Growing and Kissing (38 page)

Louise

At first, there was no blood, just a jagged tear across his shirt. I actually thought I’d missed.

Then, as hands grabbed my arms from behind and the shard of glass fell to the floor, the blood welled up in a scarlet arc, soaking through Malone’s white shirt. It went right across the curve of one big pec and into the other.

“What the
fuck?”
Malone pawed at himself. “
Jesus,
I’m bleeding!”

I heard the metallic click of a gun being cocked and cold steel pressed against my temple. I closed my eyes.

“Wait!” snapped Malone. “Bitch does that to me, she’s going to die slow.” Strong fingers caught my jaw and pushed on my cheeks, popping my mouth open like a goldfish’s. I opened my eyes and Malone was right in my face, sneering at me. “That the best you got?” He drew back his hand and slapped me hard across the face. My head snapped to the side and the room spun for a second, pain blazing across my cheek. I saw Sean, held tightly by a small army of heavies, growl and try to lurch forward to protect me.

Malone grabbed my jaw again. “If you’re going to knife someone,” he told me, “you gotta
stab
that motherfucker.” He looked down at his chest. “Slashing away like that don’t do
shit.
Hell, I might not even need stitches.”

I saw one of the guards frown as he heard Malone slur, but everyone was too scared of him to point it out.

“You gotta go deep,” he told me. “That’s what we’re going to do to you, bitch. Go
deep.
You understand me? And we’ll make that Irish fuck watch.” He grinned, but there was something not quite right about his eyes. He kept blinking. And he kept swallowing, as if—

“Mouth getting dry?” I asked.

Malone swallowed again, forcing his throat to work. He frowned at me.

“Am I getting blurry?” I asked.

For the first time, he looked scared. “What did—” He pressed his lips together and then opened them again, trying to make them work properly. “What did you do to me?”

“It’s belladonna,” I told him. “Deadly nightshade. I’d say you’ve got a minute before the convulsions start. Maybe less. Next will be your heart.”

A ripple ran through the crowd. A gun pressed against my forehead.

“Wait! WAIT!” snapped Malone. He was breaking out in a sweat, now, little salty beads gleaming across his dark skin. “How do I fix it?”

“We’ll get you to hospital,” said one of the heavies. “Come on, let’s get you in the car.”

Sean’s voice broke out, loud and clear and full of authority. “Nearest hospital’s five minutes away. We checked. He’s got half that.”

There was silence for a second.

“Bullshit,” said one of the heavies.

“
Really?”
asked Sean. He nodded towards the crop. “You want to bet against
her
when it comes to plants?”

I wanted to hug him. There was silence again as Malone and his men debated it. Meanwhile, the dealers were looking at each other, unsure of what to do.

The indecision ended when Malone’s body gave a jerk, as if he’d been touched by a live wire. It was enough to send him staggering backwards into one of his heavies...and then they found themselves supporting his weight because his legs had started to fail. “Bitch,” he croaked. “
Fix it!”

“This is how it works,” I said. “There’s an antidote: here, in the club. We walk out of here with our drugs. As soon as we’re gone, we’ll call you with where the antidote is.”

The guard pointing a gun at my head slowly lowered it and I breathed a silent sigh of relief.

Then Malone shakily pulled out a gun and pointed it right at Sean. “You tell me where the antidote is right now,” he croaked, “or I’ll kill your boyfriend.” He glared at me, waiting for me to break. I was only some stupid civilian, after all, the good little girl who’d wandered into the big boys’ club.

I closed my eyes for a second. Opened them...and glared right back at him. I wasn’t
good
anymore. I’d had
enough.

We glared at each other for several long seconds. I saw Malone’s finger tighten on the trigger...and then he broke and lowered the gun. “Let them go,” he said, his voice a dry rasp.

The hands holding my arms let go and I pulled away. Across the room, Sean was doing the same.

“You got a van?” Sean asked the nearest heavy. He nodded. “Good. Load up every packet. Every fuckin’ packet”—he turned to the dealers—”including the ones you took off the floor. We find
one
missing, no phone call.”

“Do it,” Malone growled. “All of them.”

His men formed a human chain, moving the packets of weed from the pile on the floor to the door and outside. The dealers who’d swiped packets for themselves in the confusion hastily put them back. No one wanted to be responsible for Malone’s death. Even the packet Malone had cut open to give samples from was loaded up.

Walking down the line of Malone’s men to the van was one of the scariest experiences of my life. Every one of them was armed. Every one of them wanted to kill us. If they sensed weakness for a second, they’d pounce.

Sean took my hand and, immediately, I felt better.
Most of this shit is just attitude,
I remembered. And forced myself to walk with my head high and my back straight. The doors to the van were open for us, the keys inside. We climbed in.

