Desperate (18 page)

R
oy asked about the details of the transaction. All Nicky offered was a single word that meant nothing to me: “Eagle.” That was it. End of discussion, time for us to go, or so his glowering eyes conveyed.

Needless to say, Nicky Stacks didn’t order us any food. He didn’t buy us any drinks, either. Not that I could have swallowed a bite. My throat had gone dry, my heart was racing, and the palms of my hands had turned slick with sweat. It was like a triple dose of Adderall. I was beyond jittery. My body was like radar warning me of an enemy on approach, advising me to seek shelter from Roy, from Lily, from Nicky Stacks and his drug dealing ways immediately.

I followed a silent and sullen Roy back to his Camaro, got into the passenger seat, buckled my seat belt.

“Okay, the meeting is over. Give me the folder.”

“No, not yet. There’s something else you need to do.”

“That’s not the deal.”

“Tough titty. It’s the reality. I’ve got to go check out Eagle right now. Then I’ll give you your stupid folder.”

“What does Eagle mean anyway?”

“It means don’t worry about it,” Roy said, firing up the car’s engine.

I glanced over at Roy, studying him for a moment. Though he told me not to worry, the same instruction did not appear to apply to him. The car rumbled back to life, sounding angry for having been left dormant for even a minute. Roy pulled the Camaro out into traffic, making a little squelch of the tires that seemed to please him. Next he turned on the radio, classic rock, and upped the volume when the Stones came on. The tune was “Sympathy for the Devil.”

“Ironic,” I said to Roy.

“What is?” Roy asked.

“Never mind,” I said.

Roy shot me a look.

I’d seen how our meeting with Nicky Stacks had left Roy shaken. Maybe it was just a flash, but in the course of our meeting with Nicky I saw the boy hiding out inside the hard man’s body. It made me feel sad and sorry for Roy—just a bit, a pinch perhaps. Somehow, God help me, I sympathized with his plight. He was a guy desperate for money to survive, who came up with a twisted plan to extend his life—at the expense of my own.

“It’s ironic that I’m helping you out and this song is on the radio,” I finally said.

“What does that mean?” Roy slipped a toothpick to the left side of his mouth as he made a left-hand turn.

“It means I can partly understand why you’re doing what you’re doing,” I said.

Roy got quiet for a moment, evidently mulling this over. Then he got a look on his face like he’d just figured something out.

“Does that mean you’re calling me the devil?” he asked.

I hesitated. “Yeah, I guess it does.”

Roy appeared pleased as he turned up the volume on the radio and punched the accelerator.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Roy turned to look at me. He lowered his shades until they rested on the bridge of his nose. He winked, gave me a devilish grin, but didn’t answer my question.

When Roy pulled the car to a stop, we were at Logan Airport. Well, we were
near
the airport—maybe a mile from the runways. A short distance to the north was the Chelsea River and if we crossed that we’d be in Chelsea, a city next to Boston. Gray clouds, ugly as this concrete landscape, hung low in the sky and seemed to soak up the diesel fuel scenting the humid air. I heard the plaintive cry of seagulls stalking the murky river for a meal. It sounded like they wished to be elsewhere as well.

I knew we were in Eagle Square only because that was what Roy had told me. I figured that was what Eagle meant but didn’t ask for confirmation. Oil tanks to my left poked out over some squat concrete buildings, and closer to where we parked was a large, single-story red brick building with an attached loading zone. The loading zone had three truck bays, each big enough for an eighteen-wheeler. An alley separated the loading zone from a fenced-off enclosure that held a dozen decommissioned school buses. The side of the alley with the fencing was lined with trees, while on the other side was the warehouse itself, a massive structure several hundred feet long, storing whatever got loaded through those big bay doors.

As for Eagle Square, that was a bit of a misnomer. It was more like Eagle Triangle, made up of Eagle Square, East Eagle Street, and Chelsea Street. What I could say for Eagle Square was that it was busy with working folk, but at night I could imagine this was one very deserted locale, and I figured, even with my limited knowledge of criminality, it would make for a fine ol’ place to host a drug deal. I followed Roy to the entrance to the alley.

