“Not completely. There’s still a few things real businesses do that these people don’t.” I thought again. “We need to contact a dealer.”
He sighed and rubbed my shoulders. “We can’t. No one below Malone’s level is big enough to handle this sort of volume. No oneatMalone’s level is going to side against him. They don’t want a war.”
“That’s why we have to goup.Above Malone.”
“Who’s above Malone. Wait, thecartels?TheMexicans?”He shook his head. “Louise, that’s all backwards. The Mexicans import weedtothe US, they don’t need to buy more of it.”
“No,” I said. “But I think I’ve got something else that will interest them.”
And I laid out my plan.
62
SEAN
It was crazy...butmaybe exactly the sort of crazy we needed. And the sort of thing I’d never have dreamed up: I was too mired in the way things had always been done in the drugs game. Only an outsider like her—with that big brain of hers—could have made the leap and come up with it.
“It might work,” I said slowly. “But do you realize who we’re getting into bed with, here? Malone’s an evil son-of-a-bitch butthe cartel?They won’t waste time on speeches and intimidation. When someone gets in their way, they don’t use someone like me to scare them: they just kill them.”
Her eyes were big with fear...but then she lifted her jaw and looked resolute. “We’d better hope they like my offer, then.”
I looked at her for a long moment and then shook my head. I didn’t want her anywhere near those cartel bastards...but I couldn’t kill our only chance of saving Kayley, either. “Jesus,” I muttered eventually. “Okay. Alright. I’ll make some calls.”
The temperature was dropping so I stood up, moved behind her and sat down again, my legs either side of hers and my chest pressed to her back to keep her warm. She snuggled into me and the smell and feel of her copper hair as the wind whipped it across myshoulders made my whole body ache for her. The last six months had put us both through the emotional grinder: all I wanted to do was drag Louise into a deep, warm nest and hibernate with her for about a year. The dreams I’d had of her were coming back to me: the two of us happy in some idyllic life somewhere, rolling around in a meadow.
One more time. One more desperate play and then either we’d be dead...or free.
I pulled out my phone. Six degrees of separation: in the drugs game, everyone knows someone up and down the chain. Put enough links together and you can talk to anyone. The problem is getting them to trust you.
After an hour of pleading, threatening and promising, I finally got to talk to a guy called Francisco, who was the number two guy to Isabella Gallego, queen of the Gallego cartel. I laid it out for him: what we had, the ridiculously low price we were asking. “Two hundred and fifty thousand,” I told him, “and it’s yours.”
“What went wrong?” he asked. He sounded smart, and older than us. I imagined him with a gray-flecked beard. “Why aren’t you selling it locally?”
I closed my eyes and told him everything—even why we needed the money. Francisco went quiet for a long time and then said that he had to make some calls.
An hour later, he called back. “We’ll do it,” he said. “But the deal has to be done in Texas. We’re passing through there tomorrow night. Eight p.m.”
“You want us to get the weed toTexas?”
“Don’t be late.” He gave me an address, then hung up.
“Did you really just say Texas?” asked Louise.
If they catch you with weed, you’re in trouble.
If they catch you with alotof weed, you’re in big trouble.
If they catch you with a van full of weed, driving across state borders, you go to jail. Godirectlyto jail, do not collect two hundreddollars, do not ever think about seeing sunlight again. This was the most dangerous thing we’d done so far. I’d chosen the grow house location to be pretty much off the police radar. Even the mansion had been well away from prying eyes. But out on the highway we’d be an easy target.
We couldn’t use the van: Malone’s people would be looking for it. But we had virtually no cash left. So we went to the cheapest car dealership I knew, woke up the owner and bought the one vehicle with storage space that he had.
An ice cream truck. So old that I didn’t even recognize half the ice creams on the menu.
“It runs,” said Louise hopefully, revving the engine. “And it only has to get us there: one journey. Hell, it doesn’t even have to get usback.”
I nodded, unconvinced. One little problem, one cop pulling us over and we were screwed. I double-checked all the lights and replaced a couple of bulbs that were broken. Then we loaded all of the weed into the truck’s empty freezers. Even with the plastic wrapping and the freezers shut, the smell of it still hung around in the air—there was just so much of it, in such a confined space, that there was no way we could cover it up.
By now, it was midnight. We had twenty hours to get to Texas and Google said the drive would take eighteen. It was going to be a virtually non-stop road trip.
