“Know? Lots of people.” She put her elbow atop some empty pallets leaning against the building, the smell of earth and grease drifting up from the raw wood.
“I need someone I can trust,” Bump said.
“Word is you’re in Minneapolis.” She knew he wasn’t, but it was time for some needling.
“The word’s wrong.”
“Looked like you. Black Talons? And the fire?” She picked at a sliver of wood. “That wasn’t you?”
“No,” Bump growled, emitting a sound akin to what she could only describe as gravel being crushed near a pond full of emphysematous bullfrogs.
“Really? Who was it, then?” Emmelia made her voice rise as if she hadn’t the slightest clue.
“Who do you know?”
“Eh. Depends. Who do you want to talk to? Are you actually going to Minneapolis or just looking to talk to someone who’ll do your dirty work for you?”
“I’m going.”
“I’m surprised.” In fact, she was amazed. She’d specifically gone after Jacob White because she thought Bump wouldn’t come to Minnesota in a million years, and thus, she could keep making him look like a total fuck-up as long as she wanted.
“Not my choice.”
“Avispón’s?”
“Who you know?”
Emmelia grinned. Avispón’s involvement was a lovely twist. You did not want to piss that man off. Bump had to be sweating. And, she realized, she could make it much, much worse for him. “Hold on,” she said.
She went into the roastery, took a photo of the café through the glass, and walked back outside. She texted Bump the photo. “What do you think about that?”
“You take that? When’d you take that?”
“Just now.” The picture was of Jacob White.
“Shit,” Bump muttered. “That’s your place, isn’t it?”
“It is.” She pulled a splinter from the pallet and flicked it aside. “So just be straight with me, what happened in Minneapolis? How’d you fuck up so bad?”
“I didn’t.”
“Come on. That wasn’t you? Looked like you. Except for the fact you didn’t kill him.”
“What’s White doing in your coffee shop?”
Emmelia smirked. “I remember you being better.”
“I’m coming up there.”
“He’ll be gone by the time you get here. How about I kill him? I’ve gotten pretty good since you kicked me out.” That was a lie. She hadn’t killed anyone since she’d left Chicago.
“Pretty good, my ass. Stay out of this. You’re just a damn distributor.”
“Bet I’m as good as you now.” There was no chance of that, but she was having fun with this.
“Pfft. Give me a break, Double D.” He laughed. Asthmatic toads.
“Screw you,” she said, the fun suddenly gone just like that.
“What’s wrong, Double D?”
“Fuck you and your nicknames.”
“I don’t know why you get so fussy over it. Duluth Distributor. What’s wrong with that?”
Everything. It represented the worst time in her life. It also represented the full extent of Bump’s treachery, apathy, and callousness. And he knew it. Which was why he’d only started calling her Double D once she’d left and couldn’t go back. He’d promised otherwise, but he knew the house she’d rented between 9th and 10th Street wasn’t going to be for just twelve months. He knew the job she’d picked up, making deliveries for a local vet, wasn’t temporary. He knew she was going to be driving through the countryside taking vials of xylazine, pellets of Absorbine, and aerosols of Prozap to farmers with housefly-covered cows and horses ripe with germinating bacteria for the rest of her life.
Still, Bump had insisted she’d only be in Duluth for a year; he’d said things just needed to settle down in Chicago. He’d said it was like his beloved Godfather movie. She was Michael Corleone, and she’d just killed the police chief—in this case the mother of a Gangster Disciple king (on Bump’s orders)—so she had to go into exile for a time.
Instead of Sicily, he sent her to Minnesota.
But the promised year came and went. Her desperation to return home to Chicago—she loved the city and she still (idiotically) loved Bump—grew, and she pleaded to go back, but he insisted Chicago was still too dangerous for his Double D.
He distracted her by putting her to work distributing some extra counterfeit opioids he’d overbought from Mexico.
Another year passed, Chicago quieted, but Bump still refused to let her return home. He sent her some more opioids, told her to keep distributing. “Keep it up, Double D.” He even connected her with his contact in Tijuana, the man called Avispón, so he wouldn’t have to deal with her anymore.
In hindsight, she was certain he regretted that decision. She expanded her operations, branching into the Dakotas and then up to Winnipeg. She recruited a dozen or so people to work for her. She absorbed the other small-time distributors in the area, and the few who refused to join her got pushed out. When she opened Coffee Princess, using it as a cover, her operations tripled.
After five years, she’d grown to become the queen of Duluth, running an operation that supplied the upper Midwest and central Canada with millions of dollars’ worth of opioids.
Bump was still comically giving her updates concerning the dangerousness of Chicago, but by then she didn’t give a damn. She had her northern kingdom, and Chicago was history. So was Bump.
In all honesty, it’d nearly killed her when she’d left him, even bringing her to consider suicide that first year (the xylazine could’ve done it easily enough), but then the part of her that loved Bump seemed to vanish or die; she didn’t know which, but it didn’t matter. Taking care of herself and building her empire had given her a new perspective.
