by E. R. Brown
I sneaked around back for a peek in the kitchen, where I’d taught myself to cook food that Beth could keep down and that Bree wouldn’t leave on the plate. I was certain I’d see stainless steel and granite going in where the painted plywood cabinets used to be. Beth used to get all political when the working-class houses were torn down or renovated, which I thought was weird, coming from someone who sold paintings to millionaires and corporations. The instant my foot touched the back stairs, spotlights clicked and a thin siren wailed. Motion detectors. I backed off, but not quickly enough for old Mrs. Stephanados, who still lived across the lane and was still a nosy pain in the ass. Her porch door opened.
“I call the police!”
I waved to her, since I’d never be heard above the siren, but she scurried inside and came back waving the cordless phone like a weapon. I’d have thought she’d know my face, but things must look different when the place is lit like a prison yard.
I backed to the laneway between our place and Mrs. Stephanados’s, where a Dumpster was filled with what used to be our kitchen cabinets and walls. This would be my memory of the old place: an overflowing bin of trash.
People with money. I hiked over to a bank and cashed out the credit card before Randle had a chance to empty the account on me. Call it severance pay. On the way to the bus depot I picked up a decent pair of jeans, and the first really nice skate shoes I’d ever owned. I also found a decent gift for Rachel’s grad: a nice charcoal-grey shawl with tiny Czech crystals woven through. The salesgirl convinced me it would go with whatever she chose to wear.
The cab driver robbed me, $75 for a half hour’s ride from the bus depot. By the time I got home Beth and Bree were asleep. They didn’t seem to have noticed I’d been gone.
Chapter 9
“So this is the dopemobile.” Rachel giggled, nibbling a chipped black fingernail. “It’s pretty rancid-looking.”
“Fits right into the neighbourhood.”
The pickup was where Skip had said it would be, on the shoulder of a logging road that paralleled the river and the tracks, caked with red-brown dust from the rigs and trains that rumbled by. Last time I’d been in it was the Grampa Rambo run. It was deep, dirty green with tinted windows, with a tall, bulbous cargo cap, in that nauseating yellow colour that urine has when you’ve stuffed yourself with vitamins after a night of puking booze out of your system. A Mitsubishi Mighty Max, according to a bright orange decal, and it stank of ripe weed.
I was on some kind of probation. Not that anyone had said so, but it was obvious that I’d been given another chance, and that there wouldn’t be many more. For more than a week I’d waited, pulling coffees and watching the window and wondering whether it was really over. Was he just going to leave me alone, with what I knew? Apart from three or four names, I knew a lot of addresses, and faces, and all about Bullard and the Devil’s Own. Did Randle remember bragging about his secret side businesses, or had he been too stoned? And was weed like booze, where you forget what you said when you were wasted?
At the end of the week, I was walking home from Human Beans — Randle still had my skate deck — when Skip’s white van rolled up beside me. He told me when and where to pick up the truck for my day’s work. “It’s yours,” he said. “It’s protected, just like you, as long as you stay in Bullard’s territory. The cops know the truck too, some of them, and they won’t stop you unless you drive like a dipstick.”
I’d brought Rachel along because I remembered the truck had a manual shift. It was a calculated risk — I was definitely not supposed to let a civilian in on what I was doing — but the alternative was to go grinding gears all over the valley, and maybe breaking the transmission or getting into an accident. Not recommended in a truck filled with weed.
I circled the pickup, running a finger through its coating of dust. A faded sticker on the tailgate was from Orick Ford of Redwood County, Giant Trees and Giant Deals. The driver’s door had a foot-shaped dent, and one fender drooped.
I checked, again, with Rachel, “You’re good with this? Before we go any further.”
She laughed. “What, the bud business? My uncle Ralph grows weed on his share of the family farm. My dad acts like Ralph’s the family shame, but even he pitches in to harvest the crop. We used to have a big corn spread, he and my dad got half each. Dad said it wasn’t big enough for profit, so he leased his half and moved into town. Uncle Ralph found a way to make it pay. It looks like a cornfield from the road, but there are rows and rows of weed. You got keys for this thing?”
