Everything to Nothing (50 page)

‘Sally, I’ll
love you whether you are rich or pauper, peasant or Queen.’

‘Good...’

And he did not
let her finish. He kissed her again, this one lingering, his tongue
flicking against hers. Slowly he pulled away and rolled off to lie
down next to her where he wrapped his arms around her, running his
fingers through her long copper hair. ‘What is your natural hair
colour?’

‘You’ll find
out, one day very soon…’

There they lay
on David’s bed until later that evening, talking, with David
learning more truth about his girlfriend, the young woman he
loved.

Chapter 37

Michelle was
surprised when she discovered that Sally had flown back to England
without her, but after speaking to Mr. Gallagher she totally
understood why she had wanted to. After relaxing on the yacht, she
flew back to England on her own the next day to a reunion with
Simon after which she settled back down into the routine of her
life, predominantly preparing for her exams, but also spending as
much time as she could spare with Simon.

Peter had been
surprised over the last few months about how well his drugs career
was blossoming under the tutelage of Reg. He had quickly moved his
way more into the inner-sanctum of Reg’s business taking less
responsibility for the selling of the drugs and more responsibility
for supplying the drugs.

In a show of
trust, Reg had offered him the opportunity to accompany him to
Colombia to meet one of Reg’s suppliers of the drugs, a trip which
showed Peter the dangers of the industry he was becoming more
involved in, but also the benefits.

Reg had
numerous fronts dotted all over the country, legitimate businesses
that he used to launder the drug money. It was a risky business and
he had come close to being jailed numerous times during the years,
but all the times this had occurred the prosecutors’ cases
collapsed as evidence was destroyed or witnesses suddenly lost
either the will to testify in court or were involved in unfortunate
accidents.

He lived in a
large detached house out in the countryside that was fortified and
had some of the most up-to-date security devices. In order for the
police to raid his house they would need a full-scale assault team
and with Reg’s contacts in the police and courts this would allow
him ample time to ensure that any evidence was destroyed before
they arrived. He had Porsches, he had Ferraris, he had a summer
villa in Spain, and a winter chalet in the Alps of northern Italy
and he was a powerful man.

With a word to
one of his loyal followers people in his way would disappear,
judges would suddenly find pearl necklaces being delivered to their
wives and sergeants in the police force would suddenly find that
they can afford to send their children to that expensive private
school.

It was this
kind of power and wealth that Peter craved and he made it quite
clear to Reg that he was the man to take over the business when Reg
decided it was time to retire to his villa in Spain. This approach
appealed to Reg too. With no son and his two daughters too precious
to him to get involved in such a dangerous way of life, Reg was now
thinking about succession, who could take over the business after
he had stepped down.

He did not want
the business to be closed down, he had worked all his life setting
it up, so that is why Peter found himself being introduced to drug
cartels in Colombia, drug lords in Mexico. With knowing nods
between them, the drug barons quickly realised that Peter was going
to be the man over the next few years who they would be dealing
with so they treated him like a king.

They respected
his sensible stance when he refused their offer of as much cocaine
and heroin as he could consume, but they did quickly realise he was
a man for the ladies. On one visit, for two weeks Peter had sex
with some of the most beautiful South American women he had ever
seen. He sampled everything they could offer him. From pubescent
virgins who they had stolen off the streets of Bogota for their
client’s pleasure, to fifty-five year old women who taught and
showed him sexual activities that he would not have thought
possible even in his wildest sexual fantasies.

And Peter
lapped it all up. He loved it. He loved dealing with these people,
negotiating the deals and ensuring that a steady supply of the
drugs was being sent to England and between them they created more
and more elaborate ploys to evade detection by customs and the
police forces.

All the time
that this was happening, Reg watched and analysed his apprentice,
correcting and intervening when appropriate but usually being
impressed with the way Peter conducted himself during these key
meetings. Quickly Peter was too busy to go out on the streets and
as his value to Reg increased so did his monetary value to Reg so
he compensated Peter accordingly.

This enabled
Peter to buy a luxurious apartment in the city, a new car and he
was never short of attractive women to take to bed. The humiliation
he had suffered at the hands of Reg had long been forgotten and as
the months rolled by Peter’s influence over the business
increased.

It was his idea
to expand the business into selling Crystal Meth, but over the
years Reg had become stuck in his ways and refused to digress into
such an unknown quantity, preferring instead to stick with the
drugs he knew, cocaine and heroin. It took Peter over a year of
persuasion. He showed Reg statistics of how it was more addictive
than heroin and cocaine, how the rush lasted a lot longer than
either of these drugs, how the courts were seeing more crystal meth
addicts through them than heroin users recently.

The winning
argument though was the fact that they would lose all the expenses
of importing the drug into the country because crystal meth could
be manufactured so easily and cheaply. Eventually he obtained
permission from Reg to use some money to set-up a small lab in a
room in an abandoned warehouse on an industrial estate on the
outskirts of the city.

With a simple
search on a popular internet search engine he found the ingredients
and how to make it. After quite a few failed batches he thought he
had the correct compound but in order to make sure he would have to
inject it into a human. There was no way he was injecting the vile
substance into his body so he simply got a van and took two
homeless people off the streets, a male and a female, and
restrained and blindfolded them in a cage in the warehouse. Over a
few days he injected the drug into them analysing the affects and
making slight amendments to the compound until his analysis showed
that their bodies were responding to the drug in the expected
manner.

After he had
finished with them he dumped them back onto the streets and made a
call to one of the company’s trusted sellers. Peter gave him a
supply of the drug and told him to sell it and to use his
experience to judge whether the addiction rate was high.

