Painkiller, Princess

by Chester Gattle

  PAINKILLER, PRINCESS

  Chester Gattle

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, incidents, and institutions are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author’s use of names of actual persons, places, and agencies are incidental and are not intended to change the fictional character of the work.

  Copyright © 2020 Chester Gattle

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of very brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  For Quincy

  You served as no inspiration for this book

  Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

  — Mike Tyson

  I.

  Day One, Thursday

  In fifteen days, eight people would be dead. Right now, however, Jacob was just trying to finish his book about how he'd uncovered a trafficking ring on the border of Southern California and saved the lives of four little girls. His literary agent, Simon Halloford, was saying the story had the potential to be big. It was courageous, heartwarming, and inspiring, and with the right—and timely—marketing, it could rise above the sea of social garbage that overloaded John Doe consumer and grab his attention just long enough for him to click “buy.”

  The agent extraordinaire had reached out to Jacob immediately after the news outlets had picked up the story, and he'd been telling him ever since that the book was destined to be on all the best-seller lists. "Everyone's going to want to read about the geeky scientist from 3M—no offense—who took on the cartel. I guarantee it."

  Jacob honestly had no idea if that was true. He hoped so. He hoped it would launch his writing career, but he'd had enough failures in life to know better than to get too excited.

  Still, it was hard to keep the enthusiasm down, especially once Simon got his best friend, LA-based talent agent Tina Turner, to do the pre-marketing. Tina Turner (whose parents had a sense of humor that trumped their sense of parental duty) loved, loved, loved Jacob's story. "How can anyone not just gush over this?" she'd said. "You saved a bunch of innocent, doe-eyed children from the cartel. That's pure gold."

  But Tina, like Simon, knew this story was just a spark. It had to be fanned fast and furious if it was to ignite into a roaring fire of stardom, so Tina got to work, assiging her best publicists, social media gurus, and influencers to the task of exposing him to the world.

  And just like that, he had accounts on every social media platform imaginable, plus some not even the most social media–savvy tweens knew about, like Glurk, the online community for lurking but in a safe, non-threatening way (it had its niche). Then the interviews were scheduled, starting in Jacob's hometown of Minneapolis, which was why the story was even more amazing. He'd just been visiting Southern California when all the cartel business had unfolded. "Unbelievable!" Simon and Tina kept saying.

  Jacob got on WCCO, KARE 11, Fox 9, and MPR. He even got an appointment with the Star Tribune’s premier food writer, Nacho Friend. (Tina had apparently told Nacho that the cartel had fed Jacob some very interesting food items while holding him captive, but Jacob had to admit that it'd only been expired milk glopped over stale Cheerios. Nevertheless, Tina still got Nacho to print the interview. She was very good.)

  After the local media blitz, word spread. The Late Late Show with James Corden called (Wow!), so Jacob flew to LA for a small skit with the affable host involving goggles, an air cannon, and fifty pounds of powdered sugar. Then Good Morning America called, so he flew from LA to NYC for a more traditional chat. Then he had to return to LA for a podcast with a nineteen-year-old YouTube sensation who had more subscribers than there were people in Minnesota.

  As this circus went on, Tina’s team blasted Jacob’s social media accounts. His Instagram followers hit fifty thousand, then a hundred, then a quarter million. His Twitter followers were closing in on seven figures. Each post received more attention than the last, and soon every post, no matter the content, had thousands of likes within minutes.

  Jacob could barely keep up. He didn’t even have time to think of the repercussions. His little adventure had left two members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, a.k.a. the CJNG, dead and a string more arrested. Uncovering their trafficking ring that stretched from Mexico City to San Diego would cost them millions. If he stopped for a moment to think—if any of them stopped for a moment to think—they might have backed off some.

  Jacob’s girlfriend, Missy, tried to raise the alarm, but her voice was drowned out by Tina’s and Simon’s voices on his other shoulder, goading him toward the wondrous goal of worldwide popularity and fame. Jacob liked these ego-inflating whisperers and told Missy what Tina and Simon had told him: the cartel wouldn’t dare try something in the United States.

