wanted to punch his gloved fist through the Dataphone’s blue screen.

  He reread the Vanduyne e-mail on his Thinkpad screen one more time, just to be sure he wasn’t seeing things, then saved the message to his hard drive.

  The kid’s a goddamn epileptic! All that primo inside information on Vanduyne and his brat but not one rotten mention of epilepsy, or medicine.

  A defective package—the worst!

  Served him right for getting involved with someone he didn’t know. In the first place, he never would have touched an upright citizen; in the second, never an upright citizen’s kid; and third, he’d never pick up a sick package—anything could go wrong.

  So what did he have on his hands now? An upright citizen’s sick kid.

  He wanted to scream. He wanted to— He disconnected and walked away from the phone bank before he did something stupid. When he was cooler, he came back to another phone and punched in Salinas’s private number.

  “Il Giardinello.” Snake had expected to hear Salinas’s butt boy. Alien Gold. But this voice was thickly accented.

  “It’s me,” he said, snarling. “Tell your boss the package has been picked up but it’s defective. Tell him I want to talk to him now.”

  “Defective? What do—?”

  “I’ll tell him. I’m only going to explain it once.”

  “Hold on.”

  Snake waited what seemed like a long time before the guy came back on the line. “He is not here right now, but he is on his way in. He says to give me your number and wait there. He will call you back as soon as he arrives.”

  Snake read off the number on the phone and hung up; then he sat back and waited. He calmed himself. No snarling during his next conversation. He didn’t like Carlos Salinas, didn’t trust him, and wouldn’t be working with him if he thought he had a choice, but you didn’t snarl at a guy who had his fingers in most of the drug trade east of the Mississippi.

  21

  It stank in here. Carlos Salinas could barely breathe in the thick, wet, sulfurous air. And the glare from the overhead bank of 600-watt sodium lamps spiked his eyes through his sunglasses.

  And yet, Carlos Salinas was impressed. Deeply impressed.

  He’d come to this tiny apartment in Southeast D.C. to inspect a business opportunity. Instead he’d found… a miracle.

  “Behold my own dwarf hybrid,” said their host, a thin, bearded, middle-aged ex-hippie who wore a cowboy hat and referred to himself only as “Jeff.” Carlos knew he was really Henry Walters, age 45, who lived off Dupont Circle and had been an independent drug dealer—strictly hallucinogens—for most of his adult life. “I call it Lizard King Indica Hybrid. Look at those buds, will you? I cloned out these babies barely six weeks ago and you could start your harvest right now.”

  Carlos stared at the “sea of green”— Jeff’s term— and marveled. The entire front room had been taken over by eighteen-inch plants with serrated leaves and hairy tops—“calyxes,” Jeff called them—waving back and forth in the gentle breeze from a trio of oscillating fans. They clustered i
n children’s plastic swimming pools that in turn sat on metal platforms. Shades, duct tape, and heavy drapes sealed the windows. Rubber tubing snaked from plant to plant, supplying water and fertilizer; heaters warmed their roots from below while the sodium lamps above bathed them in artificial sunlight twelve hours a day. A large metal tank kept the air rich in carbon dioxide for maximal growth.

  “And the beauty part of the operation,” Jeff said, “is it’s all computerized. The whole room is rigged with sensors that monitor light, temperature, humidity, CO2, and water levels. The computer’s modem allows me to keep tabs on every one of my seas of green from a phone booth, and a smart interface lets me make adjustments over the wire. I’ve rigged the place with motion detectors so I know if someone’s broken in. And last, all my computers are infected with Deicide, a virus that wipes out the hard drive should the wrong dude try to access it.”

  “You appear to have thought of everything,” Carlos said.

  Inside his suit he was bathed in sweat. A man of his weight should not frequent jungles, even indoors. Yet despite his discomfort, he was almost mesmerized by the gentle swaying of the leaves and calyxes. They seemed almost… happy. Where had plants ever been treated so well?

