Canary (16 page)

Wildey pulls paper packets of fake sugar from the rectangular glass container and spreads them out on the diner tabletop, still not believing he’s doing this. He gestures to the sugar.

“Okay, this is the product.”

Honors Girl tells him hold on, hold on, then goes digging into her bag. She pulls out a robin’s-egg-blue exam book and a black pen.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking notes.”

“Notes? For what?”

“It’s how I learn. I write it down, it goes in my head and stays there. Trick I learned in high school.”

Huh. Honors Girl is the real thing, that’s for sure. He was surprised when she texted him an hour ago—he didn’t recognize the number at first. For the past week, Wildey has been on
her
ass, not the other way around. Maybe the week’s worth of pressure is about to pay off. Maybe the ultimatum last night did the trick. Who knows. But when he called back, Honors Girl said in this whispery voice,
How can you tell somebody’s a dealer? I mean, for sure?
And there you go. Caving in. Looking at her boyfriend with a new set of eyes. Kaz was right about her cracking. It had just been a matter of time. Wildey told her to meet at the Aramingo Diner—which was becoming their place, he supposed—in one hour.

This time she showed up hungry. Not that she orders real food. Instead it’s just a garden salad, olive oil vinaigrette, and, weirdly, a bowl of oatmeal and honey. “You don’t want some real food?” he asked. “This is real food,” she countered. Wildey’s not hungry. He ordered a coffee and they got down to business.

The business of drug dealing.

“How do you know how to find a dealer?” Sarie asks. “They could be anyone.”

“Heh,” Wildey says. “Now you understand why they pay me the big bucks.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I’m not worried so much about dealers as what dealers can do for me, because the only way to do this job is to go up the ladder.”

“The ladder?”

Which is when Wildey gets the idea to illustrate the whole works for her, starting with sugar packets as the product.

“The product?” she asks.

“You know, Oxys, Percocet, heroin, whatever,” Wildey says, realizing he might be talking a bit too loud. A couple of civilians’ heads are turning now. Black guy, white girl at a table, talking drugs.

“Got it,” she says, oblivious. Honors Girl scribbles it down, God bless her. The tip of her tongue pokes out of her mouth and everything.

“It’s a complex network. You don’t have guys jumping off a boat somewhere and roaming the streets selling shit,” he says, almost in a whisper now. “The product passes through many, many hands before it ends up with your average street dealer.” He glances at the table, then slides an ancient ketchup bottle next to the plastic sugar container. “This ketchup is your Drug Lord. The guy in charge of everything. He gets the product direct from the source—South America, Mexico, Afghanistan, wherever. But a lot of the stuff here in town comes from Mexico, through California.”

Sarie glances up, glances down, writes furiously.

Wildey can’t help himself. He likes having an audience. He’s feeling inspired. He grabs a sticky grape jelly tub from a small plastic rack of them. Then takes an apricot jelly tub, too. What the hell. He loads the sugar on top of the jelly tubs.

“These are your international smugglers. Drug Lord hires these guys to transport the product into the country. They’re real good at it, too. Say it’s coke. Their guys are sneaking five hundred tons of shit into the country every year.”

Wildey slides the drug-smuggling jelly tubs across the tabletop to-ward … what now, what can he use …

Mustard bottle. One of those fat, squat ones. Yeah, that was right on.

“This is your kingpin. He’s in the U.S., overseeing the shit on this end.”

Sarie writes.

Wildey positions the plastic salt and pepper shakers next to the mustard. “Here’s the next level down, the domestic distributors. They take the shit from the kingpin, they process it, cut it, whatever, then send it on to their dealers.”

Sarie looks up from her notes expectantly. Wildey scans the table. What’s left? Next to his coffee cup are four empty creamer tubs, paper tops all peeled back. Yeah, they would work. He gathers them up and drops them in front of Honors Girl.

“Now these are your dealers. The guys out there slinging it to their customers. They’re nobody special. They’re the guys behind the counter at fuckin’ McDonald’s. Expendable, replaceable.”

And to illustrate the point, Wildey swipes his paw across the table, knocking the creamer tubs so they slam up against the Formica partition.

“Your boyfriend? He’s a creamer tub. I truly do not give a high holy fuck about him.”

“You only want to use him to get to the next level,” she says. “The salt and pepper shakers.”

“Yeah. Making cases against salt-and-pepper motherfuckers is what gets me up in the morning. Even better if I can take down enough of them to get me a mustard bottle. Big fat wide-mouthed one. That’s my real goal.”

Honors Girl writes it all down, leaving Wildey feeling like he needs to give a summary statement.

“All this, right here on this table? What you’re sitting in front of? This is a seven-hundred-fifty-billion-dollar game. That’s billion with a
b
. And I’m just a brother making sixty grand a year trying to throw a wrench into it.”

She nods, puts her pen down, takes a bite of her salad. Chews thoughtfully, like there’s a lot tumbling around in her head right now. “What happens to the creamer tub once you use him up?”

Wildey smiles. “Depends. But in this particular case, the creamer tub in question will be fine if he gives up his salt-and-pepper guy. You have my word on that.”

Sarie chews more salad.

Wildey continues. “Let me tell you what usually happens to creamers. Either we catch them, or they end up dead. I’m talking the
vast
majority, Sarie. Doesn’t work any other way unless they cop a deal. Your boyfriend’s white, right?”

Sarie continues chewing, glancing down at her rabbit food. She’s not going to answer this one. No. Not yet.