  It also was hard for him to listen to Missy when Simon already had publishers making offers with astronomical advances. Jacob had even quit his job at 3M to focus on writing and marketing. He and Tina’s team kept pounding social media with tidbits regarding his heroics and random cartel facts. To keep things from getting too dark and depressing, especially when it came to the cartel, they would add a random, quirky post about Quincy, the pug Jacob and Missy had gotten three years ago from the Northern Illinois Pug Rescue & Adoption Center. Quincy had a chronic eye infection that gave him a hideous yet endearing quality.

  Tina really had done a fantastic job creating a go-to-market strategy for the Jacob White brand. In fact, one of the reasons she had flown to Minneapolis today was to walk Missy and him through the updated digital strategy. Missy, a Google AdWords exec, grilled Tina pretty hard on the metrics over dinner, but her inquisition had drawn back once they were out roaming around the Minnesota State Fair on a zero-humidity August day.

  “I think we should post something about Morena,” Tina said, standing near the grandstand in the center of the state’s largest fair, hordes of people passing by. She held in her hands a bowl of sweet-corn ice cream and a cup of F. Scotch Fitzgerald, a blended Scotch rickey. Props for their next photo op. When Missy returned from the restroom, it’d be “Smile!”

  “Maybe,” Jacob said as he caught several boys sneaking a glance at Tina who had her own Instagram account with about fifty thousand followers (half of them creeps) liking and commenting on her workout routines and weekend outings.

  “This ice cream actually smells pretty good,” Tina said, sniffing the pale-yellow scoops topped with candied peanuts. “Still wouldn’t eat it.” She was an avocado toast kind of girl. Long blond hair, tall, swimmer’s body. Like many in the crowd, she had the face of a Norwegian, but her tan was darker, more permanent, as she had been born and raised in SoCal.

  “It’s starting to melt,” Jacob warned.

  “It’ll look fine. You won’t be able to tell.” But still, the second Missy stepped up beside them, Tina shoved the ice cream into her hand. “Quick.” The F. Scotch Fitzgerald went into Jacob’s. “Get close, you two,” and Tina got more photos.

  As she sent the frozen memories to her team in LA to alter, filter, and post, Missy took a tiny bite of the ice cream. She fake gagged and chucked the rest into the garbage.

  Jacob sipped the F. Scotch Fitzgerald. Not half bad, he thought and kept hold of it as the three of them merged into the crowd and continued on, searching for the final photo op.

  “I was telling Jacob we should post about the adoption,” Tina said to Missy.

  �
�I don’t think so,” Missy said. “Not that.”

  “Why?”

  “Isn’t it in poor taste?”

  “Not at all. I’m thinking just some generic comments. Nothing personal. Just ‘We applied to adopt. Wish us luck.’ And then some updates here and there.”

  “I’d rather not,” Missy said. “Maybe when we actually know we’ve been approved.”

  “You’d get a lot of pity points,” Tina pressed.

  “I think you and the team are doing good enough as it is,” Jacob chimed in.

  Tina shrugged. “That the cookie place?”

  “That’s it,” Jacob confirmed.

  A canary yellow building with a red-and-white-striped awning held sway over an eager, cookie-loving mob.

  Tina grabbed his arm and pulled. “Let’s get in line.”

  “Careful. My shoulder.”

  “Oh, sorry.” She let go. “Forgot.”

  “It’s okay.” He pressed the watery Scotch drink against the now tingling area where the ligaments and tendons had been battered, stretched, and torn from a year of adventure. The worst of it had happened during his escape from the cartel (he’d wrenched his shoulder from the socket to get free of their handcuffs), but before that, a baseball-bat wielding drug dealer had beaten it to a pulp.

  “When’s it getting fixed?” Tina asked.

  “December third.”

