Rigged (17 page)

The Baker shook his head. “There is no big picture. People like you don’t seem to understand that. It’s all just a bunch of small pictures put together by men who want more. Damon wants more, and he’s going to get it. He’s doing it right now, and the police can’t do anything about it. He’s dangerous in ways you can’t threaten me with, and he pays better than any job I’d land with a chemistry degree. You’re wasting your time here. Go home, wherever that is, and forget about your little crusade against meth.”

Charlie raised an eyebrow. “Meth? Heh. It seems you’re the one who doesn’t understand, buddy. This isn’t about meth. I don’t care what people decide to do to themselves. My problem is that other people, innocent people who want nothing to do with your poison, get caught in the crossfire. Too many unsuspecting people, naïve people who don’t know better get caught up in the bullshit rhetoric peddled by men like Damon, kids born addicted to meth, parents more interested in getting high than feeding their kids. Shit, it’s just like Africa—kids caught in the wake of someone else’s self-righteous insanity and suffering for it.” Charlie set the picture of his sister on the table in front of The Baker. “Victims deserve voices.”

The Baker picked up Kay’s picture and adjusted his glasses, then did something Charlie hadn’t expected: he started to chuckle a clipped little wheeze of a laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Charlie asked.

“This girl?” The Baker said, pointing at the photograph. “Are you suggesting this girl is one of your naïve, unsuspecting victims?”

“Yes. Caught in the crossfire.”

“Heh. Again, you’re mistaken. Who do you think convinced Damon that North Dakota would be a good place to move his operation?” Kevin Hartman had never liked to be called The Baker, because to him, it sounded too ordinary for his contribution to the operation. Considering he had a double-major in chemistry and biochemistry and had been able to come up with a formula that created a double-yield of product with diamond purity, he expected to be called “Mr. Wizard” or something along those lines, something more appropriate. Then again, the fact that Damon paid as much as he did and never used his real name made him feel a little better. He felt a great deal of safety and anonymity in making meth under Damon’s enforcement—that was until a man literally fell from the sky making accusations and trying to play the sympathy card about some tweeking little whore.

“What do you mean?” Charlie asked, looking as if he’d just learned that Santa wasn’t real.

Kevin knew he needed to buy some time, in the hopes that the two meth-heads in the back room would actually notice that something was going on in the lab and burst in with their guns raised. He panicked at the thought that they were bad shots; a wayward bullet in a room full of flammable gas tanks would not be a viable solution for any of them. “Exactly what I said,” Kevin said.

“You’re telling me the girl in this picture was actually
involved
in this operation?”

It was all so juvenile. While Kevin had no idea how the man had found out where their lab was, he was clearly over his head and on some kind of a vendetta trip. He was so filled with emotions that his own judgment had been sacrificed. It was pathetic. “That’s what I’m telling you,” Kevin said.

“What if I told you I don’t believe you?”

“It doesn’t make any difference whether you believe me or not,” Kevin said. “All that matters is the shit-storm you’ve brought on yourself by storming in here and making threats. You have no idea what’s going on or what kind of people you’re dealing with.”

Charlie paced back and forth, and Kevin began to curse the idea of having two additional bodies in the lab if they weren’t going to provide better security, quality assurance testers or not. It had never been an issue in the past, but now he realized just how ridiculous it was. 

“Fine. Let’s say you’re right—”

“I
am,
” Kevin interrupted.

Charlie sneered at him. “What’s stopping me from just killing you and destroying this whole little operation? Got a wiseass answer for that?”

Kevin shook his head, more out of contempt than resignation. “You really think that’ll make any difference? You think you can use me like some kind of pawn? Scare me into telling you details of the operation? You watch too much TV. Damon doesn’t care about me. The batch is done, and the sale will be made soon enough. He wouldn’t even care if you killed me. Besides, as I’ve mentioned, the worst thing you could think of to threaten me with would pale in comparison to what Damon and his group of thugs can and will do to me and my family if I turn on him. You’ve got nothing on me,” Kevin said, wondering how convincing his tone was. He was terrified of Damon, but he had no idea what Charlie was capable of. Rumor was that Dick and Clarence had been tortured before they were killed, and he didn’t want to endure that, no matter whose hand it came from.

