Diversion 2 - Collusion

…At the base of the stairs he found an office, old metal desk overturned and graffiti spattering the walls. A file cabinet stood empty and open. He tiptoed down the hall on plank flooring, gritting his teeth at the creak and grind of rotting wood. The kudzu vine grew on the far left, with the loading docks around the back. That meant… This way! He turned left at the next hallway. “What th—” He shrank back, biting off a shout. A rat scuttled out of the way of his QBeam’s glow.

“You leave me alone, I’ll return the favor,” he muttered under his breath. Eerie, creepy silence. No traffic noises, no voices, no electrical hum of machinery. Prickles rose on Lucky’s arms. Walter in lecture mode; the honks, beeps, and squealing brakes of downtown Atlanta at rush hour; hell, even his neighbor’s never-ending rap music beat the total absence of sound.

After passing a men’s bathroom and what might have once been an employee break area, he stepped out into a cavernous room with soaring ceilings and unboarded windows. A bird took wing, flitting among the rafters overhead.

Wood and metal racks that probably once held raw cotton or finished fabric appeared cleaned and somewhat patched, the floor less filthy than the rest of the building. Cases upon cases sat piled in a corner. Lucky set the Q-Beam down and ripped the top from one of the cartons. Roughly two dozen glass vials stared back at him. He held one up to the light. Unless he missed his guess, the vial matched the one he’d held in his hand in the conference room at Rosario.

He reached into his pocket for his cell phone to call Walter while slipping two vials into the waistband of his pants. His blood ran cold at a low, “Hold it right there…”

This book is a work of fiction.
All names, characters, locations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.

Copyright © 2013 by Eden Winters ISBN 978-1-61124-391-8 Cover Art © 2013 Trace Edward Zaber

Many thanks to my own private support group: Pam, Feliz, Doug, Sarah, Chris, Z Allora, Jared, John A, and John R. I have no idea what I’d do without y’all. Thanks for helping me continue Bo and Lucky’s story. Also, special thanks to Tam Ames

According to a November 2012
New York Times
report, in 2011 the United States suffered the worst shortage of prescription drugs in thirty years, with 261 medications making the list. The reasons for the shortages varied from equipment breakdowns to shortage of raw materials, causing medications normally readily available at reasonable prices to become impossible to obtain. Hardest hit were cancer drugs. For some patients, that meant delaying treatment, or using less effective therapies.

Both doctors and patients grew desperate.
CBS News reported in July of 2012 that seventy-nine US health care facilities were identified as purchasing illegal foreign imports during the crisis, drugs unapproved by the Food and Drug Administration. Some of those drugs were worthless, like a counterfeit of a brand name cancer drug found to contain no active ingredient.
Doctors and other health care professionals found themselves rationing medicines, openly discussing which patients should receive a portion of the limited supply, who could use other drugs, and who would be forced to postpone treatment. Pharmacy buyers scrambled to procure what they could. In this environment of need, opportunists abounded. Enter the gray market, not to be confused with the illegal black market.
Merriam-Webster describes a gray market as follows
:
a market employing irregular but not illegal methods; especially
:
a market that legally circumvents authorized channels of distribution to sell goods at prices lower than those intended by the manufacturer.
However, in the dire days of 2011, gray market buyers purchased shortage drugs for the sole purpose of reselling at a vast profit, to other wholesalers, or facilities such as hospitals and pharmacies. Their actions are not illegal as of this writing.
Through the gray market, counterfeit and misbranded drugs often entered the supply chain, prompting pharmacy buyers to shy away from a desperately needed drug for fear of harming patients, as in the incident mentioned above.
Those who conducted business with the gray market did so at their peril. A vial of product sold by a manufacturer might cost seven dollars. After entering the gray market, the markup in some cases exceeded six hundred dollars, costing patients, insurance companies, and government programs, such as Medicaid, millions.
New legislation has been introduced, designed to stop the price gouging.
While the story you’re about to read is a work of fiction, sadly, the drug shortage and gray market are not, and as of this writing, are both still going strong.

“I got too fucking many names.” The man once known as Lucky Lucklighter studied his employee ID badge, trying to recall what name he went by this week. The laughably unsuitable “Marvin Barkenhagan” glared back at him. Who the fuck made up his name? At the sound of footsteps behind him, he brushed an imaginary bug off his badge.

“Hey, whatcha looking at there, Far-figNewton?” The guy the rest of the crew called Goose strolled up, casually reaching around Lucky to grab his time card from the rack and ram it into the clock. A loud
thunk
marked him as present and accounted for, right on time for the eleven to seven shift. Night shift sucked stump water.

Lucky scowled down at the joke of a name emblazoned on his badge. If he ever found the heartless son of a bitch who set him up with fake IDs he’d kick the shit out of the bastard.

“How’s it going there, Barfin’ Mutherfuckin?” Another coworker ambled up. A piece of tape with “Ferret” scrawled in magic marker hid his given name on his badge.
Goose, Ferret…Is this a distribution center or a damned zoo?