“This is where it’s going to go down,” Roy said. “This is what Nicky meant when he said Eagle. It’s one of his chosen drop sites.”

Roy, hands on his hips, surveyed his surroundings the way a master craftsman might study a block of marble before making cut number one.

“Come here.” Roy motioned for me to stand closer. I’d been in the workforce long enough to tell an order from a request. For Roy, this was all in a day’s work. It was business to him and I was just a resource allocated to his project. Not a pretty feeling, but it was a relief compared to the near crippling anxiety I felt in the presence of Nicky Stacks. Judging by Roy’s more relaxed posture, I suspected he felt the same.

I got to Roy just as a white truck, an eighteen-wheeler, began to back up into the loading zone.

“Too bad the truck’s not delivering cigarettes,” I said. “Then you could just knock it over and solve your money problem.”

“Is that a joke?” Roy asked. I couldn’t read his eyes behind the dark glasses.

“Sort of,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I almost laughed.” Roy lowered his shades, allowing me to see the smile in his eyes. “Look, Gage,” Roy said, setting his hand on my shoulder. I didn’t flinch. There was nothing menacing about his touch. “I got to be honest here, I feel really bad about all this. I mean, to use your hopes about adopting a baby and everything to get some cash out of you, well, it’s a damn shitty thing we’ve done. But I’m a desperate man and this is all just business. But I want you to know, I like you.”

“You have a funny way of showing it,” I said.

“This.” Roy motioned to the alley. “This was not supposed to be. If you could have paid me what I needed in the first place, we’d be gone already, but you couldn’t, and so here we are.”

“Yeah, here we are,” I said, a bit wistfully. Roy and I were standing shoulder to shoulder, staring down this dark, empty alley like there was actually something to see. “We’re not a
we
, Roy,” I said, feeling the need to clarify. “You’re doing the deal alone. Remember?”

“I will say I think you’re being very cool about all this,” Roy said.

“I’m hardly cool,” I answered. “What I want to do is take your friggin’ head off with that metal bar.”

I pointed to the ground at a rusty piece of rebar lying next to a crumbling concrete brick.

“I’d kill you if you tried,” Roy said as though it was a known fact, like water was wet and the sky was blue. I gave him a half smile. “Look, I know you hate me. I know that I’m the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.”

“You’re not the worst,” I said. “You’re not even close.”

Roy seemed to appreciate my point, as if he could read my thoughts and saw in them something much darker kicking about, the worst of the worst, the kind of pain that guys like him and Nicky Stacks, hard guys with hard hearts, couldn’t ever dream of feeling.

“Let’s just get this over with,” Roy said. “I’ve got a lot to teach you before the deal goes down.”

“Teach me? What are you talking about? This is over. Done. I did what you wanted. I met with Nicky Stacks, now you’ve got to give me Anna’s folder and go away.”

“It’s not going to be dangerous, Gage. All you have to do is be my lookout. You just have to be a presence and nothing more.”

“It’s still no.”

“Nothing will go wrong.”

“I’m not going to help you and that’s final. Now give me Anna’s folder like we agreed!”

Instead of the folder, Roy made a strange look and then let out an exasperated sigh, as if to say he was growing tired of my continued protests. From his back pocket, he took out his smartphone, the kind that one day soon would last infinitely longer on a battery powered by Olympian, tapped on the phone’s display, and pressed the speaker against my ear.

I deflated on the spot, crinkled up just like the sides of the discarded soda can at my feet. I heard Roy’s recorded voice in my ear. It was from the conversation we had in Lily’s apartment, the conversation I had no idea had been recorded.

Roy: “What kind of cash are we talking about?”

Me: “Fifty grand. That’s what I can afford. Fifty grand and that’s stretching it for me.”