Charlie continued to pace around the room like an animal. Then, all at once, he stopped. His face lost any trace of emotion, for better or worse. His eyes looked hollow as he stared at Kevin. It wasn’t the kind of menacing, intimidating stare Damon’s thugs tried to muster, squinting to appear tough. Rather, the look Kevin saw on the man’s face was like a great white’s before a kill, devoid of everything but impulse. He knew he had to keep himself from revealing how worried he suddenly felt. Where the hell were those guys and their guns?

“You’re a smart guy,” Charlie said. “You know how to make meth, and you must do a good job, all alone and high volume and all that. You’re probably used to being the smartest guy in the room. I bet you’re really polite with Damon, but as soon as he leaves the room, you’ve ramble off all sorts of snide little comments that you’d say to his face if you had the balls to say it. Hell, I’m guessing you’re the kind of guy who corrects other people’s grammar.”

Kevin felt the urge to move toward the back door.

“I bet you had to talk and reason your way out of more than one ass-kicking on the school playground or in the locker room when you were a kid, huh?” Charlie asked. “You got good at talking down to people to cover up how lonely and miserable you really are. Then you became an adult, something switched in your head, and you realized there’s more profit to be made in playing with the bad guys, mingling with the class bullies. Maybe it’s your own personal ‘Fuck you’ to those guys who used to beat you up as a kid, showing them how tough you are now.”

“You don’t know me,” Kevin said.

“Keep telling yourself that,” Charlie said. “See, the problem here is that you’re trying to talk your way out of this right now too. You’re trying to make me mad, frustrate me by talking in circles, get me to do something stupid. Maybe you’re wasting time on purpose, hoping someone will show up and rescue you. In spite of what you say, you’re still valuable to Damon.”

Kevin laughed. “Why would you think that?”

“Because the drugs are still here, aren’t they? And if I have you and the drugs, I think that makes me a monopoly.”

Kevin didn’t know what to say, but while his mouth had stopped moving, the rest of his body naturally started to retreat toward the back door.

“Stop,” Charlie said, and Kevin complied. “We got a little sidetracked, sure, but now we’re on a new course in our conversation. That’s okay, right? It’s good to be put in situations where you are forced to adapt. It shows what kind of a person you are, what you’re really made of.” Charlie walked toward Kevin slowly, portentously. He seemed seven feet tall, almost looming by the time he got within arm’s length of Kevin. “I’ll tell you what, Baker. If you tell me where your five-star meth is, you won’t have to adapt to life without thumbs…or eyes.”

Kevin swallowed and stood up straight. He refused to let this stranger, a man who knew nothing about him, have any leverage with which to bully him. “Save it,” Kevin snapped, albeit rather weakly. “I’m not scared of you.”

Charlie moved fast in popping Kevin’s right thumb out of place and putting a hand over his mouth to keep Kevin from crying out in pain. “Shh,” he said. “It’s just dislocated. Stop overreacting.”

Kevin felt a tear roll down the side of his nose, and he sniffed as he tried to compose himself.

“Now,” Charlie said, “what else needs to happen before you’ll cooperate?”

The answer came from the open door behind Kevin. “Move away from The Baker.” It was that mean-looking tweeker, John, armed with a .44 in his hand and bulldog-of-a-scowl on his face. It was the first time Kevin had ever been happy to see the man.

Charlie didn’t move.

“I said move away from him, or you’re dead, buddy,” John said.

“First, I’m not your buddy, pal. Second, I think the meth has gotten to you. Why would I move away from him when he’s the only reason you aren’t shooting me?” Charlie said. “I don’t like the idea of being shot any more than I like the idea of you missing and blowing us all up, or at the very least shooting a gun and alerting the police before I get what I came here for.”

Kevin could just barely see John out of the corner of his eye by turning his head and looking over his shoulder, and from what he could see, the man didn’t look too happy. He could also see Greg moving around in the room behind John. Greg was definitely the prototypical meth user, complete with the twitch and the constant itching, thin as a rail, with a skeleton head. In his hand was a .357 Magnum that might as well have been a cannon. Kevin prayed John would be able to do something before Greg got so freaked out or riled up enough to come in and kill them all with a stray bullet.

