Fucking creep, he thought with a pang of guilt. The man was some kind of obsessed, and Drake had facilitated it.
I will find her, he promised himself. When this is done, when Ken is behind bars, I’ll find her. And when I do, we’ll laugh about this.
Dr. Kruk brought the hairbrush to his nose and inhaled deeply. Drake cringed.
Well, maybe not laugh.
“Not too much farther,” Kruk informed them.
Hanna slowed to nearly a crawl, partly because she was awaiting the next turn, but also because the alley was lined with garages and even her VW had a hard time squeezing through.
“How much farther,” Drake said, feeling his temperature rise.
Kruk said nothing; he only stared at the hairbrush.
Drake wanted nothing more than to wrench it from the man’s hands and throw it out the window.
“Tell me where the fuck—”
“Stop the car,” Kruk instructed suddenly, and Hanna slammed on the breaks. They weren’t moving quickly, but half-turned as he was, Drake jostled forward awkwardly.
The adrenaline of the day had forced most of his acute and chronic pain away, but the aches had slowly started to creep back over the last few hours. When the afternoon eventually bled into night, Drake wouldn’t be surprised if he couldn’t breathe let alone move.
“On the left,” Kruk said, and Drake immediately turned his attention to the window.
They had stopped in front of a simple, white-washed garage. Drake’s eyes drifted to the identical garages flanking this one, then to those on the other side of the car.
They’d arrived in a sea of indistinguishable garages.
“I assure you, this is the one,” Dr. Kruk said, sensing his frustration.
“Better be,” Drake spat as he stepped out of the car and squeezed his way to the other side. Hanna met him in front of the garage in question, her expression making it clear that she shared Drake’s doubts.
At first, neither of them could figure out a way to open it. There didn’t appear to be a handle, a lock, anything. Drake reached out and pressed his palm against the door.
He’d expected it to give a little — it looked like it was made of cheap plastic — but to his surprise, it felt thick and solid to the touch.
Eyebrow raised, he took a step back and observed the garage as a whole.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing a finger at a small box embedded in the frame of the door. At about four inches tall and maybe half that deep, and painted to match the door, it was no wonder they hadn’t noticed it at first.
Hanna shrugged and walked over to it. She pried at it with her nails for a moment before managing to flip the cover up. Instead of a number pad beneath, however, there was just a flat, featureless pad.
Furious, Drake walked back to the car.
“How the fuck do you open it, Kruk?”
“Fingerprint,” he replied, eyes still locked on the hairbrush.
When the man didn’t move, Drake reached inside and grabbed him roughly by the shoulder. One sharp tug and Dr. Kruk was standing in front of the door, a confused look on his face.
“Either you open it, or I’ll chop your hand off and do it myself,” Drake threatened.
With the brush still clutched in one cuffed hand, Kruk somehow managed to reach up and press his thumb into the pad.
At first, nothing happened, and Drake felt his anger returning.
“This is—”
But he was cut off by the sound of a beep, followed by a motor engaging.
Drake casually guided Kruk in front of him as he waited for the garage door to roll up.
He suddenly found it difficult to swallow. With only a handful of days left before he was due back in court, this was his last resort.
Either Dr. Kruk had something in here that he could use, something of value, or he was toast.
Drake would never see his son again. Shit, if he went back to prison, which was the most likely outcome, he might not even see another sunrise.
He squinted hard, trying to peer into the dark garage. On the drive here, Drake had pictured something more… professional. All he saw now was a concrete floor covered with a thick layer of dust.
“There’s nothing—” he began, but then Hanna flicked on her cellphone flashlight and Drake gasped. “Jesus.”
Chapter 62
“I think I should go with you,” Screech said.
Yasiv made a face.
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s a good idea. With all due respect, Screech, you’re more of a behind the scenes guy. Besides, if anything goes down, you can’t be there.”
Screech held Yasiv’s stare.
Yasiv was right: Screech was a behind the scenes guy. Or, more accurately, he had been a behind the scenes guy. But Drake had since thrust him in the spotlight and now it was on him to get some hard evidence on Ken Smith to put him away. Otherwise, Drake, the stubborn prick that he was, was as good as dead. And the supposed drug lab that Leroy had helped identify showed more promise of doing some real damage to Ken Smith than two corrupt cops flipping.
If what Yasiv and Beckett said was true, if the new heroin — if Ken’s heroin — that was flooding the streets all contained ohmefentanyl, then this lab was the key.
“So, you’re just going to go in alone, then? Just knock on the door and say, ‘Oh, hi there, it’s me Sergeant Yasiv from the NYPD. I was just curious… have any ohmefentanyl lying around? What’s that? No? Hmmm… what about a video of Ken Smith in scrubs injecting his eyeballs with heroin. How about that?’”
