What the hell? Urban thought. “What are you doing? You should be in bed.”
Joey did not turn his attention away from his reading. “Hmm…dumm…hmm…dumm…”
“Joey! Stop it!”
“Hmm…dumm…hmmm…”
Urban grabbed the boy’s arm away from the book.
The boy wrenched free, ran away shrieking, and began slamming the open door into the wall, screaming all the while. Tears streamed down his reddened face.
Urban had seen this before; a meltdown for any interruption of Joey’s—what were they—fetishes? He’d learned the only thing to do was to let the tantrum play itself out.
He was about ready to put the kid in an institution. He isn’t normal, for Christ’s sake! This wasn’t the only problem the boy had. You couldn’t take him anywhere, especially out to eat. He only liked certain foods: peanut butter, white bread, mashed potatoes (no butter or salt, thank you!). Then there was his fondness for making odd noises and sudden outbursts. How the hell he ever got saddled with the brat was a mystery. No…he knew damned well how.
Gloria.
Sexy crazy, red-headed Gloria.
In one of those stupid fucking decisions in life, he’d agreed to have her move in to his three-bedroom Vancouver apartment. That was nine years ago. It went well for a while until they discovered she was almost four months pregnant.
“Four months!” he’d yelled. “How in Christ didn’t you know?”
Her non-response told him the answer: she’d known all along. That was his second mistake: Tears and pleading convinced him to let her have the child. She had been told it was likely a boy. What the hell, he’d thought. A son. That’s something.
Then the boy was born, and the nightmare began. Gloria was not equipped to be a mother or anything else that required a commitment to nurturing. Little Joey was eleven months old when Urban came home to their apartment to find Gloria gone, along with her cleaned out half of the bedroom closet.
No note.
Just gone.
He was half relieved until a neighbor knocked on the door holding Joey in her arms and wondering why Gloria hadn’t returned from shopping like she’d promised.
In fewer than two years, Dale Urban had transitioned from free-wheeling bachelor to a single father tied to a feeding schedule.
~ * ~
As bad as his private life had been hampered by the presence of the boy, his business life had flourished. It hadn’t happened overnight, though. He’d earned it the hard way.
Twenty-one years earlier, twenty-two-year-old Dale Urban graduated from the Alberta University School of Pharmacy. Needing a job, he took a position as assistant pharmacist in a large Vancouver, B.C. grocery chain.
While in pharmacy school, he’d had a sweet arrangement with one of the interns to sell drugs out of the hospital pharmacy. His new job was a perfect place to continue augmenting his salary by shorting prescriptions by a pill or two, then selling them. Soon, he developed a loyal—and growing—clientele. It became impossible for him to meet demand without being discovered, despite the lax security of the pharmacy.
An internet search uncovered a Chinese source offering a sixty-day supply of oxycodone for a price that was half his current selling price. They were delivered as advertised, and he sold them promptly. His customers were pleased with the quality.
When he re-ordered for twice the quantity, he received an email offering a better price for a contracted amount. Urban sold out the new shipment in two weeks, doubling his client base. It was then that he quit his job and contracted for a supply larger than the last by an order of magnitude.
At twenty-eight, Dale Urban was doing very, very well. At about that time, Gloria Setzer entered his life. There was no question about her being a bit ditzy, but that appealed to him. Unlike other women he knew, she seemed unimpressed with his money or lush lifestyle. Her one goal in life was having fun. Yes, and sex.
That went on for a few years. About the time they’d decided to cohabitate, his business had grown to include other opioids, including counterfeit OxyContin and a new, more powerful opiate, fentanyl. For these chemicals he was the go-to man in British Columbia and beyond. This success attracted two organizations: the Canadian Revenue Agency and organized crime.
By the time of Gloria’s departure, Urban was already making plans for a more secure lifestyle. He made a preemptive deal with the crime cartel that was muscling into his territory. He offered to turn over his clients in return for becoming their sole distributor in another city. It was a win-win deal, and they took it.
