Dead on Arrival

52

Danny was going nuts; he’d been in the motel room eighteen straight hours. There wasn’t a damn thing to watch on TV, the crummy motel didn’t have payper-view, and he didn’t even have a deck of cards so he could play solitaire. Not only was he bored, he was tired, so worried he hadn’t been able to sleep all night. Joe had said that if this thing didn’t work out he was going back to Riker’s, and he knew Joe wasn’t kidding. If Pugh didn’t call today, he was fucked.

He turned on the television again. Something about some senator getting whacked. Who cared? He changed the channel and got Wheel of Fortune and that Vanna White broad. She’d been doing that show forever, smiling like she had lockjaw, turning over those letter blocks. She must hate those letters by now — and fuckin’ Pat Sajak too. He wondered how old she was. She had to be pushing fifty, but he had to admit she still looked damn good. And these people they got for contestants. How the hell did they find three idiots every day that would jump up and down and scream every time they-

His cell phone rang. The phone was sitting on the nightstand next to the bed, and he grabbed for it so fast he knocked it to the floor. He rolled off the bed, landing hard on his knees, and scrambled for the phone. He answered it on the second ring.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘Get on a land line. Call 540-432-2387. Got it?’

‘No! Wait a minute! Let me get a pen.’ Before the guy could say anything, he reached up and grabbed a pen sitting next to the motel phone. ‘Give me the number again.’ The guy repeated it, and Danny wrote the number down on his left forearm.

The caller had sounded like Jubal Pugh’s snake, that skinny rat-bastard Randy with the prison tats on his knuckles. Thank you, Jesus. He waited a couple of minutes and then picked up the motel phone and called the number Randy had given him.

‘Come on back out to Jubal’s place,’ Randy said. ‘If somebody follows you, we’ll know it.’

Shit, the guy could have told him that on the cell phone. ‘Aw, relax, Randy. I’ll be there in forty-five minutes. That’s how long it took me to get there yesterday.’

He hung up and called his cousin. ‘Joe, it’s me. It looks like we’re on. I’m heading out to Pugh’s place right now.’

Joe didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, ‘You better make this work, Danny,’ and hung up.

Jesus. Would it have killed the guy to say ‘good luck’?

There wasn’t anything for Joe to do but wait. And while he waited, all he could do was think about his ex-wife. Every time he spoke to his goddamn cousin, every time he looked at his goddamn cousin, he thought about her. He was sick of thinking about her.

His cell phone rang again. It was probably Danny calling back. With DeMarco’s luck, Danny had gotten a flat tire driving out to Pugh’s. But it wasn’t Danny; it was Emma.

‘Anisa Aziz called me late yesterday and I drove down to Charlottesville and spoke to her last night. I just got home. Anisa was abducted right before Mustafa tried to blow up the Capitol.’

‘Jesus. Will she tell the Bureau?’

‘No. I spent an hour trying to get her to change her mind, but she’s terrified. And I don’t blame her. The people who abducted her showed her pictures of her mother and her brother and said they’d kill them if she talked to the police. If the FBI gets somebody, she’ll be willing to testify, but she’s not going to go to them now.’

‘Well, shit,’ DeMarco said.

‘She did tell me a couple of things that I wanted to pass on. She couldn’t identify whoever kidnapped her and doesn’t know if they were American or foreign-born because they wore masks and never spoke to her. The only thing she saw was that both men had brown eyes, one was six-four and heavy, and the other was about six feet and skinny. The skinny one might be white and he might have had tattoos on his knuckles, but she wasn’t sure if they were tattoos or grease or dirt. When your cousin goes out to Pugh’s place, have him look for guys meeting that description.’

‘You’re too late,’ DeMarco said. ‘Danny’s already left for Pugh’s. I’ll ask him when-’

‘Oh my God, Joe! Turn on your television. Broderick’s dead!’

Randy was waiting outside Pugh’s house when Danny arrived. He was wearing a black sweatshirt, and his pants and baseball cap were that brown and green mottled camouflage color. On his feet were black combat boots. These peckerheads who wore camo pants and combat boots scared the shit out of him; it was like they could hardly wait for World War III to start.

Randy patted Danny down and they entered the house. It was 9 A.M. and Pugh was in a white bathrobe bearing the name of a Hilton Head resort and wearing the same fluffy blue slippers he’d had on the last time Danny had seen him. He was at his kitchen table, squinting at a newspaper, reading glasses perched on the end of his long nose. There was something odd about Pugh in reading glasses. He reminded Danny of a drawing you might see in a children’s book: a rat dressed like a person, wearing glasses.

Danny started to sit down at the table, but Pugh said, ‘No. Go with Randy. He’s gonna make sure you’re clean and you’re gonna change clothes before we talk.’

Danny started to protest, realized it would be futile, and said, ‘Hey, whatever floats your boat.’

Randy led him to a bedroom and told him to strip, all the way. Danny resisted the urge to make some comment about Randy getting his thrills by looking at his ass. He resisted the urge because Randy looked like he might beat the shit out of him if he said something like that.

He undressed and handed Randy his clothes, and Randy ran his hands over the garments looking for electronics. When he was naked, Randy had him turn around once to make sure there wasn’t anything taped to his back, then tossed him a pair of swimming trunks and a white T-shirt. Danny put them on, and Randy turned to leave the room.

‘Hey,’ Danny said, ‘I gotta go barefoot here? You don’t have shower thongs or something?’