“You’re dead,” said one of Malone’s guards, just before he slammed the door. “We’ll find you, even if it takes a year.”

I tried to look unafraid, however much I wanted to throw up. We pulled away, Sean behind the wheel. “You okay?” he asked immediately.

I nodded weakly. “Did we do it?” I looked behind me, into the back of the van. “Tell me we did it.”

“We did it,” he reassured me. “Now hang on.”

He put his foot down and the buildings started to flash past. He switched between roaring down main streets and cutting down side alleys, until we were sure we weren’t being followed. Then I made the call. Malone answered on the first ring.

“The antidote is the Physostigmine you use to treat your glaucoma,” I told him. “It’ll counteract the Belladonna. You probably want to chug the whole bottle.” I waited, every muscle screaming with tension, listening to the plastic cap unscrewing and the gulping as he drank. I was terrified that it wouldn’t work. However much I hated the guy, I wasn’t a murderess.

After long minutes, he spoke. “I’m going to find you,” he whispered. “I’m going to find you, bitch, and when I do….”

I took a deep breath and tried one last attempt at reason. “Look, we have our drugs back. You’re going to be fine. No one got killed. We can just walk away from this and never see each other again.”

Sean was glancing across at me, his expression halfway between pity and adoration at my naivety. I didn’t expect it to work either, but a little part of me held out hope. That was crushed in seconds. “I’m putting the word out,” Malone said. “
Everyone
is going to be looking for you, all over the city, all over the
state,
I will
fucking find you—”

I ended the call, my stomach twisting.

We had the crop back, but no one to sell it to. No other dealers would dare touch it, not once they heard it had been stolen from Malone. Even if we
could
find a buyer, Malone would hunt us for the rest of our lives.

Our problems had only just begun.

Louise

We didn’t dare go back to the mansion: Malone knew that place. For the same reason, I’d asked Stacey to take Kayley to her apartment.

We headed for the docks, where we could disappear among all the other vans and trucks. Then we prowled around for somewhere to put the van where it would be out of sight. Eventually, we found some long-abandoned garages, the windows broken and the white paint nearly invisible behind a coating of graffiti. “But the door’s chained shut,” I said.

Sean climbed out, wrapped the chain around his fists and heaved, the muscles of his back standing out in the moonlight. There was a sudden
crack
and
clang
as the chain broke and snapped against the metal door like a whip. He hauled the door open so that we could back the van in.

We didn’t dare leave the van, so we wound up climbing up on a dumpster and then onto the flat roof of the garage. We sat on the edge with our legs hanging down, looking out over the black water of the harbor and the reflections of the lit-up cranes. Sean put his arm around my shoulders and, for the first time since we left the jazz club, we
stopped.

It hit me, then, how much had changed. Six months before, I wouldn’t have even run a red light at an empty intersection. Now I was on the run from a drug dealer whose life I’d threatened, sitting on the roof of a graffiti-covered derelict building at midnight. Beneath me was a van containing half a million dollars in weed and beside me was the scariest, most badass man I’d ever met.

And then that badass turned my head to face him and kissed me, long and deep, and I felt my body relax. Just having him close made things seem better. That was the biggest change of all. For the first time since my parents died, I didn’t feel like Kayley and I were on our own.

We sat there in silence while both of us had a very long think. But however evil and devious I got, I couldn’t come up with a way to turn the van full of marijuana into cash, not without going through dealers.

The worst part was,
it had worked.
We’d pulled it off.
The van was loaded with a bumper crop of high-grade weed that was easily worth the money we needed—probably more. After all the months of effort, we’d done exactly what we’d set out to do...only to be defeated by a problem further down the chain—Malone’s greed—that was nothing to do with us. It was human nature that had got in the way. The science—the
process
—had worked just fine.

And then I had a revelation. Something Stacey had said to me. All along, I’d been thinking about the crop—that was the product of all my hard work - that was what I’d created. But maybe I’d created something else, as well.

“We need to stop thinking like criminals,” I said. “And start thinking of this like a business.”

Sean frowned. “The whole fuckin’ drugs game is a business. Supply and demand, distribution...it
is
a business.”

“Not completely. There’s still a few things real businesses do that these people don’t.” I thought again. “We need to contact a dealer.”

He sighed and rubbed my shoulders. “We can’t. No one below Malone’s level is big enough to handle this sort of volume. No one
at
Malone’s level is going to side against him. They don’t want a war.”

“That’s why we have to go
up.
Above Malone.”

“Who’s above Malone. Wait, the
cartels?
The
Mexicans?”
He shook his head. “Louise, that’s all backwards. The Mexicans import weed
to
the US, they don’t need to buy more of it.”

“No,” I said. “But I think I’ve got something else that will interest them.”

And I laid out my plan.