He already had enough money to set himself up in a shell business that would accomplish two things he lacked in Vancouver: respectability, and a vehicle for laundering his money. But where?
Large cities like Calgary, Regina and Winnipeg were becoming saturated. Edmonton, perhaps, but he’d burned too many bridges there while at the university. He looked further east to Sault Ste. Marie.
At first, he deemed the area too small, but a visit there revealed a market almost completely unserved, plus there was an equally attractive market just across the border in the U.S.A. Something he’d learned about certain drugs was how easy it is to pass them, undetected, through a border.
After his years of selling opioids in British Columbia, Urban had accumulated enough to easily buy two failing Sault-area shopping malls, refurbish them, and offer incentives for new, more attractive tenants at the same rent. He had no interest in making the ventures anything but break-even. He purchased a handsome, sprawling three-bedroom ranch on the St. Marys River and a view of the huge ore boats as they passed. After a little over eighteen months, Dale Urban was established…a respected business man in the city of Sault Ste Marie, Ontario.
Unfortunately, Joey did not take the move well. His behavior did not allow him to tolerate change, and something about the house here was repugnant to him. “It stinks!” he’d insisted many times before Mrs. Pearl suggested that the boy literally did smell something bad.
Urban was at the point of not knowing what to do with the kid.
Six
Marly pushed the box with the last slice of pizza across the table to Eddie. “Take it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah really, for chrissake!”
Eddie bolted down the wedge.
She waited for him to finish. “So, you got a job, or anything?”
“Huh?”
“This place…taxes, upkeep, lights. You gotta live.”
“Had one. Canadian Tire. Christmas was done, and they laid me off. Been lookin’ for something.”
“You good at anything? Finish school?” she asked.
“Barely. I did pretty good in school until my last year. Started fighting with the old man and stuff. That year my grades went to shit. My ma wanted me to go to college, but we couldn’t afford it. Coulda had a scholarship but that year fucked it up. Did you?”
“Finish? No. Took off in my last year. Stupid.” She steered away from the troubling subject. “How come you owed that creep with the neck tat money?” she asked.
Eddie seemed to stiffen at the mention of the man. Instinctively his hand rose up to touch the bruise on his face.
“Let me guess. You still owe him.”
“Something like that,” he said.” Then he added, “Worse.”
She waited.
“I lost some shit of his.”
“What?”
“A bag of meth. Worth maybe six, seven large.”
“Cripe! How in hell?”
“I got to know Nick, ‘cause I went to high school with his younger cousin. We were at his shop one day. Everyone knew he was a dealer. I was really desperate for money at the time. It was stupid, but I told him I could move a bag to some guys I know. Maybe because of his cousin, he gave me the stuff to sell. Told me to keep anything I got over five thou.”
“Go on.”
“I got the shit kicked outta me and lost the bag.”
“So, you owe him five tho
usand dollars?”
“More, now. He’s charging interest.”
Marly suddenly felt a twinge of empathy for this guy whose fortunes had turned to crap, much like her own.
“How about your family? Would they help?”
“I told you my father died four years ago. My ma’s living off her older sister. She’s got nothin’. Five thousand might as well be fifty thousand.”
“Your ma and pa split?”
“I gotta admit he was a bum to my ma, but he was here, and I wanted to stay in town with my friends.”
Marly considered how similar this was to her experience in Toronto; always in debt to her handlers. Maybe Eddie could pay off his debt like she and the other girls did for their rent, food, and protection. “You ever think of workin’ it off?”
Eddie looked at her like she was crazy. “I don’t want to go near that guy unless I’m in the middle of Queen Street with cops on every corner.”
“Just sayin’.” She picked up the empty pizza box and threw it in the trash. “You do nothin’ and that dude’s gonna have you beat to a pulp, or worse.”