Two weeks later
his seller reported back to Peter clamouring for more of the
crystal meth. He was selling a large amount to the same people day
in, day out, which indicated a high addiction rate and those people
were informing their friends of the new powerful drug with the
intense high that lasted for at least double the length of a heroin
high. With this news Peter got some more resources to work in the
lab to up the production. Once Peter had a month’s worth of strong
sales recorded in his ledger he reported back to Reg.

‘The uptake has
been, well, phenomenal Reg. The addictive nature, the long high it
gives to the user. The dealers I’ve been using have reported the
same buyers buying more and more. I took the sellers off the street
one night to experiment, and when they returned there were damn
well near enough riots! You know those scenes you see in Africa of
the starving people fighting over the food? It was like that!’

‘And these
figures are right, one hundred percent accurate?’

‘You know I
don’t fuck around with my accounting. They are accurate.’

‘So including
set-up costs you made a profit in the third week?!’

‘Yes! I’ll be
honest with you, after salaries have gone out at the end of the
fourth the profit was smaller, and after I gave the lads a small
loyalty bonus for keeping this quiet I made a slight loss over the
whole month, but next month with no set-up costs and no bonuses,
well, you can see my sales predictions for the quarter, half-yearly
and full year over the next few pages.’

‘Wait outside
why I read it.’

This was a big
decision and Peter was used to being dismissed so Reg could think
in private. He paced outside Reg’s office for what seemed like an
eternity while Reg was considering Peter’s figures and looking for
any flaws in his accounting.

As usual, Reg
quickly realised he was wasting his time trying to fault Peter’s
maths. Once he had all the information and had digested it Reg made
his decisions quickly and it was not too long before he called
Peter back in. ‘I think your sales are optimistic.’

‘Pardon
me?’

‘You
heard.’

‘I think they
are realistic.’

‘Justify
them.’

‘I’ve seen it.
I’ve watched the druggies come out of whatever holes they live in
and buy so much of the fucking drug that in an hour my sellers have
to go home! Believe me, they are not ambitious predictions, if
anything they are understated predictions!’

‘So you think
that if you doubled the size of production it would be sold?’

‘I think if we
tripled production it could be sold, but one step at a time.’

‘Yeah, one step
at a time. Is the place you’re using now big enough?’

‘Yes. And I was
going to tell you that I’ve got it in plan to rent out other
warehouses in different areas of the city. I’ll set up a moving
production line. One month we are in warehouse A, in the third and
fourth weeks we set-up warehouse B. At the end of the week four we
move to warehouse B, close down warehouse A, and in the third and
fourth week of production at B we start to set-up warehouse C,
etcetera.’

‘Good plan, but
we’ll go through some warehouses.’

‘Well, after a
six month break there is no reason why can’t move back to warehouse
A. If it was under surveillance it wouldn’t be after six months of
no activity being seen there.’

‘Right. Double
production. Whatever resources you need you can have. Report back
to me in a month. Make sure this does not detrimentally affect our
sales of H and C. Keep those going in case all this explodes in our
faces.’

‘It won’t, but
of course I will. I’ll set the balls rolling straight away.’

With a shake of
their hands, Peter left Reg and made some phone calls to start more
production of the drug with the full intention of doubling their
output and income. It was not long before the city, towns and
cities nearby were awash with the drug.

*

With a now
practiced hand and a quiet click the lock was opened and the door
was silently pushed open. The burglar could not believe the number
of houses out there that still did not have burglar alarms or had
inadequate security, so with a quiet chuckle she crossed the
threshold of the house and took the stairs up to the bedrooms.

Upon entering
the master bedroom she carefully opened drawers until she found one
full of jewellery which she sifted through, placing the more
expensive looking items into the bag that hung at her hip. With
equal care she closed that drawer and opened more, a big, toothless
smile flashing across her face as she found a stash of cash which
she again placed in the bag. Crossing the bedroom she opened the
wardrobes, standing on tip-toes to look for anything else that
could be easily sold. Another smile lit up her once glowing eyes
for a moment, before the eyes dimmed down into the dark soulless
pits they had become. She had spotted a shoebox, but was
disappointed when she opened it and just found some papers, one of
which was a marriage certificate.

After she had
taken the lighter out of her pocket, simply out of spite she burned
the certificate, watching the ashes cascade like grey snow into the
shoebox. Placing the shoebox exactly where she had found it, near
enough to the millimetre, she proceeded to look in the rest of the
drawers and wardrobes in the master bedroom and all other rooms,
taking as much care in these rooms as she had in the master
bedroom.

By the time she
was ready to leave, she had found more jewellery and more cash.
Some of the jewellery had belonged to the owner’s great-grandmother
and due to Sarah’s care it would be two days later, when the owner
went to get a pair of earrings, that they realised they had been
burgled. With a frantic search of the house in case her husband had
for some reason moved them, the family heirlooms could not be found
and it was only when she found the burnt marriage certificate did
she tearfully call the police.

But Sarah had
been careful by wearing gloves and any evidence that may have been
left had long been walked on or vacuumed up in the intervening
days. When the police came, the owners could not even tell them the
day they were burgled, only the day of discovery. Of course, by
then Sarah had sold the jewellery to a pawn shop and had blown the
cash on a new drug that she had just discovered.

*

Sarah still
funded her drug addictions by prostituting herself which was still
her main source of income, but she had taught herself how to pick
locks and this subsidised quite nicely the money she got from
whoring. With a now rare flash of intelligence, she had thought
about burgling and had used an internet café to access certain
pages on the World Wide Web that explained the method. With a
little bit of practice on her locks at home, she had managed to
keep hold of the council house she had lived in with her mother,
she was soon able to open standard door locks and it was not long
before she was opening other people’s door.