He’d meant the comment as a joke, but as the words started to come out of his mouth, his temperature began to rise.
“Screech, I know what you’re going through. I know you’re—”
“You don’t know shit, Yasiv,” he spat, his anger coming to a head. “You don’t know why I’m here, how I got suckered into taking this job by some asshole DA who threatened to throw my brother behind bars for the rest of his life if I didn’t take it. You don’t know about how I was coerced into taking pictures of Drake and his friends, pictures that Ken Smith used to blackmail all of us.”
Yasiv’s eyes widened.
And there it was; Screech had finally let the cat out of the bag. Only he hadn’t spilled his guts to Drake who deserved to know the truth more than anyone, but to an NYPD sergeant and a kid he’d just met. But now that the floodgates had opened, he had a hard time shutting them.
“All I had to do was snap those pictures, then guide Drake in one direction or another, do whatever I needed to do to make sure that his path crossed with Ken Smith. That’s all. I had no idea that Ken was such an asshole… more of an asshole than Drake. I had no fucking idea about sex slaves from Colombia, about heroin, about ohme-fucking-fentanyl. I had no idea about any of this.”
Screech’s anger was slowly starting to be replaced by guilt.
Guilt and shame.
He was ashamed of what he’d done — there was no doubt of that. Screech had contributed to pushing Drake to the edge.
To the brink… the brink of madness.
Yasiv blinked once, twice, and then nodded.
“All right, you come with me, then. I’m just doing recon, anyway. If we confirm that they’re making the fentanyl there, I’ll call for backup, SWAT if I have to; anybody who Ken doesn’t have in his back pocket.”
Screech ground his teeth. Everyone was in Ken’s back pocket. Everyone except for Drake, Yasiv, and Leroy.
It’s us against the fucking world, he thought. It’s us—
“What about me?” a small voice asked.
Screech turned to see Leroy staring at both of them. He’d forgotten that the kid was even there.
What about him, Screech thought. He should be home with his grieving mother, that’s what he should be doing.
He looked to Yasiv for advice. The man shook his head and threw up his hands.
“You don’t want to go home and we sure as hell can’t leave you here,” he
snarled. “You can come with us, but you’re not getting out of the car.”
Chapter 63
If it was all just an elaborate ruse, Dr. Kruk was perhaps the greatest practical joker of all time.
The entire back wall of the garage was lined with bookshelves… bookshelves that were filled with VHS tapes, of all things. There were also perhaps a dozen dusty boxes to the right, some stacked three or four high. On the exterior of the boxes, Drake could see names and dates scrawled in black sharpie, as well as what looked like some sort of patient identification number.
But his main interested was the VHS tapes.
“Stay here,” he told Dr. Kruk as he made his way toward the back of the garage. Hanna followed suit, using her cell phone to illuminate their path.
Just like the boxes, the tapes were labeled with some sort of coding system, only they didn’t have dates or names on them. The sheer magnitude of tapes — there must have been six or seven thousand of them — was overwhelming.
Drake turned back to look at Dr. Kruk, who was once again fiddling with the brush in his hand. He glanced at Hanna next. Her eyes were as big as saucers.
“Well, at least he wasn’t lying about the tapes. Kruk, what tapes correspond with your sessions with Thomas Smith?”
“Alas, my memory is not so good, Drake. These represent almost eleven years’ worth of work in my practice.”
Drake frowned.
“That’s fucking useless. How would you ever—”
“But,” Kruk continued holding the brush in the air like some sort of talking stick. “I started filling the shelves from the bottom left-hand corner working my way across before starting on the next row — like a typewriter. If I recall correctly, Mr. Smith came to visit me towards the end of my tenure, which means that his tapes should be up in the top.”
This was only moderately helpful, narrowing it down to maybe a hundred tapes. Drake didn’t have time to watch them all.
“What about a legend of some sort?”
“In one of the boxes. Let me see if I can find it,” Dr. Kruk said as he made his way towards the stack of boxes.
Suspicious, Drake turned to Hanna.
“Go with him,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. Then to the doctor, he added, “Kruk, where are the lights in here?”
The man chuckled, an unnerving sound, and then clapped his hands. The sound wasn’t particularly loud given that his hands were cuffed, but it was sufficient to activate on a lamp to Drake’s right.
“What can I say,” Kruk said, still chuckling, “I started renting this place in the mid-nineties.”
As Hanna and Kruk started to root through the boxes, Drake once again took a step back and stared up at the video cassettes.
A comment that Dr. Kruk had made suddenly took on another meeting: the person I most like to learn from? Why, that would be myself, of course.
