“You got a van?” Sean asked the nearest heavy. He nodded. “Good. Load up every packet. Every fuckin’ packet”—he turned to the dealers—”including the ones you took off the floor. We findonemissing, no phone call.”
“Do it,” Malone growled. “All of them.”
His men formed a human chain, moving the packets of weed from the pile on the floor to the door and outside. The dealers who’d swiped packets for themselves in the confusion hastily put them back. No one wanted to be responsible for Malone’s death. Even the packet Malone had cut open to give samples from was loaded up.
Walking down the line of Malone’s men to the van was one of the scariest experiences of my life. Every one of them was armed. Every one of them wanted to kill us. If they sensed weakness for a second, they’d pounce.
Sean took my hand and, immediately, I felt better.Most of this shitis just attitude,I remembered. And forced myself to walk with my head high and my back straight. The doors to the van were open for us, the keys inside. We climbed in.
“You’re dead,” said one of Malone’s guards, just before he slammed the door. “We’ll find you, even if it takes a year.”
I tried to look unafraid, however much I wanted to throw up. We pulled away, Sean behind the wheel. “You okay?” he asked immediately.
I nodded weakly. “Did we do it?” I looked behind me, into the back of the van. “Tell me we did it.”
“We did it,” he reassured me. “Now hang on.”
He put his foot down and the buildings started to flash past. He switched between roaring down main streets and cutting down side alleys, until we were sure we weren’t being followed. Then I made the call. Malone answered on the first ring.
“The antidote is the Physostigmine you use to treat your glaucoma,” I told him. “It’ll counteract the Belladonna. You probably want to chug the whole bottle.” I waited, every muscle screaming with tension, listening to the plastic cap unscrewing and the gulping as he drank. I was terrified that it wouldn’t work. However much I hated the guy, I wasn’t a murderess.
After long minutes, he spoke. “I’m going to find you,” he whispered. “I’m going to find you, bitch, and when I do….”
I took a deep breath and tried one last attempt at reason. “Look, we have our drugs back. You’re going to be fine. No one got killed. We can just walk away from this and never see each other again.”
Sean was glancing across at me, his expression halfway between pity and adoration at my naivety. I didn’t expect it to work either, but a little part of me held out hope. That was crushed in seconds. “I’m putting the word out,” Malone said. “Everyoneis going to be looking for you, all over the city, all over thestate,I willfucking find you—”
I ended the call, my stomach twisting.
We had the crop back, but no one to sell it to. No other dealers would dare touch it, not once they heard it had been stolen fromMalone. Even if wecouldfind a buyer, Malone would hunt us for the rest of our lives.
Our problems had only just begun.
61
LOUISE
We didn’t dare go backto the mansion: Malone knew that place. For the same reason, I’d asked Stacey to take Kayley to her apartment.
We headed for the docks, where we could disappear among all the other vans and trucks. Then we prowled around for somewhere to put the van where it would be out of sight. Eventually, we found some long-abandoned garages, the windows broken and the white paint nearly invisible behind a coating of graffiti. “But the door’s chained shut,” I said.
Sean climbed out, wrapped the chain around his fists and heaved, the muscles of his back standing out in the moonlight. There was a suddencrackandclangas the chain broke and snapped against the metal door like a whip. He hauled the door open so that we could back the van in.
We didn’t dare leave the van, so we wound up climbing up on a dumpster and then onto the flat roof of the garage. We sat on the edge with our legs hanging down, looking out over the black water of the harbor and the reflections of the lit-up cranes. Sean put his arm around my shoulders and, for the first time since we left the jazz club, westopped.
It hit me, then, how much had changed. Six months before, I wouldn’t have even run a red light at an empty intersection. Now I was on the run from a drug dealer whose life I’d threatened, sitting on the roof of a graffiti-covered derelict building at midnight. Beneath me was a van containing half a million dollars in weed and beside me was the scariest, most badass man I’d ever met.
And then that badass turned my head to face him and kissed me, long and deep, and I felt my body relax. Just having him close made things seem better. That was the biggest change of all. For the first time since my parents died, I didn’t feel like Kayley and I were on our own.
We sat there in silence while both of us had a very long think. But however evil and devious I got, I couldn’t come up with a way to turn the van full of marijuana into cash, not without going through dealers.
The worst part was,it had worked.We’d pulled it off.The van was loaded with a bumper crop of high-grade weed that was easily worth the money we needed—probably more. After all the months of effort, we’d done exactly what we’d set out to do...only to be defeated by a problem further down the chain—Malone’s greed—that was nothing to do with us. It was human nature that had got in the way. The science—theprocess—had worked just fine.
And then I had a revelation. Something Stacey had said to me. All along, I’d been thinking about the crop—that was the product of all my hard work - that was what I’d created. But maybe I’d created something else, as well.
“We need to stop thinking like criminals,” I said. “And start thinking of this like a business.”
Sean frowned. “The whole fuckin’ drugs game is a business. Supply and demand, distribution...itisa business.”