~ * ~
The following morning Eddie woke to the sound of activity upstairs in the kitchen. His bedside clock read 5:40. It was still dark outside the tiny basement windows. He recalled her complaining about her 6 to 2pm shift at the restaurant. It wasn’t long before he heard her footsteps in the hall, the front door open and close, returning the house to silence and his own thoughts.
Last night she’d been telling him he needed to get off his ass and do something about Savos, or else. Not like he didn’t know it! Of course, she was right, but work the debt off? Savos was a crook. Doing what?
Twenty minutes later he was dressed, looking for something to eat in the newly organized refrigerator. Organized or not, it offered little in the way of sustenance. The last of the orange juice would have to do.
He’d slept poorly, thinking of what he might have to say to Nick Savos today, but she was right; he couldn’t avoid facing him sooner or later. He threw on his jacket and trudged out to the detached single car garage. The old wooden doors swung open to reveal the hazy headlamps and cracked windshield of a nineteen eighty-six Ford Taurus sedan.
Eddie drove the car whenever he had enough money for gas, or when absolutely necessary, such as now. If he was going to face Savos at his shop, he damned well wasn’t going to rely on the bus for a potentially rapid retreat.
~ * ~
He knew Savos was there. The gravel lot contained two cars, one of which was Nick’s red and white vintage Corvette parked next to a blue, late model Ford pickup. Beyond, over what had once been a filling station, a sign read in large red letters: SAVOS CUSTOM AUTO.
If Nick Savos ever had a customizing business, Eddie didn’t know it. Since that first day his school chum brought him there for a score of oxy, that same old 1956 Chevy was in the bay, wheels missing, up on four stanchions, its interior gutted, and a patina of dust on the grey undercoat paint.
No, Savos had another source of income and the source of Eddie’s problems: drugs.
Shortly before his father died—not from a heart attack, as he’d told Marly, but from complications from booze and COPD—Eddie had gotten hooked on pills.
The death exacerbated Eddie’s chemical dependence. By the time he met Savos, he was addicted to prescription OxyContin and short of money, having dipped into the small equity of the house his father had bequeathed to him. His high school friend, Tommy Salerno, told him to ask his cousin Nick for a favor.
Savos had seventy-five, maybe eighty percent of the drug trade in the Soo, and wanted more. Eddie knew a guy who wanted to make a major score. Savos relented and let Eddie in on the sale, offering him ten percent. It was a mistake for both. Eddie was badly beaten while having the drugs stolen. Savos was out a little over $3,000 (he’d told Eddie $5,000).
Eddie pushed open the door where Savos stood, hip draped over the corner of his desk. The door swung shut, closing off the noise of traffic visible on the street just outside the dirty front window. Eddie blurted out the words he’d rehearsed in his mind.
“You fuckin’ kiddin’ me? Why would I give you a job?”
“So’s I can work off what I owe you.” Eddie searched Savos’ pitiless face for any sign of acceptance.
“Bullshit! Sell something you got…that house, your car, for chrissake!”
“The car’s a piece of shit, Nick. I could get a couple hundred, maybe. The house is mortgaged already. I blew through that money taking care of my old man and living for the last five years.”
Savos moved off the desk and put his face up to Eddie’s, their noses almost touching and Eddie could smell his coffee breath. “Sounds like you got a problem and wanna make it mine. Get the fuck outta here and get up five and a half big ones. I know where you live. I wanna see a big dent in that by—”
“Nick!” The word came from a chair in the corner of the office. Eddie had been so focused on seeing Savos he hadn’t noticed someone there.
Savos turned. “Yeah.”
A large guy who Eddie knew only as “Teach,” in his late twenties, his well-built body underpinning a brutal mug, his sleeveless tee revealing well-tattooed arms, moved to Savos’ side and mumbled something Eddie couldn’t make out. The man had a thick, black hairline that seemed to compete with heavy eyebrows for a small amount of forehead space. A quarter inch of black stubble completed the simian impression. If Savos was an intimidating presence, his henchman was that and more.