She was now doing better than ever.
Yet, the fact still remained that Bump had lied and used her and nearly gotten her to kill herself, mocking her the entire time. Double D. Double D. A raspy, croaking Double D.
Perhaps what made it even worse was that nobody knew what he’d put her through. The man was a real suave, charismatic rat bastard. He had everyone fooled. He’d even managed to get his own brother thrown in jail while looking like he was the good guy. Had she refused to go to Duluth, he would’ve certainly found a way to get her locked away too.
She survived, though. She got through it. And now it was time to see if he could get through her little bit of manipulative reciprocation.
Good luck. The CJNG was now watching him, Avispón giving him ultimatums. How perfect was that? Bump was going to be absolutely screwed.
“Let me take care of White,” she said, goading him.
“You’re not taking care of shit. I’m coming up there.”
“He’ll be gone,” she warned.
“I’ll be there tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Bump’s urgency, she assumed, had to have been put there by Avispón. “Okay, but this isn’t Chicago. You treat this like Chicago, and you’ll get caught.” That was the truth. But she wasn’t so much as protecting him as she was protecting her own self-interests.
“I can handle it,” Bump said.
“You have to be quiet up here.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You think you can be quiet about it?”
“We’ll see,” he mumbled.
“And how about you don’t leave me a mess to clean up? Kill him this time, okay?”
The needling was getting to him. She could hear him grinding his teeth.
“How’s your mother doing?” she asked.
No answer.
“She ever ask about me? What about Devon? He good?”
Bump hung up.
Deserves everything coming his way, she thought as she stepped from the pallets and went back into the roastery.
Through the glass, Jacob was happily tapping away on his laptop. She’d been absolutely pissed he’d come to Duluth. She’d planned on staging countless failed attempts on his life�
��and ruining Bump’s reputation—but with him in Duluth, that’d all gone out the window. She couldn’t cause that kind of trouble in her own city.
She’d hoped burning his apartment would’ve gotten him to go home, but no such luck. He was hunkered down.
So now what? Well, that was what she had to figure out. She had the early nuggets of something, but she had to think about it more. Whatever the case, she absolutely couldn’t have Bump coming up here doing a drive-by or some other stupid sidewalk killing.
Leaving the batch of fresh-roasted coffee to sit in the cooling tray a bit longer, she strolled into the café, greeting a few of her regulars as she aimed for the center of the room.
Jacob was hunched over his laptop, typing, deleting, typing again; she stopped a few feet away. His typing paused, but he didn’t look up, deep in thought.
“How was the cappuccino?” she asked.
He lifted his face and smiled, but his eyes didn’t leave his computer. “It was good. Thanks.”
She reached for the empty cup. “I can take that if you’re finished.”
“Great. Thanks.” He glanced up to nudge the dirty dish to her hand. “You burn yourself?”
She touched the blister, a memento of how close Jacob’s girlfriend and their little dog had come to screwing her over. Who leaves a lit candle unattended? The fireworks she’d brought should’ve given her a good twenty seconds to get away. She’d timed the bottle rockets. She should’ve been down the elevator and in the lobby when they went off. It would’ve been another thirty seconds before the smoke alarms were triggered. Instead the whole place blew up in her face. Damn pug. “The roaster can get pretty hot,” she said instead.
“If you put aloe on it, that might help. I do that,” Jacob offered.
“Thanks.” Emmelia dropped her hand and asked, “How’s everything?”
Jacob leaned back. “Eh. Why?”
“I saw something on the news…”
“Oh. It was on the news?”
She nodded. “I forget where I saw it.” Excluding my firsthand experience.
“What’d they say?”
“Just that there was a fire.”
“Did they say it was arson?” he asked.
“Arson? No. Was it?”
“That’s what I’m being told.”
“Who did it?”
“No clue.”
“Anyone get hurt?”
“No. Even Quincy, our dog, got out somehow, thankfully.”
Because I didn’t want to leave him there to fry like a Thanksgiving turkey, she thought. “You going back?”
“My girlfriend’s putting what survived in a box and coming up here.”
“Oh. How’s she taking it?”
“She’s good. Taking it better than I am, actually.”
Emmelia had seen Missy’s Instagram posts from the previous night. One photo was of her and Quincy sitting at the top of the hill in Gold Medal Park. Their burned apartment, ribbons of black soot trailing up the building’s facade, was in the background. Missy was eating an ice-cream cone and doing just fine.
Emmelia asked Jacob, “So you’re just going to stay up here for a bit?”
“Might as well. Nowhere else to be.”
“Nowhere?”
He shook his head. “I feel pretty good here.”
“That’s good.” She’d change that.