Roy: “Fifty grand to make us go away?”

Me: “Yes. Fifty grand and you two disappear. You’ll go away and you’ll never come back.”

Roy: “You must really want Lily gone.”

Lily: “I hope Anna’s not too upset about this offer of yours. I really like her a lot. She’s been really nice to me.”

Me: “She’s not to know. You’ll say nothing to her about this. You take the money and you’re gone. That’s the deal.”

Roy pulled the phone away from my ear and said, “Lily’s got a copy, too, so don’t try to break my phone or anything. Why’d you offer us a bribe? Easy. You and Lily slept together and I was going to tell Anna. Normally, I’d beat the crap out of you for sleeping with my girl, but I couldn’t risk going back to prison. So the payout was my revenge. Only, you reneged on the deal, so Anna hears the recording, and I show her the evidence. Gage, I can screw you longer and harder than a porn star. I need a lookout on this drop and you’re my man for the job, like it or not.”

T
he recording changed everything. I could talk until I was blue in the face and Anna would believe, and rightly so, that I had offered Lily and Roy a bribe to disappear. The reason? I slept with Lily. The evidence? Plenty. I seriously doubted our marriage could survive this revelation, and it wasn’t a chance I was willing to take.

While I was still reeling with this sick feeling in my gut, Roy went back to teacher mode. He asked me this question: “What don’t you see?”

Was this a test? If I got it wrong he might think I was a liability, take my twenty grand, and be on his merry little way. “I don’t see a blimp,” I said.

Roy knew I was playing games and was none too pleased.

“No more jokes, funny man.” He poked my arm hard with his long finger. “Why here? What’s good about this location for the drop?”

I took the test more seriously, looking up and all around and did notice something useful.

“Security cameras,” I said.

Now Roy seemed pleased. “What about ’em?”

“There aren’t any.”

Cameras were mounted to the roof of the warehouse closer to the loading dock, but none of those were focused on the alley. There was no need to survey a school bus graveyard. Roy appeared duly impressed.

“That’s right. Nicky has a map in his head of all the places in Boston, Everett, Revere, Charlestown, you name it, where we can make drops without being recorded. Each place is coded by the name of the nearest cross street. Eagle. Burbank. Mill. Whatever. So he sent us to Eagle.”

“Is that bad?” I asked, thinking it was.

“It’s not my favorite,” Roy said. “Sight lines down the alley aren’t great. How many guys are really coming? It’ll be hard to tell. Is it an ambush or just a deal?”

“Why would somebody ambush you?”

“Us,” Roy reminded.

I rephrased the question. “Why would somebody ambush us? I thought you said this was a no-brainer job, nothing dangerous, just a straight drop.”

“Nobody is going to ambush us, and it is a nothing job.”

“Then why bother sending two of us at all?”

“Because if there’s only person, then it might become a temptation for our buyer to take more product than they’re paying for. That’s why Nicky always insists on having a team. He wouldn’t let me do it alone for that very reason.”

“You took me to meet Nicky knowing you were going to make me do the drop.”

“It obviously wasn’t going to be easy to convince you otherwise.”

I was curious. “Exactly who are the Moreno brothers?” I asked.

“They’re distributors. Some superconnected family controls this territory, and the Moreno brothers work for them.”

“What exactly are you dealing here?”

Again Roy looked at me.

“We,” I said, impatiently. “What are we dealing here?”

“You’re in this. Like it or not, you’re a player now.”

“I hate it,” I said.

“Yeah, I imagine that you do.”

“So what are we dealing?” I asked again.

“Oxycodone,” Roy said. “About half a million dollars’ worth. We’re talking about twenty-five thousand pills.”

I swallowed hard. I was thinking of irony again. Here I was, a full-blown, self-confessed Adderall addict, dealing in another form of widely abused prescription medication. It was difficult not to imagine divine intervention at work, the universe punishing me for my forthcoming crime, a reaping of what I’d sowed.

“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 again. “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.