Savos listened, shrugged his shoulders, and said something back to the ape-like man who returned to his perch.
“You got a registration for that heap?” Savos said, walking to the window and appraising Eddie’s Taurus.
“Uh…yeah.”
“Driver’s license clean?”
Eddie smiled. “I don’t drive it enough to get no tickets.”
“That mean ‘yes’”?
“Yeah, Nick. It’s clean.”
Savos’ dead eyes bore into for several seconds before he spoke. “Sit down over there.” He pointed to a chair by the desk and sat opposite. “Here’s how it’s gonna be.”
Seven
It was three in the afternoon before Eddie heard the front door open and close. He was waiting in the kitchen when she returned downstairs from her room.
“Geeezz!” Marly cried. “You scared the crap outta me!”
“Sorry…I just…” He wanted to tell her his news for some reason, knowing it was none of her business. But he’d shared his problem with her, and after all, she was the one who prodded him to face Savos. She’d been right.
“Just what?”
“I did like you said…talked to Nick.”
“Yeah?”
He told her how Savos said he could work off his debt by running errands in his car.
“Pay off five, maybe six thousand by running errands?”
“Some of them would be ‘special’ errands—like crossing the bridge into the States. A hundred each time.”
“Sounds fishy. So, that’s what…fifty, sixty trips? How often?”
Eddie confessed he hadn’t asked.
“He still charging you interest?”
“I guess.”
“Eddie! It could take you forever.”
He resented her throwing cold water on his good news and showed it. “I got no choice! At least he’s not busting my balls!”
Marly watched Eddie slump into a chair at the old wooden kitchen table. He was right, she supposed. What else could he do? She looked in the fridge for some of the orange juice from this morning, but it was gone.
“I’m going to the store. I got paid today. I’ll get us something for dinner.”
The comment elicited a muffled response, and she left him there. She knew she had no obligation to help Eddie, but she had to eat anyway, and the rent was too good to pass up. If he kept out of trouble, she had a place to live.
~ * ~
It was not quite 4pm when
Urban returned home. Mrs. Pearl was sure to be collecting Joey from his after-school program. He’d just made it home in time. The traffic on the bridge and through customs had been horrific and he wanted to secure what was in his attaché before dealing with the confusion Joey always created.
He entered his office, placing the attaché on the desk, and pushed aside the heavy credenza behind his chair. Two of the square foot parquet tiles came loose to expose a metal plate.
From his attaché he transferred sixty-five thousand U.S. dollars to the space under the plate. It was a disappointing week’s take from his Northern Michigan distributors.
This would be the last time he would chance moving drugs or cash over the border. He needed separation and deniability from day-to-day functions of the trade, and Nick Savos would provide it.
It had taken a long time, but he had come to trust Savos…a thug, but a careful, disciplined thug. Savos had been his distributor for all of Algoma, which included the east coast of Lake Superior and half way to Sudbury. The man had been a player in the supply of heroin and cocaine in the area and knew the ropes when Urban came to town.
It didn’t take long for Urban to single Savos out and convince him that opioids, particularly fentanyl, were more profitable. They’d since forged a successful business arrangement. Now was a good time to cut Savos in on the northern Michigan trade. With that came the transportation risks. His visit to Michigan was a disappointment, and further justification for his decision to turn the distribution there over to Savos and his associates.
Urban’s share of the fentanyl market in Northern Ontario had grown to almost sixty percent and was still increasing. What inroads he’d made in Michigan had receded in recent months. The market there was too big to ignore. He knew Savos had the muscle to either drive competition away or turn them into his own dealers.
One thing was certain: Urban’s China source via Vancouver was better quality and more consistent than the mom and pop labs prevalent in the Sault and across the border. With a trusted distributor, the sky was the limit. He replaced the flooring and moved the credenza back into place. Mrs. Pearl and the boy would be arriving any time.
Steel Town Page 3