Rigged (9 page)

The boys nodded in wide-eyed horror at the thought of rotting in the mud.

“You talk to no one about this business except your handler—and I’ll tell you who that is. There will be no change in prices or plans, period. You even think about going independent, trying to be some kinda goddamn entrepreneur, and I’ll fill you full of holes—with my dick first and a power drill second. You got it?”

Both new guys, with eyes down, nodded quickly, just how Damon liked it.

“You boys like to get twisted?” he asked, looking at them from the corner of his eye.

The two looked at each other, then up at him like they weren’t sure if it was okay to admit they liked to party with meth.

“Remember, you lie to me, and oil ain’t the only thing that’s gonna be drilled around here.”

“Yeah,” they both mumbled, “we p-party.”

Damon smiled, satisfied. He liked it when his pushers got lit once in a while. His lieutenants weren’t allowed to touch the shit, because they needed to keep their heads straight, but a punk on the street, zoomin’ outside of a trailer park, would make a very visible statement that he wasn’t a narc. Sometimes Damon wondered if the police would ever have the stones to get an undercover strung out just to try and get someone inside his operation. Even that wouldn’t matter though, because the amount he dealt around Bluff Falls was minimal, trace amounts sold to bored high school kids, oil rig workers, and second-shifters. It was a little extra cash, but he didn’t want to flood the place; he knew that would defeat the purpose and bring too much heat. The real money was in production and shipping, and there was no better place to set up shop for that than in desolate North Dakota.

“That’s cool, guys,” Damon said and watched their little faces light up like their daddy had just patted them on the head for a job well done. Damon traced his thumb and forefinger over his mustache to smooth it out. “I got no problem with my guys partaking, just so long as you don’t skim off the top. This is a takes-one-to-know-one kind of business,” Damon said, then let the words hang in the air for a moment so they could think about them. “I gotta tell ya, though, the go-go best not affect how you work for me,” he said sternly, looking over at Rook, his number two.

Rook was standing against the wall like the bad-ass motherfucker Damon paid him to be, all chill, laidback, and nasty, with his thick arms crossed like he didn’t give a fuck. He was always dressed in some flashy suit, playing the stone-cold act, as if that was necessary to intimidate country kids when he was already a huge black man holding a power drill. It never ceased to amaze Damon how little it took to scare the general population; stereotypes were great for business. Just to get his boss man’s point across, Rook took out his D
E
WALT
and gave it a few revs. The bit was still stained red with paint to make it look like blood from the last piece of shit tweeker who didn’t have his priorities straight, like they’d be so stupid as to leave DNA evidence of a murder. It was good for show, though.

The two kids started to sweat, and Damon felt content that he’d gotten his point across, at least for the time being. Now, it was time to get them out on the street and see what they could do. North Dakota had been a land of opportunity just like L.A., Anchorage, and pretty much anywhere in Missouri after that. He knew firsthand that a man with the entrepreneur spark and a willingness to relocate could achieve just about anything.

After Rook pushed the two guys out the door, one of the strung-out bitches who were always hanging around burst in, claiming she had something important to say. Damon played nice and offered her a seat so she could tell her little tale. She claimed that she used to be a stripper, but Damon couldn’t imagine who would have paid to see her writhing around on the floor or slithering around a pole in a g-string. Her hair was all shitty and burnt-looking, as if she’d tried to curl it or comb it and had simply given up. Her tank top barely covered a pair of sagging tits that Damon wouldn’t want to see even if she offered to pay him to look at them. Her sorry excuse or a skirt was hiked too high, showing off bruised legs speckled with cottage cheese. In fact, she looked almost as beat up as those billboard pictures over in Montana. He wondered if her mug shot was on any of them, because she could have been a poster child for scaring kids straight. It was really too bad that she looked so beat up; clearly she’d been ridden too hard or had bumped into more than a few walls when she was high, but Damon didn’t have much time for a woman who didn’t respect herself enough to look decent.

“What’s your name?” Damon asked. He’d seen her around plenty, but he’d never felt compelled to get close enough to speak to her.

“Sherry,” she said with that familiar tweeker shake in her voice.