“I’m gonna give you five seconds to step away from The Baker, or Greg and me are gonna start blasting. You got it?”

“Put your guns down,” Charlie said.

John almost smiled, but it was really more of a smirk. “One—”

“It’s nice to see you know how to count, but you still have a chance to get out of this,” Charlie said.

“Two—”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Before the man could move or say anything else, Kevin heard a
pop
, then just ringing as the frame around the front door blew out in some kind of strange explosion. At that point, it felt like he was standing outside of himself, watching everything happen at once, all in slow motion. John’s eyes widened at the sound, and Greg scurried out from behind him like a startled dog, but also disoriented from the blast. The door fell down, and two men moved in—almost slid in—armed with suppressed machine guns. They walked like ghosts; their heads didn’t bob, and their upper bodies were rigid and poised.

Charlie looked back at them, then over Kevin’s shoulder at Greg and John and let out a quiet, “Shit.”

John’s and Greg’s attention immediately turned to the two men at the door, and no one said another word, as no words seemed appropriate at the time. 

What happened next would be anyone’s guess. The yelling started, and Kevin felt a
thud
against his chest. Whether it was a punch or just a shove, it caused him to stumble back and away. He fell through the open back door just as he felt the warm spray of someone’s blood mist across his face.

By the time the fire captain announced the all-clear, the outside of the dilapidated old building looked like Jackson Pollock had thrown buckets of soot around the scene. The primary concern hadn’t been the fire, according the captain, but another meth explosion, with potentially lethal gases wafting about. In his exact words, “It was an act of God that the explosion didn’t happen in a residential area, as people surely would have suffered from inhalation, and there probably would have been a few fatalities more than the two bodies we found inside.”

Perez sat in the cab of his cruiser just outside the fire department barricade, impatiently drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

“You okay, Boss?” Nikki asked, her hair pulled back in that all-business ponytail, her knockoff designer sunglasses resting on the bridge of her nose.

“I’m fine,” Perez said.

“Don’t play games. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Perez nodded. He appreciated Nikki cutting through the bull, especially because Elsa was like that with him too. “Does any of this seem right to you?”

“It’s a meth explosion, Boss. What part of it is supposed to feel right?”

“Before this week, how many meth labs went up in or around Bluff Falls over the last year?”

“Seven. I looked it up.”

“Seven explosions in a year, but now two in a week.”

Nikki shook her head, her eyes still looking out over the dash, toward the firefighters. “Coincidence?”

“Don’t use that word around me,” Perez said. His stance on coincidences was well known in the department, and he hated things being pawned off the chance. It led to sloppy police work, sloppy work anywhere. Elsa’s first doctor thought it was a coincidence that she’d had a fainting spell not long after a bout of pneumonia. “There are no coincidences, Sergeant.”

Nikki looked down and cocked her head away from Perez, as if she was lost in a thought.

“What is it?” Perez asked.

“Well, to tell you the truth, I kind of thought it was a weird coincidence, but—”

“But what?” Perez turned in his seat to face his partner.

“A couple nights ago, the last time I saw Charlie Kelly, at the Daily Diner…well, remember how I told you he seemed like a calm dude, like the type who likes to stay in the background and not really get involved in anything? I mean, even with the background check, we don’t have anything concrete on him anyway, and—”

“Spit it out, Nikki.”

“Well, the other day, at the diner, we were looking through those Trivial Pursuit cards they keep on the counter, and there was this question about the dad on
Diff’rent Strokes.
”

“Conrad Bain?” Perez said.

Nikki looked over at him.

“He just passed away. It was on the news not too long ago.”

“Actually, the question was about the character name, Phillip Drummond.”

Perez felt like he saw the connection that didn’t quite form in his mind. “And?”

“Dina, the waitress, said the guy’s name reminded her of Drumlins’,” Nikki said, pointing out the windshield at the burnout building. “That used to be Drumlins’ Pharmacy.”