Everything to Nothing

by Mark Henthorne

  This enabled Peter to buy a luxurious apartment in the city, a new car and he was never short of attractive women to take to bed. The humiliation he had suffered at the hands of Reg had long been forgotten and as the months rolled by Peter’s influence over the business increased.

  It was his idea to expand the business into selling Crystal Meth, but over the years Reg had become stuck in his ways and refused to digress into such an unknown quantity, preferring instead to stick with the drugs he knew, cocaine and heroin. It took Peter over a year of persuasion. He showed Reg statistics of how it was more addictive than heroin and cocaine, how the rush lasted a lot longer than either of these drugs, how the courts were seeing more crystal meth addicts through them than heroin users recently.

  The winning argument though was the fact that they would lose all the expenses of importing the drug into the country because crystal meth could be manufactured so easily and cheaply. Eventually he obtained permission from Reg to use some money to set-up a small lab in a room in an abandoned warehouse on an industrial estate on the outskirts of the city.

  With a simple search on a popular internet search engine he found the ingredients and how to make it. After quite a few failed batches he thought he had the correct compound but in order to make sure he would have to inject it into a human. There was no way he was injecting the vile substance into his body so he simply got a van and took two homeless people off the streets, a male and a female, and restrained and blindfolded them in a cage in the warehouse. Over a few days he injected the drug into them analysing the affects and making slight amendments to the compound until his analysis showed that their bodies were responding to the drug in the expected manner.

  After he had finished with them he dumped them back onto the streets and made a call to one of the company’s trusted sellers. Peter gave him a supply of the drug and told him to sell it and to use his experience to judge whether the addiction rate was high.

  Two weeks later his seller reported back to Peter clamouring for more of the crystal meth. He was selling a large amount to the same people day in, day out, which indicated a high addiction rate and those people were informing their friends of the new powerful drug with the intense high that lasted for at least double the length of a heroin high. With this news Peter got some more resources to work in the lab to up the production. Once Peter had a month’s worth of strong sales recorded in his ledger he reported back to Reg.

  ‘The uptake has been, well, phenomenal Reg. The addictive nature, the long high it gives to the user. The dealers I’ve been using have reported the same buyers buying more and more. I took the sellers off the street one night to experiment, and when they returned there were damn well near enough riots! You know those scenes you see in Africa of the starving people fighting over the food? It was like that!’

  ‘And these figures are right, one hundred percent accurate?’

  ‘You know I don’t fuck around with my accounting. They are accurate.’

  ‘So including set-up costs you made a profit in the third week?!’

  ‘Yes! I’ll be honest with you, after salaries have gone out at the end of the fourth the profit was smaller, and after I gave the lads a small loyalty bonus for keeping this quiet I made a slight loss over the whole month, but next month with no set-up costs and no bonuses, well, you can see my sales predictions for the quarter, half-yearly and full year over the next few pages.’

  ‘Wait outside why I read it.’

  This was a big decision and Peter was used to being dismissed so Reg could think in private. He paced outside Reg’s office for what seemed like an eternity while Reg was considering Peter’s figures and looking for any flaws in his accounting.

  As usual, Reg quickly realised he was wasting his time trying to fault Peter’s maths. Once he had all the information and had digested it Reg made his decisions quickly and it was not too long before he called Peter back in. ‘I think your sales are optimistic.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘You heard.’

  ‘I think they are realistic.’

  ‘Justify them.’

  ‘I’ve seen it. I’ve watched the druggies come out of whatever holes they live in and buy so much of the fucking drug that in an hour my sellers have to go home! Believe me, they are not ambitious predictions, if anything they are understated predictions!’

  ‘So you think that if you doubled the size of production it would be sold?’

  ‘I think if we tripled production it could be sold, but one step at a time.’

  ‘Yeah, one step at a time. Is the place you’re using now big enough?’

  ‘Yes. And I was going to tell you that I’ve got it in plan to rent out other warehouses in different areas of the city. I’ll set up a moving production line. One month we are in warehouse A, in the third and fourth weeks we set-up warehouse B. At the end of the week four we move to warehouse B, close down warehouse A, and in the third and fourth week of production at B we start to set-up warehouse C, etcetera.’

  ‘Good plan, but we’ll go through some warehouses.’

  ‘Well, after a six month break there is no reason why can’t move back to warehouse A. If it was under surveillance it wouldn’t be after six months of no activity being seen there.’

  ‘Right. Double production. Whatever resources you need you can have. Report back to me in a month. Make sure this does not detrimentally affect our sales of H and C. Keep those going in case all this explodes in our faces.’

  ‘It won’t, but of course I will. I’ll set the balls rolling straight away.’

  With a shake of their hands, Peter left Reg and made some phone calls to start more production of the drug with the full intention of doubling their output and income. It was not long before the city, towns and cities nearby were awash with the drug.

  *

  With a now practiced hand and a quiet click the lock was opened and the door was silently pushed open. The burglar could not believe the number of houses out there that still did not have burglar alarms or had inadequate security, so with a quiet chuckle she crossed the threshold of the house and took the stairs up to the bedrooms.

