“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.