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Randy said.

Back in Pugh’s kitchen, Jubal pointed Danny to a chair and said, ‘Okay, I checked you and your boss out. You’re a punk, but your boss is the real thing. I’m interested. So let’s talk details. How much product do you expect to get for a million and how will we arrange delivery and make the exchange?’

Danny shook his head. ‘Not yet,’ he said.

‘What?’ Pugh said.

‘I need to see your lab first. I told you, we have to make sure you have a big enough operation to deliver the quantities we need. If we have an inventory problem, we’ll lose the market.’

Patsy Hall had told him to say that too, because Pugh would like it to sound as if he was supplying brake linings to General Motors, not some hillbilly dealing meth.

‘My operation’s big enough, sonny. Don’t you worry about that. I supply half the tweakers in Virginia and cover parts of Maryland and Pennsylvania too.’

‘Sorry, Mr Pugh,’ Danny said, sounding contrite and respectful, ‘but if you don’t have enough product to take care of some biker and his bitch, they’ll just wait a day. But we can’t take that chance.’ Before Pugh could protest, Danny said, ‘I’m not disrespecting you here. My boss told me before we make a deal, I gotta see your lab. We’re talkin’ a lotta money here, for you, five million a year, maybe more.’

Pugh looked at him for a second, then nodded.

‘Go put your shoes on,’ he said, ‘but nothing else. Randy, give him some overalls and loan him a jacket so he don’t freeze out there.’

Danny donned grease-stained overalls and a leather jacket that smelled of stale beer. His Gucci loafers looked pretty stupid with the overalls. When he returned to Pugh’s kitchen, there was another man with Pugh, a big guy with a beard and a huge gut. The fat guy looked a little friendlier than Randy, like maybe he smiled once a year.

‘You know what to do,’ Pugh said to Randy.

Randy just nodded, then said to Danny, ‘Let’s go.’

What the hell did that mean, You know what to do?

The three men left the house and walked over to a shed that contained five ATVs — all-terrain ve hicles that looked like four-wheeled motorcycles. ‘Roll two of them out, Harlan, and make sure they’ve got gas,’ Randy said.

‘You gotta be shittin’ me,’ Danny muttered.

‘You ride behind me,’ Randy said to Danny. That was good, Danny thought; the other guy’s ass was so big there wouldn’t be room for two of them on his machine. ‘And we’re gonna blindfold you,’ Randy said, and before Danny could say anything, Randy pulled a white rag out of his pocket, the remnants of a T-shirt, and tied it over Danny’s eyes. Then he put a ski mask over his head, the eye holes at the back.

This wasn’t good at all, Danny thought. This was just going to fuck up everything.

Danny didn’t like it on the back of the ATV, unable to see, unable to anticipate the bumps and turns. The ATV had little bars next to the passenger seat for holding on, and he gripped them as hard as he could. The main problem was his feet kept coming off the footrests, and every time they did it upset his balance and he thought he was going to fall. They stopped riding after half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes. Patsy Hall had told Danny that Pugh owned three or four hundred acres. Maybe that’s why it was taking so long to get to wherever they were going, or maybe Randy was driving in circles. Danny had no way to tell.

Randy helped him off the ATV and started walking him, holding on to his upper arm. ‘Can I take the blindfold off now?’ Danny said.

‘No,’ Randy said. ‘You don’t do a damn thing unless I tell you.’

They walked maybe fifty yards down what felt like a dirt trail. He tripped once over a tree root but Randy kept him from falling. Randy had a grip that could crush rocks. Finally they stopped and Randy said, ‘Stand still a minute.’

Danny heard something being moved, he didn’t know what, and maybe the sound of tree branches brushing against each other. Randy grabbed his arm again and said, ‘We’re goin’ down some steps. Slide your feet forward until you can feel ’em.’ Danny did, and with Randy still holding his arm they descended seven steps. Danny counted.

They stopped moving, and Randy said, ‘I’m gonna take off the blindfold now, but you look straight ahead. If you look up or behind you, I’ll break your neck.’

And as strong as the guy’s hands were, he could probably do it.

The hood was pulled off Danny’s head and the blindfold off his eyes. He was standing on the earthen floor of a room that was about the size of a one-car garage. Stacked against one wall was all kinds of crap, metal containers of denatured alcohol and acetone and stuff like that. There were also stainless steel tables, like the type you see in restaurant kitchens, and on the tables was a bunch of … well, lab shit, beakers and scales and rubber tubing and pots. God, the place just stank. He felt like he was standing inside a sweat sock that had been worn by Shaquille O’Neal for ten games in a row.

After a moment, Randy said, ‘Okay, slick. You satisfied?’

‘Not quite,’ Danny said. ‘I want to see how much ephedrine you have on hand.’

Randy led him over to a stack of two-gallon cardboard containers, like the type you saw behind the counter at Baskin-Robbins, containing ice cream. There must have been twenty containers. Randy popped the top off one of the containers and Danny looked inside. White powder.

‘Okay,’ Danny said. ‘That’s all I wanted to see.’

The fact was that Danny didn’t know anything about meth. He didn’t know if the equipment and chemicals he was looking at were really used for making meth, and he didn’t know how much meth the equipment could produce. Nor did he know if the white powder had been ephedrine; it could have been baking powder for all he knew.

But he didn’t need to know any of that stuff to do what he’d been asked to do.