With hours and hours of footage, sure Kruk could learn from himself, but he could also learn from others. Drake was reminded of something else that Dr. Kruk was fond of referencing: an imago.
With all these tapes at his disposal, Dr. Kruk or Marcus Slasinsky could become an imago in the truest sense of the word; he could be whatever other people needed or wanted him to be in order for him to get what he wanted.
Like Chase’s hairbrush… like this fucking day trip.
“Hey Drake, check out this relic,” Hanna said, struggling to lift an old school CRT TV out of a box. Drake walked over and gave her a hand. As he set it on the floor, he realized that it wasn’t just a TV, but one of those TV VCR combos.
“Lucky day,” Drake grumbled as he looked around for an outlet. He found one halfway across the wall on the other side of the room. It took some effort to move the TV close enough to plug it in, but when he did, he was surprised that it powered up without any issues. “Dr. Kruk, any luck with a legend?”
“Not yet,” he replied. “But it’s here somewhere.”
“How ‘bout you just go ahead and give me the cliff notes, then,” Drake said, starting to get annoyed again. “What did Thomas Smith say to you during your sessions that is so incriminating for his father?”
Dr. Kruk offered him a patronizing smile.
“Drake, our deal was for the tapes. It is up to you to decide what is pertinent and what isn’t.”
Drake instinctively slid a hand into his pocket and fingered the vial of blood within. He debated offering it up to the man, to expedite things, but something in the back of his mind told him that that wasn’t a good idea.
Dr. Kruk was acting strange enough with the hairbrush, god only knew what he’d do with the blood.
“Just hurry the fuck up then,” he spat.
As if sensing that Drake’s patience was coming to an end, Dr. Kruk pulled a small stack of papers from the box and held them up.
“Got it,” he said.
Drake’s heart skipped a beat and he hurried across the garage.
“And? Which tapes are Thomas Smith’s?”
Dr. Kruk scanned several of the pages before answering.
“There,” he said, pointing at a five-digit string of numbers. “10568 to 10884.”
Drake turned his eyes back to the bookshelf. The tape with 10568 on the side was in the upper right-hand corner just where Kruk said it would be. The problem was, the other tape, tape 10884, was on the shelf above, which meant that there were 200 or so in total.
“What the fuck, Kruk? Is this some sort of joke? Which one is it? Which tape should I watch?”
“Drake, our deal—”
Drake whipped around and grabbed Dr. Kruk by the collar and pushed him up against the boxes. One of them fell to the ground, spilling file folders and random trinkets on the floor.
“I don’t give a fuck about our deal. You’re gonna tell me or I’m going to—”
Drake was unnerved by the fact that Dr. Kruk was still smiling.
“You’re going to what? Beat me? How has that worked out for you in the past, Drake? How has beating others and beating yourself done anything for you—”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me,” Drake snarled, tightening his grip on the man’s collar. The white hospital shirt started to pinch his throat, cutting off circulation.
Drake would’ve strangled him right there, left his ass passed out on the floor, if it hadn’t been for Hanna. The woman touched his arm and he eased his grip.
Dr. Kruk took a gasping, wheezing breath, but he never stopped smiling.
“Now, unless you have something else of your lady friend to offer, I would suggest you start watching the tapes. Remember the last time you visited me? Remember when I told you that you were the one that was in a hurry? That I had all the time in the world? Well, I’m guessing that the same is true today. Otherwise, why would you have to sneak out of Oak Valley in the trunk of a car?”
Drake made a fist and lunged at the man but stopped just short of hitting him. With his other hand, he pulled out the vial of blood and thrust it against Dr. Kruk’s chest.
Eyes wide, the man barely managed to catch it before it fell to the floor.
“There, that’s something else of hers, you sick fuck. It’s her blood. Now tell me which of the goddamn tapes I need to watch.”
Chapter 64
“Whatever happens, just keep your mouth shut, Dalton,” Officer Mike Pontiac said. His words were slurred on account of the fact that most of his front teeth were broken and his lips were swollen to the size of bratwurst. “Just keep quiet.”
Pontiac still wasn’t sure what had happened. He was convinced that the detective and sergeant were sent by her to kill them, but they hadn’t taken the shot. They’d had the opportunity but hadn’t gone through with it.
And now he found himself handcuffed in the back of an unmarked police car driven by some woman who claimed to be from IA. Stranger still was the fact that Dalton was sitting in the back with him. Suspects and victims alike were almost unilaterally transported separately to avoid influencing or coordinating statem
ents.
It didn’t make sense; none of it did. Pontiac still didn’t understand how the sergeant and detective had found him in the first place.
“I can’t go to prison,” Dalton whimpered. “I didn’t… I didn’t want any of this. I just wanted to do my job.”
Drug Lord- Part I Page 19