  Upon entering the master bedroom she carefully opened drawers until she found one full of jewellery which she sifted through, placing the more expensive looking items into the bag that hung at her hip. With equal care she closed that drawer and opened more, a big, toothless smile flashing across her face as she found a stash of cash which she again placed in the bag. Crossing the bedroom she opened the wardrobes, standing on tip-toes to look for anything else that could be easily sold. Another smile lit up her once glowing eyes for a moment, before the eyes dimmed down into the dark soulless pits they had become. She had spotted a shoebox, but was disappointed when she opened it and just found some papers, one of which was a marriage certificate.

  After she had taken the lighter out of her pocket, simply out of spite she burned the certificate, watching the ashes cascade like grey snow into the shoebox. Placing the shoebox exactly where she had found it, near enough to the millimetre, she proceeded to look in the rest of the drawers and wardrobes in the master bedroom and all other rooms, taking as much care in these rooms as she had in the master bedroom.

  By the time she was ready to leave, she had found more jewellery and more cash. Some of the jewellery had belonged to the owner’s great-grandmother and due to Sarah’s care it would be two days later, when the owner went to get a pair of earrings, that they realised they had been burgled. With a frantic search of the house in case her husband had for some reason moved them, the family heirlooms could not be found and it was only when she found the burnt marriage certificate did she tearfully call the police.

  But Sarah had been careful by wearing gloves and any evidence that may have been left had long been walked on or vacuumed up in the intervening days. When the police came, the owners could not even tell them the day they were burgled, only the day of discovery. Of course, by then Sarah had sold the jewellery to a pa
wn shop and had blown the cash on a new drug that she had just discovered.

  *

  Sarah still funded her drug addictions by prostituting herself which was still her main source of income, but she had taught herself how to pick locks and this subsidised quite nicely the money she got from whoring. With a now rare flash of intelligence, she had thought about burgling and had used an internet café to access certain pages on the World Wide Web that explained the method. With a little bit of practice on her locks at home, she had managed to keep hold of the council house she had lived in with her mother, she was soon able to open standard door locks and it was not long before she was opening other people’s door.

  The first three times she had burgled she had done it quickly, noisily and left one hell of a mess, even defecating on the bed of one of her victims, using their pillows cases to clean herself with. But after the third time the victims had returned sooner than she had expected and Sarah had to drop out of the bedroom window, spraining her ankle in the process. As soon as the owners entered the bedroom they knew they had been burgled so they of course instantly called the police and Sarah only just managed to hobble far enough away to avoid detection.

  As she waited the next day for one of her regulars, she contemplated how it had gone so badly wrong. She decided there was not much she could have done about them returning home earlier than expected, but if they had not known they had been burgled it would have bought her more time. She contemplated this some more while she grunted and yelped her fake pleasure as the regular was taking her from behind in his marital bed on top of a layer of his wife’s lingerie.

  It was a long time since she could last remember enjoying sex, the activity that only a year ago was second to only oxygen in a need for a body. Now it was just a way to earn thirty or so pounds a session, and this guy always tipped if Sarah allowed him to dress her in his wife’s lingerie. If it meant an extra ten pounds he could have dressed her in a Minnie Mouse costume never mind his wife’s expensive silk lingerie.

  With a loud groan he sprayed his seed into her to which Sarah responded with a loud moan of her own and while she was moaning along with rotating hips coaxing more groans out of her client, Sarah hit on the idea of creating the scenario that the victims did not know they had been burgled. If she was clever and careful about it, it could be days before they realised they had been turned over. Perfect!

  As he cleaned up Sarah took off the lingerie and put on her own clothes not bothering with underwear as it took more time for clients to take off. On average, wearing underwear took up an extra five minutes per session, multiply that by six and it worked out as an extra session a night.

  She accepted the money and the tip and they left the lawyer’s five bedroom detached house, taking his expensive Lexus back to the red-light area. After pecking his cheek and muttering her thanks, she got out of his car and checked how much money she had in her small, cheap, shiny plastic handbag. She could feel that she was getting irritable and was starting to sweat. Really she wanted one more session so she could get a little food tomorrow, but she knew that if she bought what she really wanted now she would not feel hungry anyway so she walked a couple of streets until she found the guy she was looking for.

  ‘Hey Sarah. How are you?’

  ‘Not bad. And you?’

  ‘Getting by, getting by. What you after tonight? Got some H on cheap, or two for one on big bags of Charlie. Got some crack and some new crack pipes. How does that sound?’

  ‘You always try to sell me what I don’t want. Give me ninety pounds worth of your finest mind blowing crystal meth.’

  ‘Roger that. Good shit this Sarah. Very good batch. For a shag I’ll chuck in an extra bag?’

  Irritated Sarah said, ‘Fuck you,’ and flicked her middle finger at him. ‘Give me it. I want to go home.’

  ‘Okay, okay. Only trying to have a joke honey.’ Her hands were shaking as she reached into the bag and he noticed that there was a layer of sweat on her brow despite the chilly night. ‘Looks like you could do with a shot straight away never mind waiting until you get home.’

  ‘No, I don’t. I’m fine. Here.’ She handed over the ninety pounds and she got a couple of small bags in return. ‘Is that it?!’