I reached under a front fender and found them on a tire, as expected, and tossed them over.
“At home we don’t talk about Uncle Ralph’s money, or his winters in Baja, not when Dad’s around. Whoa, that’s funky,” she said as the driver’s door sagged into her hand. She reached over to open my door.
“You can drive this thing?” I asked as I slid into the passenger side.
“I was driving a tractor when I was ten.”
Her competence never failed to impress. She twisted to find the seatbelt in the cramped cab, and as she leaned over to slip a hand into the vinyl bench, a soft nipple brushed my arm. I twitched at the touch, and she busied herself with the tangled seatbelt while the tips of her ears turned red.
As she adjusted the seat and mirrors, she adopted a businesslike tone. “Your friends couldn’t just leave the truck in front of the coffee shop?” she asked. “Not that I mind a five-mile walk on a hot day.”
“Not a chance. You can smell the load a mile away, and anyone who saw me get in would make the connection. Just about anywhere in Wallace is too public. A shopping mall parking lot, a gas station, they’ve all got cameras. Believe me, I’ve had the lectures.”
“You never learned to drive?” She steered the pickup onto the road. “Everybody wants to drive.”
“Not Beth’s Volvo. No one wants to drive that.” I didn’t even like the idea that she drove it. “You have to hold the ignition bracket with one hand and turn the key with the other. And remember to park on a hill in case the battery dies.”
“I was in for my test the day I turned sixteen,” she said. “Passed it first try.”
“What you think of this?” I reached into my wallet and handed her the fake driver’s licence.
She glanced at it as the truck came out of a curve, and frowned. “Jackson Mitchell?”
I told her how it had appeared, unearned and unrequested.
“Nice people you work for.” She made a slow blink of exaggerated surprise. “Well then, your first lesson is to watch my feet while I shift.”
I was not a natural. The truck was small, but in the wing mirrors it looked like a semi trailer stretched out behind me. I had trouble with its sluggish steering, and a harder time with the clutch. Reaching the pedals was hard, and I either stalled the engine or hit the gas too hard, spinning the rear wheels in a drag-race shudder that nearly slewed the tail into the ditch and spun dirt and rocks across the road as I whipped the wheel back and forth. Rachel was patient, and I got better, but not much, and the only way to do the day’s work was for her to drive. I hoped the tinted glass would hide her.
For Sale signs lined the entrance to the three-storey Tudor-style apartment building on the northern outskirts of Soowahlie. I guided Rachel to the parking entrance around the side, then down to the basement garage. The security camera was conveniently shattered.
Rachel waited while I carried the cash upstairs and knocked on the door. The peephole darkened, and the door swung open.
“You’re new.”
The girl was pale and pretty, with her hair under a knit cap with earflaps and tassels. There was someone in the back too, a guy who glanced at me and disappeared into the kitchen. He was about her age, mid-to-late twenties, with a plaid shirt and stringy brown hair. The hallway was lined with a dozen heavy-duty plastic garbage bags, loosely tied.
The apartment was great — not much furniture, but sunny and clean. I could see myself in a place like it,
with a girl like this. She held the door open as I carried load after load down to the truck. When I returned to pick up the last bag, she was still there.
“Thanks,” she said, reaching out to touch my upper arm. “Will it be you next time?”
I nodded and shrugged.
“Good. Bye then.”
All that thanks. I guessed it was because I’d played dumb, like I’d never seen them before. She was a chai latte, and he was a double Americano, every time.
“Isn’t that a lot of weed for an apartment grow? Or is that normal?” Rachel asked, as I closed the passenger door. The truck was crammed with ripe green weed, and I was certain we’d leave a scent trail wafting behind everywhere we drove.
