Confessions of a Murder Suspect

59

Angel Pharmaceuticals occupies a daunting, slate-gray, nine-story building on Eleventh Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, in the heart of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen district.

As we got out of the car, Matthew said to me, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“You have to ask? This is going to be the grand finale, Matty. You can thank me later.”

We climbed two flights of metal steps to a landing. I pressed the buzzer on the wall and looked up at the camera mounted above the door. A moment later the door opened, and we entered the building onto a factory floor.

The action on the floor was mesmerizing. The ceiling was at least thirty feet high. On one side of the vast warehouse, ice cream–colored pills poured down chutes and were funneled into bottles that moved along a conveyer belt like little soldiers. The bottles were then stacked into cartons by faceless people in powder-blue masks, caps, and paper gowns.

This mechanized operation, those rivers of pills—just like the ones I’d been taking since I was old enough to hold a sippy cup—gave me the creeps.

“It smells like pills in here,” Hugo said. “Gross.”

On the other side of the floor, backup alarms sounded as forklift operators drove back and forth with pallets stacked with cartons, wheeling, reversing, and placing the cartons high up on shelves.

The cartons were labeled in Chinese.

And it might not surprise you at this point to learn that I can actually read Chinese.

The shipping address was Beijing, China. And the cartons were labeled with product names: “Strong As Ox Pills”; “Very Smart Children Pills”; and one I had to think about for a moment… and then I had it: “No Worries Pills.”

Even if I hadn’t been able to read the labels, I could have guessed at the contents of the cartons; I could smell ylang-ylang and viburnum in the air—and a particular fragrance that I thought of as “yellow.”

If I was right, the drugs that had been tested on us—XL, Lazr, SPD, and the others—were soon going to be dispensed far and wide. Angel Pharma was shipping our drugs overseas.

Had that always been the Angel brothers’ plan?

Hugo was taking pictures with his cell phone, and he didn’t care who saw him. He had no inhibitions. He was a certifiable genius and as strong as a wrestler. What would he have been like without the pills?

What would any of us be like without the pills?

Could I ever be normal?

And the most difficult question: Did I even want to be?