“What you got for me, girl?” Damon asked, perching himself on the arm of the couch. He dabbed a bump of coke on his hand and took a snort. The pain in his side faded, and he sat up a little straighter.

“I heard some news that I knew…well, I-I figured you’d wanna know ‘bout it, ‘cause I know you like to know things,” Sherry said.

Damon watched her twitch, the girl was hurtin’ for some ice
.
He took a small baggie from a bank deposit bag on the end table and dangled it in front of her. “Yeah, I’m motherfuckin’ CNN, all news all the time. You got something worth
my
time and
your
high?”

Her eyes fixed on the baggie like it was water in the desert. “I-I heard that Dick and Clarence’s lab blew up,” she said with a stutter stemming from fear or withdrawal or a little of both, never taking her eyes off the drugs. 

Damon looked at her, ready to kill the messenger. “What do you mean, it blew up?”

“I uh…er, I, uh…well, it blew up.
Ka-boom.
It ain’t just some rumor I heard, ‘cause I saw the cop cars and stuff around there myself. That’s all I know ‘bout it though.”

Damon crunched the baggie in his meaty hand, and the girl’s eyes grew wide, as if he’d destroyed the antidote to whatever was killing her. When she reached her hand out a little in an attempt to save it, Damon grabbed her by the scrawny throat and pulled her close enough to count her missing teeth. “What’s the matter with you, bitch? You got a problem with your priorities? You come and tell me that part of my operation blew up, and all you’re worried about is this motherfuckin’ glass?”

“I-I’m s-sorry,” she managed to sputter under his grip, then whimpered. When Damon threw her to the floor and tossed the baggy at her feet, she scrambled to it, still coughing.

Damon looked up at Rook, who was already on the phone, shaking his head. “Well? What happened, Rook?” Damon asked.

“I don’t know,” Damon said, with the phone still to his ear, “but I’m sure as hell gonna find out.”

“Goddamn right you will. I need to know. How is it that this strung-out whore, this street trash knows about this breaking news shit before me? Did those two fuck up a simple shake-and-bake, till somebody decided to put the hurt on them? Is someone trying to move in on my shit? Rook, you better find out who’s responsible for this, and you better tell me soon. If they ain’t already dead, they gonna wish they was.” As much as Damon hated shake-and-bakes, they were a good substitute, a diversion for chumps who didn’t know better while The Baker was busy making the serious weight. Damon punched the wall, leaving a massive fist-shaped hole in the drywall. Then he cursed every four-letter word he could think of under his breath and wondered who would be so stupid as to mess with his business. A dead man walking, that’s who, he finally decided; a dead man not smart enough to just lie down and be dead.

Rook lay back in his king-sized bed and stared at the ceiling. He’d spent the last two hours on the phone, trying to track down information about the explosion in Dick and Clarence’s meth lab trailer. No one had answers, but “I don’t know” was not an acceptable response for Damon. He knew someone had to know something, but they just weren’t scared enough of him to spit it out, and that pissed the big man off all the more.

Over the last ten years, Rook had spent time in New York, Los Angeles, and all over Missouri, where he’d met Damon—a man who’d just been released from a stretch for possession with intent and was on a mission to do things his own damn way. At the time, Rook had liked what he heard, and he saw Damon had some pretty good contacts. Rook agreed to partner up with Damon for a while, just till they got things going; he would serve as security and see how things played out from there. He followed Damon to North Dakota, though he quickly realized he may as well have followed him into the goddamn Sahara, because what was The Peace Garden State to some was The Piece of Shit State to him. The place was too quiet, too unpopulated, and as boring as hell.

No long after moving there and getting things set up, Rook looked up the census data on North Dakota, which didn’t serve to improve his opinion of the place. There were less than 700,000 people in the entire state and, and only 1 percent of that lackluster population was black. That meant there were less than 7,000 black faces in the entire state; in other words, he was more of a minority there than in other places in the country, and the majority of the North Dakota population was just stupid enough to point it out to him. It depressed him and left a perennial bitter taste in his mouth. There was always some wiseass with some racist comment, and life for Rook in North Dakota had turned into the living embodiment of an old joke: How does every racist joke start? With a white person looking over both shoulders. Fortunately for Rook, a D
E
WALT
drill went a long way to get people to mind their manners.