  “That’s right. No book readings that week. Shame it has to be a week.”

  Jacob reminded her, “My doctor wanted two. And I don’t get to play pond hockey at all this year, so a week’s not really that bad.”

  Tina looked at him like she wasn’t even sure what that meant: pond hockey.

  “You said you were going to take your hockey gear out of the back of the Honda,” Missy reminded him.

  “Yeah, I was,” he said, “but there’s nowhere to put it.”

  “I can make space in one of the closets,” she assured him.

  Jacob nodded and continued moving with the mob in their slow march upon Martha’s Cookies.

  Tina said, “This place must make a fortune.”

  “Makes millions,” Jacob told her. “Not bad for twelve days’ work, huh?”

  “Is that how long this goes for?”

  “Twelve days,” Missy confirmed. “It gets like two million people.”

  “Who owns it? The fair?” Tina asked. “Like who do these vendors pay to be here? They must be loaded.”

  “Missy’s theory,” Jacob said, “is that the fair is owned by a syndicate of old-money families in Florida. But I don’t know if I believe that.”

  “It’s true,” Missy said. “They don’t want anyone to know that, so they’ll never confirm it, but that’s the truth.”

  “Florida families own the Minnesota State Fair?” Tina took a step closer to the cookie shack that was making the air taste of chocolate and sugar.

  “And they’re raking in the money,” Missy added. “Every vendor, every music act, every carnival ride. Even the state pays them to use the State Fair logo in tourism brochures.”

  “I still can’t believe how many people are at this thing,” Tina said. “I didn’t even know there were this many people in Minnesota.”

  “Minnesota’s not that small. There’s five, six million people here,” Missy told her.

  “I think there’s four million in LA, so…”

  “Bet we’ve got more deer here,” Jacob chided. “A million at least.” He checked his phone for confirmation. “Yeah, there’re more deer here than kids.”

  Tina scanned the crowd. “It’d be a good place for a book signing.” She pointed at her sandal-clad feet. “Put your table right here.”

  “And I’ll set Quincy next to me so he can stare at everyone with his bad eye until they break down and buy a book.” Jacob laughed.

  Missy turned to Tina. “Was that in your marketing strategy? Intimidation by pug?”

  Tina nodded. “Right between the brand messaging and customer characterization.”

  “Ah. Missed that.”

  They closed in on the shack (a miniaturized cookie factory), where an army of yellow-shirted, borderline child laborers hustled about pushing racks of small slightly underbaked cookies from the cooling area to a team scooping the treats by the dozen into plastic buckets. Runners grabbed the buckets and slid them across the counter to the customers without missing a beat. When the three of them reached the counter, they ordered two buckets, were promptly provided said buckets, and then summarily wished an enjoyably sweet day.

  Wiggling their way out of the mob, they inevitably lost a couple of cookies from the tops of the overflowing buckets, adding to a layer of stomped, doughy mash that the night crew would shovel up and truck over to the animals in the petting zoo once the front gates closed.

  Tina grabbed two glasses of milk from the Minnesota Dairy Association’s “all-you-can-drink” stand next door, handed them to Jacob and Missy, then positioned her photo subjects near a massive viewing window on the side of Martha’s Cookies. “Perfect,” she said, taking the hundredth photo of the day.

  Jacob quickly nudged Missy from the cookie hut as a family of seven (all the children under ten) came running over to press up against the window and ooh and aah at the cookie-baking action within.

  “I’m ready to head out,” Jacob said, finishing one cookie and grabbing another.

  Missy handed her bucket to Tina. “You take it. Too much sugar.”

  “Why would I want that?” Tina said.

  “I’ll eat ’em.” Jacob gave Missy his glass of milk and took the bucket, cradling both in his arms like newborns.

  Tina took the 101st photo.

  Eyeing his twins, Jacob said, “Think how productive I’m going to be. All this sugar. I won’t sleep. Just write, write, write.” He turned to Tina. “The book’ll be done by Monday.”

