“Shit.” Katy scrambles to pick up the bag, but as she does, white powder falls from a new hole created on the end from the fall. “I’ll ride back here. Hurry. We need to motor.” Katy tosses the leaking bag on the car floor and sits down next to the stack of boxes.
Winnie slams her door and then jumps in the driver’s seat starting the car while I climb into the passenger’s seat, not at all sure what we’re about to do. The car charges off with a lurch and I’m still buckling my seatbelt by the time we make it out of the storage unit parking lot.
“Slow down,” Katy directs. “We don’t want to get pulled over.”
“Yes, please slow down. That’s the last thing we need,” I plead as Winnie reduces her speed and heads to Pelican Bay, each of us pretending we aren’t driving around with a bunch of stolen goods. Stolen drug goods.
The twenty-minute drive to Pelican Bay proper gives me a lot of time to contemplate my choices in life. I’m not sure how I ended up here, riding with two women in a car stuffed with drugs, but I feel like at some point maybe I did something wrong. Maybe I ate too many Oreos. Maybe I didn’t eat enough Oreos.
If I was a home eating Oreos right now, I wouldn’t be in the car full of drugs.
“Don’t worry,” Katy says patting me on the shoulder as she leans up front from the backseat. “We’ll make it to Tabitha and she’ll take care of everything.”
“Does Tabitha sell drugs?” I ask the question I’ve been holding in since this crazy thing started.
“No!” Katy yells, startling Winnie. She reduces her speed again as we get closer to town. “She’s wholeheartedly against drugs. But her fiancé Ridge will know what to do.”
“So you plan to drive a car full of drugs up to the bakery and then what? Tell her to call her fiancé over and get the loot?” How will this not cause us trouble?
Katy taps a finger to her chin. “Well, when you put it that way, maybe we should have called him from the storage unit.”
My eyes widen and I have to focus on my breathing as my heart thumps in my chest. “You think?”
Nate works for Ridge, and while I don’t know the man, I can’t imagine how Nate would respond if I called them up and told him I was riding around in a car with drugs. In fact, I can guarantee it would not go well. None of this will go well.
The car hits a pothole and the box on the top of the stack next to Katy wobbles and tilts toward her. She braces the stack with an arm, managing to keep it up.
“Whoops,” Winnie says, turning the car with a hard left as we get closer to Pelican Bay. The stack of boxes hits the window and Katy hugs the middle one trying to keep everything lined up.
“Shit, we’ve almost made it,” Katy says as we drive past a cop car stationed on the side of the road using a radar on cars as they pass. She smiles and waves as we pass the police car and we all breathe a sigh of relief when it doesn’t pull out into the road after us.
“I will need so much church for this,” Winnie says, stopping the car in the back parking lot of the bakery.
“I just can’t believeyou did it,” Nate sputters in complete disbelief.
It’s been four hours since we dropped the car load of drugs off at the bakery and left Tabitha with a bunch of similar questions. Anessa, the smart one, refused to let the drugs enter the store. But eventually, without even being called, Tabitha’s fiancé and a few guys showed up in the back room, and magically the drugs disappeared. Ridge put the three of us back into Winnie’s car and told her to take me home.
He kept calm, but it was one of those calms where you know it’s fake. There could have been smoke coming from his ears if the bakery wasn’t so warm.
I have a feeling I won’t be hanging out with the Bakery Bandits again soon.
“Whose idea was it?” Nate asks, pacing my tiny bathroom as Emma splashes in the tub unaware the trouble her mother got into today.
“Well, it kind of just happened… a little Katy.” But I hate to put all the blame on her. We followed along. Winnie didn’t object either.
I’m not sure what happened to the drugs. The tall guy named Bennett promised us Winnie’s car would pass a drug inspection and not to worry about it. Not that I think she has one of those planned anytime soon. He then promised all of us to secrecy and told us to pretend like it never happened. After that he called some guy named Spencer and told him to wipe the video surveillance. It had been more than a little shady.
Nate paces a few more times, mumbling under his breath. The name Katy is the only word I make out on a random occasion.
“Do you know all the stories I’ve heard about her?” he asks, when he finally stops for a moment. “If I had believed for half a second, they were true, I wouldn’t have let her in the apartment.”
“Wait!” I say squeaking a little rubber ducky at Emma to keep her distracted. “Katy is nice. You weren’t there, Nate, but the situation was stressful. We had to act fast.” It’s true.
I’m not happy with how it went down. If we had been pulled over and arrested for drugs before we made it to the bakery, life would have gotten bad. Custody of Emma would have been in question and I could have lost her. Barry would never let me near her again if that happened. On the ride back to my apartment I vowed to make smarter choices from that moment forth. At the time it didn’t seem so horrible. Well, that’s a lie. It was a bad idea from the start, but Katy was persistent and I was so scattered. Everything happened so fast I had to go along with it. Winnie agreed too.
“Do you know the local police station calls her the Bakery Bandit?”
I smirk, remembering the conversation from earlier in the day. “Yes, I’ve heard.”