  A wave of nostalgia engulfed him for an instant. His first brush with the drug trade had involved marijuana. Many moonless nights on the beach west of Cartagena, transferring bale after bale of Colombian Red from trucks to trawlers bound for the Gulf Coast of the United States. The “square groupers,” as they were known, were the most profitable “catch” for those crews in the early seventies when America’s domestic marijuana was so poor.

  Smuggling… it was in his blood. After all, he was a paisa. His ancestors had left the Basque regions of Spain in the 1600s and settled in the Andes, in Antioquia Province around what would later become the city of Medellin. When Spain fixed the price of gold in Colombia, his forebears smuggled it out to Jamaica where they got the higher market price. Down the centuries it became an Antioquian tradition: Sneak out coffee, emeralds, and quinine; smuggle electronics, appliances, and perfumes back in past the rapacious import duties.

  True to another paisa tradition, his father had kicked him out at age sixteen, telling him: If you succeed, send money; if you fail, don’t come back.

  He had succeeded.

  “Yeah, the technology’s great,” Jeff was saying, drawing Carlos back to the present, “but it’s the plants that are truly awesome—four pounds of top-grade sensemilla per hundred. This ain’t no Maui Zowie, you know what I mean? The stuff I started smoking in the sixties was maybe one percent THE. Lizard King is connoisseur stuff, man—tests opt to fourteen percent. An absolutely bodacious high. Brings down a minimum of five hundred bucks an ounce.”

  “How many plants in this room?” Carlos said.

  “Two hundred.”

  Carlos glanced at Alien Gold, his lean and lupine chief bean counter. “Alien?”

  Gold stood near the door, his arms folded across the front of his Armani suit, the sodium lights reflecting off his blond hair and the wire rims of his glasses. “That’s sixty-four thousand per crop,” he said without hesitation. “At roughly eight crops a year, figure half a mill per room per year.”

  Carlos looked at Jeff. “That is a good living. Why do you need me?”

  “I want to expand,” Jeff said. “Look. Grass is a thirty something-billion-dollar industry. I can’t produce it fast enough to keep my customers happy. I’m ready to move up to warehouses.” He extended his arms over his tiny jungle as if blessing it. “Imagine it, man. A twenty thousand-square-foot sea of green. Cosmic!”

  “You are not afraid of President Winston legalizing your crop?”

  “Never happen. This is a growth industry, and I need a banker—somebody with connections… you know, for security and such. You’re that guy.” Gold’s cell phone beeped before Carlos could reply.

  He saw a troubled look steal over the young MBA’s features as he muttered monosyllables into the receiver. “Everything is all right?” he said as Gold turned toward him.

  “It’s Llosa,” he said. “He just got a call from your new contractor saying something about the package being defective. He insists on speaking to you right away.”

  Defective? Carlos felt a sudden tightness in his chest. Had something gone wrong? Had the child been hurt? He prayed not.

  “Have Llosa tell the contractor to give a number and wait. I’ll call him from my office.”

  As Gold passed on the instructions, Carlos turned toward the door. “We must go,” he said.

  “That’s it?” Jeff said. “I took a risk bringing you here, you know.”

  “We will be contacting you.”

  “I’d like an answer soon,” Jeff said. “After all, I ain’t getting any younger.”

  “You must be patient,” Carlos said, giving the man’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Otherwise you could be worried about getting older, eh?”

  Jeff blanched behind his beard. “Hey, I didn’t mean any—”

  “You will be contacted,” Carlos said, smiling grimly as he walked out into the cooler, fresher air of the dirty hallway. He didn’t like to be rushed.

  22

  “Any details from our friend that you didn’t mention?” he said to Gold when they were seated in his Lexus and his driver was gliding them back to Georgetown.

  Gold shook his head. “No. Pretty damn enigmatic.” His voice took on a whiny tone. “Just like the rest of this kidnapping thing. If you’d let me in on the big picture, maybe I could help.” As much as Carlos trusted Gold, this “big picture” was best left under wraps.