  She laughed. “I wish.”

  “You doubt the power of sugar?”

  “I doubt the power of sugar,” she confirmed. “Now maybe if it was cocaine…”

  Missy chuckled. “That’d be ironic.”

  “Or just use a ghostwriter if you want to finish it fast,” Tina offered.

  “No. No ghostwriters,” Jacob said, biting a cookie in half. “Hate ghostwriters.”

  “You’d be surprised—almost everyone does it.”

  As he chewed, he asked, “If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?”

  “I have, yes,” Tina admitted. “Bungee jumping.”

  Missy asked, “They have a bungee jump here, don’t they?”

  “It was taken down,” Jacob said, still chewing. “They were playing fast and loose with the weight restrictions. Got messy.”

  “Jesus. Really?” Tina asked.

  “Nobody died, but yeah.” Jacob popped the other half of the cookie into his mouth.

  “Glad we skipped the rides, then,” she said as they walked out the front gates.

  The Honda Fit, a red hatchback, was parked at the curb just a few blocks from the fair, a rare find since most people who arrived anytime after the crack of dawn had to park at least a mile away (or shell out thirty dollars for a closer spot in someone’s driveway or lawn). They’d lucked out, though. They’d come rolling through just as a family of four had had their day cut short by what appeared to be an untimely vomit session, judging by the yellowish stains on their child’s shirt. As Jacob had turned the corner, they’d been climbing into their car.

  Now, that timing was proving even more apropos, as it meant Jacob wouldn’t need to lug ten pounds of cookies to a car halfway across the neighborhood. Cradling the buckets in one arm, he fished his keys out of his pocket. Missy and Tina waited by the side of the car, the remark about bungee jumping having induced some comments about skydiving.

  No one saw the shooter, but they heard the shot, and they saw the cookies in Jacob’s arm explode in a spray of dough and chocolate.

  Jacob and Missy, still on edge from their misadventure with the CJNG, hit the
ground without hesitation. Tina just stared.

  “Get down.” Missy pushed the back of the publicist’s knees, buckling her leg, and she went tumbling to the grass.

  Jacob scooted around the car. He checked himself. No blood. No holes. No pain.

  Missy flicked her head right then left. She gasped.

  A lone figure was making his way down the sidewalk toward them. He looked like any other fairgoer, dressed in a Minnesota Twins T-shirt and cargo shorts, except he had a pistol at his side, both hands clasped over the grip, and a steely determination in his eyes. He was yelling at them.

  Jacob pushed at Missy and Tina to run.

  The man shouted louder. “Stay down! I’m a police officer. Stay down.”

  II.

  Day Two, Friday

  El Avispón, the boss of the Tijuana plaza, stood on his balcony in shorts and bare feet, looking at the Pacific Ocean, its color reminiscent of the first piece of jewelry, a topaz ring, he’d bought his wife. He tried to keep that happy memory in mind while he interrupted the man on the other end of the phone. “I still don’t get it. Why the hell’d you drive back to Chicago?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. I didn’t.” The voice came through rough and scratchy, as if there were a bad connection, but it was just how the man, Anthony “Pretty Boy Bump” Williams, spoke, the result of having his throat cut when he was ten. “Never left. That wasn’t me.”

  El Avispón, or just Avispón if one dared to be boldly informal, considered Bump’s claim of innocence as an osprey flew by with a fish in its talons. He’d seen the same osprey the other day, except instead of a fish, it’d been a human hand. The birds in this area could be aggressive, especially the monstrously sized seagulls, but they weren’t so aggressive to separate a man from his hand. The osprey had gotten a leftover scrap from some grisly cartel work down the beach.

  Avispón had actually known the hand’s owner, a low-life sicario who’d tried to kidnap his daughter a few weeks back. He couldn’t remember if he’d instructed his men to keep the sicario alive after the hand’s detachment. In any case, the man wasn’t going to be grabbing his daughter, or anyone else’s, again.