  ‘Times are hard Sarah. Costs are rising with this flamin’ credit crunch. More buys less now for all of us unfortunately.’

  ‘Right. Fine.’

  She snatched the drugs out of his hand and decided to get one more client so at least she would not have to walk home. It did not take long for her to be picked up and she serviced the client quickly, eager to take the drug. Sarah in the recent months since she had discovered this drug had tried taking it in numerous ways, from snorting and smoking it to swallowing it or placing it in her anus. Tonight she decided to smoke it so she got her short pipe and placed some of the drug in the cup. Using her lighter she lit the meth and inhaled deeply, loving the feeling of the euphoria as it quickly washed over her.

  Recently though she had found it necessary to take more and more of the drug to reach the same level of high and the affects of taking a drug that produces about five pounds of toxic waste for every pound of meth produced was showing its hold on her already heroin ravaged body. She was already malnourished after taking the heroin, but now the only word that could be used to describe her face was gaunt and her breasts were now nothing more than empty sacks of skin. But it was the hidden damage she was doing to her body that was slowly killing her.

  Currently she had not slept for five days, yet she had had sex fifty times, thirty of those unprotected. Unknowingly and luckily for her two of the men she had used protection with had the AIDS virus, but someone had given her Hepatitis B. Right now after taking a large amount of the drug she was experiencing a form of toxic psychosis and was hallucinating, muttering and mumbling to herself. Her heart was struggling to deal with the intense chemicals rushing through her blood, and her lungs were rasping and crackling as she took quick shallow breaths. It was a combination of all these symptoms of intense drug use that would lead to Sarah’s death.

  Chapter 38

  ‘Look, don’t be so nervous. I’m sure he’ll be fine.’

  ‘You’re the first boy I’ve ever introduced to him.’

  ‘Look, he let us take the jet, he let us take the yacht for a week and he hasn’t even met me so surely that is a good sign?!’

  ‘Oh, I meant to mention that to you. Don’t speak to him about that. I told him I was with Michelle.’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘I asked him because I had ruined the weekend could we relax on the yacht while studying. He was reluctant at first, but it would have been a firm no if I’d told him I wanted to go with you.’

  ‘Sally, I really wish you hadn’t done that. Not exactly the best start is it?!’

  ‘I suppose not, but it was all I could think of at the time.’

  ‘Great. So if he finds out he’ll think I’m a liar too.’

  ‘If he does find out, which he won’t, I’ll tell him you knew nothing about it.’

  ‘Yeah, and I’m sure that’ll go down like chilled champagne.’

  ‘Speaking of champagne, do you want some more?’

  ‘Great first impression Sally. “Hi daddy. This is my boyfriend, David. Don’t mind him though, he’s pissed!” ’

  ‘You’re funny David! Have some more. Dutch courage and all that.’

  ‘Okay, okay. Go on then.’

  Sally reached for the bottle of champagne and lifted it from the cooling cabinet of the Rolls-Royce. ‘We’re nearly there.’

  It was a glorious summer’s evening and David looked out of the window. ‘I know where we are. My garage is not far from here. In fact, I drive along this road sometimes when I feel like a fast drive. Good road this. You don’t live… Nah, you couldn’t, could you?’

  ‘Could I what?’

  ‘Live… Oh my, you do! The number of times I’ve driven past this mansion and wondered who lives here!’

 
; ‘Well, now you know!’

  Majestically the massive gates opened and the Rolls sedately drove through them onto the long driveway. In the distance, over the folds of the land, David could see the mansion and his heart missed a beat as he realised it was the place he had looked down upon many times from the hill he could now see in the further distance.

  As they drove along the drive, Sally indicated a track leading off through a coppice of trees. ‘We’ve got stables down there. I’ll introduce you to Storm later and I’ll trust her judgment implicitly so if she doesn’t like you you’ll be dumped!’

  ‘Gee, thanks Sally! That lake looks lovely, as does the island. Do you ever have picnics out there? I bet it’s lovely on a night like tonight.’ David looked across at Sally and he could tell that something he had said had upset her.

  ‘Erm no, not exactly. My mum is buried on that island.’

  ‘Oh bugger, sorry Sally. Trust me.’

  ‘It’s okay. You’re right though, it is a lovely island. My mum loved it out there, boating on the lake. A part of me wishes my dad hadn’t buried her there because it has, of course, never been the same since, but she is resting where she was happiest so I suppose that is for the best.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose. How long is this drive? And how big is that house? It already looks huge from here but we don’t appear to be getting any closer!’

  ‘The drive is just over two miles long. Oh goody, he’s here! Well his helicopter is here so that’s probably a good sign! You never know if he’s going to turn up or not because he’s so busy.’

  ‘No getting out of it then.’

  ‘No, you’ll be fine.’

  ‘Are you sure because I’m not.’

  Sally did not reply. Instead she took his hand and grasped it, stroking it tenderly. Shortly the car pulled up in front of the mansion and David saw the man he had seen in the pictures on the internet at the top of the steps up to the huge doors. Almost before Sally could stop him, David was opening the door to get out of the car.