“Hey! Go easy on Marvin, now.” For one split second Lucky suddenly didn’t mind Christy so much, the lone worker besides himself with an actual name and not a nickname. Besides, at five foot nothing, she also didn’t tower over Lucky’s five foot six inch frame like the two six foot plus goons. However, she hit Lucky’s shit list along with the others with, “How the hell are you, Barksat-themoon?”

Okay, a beating wasn’t near enough punishment. If Lucky found the person responsible for his latest unfortunate alias, he’d stake the asshole out on an anthill…and pour on plenty of honey. Once the carnage started he’d toss in his current coworkers.

With one minute to spare, he jabbed his time card into the clock and tossed it back into one of the slots marked “Third Shift” by an official looking placard. A handwritten Post-it declared third “The Mushroom Shift—they keep us in the dark and feed us shit!” The writing matched Ferret’s makeshift nametag.

Lucky slogged toward the warehouse to begin his eight hours of blue-collar torture, trailing behind his coworkers. As they crossed the concrete floor, Ferret nodded toward loading bay five, or in this case, unloading bay. They’d soon be schlepping pallets off the truck for dividing up, and later storing or reloading them on smaller carriers for the next leg of the trip to wherever the hell they’d end up.

“Whoo -hoo! Would you get a load of that! Wednesday night and right on time. Come to Papa, baybee!”
Ferret beelined for the trailer and grabbed a pair of wire cutters off the receiving desk to snip the seals from the door. Goose and Christy completed their pre-work equipment checks. Once done, the slip of a woman stepped back and let Goose take his seat behind the wheel of his forklift while Lucky checked out the trailer’s paperwork. Seven pallets from Amerhill Pharmaceuticals. He shivered. Weeks spent working the docks of a similar place, Regency Pharma, less than a year ago, left him with absolutely too much knowledge of the inner workings of the pharmaceutical industry.
The trailer door screeched when Ferret raised it, and he stood rubbing his hands together, staring at pallets probably worth more in street value each than the late model dually truck he drove.
Although the bill of lading merely listed seven pallets with no description, and black plastic wrapped the goods to disguise distinguishing markings, according to the manifest, two weighed in at close to four hundred fifty pounds. Three weeks spent working at the distribution center, and previous time spent at a drug manufacturer, taught Lucky that four hundred fifty pounds pretty much guaranteed the good stuff. He’d also learned from his time at Regency that “the good stuff” weighed a lot more than the not-sogood-stuff, and therefore nestled near the bottom of the pallet, in the perfect location to hide tampering.
Goose accepted the manifest from Lucky, who nodded and mumbled “One and seven,” and loaded up the first pallet. He backed up and swung the load around to head toward an empty storage rack. Unlike at Regency, controlled substances weren’t kept in a locked cage, because the distribution center employees weren’t supposed to give a rat’s ass what the pallets held. They regularly received shipments of clothing, toys, appliances, pharmaceuticals, and even non-perishable grocery items. Lucky and the animals, as he privately called them, were betting on what this particular trailer contained, and cared very much.
Goose lowered the forks to nearly floor level and paused, pretending to study the paperwork. With the lift stalled at the right angle, the ceiling-mounted security cameras captured only a lone worker. Christy crawled out of hiding and wriggled beneath the forks. Lucky winced. No way in hell would he trust a moron like Goose not to drop the load on him. Thank God for the woman’s size, or lack thereof. If not for her, for certain it’d be him scuttling around on the floor like a damned palmetto bug. And if Goose ever suspected Lucky’s real identity, the company could kiss their thousand-days-no-lost-time-accidents-award goodbye. Someone might find Lucky’s flattened remains years from now in the back of an abandoned trailer out in the yard.
Lucky and Ferret began unloading a truck in the next bay, carting out cases of cigarettes. From where he stood, Lucky spotted a red tennis shoe underneath the forklift. The third shift crew might not be smart or creative, but they made up for the lack with simple effectiveness. One by one Christy pushed brown bottles from under the pallet, dug out between the slats from the bottom boxes. Bingo! A dozen bottles wouldn’t lighten the load enough to make a noticeable difference. With those pallets not scheduled for reshipment for a week, by the time the end customer got them and inventoried their order, there’d be too many fingers in the pie to easily lay blame. No one would notice until a hospital needed to ease someone’s pain and opened the case to find the bottom pried open and several bottles of codeine missing.
The forklift began moving again and Christy disappeared, scrambling between conveniently placed boxes on a nearby rack to hide her bounty.
Next Goose unloaded a pallet of absolutely no interest to the crew, probably containing antacids or headache remedies, and promptly placed the inventory on a rack.
When they reached the last pallet, Goose and Christy repeated their ruse, never suspecting that, although the company cameras couldn’t spot them, the one Lucky added two weeks ago, hidden in a convenient I-beam, did.
At two A.M. they gathered in the break room. Lucky opened his lunch box on yet another half-hearted attempt to feed himself. Two minutes in the microwave produced a tomato-sauce covered pulpwood disk the package called pizza. Once upon a time Lucky didn’t mind cardboard pizza. Lately he’d been spoiled by freshly cooked fare. He sighed. The night before he’d started working the docks he’d feasted on roasted chicken with brown rice and grilled veggies, complete with made-from-scratch wheat rolls. He missed the cook even more than the homecooked meals. Not that he’d ever tell the cook.