“It’s not one apartment, it’s the entire building. Look around, the garage is empty. Nobody lives here but the caretakers. It’s a factory, hoses and lights and fans on every floor. The elevator shaft’s been turned into ventilation, blowing the smell up to the top floor and out over the lake.”
“I can’t believe how totally you’re into this.” She giggled.
“It’s cool. It’s a whole world that I never knew existed. “
Rachel steered the truck into the gravel drive of the day’s drop spot, a medium-sized corn farm in the flatlands of the Fraser Valley. The grey Cavalier was parked by a chain-link fence alongside a truck, an old Dodge farmyard special with a missing tailgate. I told her to head to the far side where the Dodge would hide her from view, and to stay low while I delivered the product. I clambered over her and got out by the driver’s door.
There was nothing in sight but hundreds of acres of young corn and the highway, cutting across one side of the property, where a couple of pickups were slowing near the farm’s drive. As instructed, I passed through the chain-link fence gate, disregarding the warning signs about guard dogs, and knocked on the door of what looked like a mechanic’s shed. The cream-coloured metal walls and low-slope grey roof matched the farm buildings, but on a smaller scale. Surveillance cameras — real or props, I couldn’t tell — hung from the corners, pointed at the rollup garage doors and the aluminum storm door where I stood.
“Yes?” The door opened a crack, then wider. A twenty-something guy with thin, wispy hair gave me a hesitant up-and-down.
“Mr. Blunt —”
“Yes, yes, you have it or not?” He was wearing matching green shirt and pants that reminded me of a school janitor.
I started to tell him the cargo bed was squeezed tight with three grows’ worth, plus what been left in it overnight. I was trying to hint that it would go faster if he’d volunteer a helping hand, but he stood there looking somewhere over my head. The crunch of driveway gravel made me turn to see two big pickups wheeling in, with off-road headlights and gun racks in the rear window. Tall, skinny Ivan was driving the first; short, wide Bullard the second. They must have followed me here, or they’d been lurking nearby, but either way, my approach seemed to have triggered something. Suddenly I knew: the weed in the truck was for Randle’s secret side business. The business that Bullard and the bikers knew nothing about.
Bullard climbed down from his club-cab Ford and pointed at me, then the space beside him. I was kind of stunned, but I dutifully took my place at his side, keeping my eyes down. If they’d been following me, had they seen Rachel? I hoped she had the sense to sit tight, or better yet, to lay down on the seat.
Ivan strode over from his truck, looking like he hadn’t washed since I saw him last. His eyes were flat but alert, roaming the fields and the road, taking in everything but me. Bullard pushed past the guy in green and I crowded in after him. Ivan remained at the open door, arms crossed and silent like a scarecrow bouncer. He was either protecting his boss from whoever was outside, or making sure the rest of us stayed in.
By now, I’d seen enough operations and learned enough about the business to know a hash shop. There was a shelf-lined front room with a German-made hash press on a worktable, and a door of pebbled glass leading to the rear. The shelves were paint-stained and mostly empty, but the wall nearest the hash press was stacked with glass jars of crystal-encrusted green buds. There was a pollinator, an industrial-strength motorized device for separating leaves and trim from the valuable resin glands. On the lower shelves were foil-wrapped rectangles of hashish, stamped with the House of Dreams coat of arms and stacked like gold bars in Fort Knox. Sitting on the floor, a tinfoil ball in his hands, was a three- or four-year old kid.
Bullard pushed open the rear door and called, “Kennedy,” and waited. He gave me an appraising look while he waited for a reply.
“Yo, coming.” Randle’s voice echoed from far in the rear.
A moment later he strolled in with a nod and a relaxed smile, cleaning his hands on a paper towel. He nodded at me and said, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Have a seat, Bull, make yourself comfortable.”
Bullard remained standing while Ivan disappeared into the back, where I assumed there was a drying room with enough space to process the truckload of uncured bud I had in the truck. Randle and Bullard faced each other, Bullard acting like he had the upper hand, that he’d caught Randle at something. He didn’t look threatening. His attitude was more like a landlord checking on his property, or an insurance investigator or something.