“I’ll assume that’s yes. Maybe he’s got slightly better chances. But he’s also more likely to be dipping into his own product if he isn’t already. White boys do love their pills. Soon, you’ve got judgment lapses all over the place. For instance, you get your innocent girlfriend to drive you down to his salt-and-pepper shaker and then leave her holding the bag. If he’s doing that kind of shit, he’s already circling the drain, you know what I mean?”

Sarie continues chewing. Washes things down with a gulp of ice water.

“Which means you’d be doing him a huge f”

Honors Girl’s cell goes off—a text or something. As she digs it out of her bag, Wildey tries to take a casual peek, but the glare from the diner lights makes it impossible.

“Who’s that?”

Sarie looks up at him. “My dad. He’s wondering if I’m going to be home for dinner.”

“What, with all that salad you’ve been wolfing down?”

Then it comes: a real smile from Honors Girl. Wildey is floored. When his CI smiles, she looks like a completely different person.

“So,” Wildey says, feeling emboldened, “anything you want to tell me?”

The smile fades just as quickly as it appeared, and a look of worry creeps back in. That’s it, Honors Girl. You should be worried. Let’s help your boyfriend—together. Kid talks tonight and Wildey can be preparing his end run on Chuckie by morning. I’ll buy you all the salad you can eat. You know it’s the right thing to do. You’re smart. So come on, do it.

“Give me forty-eight hours,” Sarie tells him, surprising Wildey for the second time in one day.

Sarie is showering, which means she’s headed out somewhere. Marty Holland knows this is strange for a school night. If anything, Sarie stays later at school to do some library research but then comes home, makes/eats a quick supper, and goes down to the den to work. Sometimes Marty would bring a book down to the den, ask Sarie about a word or phrase he’d pretend he didn’t know, just to make sure she was okay. She never even goes out to hang with Tammy anymore. (Which is a shame, because Tammy was always cool to him, even though he knows she’s probably just being kind to a dork for karma’s sake.) Ever since starting college in September, Sarie never goes back out at night. So where is she going now?

Is Dad going to question her? Unlikely. He’s in the living room watching an old eighties action movie, drinking his fourth bottle of Yuengling (judging from the three empties in the recycling bin). He asked Marty to join him, maybe they could even make some popcorn, but Marty passed. Not his kind of thing. Didn’t anyone realize this was a school night?

Marty holds his ear to the wall to confirm the water is still running, then quickly takes Sarie’s keys from the plastic hook on the fridge and darts outside. The gunfire and explosions from the living room cover up all sounds, which is nice. Confident now, Marty makes his way to the Civic, opens the door, keys the ignition to power up the vehicle, notes the odometer reading, turns off the car.

But this is just a backup measure, because now he has a new way to figure out where Sarie’s headed. Marty ordered it online over the weekend, and it had arrived today: $18.95 scored him a first-generation sQuare, a non-GPS, Bluetooth-powered tracking device. Normal Bluetooth range is only 100 feet, so unless Marty was only tracking Sarie halfway down the block, the little white plastic chip would be useless. But instead sQuare’s designers came up with a pretty clever idea: crowd-sourcing the search. The moment your sQuare enters the 100-foot range of another sQuare user, you’re notified in your app. The big limitation, of course, is that sQuares aren’t going to be everywhere yet. But a bunch of early adopters and crowd-source funders snapped up the first wave, so Marty was hopeful that there were enough in Philadelphia to give him at least a rough idea of where Sarie might be.

Question now is: Where to put it? Marty doesn’t want to bury it in the glove box (which Sarie keeps organized and neat anyway) and cut off from any potential sQuare hits. The outer edges of the Civic would be best. Short of mounting it on the dashboard, where could it go? This is when Marty glances up and notices the oversized St. Christopher’s medallion clipped to the visor. Mom bought that the day they bought the Civic. She was Catholic and superstitious and refused to drive the car without one. Dad, who was a recovering Catholic, drove her straight to a St. Jude’s shop and bought her the biggest he could find. Which was fortunate because the sQuare would fit snugly beneath it, hidden away.

As Marty touches the medallion he thinks about Mom, and thinks she’d be frowning at him right now, which is the worst possible thing he can imagine. His lip trembles and he bites down on it. Don’t be a baby. Your sister doesn’t need a baby brother; she needs someone watching out for her.

There. Snapped into place. Completely invisible, and wedged in tight. The metal shouldn’t interfere at all with the Bluetooth signal, and the low-energy battery is supposed to last nearly a year.

“Sorry, St. Christopher,” Marty says, just in case. “Don’t hold this against Sarie.”

St. Christopher, if listening, does not reply.

Marty steps out of the car, closes the driver’s door as quietly as he can, then darts back up to the house. He opens the door and immediately hears the reassuring sounds of shouts and gunfire. But Sarie’s in the kitchen, in a robe, hair wrapped up in a towel, making a cup of tea. She turns and notices Marty immediately.

“Where were you?”

Marty still has his sister’s keys in his hand, which he now hides behind his back, praying they don’t jingle.

“Thought I heard something outside,” he says, the lie tumbling from his mouth almost automatically. “Are you going somewhere?”

Sarie turns away to face the counter again. “Yeah, I’m going to study with Tammy for a while.”

“Tammy? Really?”

“Yes. Really. Tammy. What’s up with you?”

“Does Dad know?”

Sarie turns back around with a strange look on her face. “Yeah, he knows. Why wouldn’t he?”

“You know … Dad doesn’t always pay attention. Just wanted to make sure he knew where you’d be so he didn’t wake me up at midnight asking about you.”

That comes out a little more aggro than Marty intended. Sarie looks a little wounded before she turns her attention back to her tea. Another concussive explosion echoes from the living room. Boom. Fail.