  “All in good time. Alien,” he said. “But tell me: What did you think of that little demonstration back there?” Carlos did not really want to talk about marijuana— he was more concerned about the “defect” in the package MacLaglen had picked up—but he did not want to listen to Alien’s whining about not being trusted.

  “A warehouse-sized setup like that could be very profitable But I hope you’re not considering investing—”

  “Not me,” Carlos said. “But I can connect him with some money people—”

  “And take a cut.” Gold smiled. “That’s my man. For a moment there I was afraid you were thinking about getting back into handling product.”

  “No.” Carlos shook his head slowly. “I’ve handled more than enough in my day.” How many years had he been in the trade? Certainly half his life—and he was looking down the barrel at fifty.

  His first brush with cocaine had come when he joined up with fellow paisa Pablo Escobar, who was transshipping kilos of the white powder from Chile to the U.S. in spare tires. Cocaine was a small business back then, a cottage industry run out of Chile. But everything changed when Pinochet took over in 1973. The cocaine refiners fled to Colombia and into the arms of Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa… just about the time cocaine use exploded in the U.S.

  Colombia, Medellin, the world—especially Carlos’s world—would never be the same.

  Carlos had done his share of mule work in “Los Pablos,” but along the way he became the group’s peacemaker. He discovered a knack for bringing warring factions together, striking a deal, and letting each feel that the other party had given up more.

  And so when Jorge Ochoa—“El Gordo”—called a summit meeting of all the major players in the cocaine trade, it was only natural for Pablo Escobar to send Carlos Salinas to represent his interests.

  April 18, 1981, the day he landed on Ochoa’s private mile-long airstrip at his estate on the Caribbean coast near Barranquilla. Jorge Ochoa—“the Fat Man”— personally came down to the air strip to greet them and bring them up to the main house. Hacienda Veracruz, as Ochoa called his estate, was the size of a small province, with its own zoo, a private bullring, and a stable of prized caballos de paso—walking horses.

  The traders arrived as suspicious competing factions, feudal lords, viciously protective of their individual fiefdoms; they left with an agreement to pool
their resources and their product in a combined effort to keep the lines of supply wide open into their biggest market: the United States. Later the Americans would say that this meeting marked the birth of the Medellm cartel. True, he guessed, but none of them ever referred to themselves as a cartel. They were la compania.

  “Call him,” Carlos told Llosa as he entered the sumptuous back office of his restaurant. Llosa dialed, then handed him the receiver of the Louis XVI-style telephone.

  When Carlos recognized MacLaglen’s voice, he did not let him speak. He said, “Hold now while we check the line.” He signaled to Llosa to run a scan. Llosa was good at this.

  Carlos Salinas shifted his two-hundred-eighty pounds in the oversized chair as he waited. His back was killing him.

  Even though only a handful of people knew his private numbers, Carlos hadn’t accepted an incoming call in years. Who knew where they were originating? His research had assured him that MacLaglen was just as careful as he, but even public phones could no longer be trusted. America was turning into a fascist state. Almost as bad as his homeland.

  So he always called back, using his secure line—and never to a cellular phone. Even his own line was suspect; he constantly had it checked and rechecked.

  He wondered which of MacLaglen’s favorite phones he was calling from. He knew most of the man’s habits, his favorite hotel lobbies and street phones, his accomplices, Paul Dicastro and Poppy Mulliner. He probably knew more about Michael MacLaglen than anyone else in the world.

  Carlos could have used some of his fellow paisas for this job. After all, kidnapping was an art in Colombia. But he’d decided an American would be better. He did not want any Colombians involved should anything go wrong.

  Carlos had become aware of MacLaglen when he kidnapped a gun runner Carlos had dealt with. He watched MacLaglen then, saw how he handled his next snatch— a videotape bootlegger. Very smooth. He had talent. Here was their man.