The skinny guy in janitor greens — the kid’s dad, I guessed — kept swallowing, looking terrified and trying to hide it. Worried for his son, I guessed, although if it were my kid I’d be more worried about the chemicals and concentrated hash oil that might be on whatever he was putting into his mouth.
It felt like minutes before Randle spoke. “Tate, you might as well head on home. These people are going to be here for a while.” His eye caught mine. Get out of here with that load of weed before Bullard finds it.
I turned to Bullard for approval, hoping that my face wasn’t as easy to read as the caretaker’s. Had he or Ivan seen that I hadn’t unloaded, and that the pickup was crammed to bursting? If so, I’d be as guilty as Randle if I left now. If not, I could get out of here with Rachel undetected and save Randle’s ass at the same time.
Bullard shook his head.
“He’s in the way.” Ivan said from the back door. “This isn’t his problem.”
“Fuck.” Bullard was more irritated with Ivan for speaking out of turn than he was at me. “Get out of here, you. Go.”
I walked to the truck, feeling Ivan’s eyes on me. He’d resumed his bouncer’s pose, and if he was looking he could not have missed that I opened the passenger door, not the driver’s. He couldn’t have seen that the truck was loaded, because the cargo cap had no windows and weed isn’t what you’d call a heavy load, but as Rachel took us out of there I saw his head turn, following the departing truck. Was he trying to see who was at the wheel? I was certain that, tinted glass or no, Rachel’s silhouette couldn’t be mistaken for, say, Skip.
Chapter 10
The sun was already up at six in the morning, when I breached the gate to the unfinished sections of Heritage Properties. Only one switchback uphill from our nouveau-mansion neighbours with their groomed lawns and remote-controlled security gates, it was a zone of neglect, mud, mould, and decay, and houses that were old before they had a chance to be new.
I’d parked the truck up here for the past couple of days, still stuffed with the undelivered weed, while I pulled espressos and wondered about Bullard’s spot-check. Was the entire hash factory a clandestine operation, or was it Bullard’s operation and Randle was using it for a little extracurricular processing? It certainly felt like a surprise audit, and my load would have been a major problem. Where was Randle now? What happened if these guys caught you red-handed? Did they fine you, break your kneecaps, or worse?
Then Skip had stopped in for a carrot cake, and, acting totally James Bond, paid for it by slipping me a fiver that had a slip of paper tucked under it. Written on it was a time and an address where I could deliver the load. It seemed that we were still in business.
I called it
the tree house. Its front door was framed by these huge peeled-log columns, entire trees nearly. Inside, two more tree-columns supported a two-storey entrance with gaping holes where floor-to-ceiling windows would provide expansive valley views — if the house were ever finished. The back and sides were nothing but shredded sheathing paper. The exposed chipboard had swollen, warped, and gone grey. But the doors could be locked, and there was a four-car garage that hid the dopemobile from sight.
Months ago, during one of Beth’s bad days, I’d taken off and waited for her to chill out, going for a hike uphill through the unfinished subdivision. When I saw the tree house, directly uphill from Pop’s, it was a perfect escape. I popped the rusty realtor’s lock, swept out the mouse shit, and brought up a cooler and boom box.
I could sit on a folding chair borrowed from Pop’s basement and look down on our moss-covered roof, imagining Beth nibbling distractedly at her breakfast while Bree slept late, enjoying her first days of summer vacation. If the electricity had been run up this far, the house would have made an ideal grow op — no one ever entered the wasteland up here — but the gas and electrical lines had never made it this high.
In what would have been the great room, I saw a spot where some insulation had been pushed into place under a window. Lifting a flap of glass wool, I knocked and pried until I found a boxed-in section of plywood, and picked at the panel until I loosened it enough to pull it off. A hole in the wall, literally, and a perfect place to hide my growing stash of money. Robbie the Robot was full.