The world around him was useless, so Rook did what he could to make it a little more tolerable: Egyptian cotton sheets (the real deal, not those fake 1,500 count lies), Napoleon cognac, and tailored suits, just to name a few of the luxuries. It wasn’t as if he could keep a low profile anyway in that pale sea of white faces and whiter attitudes, so he figured he may as well enjoy himself. It didn’t really help, either, to have to live out in the middle of nowhere at Damon’s makeshift compound, where no one seemed to understand the meaning of personal space. Even if he’d had a mansion to himself, he still would have been living in a shit-heap dump where he didn’t want to be. More than once, Rook had found some stoned-out cracker wandering through the door with such a dumb look on his face that Darwin’s theory had to be a lie. 

In the end, for every step Rook took to make himself a home, the further away from real life he felt. He knew he’d never feel at peace in such a place, especially because Damon was turning into a bigger and bigger prick every day. Sure, the man had a good business head on his shoulders, and he’d done a decent job of getting the local idiots to consolidate power and actually learn a thing or two about meth. He’d even found The Baker and had him cooking away for the big score, but every day that went by meant another day of Damon swimming in that sea of adoration he’d created for himself. The man’s arrogance had reached a level no one could handle without being a chump. Pride before the fall
,
Rook would muse when he thought of Damon, and he knew the  man was going take quite a tumble if he didn’t get his damn head out of his ass. There were too many heads up there already.

Rook sat up in bed and cursed the fact that he shared a homestead with a rotating group of a dozen other people. He was a grown man who’d served hard time, living in some backwater frat house. He wanted the job to be over with, and he wanted it over as soon as possible. Every passing moment grated on his nerves, and every beat of every death metal guitar solo took him one step closer to putting an auger bit through the back of Damon’s head. Unfortunately, Damon was the man with the contacts; he kept that part to himself, probably because he was justifiably paranoid of a coup. No matter what angle Rook looked at it and no matter how much he hated depending on the self-aggrandizing asshole, the big score wasn’t going to get done without Damon. Rook had to bite his tongue and try to be patient, but that was getting harder and harder to do.

Every night, he looked out into the emptiness of the land around him, the dark expanse that held nothing that could possibly be worth anything to anyone.
One more day
became the mantra that helped him get through it, along with tagging ass.

He grabbed his cell phone, in desperate need of some stress relief.

Chapter 10

The screen flicked on, and Perez loaded up the video chat program. It took a few moments, but soon the face of his wife, Elsa Perez, appeared. There, in her hospital bed at the Mayo Clinic, she looked tired. She’d been through so much, but, being the caring woman she was, the first words out of her mouth were how tired
he
looked. “You all right, honey?” she asked, as if he were the sick one.

Perez rubbed his eyes. “Yeah. I’ve just been busy.”

“Aren’t you sleeping well?” she asked. Elsa was always the one to worry about everyone else first, even from a hospital bed, even in the wake of a crushing diagnosis and a series of difficult treatments.

“Hon’,” Perez said softly, “stop worrying about me. I’m fine. How are
you
doing?”

Elsa mustered up a smile, albeit a weak one. She did an admirable job trying to put up a front, but Mark knew better. She was so beautiful, with long, straight black hair that hung past her shoulders and soft green eyes he couldn’t seem to look away from. Sick as she was, she still had that same mesmerizing look in those eyes that she’d had the first time he’d seen her at that cop bar in Chicago. She had played coy then, but she was a cop’s daughter, no doubt attracted to the badge. She was tougher than most, a lot of cops’ wives were worriers, always convinced that their husbands weren’t coming home. Elsa never worried. She never told him to stay home or called him to check in while he was on duty. As strong as she was, though, the life had pushed them apart. More and more late nights led to the two of them being together out of mere routine more than anything else. When she was diagnosed, Perez suddenly realized how those cops’ wives felt; he had to worry that every day might be the last day. Those grim thoughts had brought him back to her, which was a good thing, but he hated that a fatal disease turned out to be more meaningful and stronger than their wedding vows.