The crew fantasized how to spend their anticipated ill-gotten gains. “I got a guy lined up who’ll pay us a hundred thirty a bottle, five bucks a pop more than last time,” Ferret boasted. “That’s almost eight hundred for each of us.”
Though no fortune teller, Lucky foresaw the guy’s future a bit less rosy-colored, but given his insider information that Ferret received one-fifty per bottle, he refused to waste any pity. Slimy fucker not only cheated his employer, but his accomplices as well. A man couldn’t trust anybody these days.
“I got my eye on a set on rims,” Goose informed the group between mouthfuls of what might have been spaghetti. Dog food smelled better than Goose’s dinner.
“I can’t believe you guys spend every dime we make as fast as we make it,” Christy huffed. “I’m saving for a new car. I’ve had it with bumming rides every time mine decides todie on me.”
Of the three, if Lucky ever were to develop a guilty conscience or sympathetic streak, it’d be for Christy, the single mom struggling to support her kids. She’d be a whole lot more successful if she’d dump the loser boyfriend who snorted her weekly paychecks up his nose.
Ferret kept quiet about his plans, munching a vending machine burrito.
Lucky asked, “Don’t you ever worry about what we’re doing? Aren’t you afraid someone’s gonna notice?”
Ferret chuckled. “Ain’t one damned thing they can pin on us. If they paid us decent money, we wouldn’t have to help ourselves. If it makes you feel better, consider it a company retirement program, ’cause these assholes sure as hell don’t have one.”
“It’s not like the fuckers are hurting,” Christy chimed in. “You’ve seen the cars the bosses drive. They could afford to give us more. Besides, we’re doing a public service. The good folks of Atlanta will have real nice time this weekend, thanks to us.” Yeah, like the woman’s jerk-off boyfriend.
Having heard enough, Lucky poured a cup of coffee from his thermos and sauntered out the back door to stare up at the night sky. In midApril, the night still held a hint of the receding winter’s chill. In a few short weeks temperatures would soar—summertime in Georgia. He reached up a newly healed hand to scratch an itch where doctors had recently sewn his scalp back together. How he’d love to be home in bed right now, and not alone. Soon enough, soon enough.
He exhaled slowly, breath fogging before his face as he contemplated life—quite a feat for a man declared dead four months ago. A memory danced into his consciousness—dark brown eyes, mischievous smile, tanned skin appearing even darker against white cotton sheets. He’d spent most of his life avoiding weaknesses, not getting involved ’cause the resulting heartache and betrayal wasn’t worth the grief. And one man had to go and sneak in under his defenses, reawakening feelings he’d denied himself for far too long.
Where was his weakness now, and when would they meet again? After another long breath of clean air, he returned inside to finish up his shift.
The rest of the morning passed uneventfully, except for the wild pounding of his heart when the hour crept painfully close to quitting time. Show time. Lucky lived for show time.
The morning shift arrived, trading banter and trailing the fresh scent of clean clothes and recent showers. Quite frankly, Goose and Ferret never smelled fresh, which might be how they’d earned their names. Christy hardly fared better after crawling underneath pallets.
Lucky crossed the warehouse on his way to the time clock, passing between the storage racks and stopping by an open box. He lifted six bottles out to slide into the pockets of his cargo pants, and kept on walking. The guard checked his lunchbox on the way out of the door, patted down his jacket, but never touched his shirt or pants. Moron.
With each footstep between the guard and the door, Lucky’s heart beat faster. He wiped sweaty palms on his pants. Twenty more minutes. Twenty more minutes and he’d be home free. He stepped out into a gray morning and picked his way through parked cars on the way to Ferret’s truck. Gravel crunched behind him, too quickly to be the world’s slowest ferret, and too heavily to be Christy. Goose, then. One down, two to go.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. In, out.
Breathe normally. Calm the fuck down. Focus!
Everything was falling into place. He needed to keep his shit together a while longer.
“Man, did we ever score last night!” Goose crowed. “We’re gonna make a killing off this shit.” Further proving his complete ignorance, he hefted one of the bottles. The man’s stupidity defied belief.
“Idiot! Put that shit away! Are you out of your fucking mind?” Ferret tried to shout and whisper at the same time. Having watched too many bad spy movies, apparently, he sidled out another door and approached from a different direction, his crouch far more attentiongetting than Goose’s indiscretion. Christy trotted along in his wake, taking three steps for every one of Ferret’s long-legged strides.
“Aww…c’mon, Ferret. Ain’t nothin’ they can do to us now.”
Lucky bit down on “stupid-assed motherfucker” before it clawed a way out of his mouth.
“Let’s do this,” Christy said on a yawn. “I gotta pick up the kids at Mom’s in an hour.”
Those kids would still be at Grandma’s for a long, long time to come.
Ferret unlocked the toolbox on the back of his truck and the crew reached into their pockets, extracting their night’s haul. In mid-motion, a gravelly voice from behind uttered, “Okay, boys and girls. Set ’em down nice and easy and place your hands on top of your head. You have the right to remain silent…”