~
Gregory had a lot of ways to make money. Unfortunately he always blew it trading high-risk options through his Robinhood app in an effort to hit it big like he’d seen some people do on Reddit’s wallstreetbets. There were guys there who would bet everything on a single options play and cash out a week later with hundreds of thousands of dollars. They called those bets YOLOing (“You only live once.”). Such was the power of options. It was a rush, but as a result of his own options trading, Gregory was still living with his parents, wearing the same sneakers he’d had in high school, and hoping his pet tarantula would die so he could stop spending money on its food. He was staring at the thing right now as it sucked on a four-cent cricket. Every penny counts.
But that was precisely why he was hunkered down at his workspace—an old recliner and a wobbly plastic folding table—toiling away with the pills.
Off to the side, a YouTube video about martial arts played on his laptop. Multitasking was a great way to maximize one’s potential. One of these days, his own YOLO would pan out. He just had to keep pulling in the money where he could, and then let it rip. YOLO!
The YouTube instructor, a slick, brisk-talking, no-nonsense bearded man was introducing a takedown Gregory hadn’t heard before. He turned his full attention to the video and watched the instructor’s two assistants perform the maneuver. He then watched it again before pulling himself out of the recliner to try the move.
He got carried away against his invisible opponent and slapped the side of the tarantula’s terrarium with a bang. The creature flared up, baring its fangs. “Go fuck yourself,” Gregory said, rubbing his knuckles.
He stepped back and tried the maneuver a couple more times until he had it down. Then it was back to work.
On the table were a mortar and pestle for grinding the painkillers, a mixing bowl for combining the resultant powder with a dash of fentanyl and a tablespoon of cornstarch, and a solid-iron pill press the size of a nineties TV that tested the table’s supports with every pull of the lever. The thing worked like a dream, though, just as the guy on Alibaba had said it would, so he kept at it, pulling and pressing like a madman.
His latest moneymaking venture, lacing painkillers with fentanyl and cornstarch, had the potential to be big. He had no doubt his customers would appreciate the adjustment. They were a desperate bunch paying a buck a milligram for the black market prescription stuff, which, depending on the dosage, could work out to as much as eighty dollars a pill, so they’d sure as hell buy this new concoction, which was twice as strong but half the cost.
The issue was whether he could avoid killing himself with it before he got it in their hands. This fentanyl was tricky shit. The Canadian woman he’d bought it from had told him about a customer of hers in Seattle who was a chronic nail biter, and after getting a few grains of it under his fingernails and not thoroughly washing after a mixing session, he’d OD’d while watching a close Mariners playoff game.
Even so, Gregory had inquired about the possibility of getting some carfentanil too. The Canadian didn’t deal in that, though. She said he’d have to go to China if he wanted carfentanil. Two milligrams of fentanyl was lethal, but just two hundredths of a milligram of carfentanil would kill you. He understood: if fentanyl was the Darth Maul of opioids, carfentanil was Darth Vader. It was the real deal and only a few select groups dealt in such death powder. Gregory had said he was good with the fentanyl and left it at that.
He hadn’t run the numbers, but the half gram of fentanyl he’d bought supposedly could kill 250 people. He was doing his best to distribute that half gram evenly among five hundred pills. Too much in one pill, and someone was liable to die. It seemed an almost impossible task to ensure such even distribution, but the profit margin was too good to ignore. The numbers he had run told him that the five hundred altered pills he could make would net him more profit than the five thousand Oxy pills he’d sold last year, so he was making a go of it. This potential gold mine would mean he could quit Uber, stop with the security gigs, and get off Fiverr. He’d collect enough cash with this to make some serious trades on Robinhood.
He’d keep his private investigation website up, though. Doing some PI work would be fun, or so he assumed. He hadn’t gotten any jobs yet, but it was only a matter of time. He was blasting those Google AdWords.
Gregory pulled down on the pill press; the table squeaked and shook, and a single pill slid out. He held it to the light. The pill looked almost identical to the real thing. He gave himself a pat on the back and popped out three dozen more, then packaged them four to a bag.
When the martial arts video
ended, he took a break and scanned the local news sites. He wasn’t a political guy, but the messed-up presidential election was good theater, so he watched a video about the day’s bickering. Once the video finished, the site suggested a couple of related stories, and Gregory did as any good web browser should do and clicked on one, then another and another. He ended up wasting half an hour, but then he came upon something really interesting.
He paused the video, studying the photo of some hot redheaded girl. He’d seen her recently. But where? Ah! He’d given her a ride home after Prince Fest. What about her? He played the video, and the voiceover said she’d died. Gregory’s first thought, having read too many cheap ghost stories growing up, was that he’d given a ride to a ghost, but after checking the date on the video, that clearly wasn’t the case. The video was yesterday’s news. The girl, the newscaster said, died from a fentanyl overdose.
“Shit. My bad,” Gregory muttered. He’d sold the girl a couple pills from his first batch. Obviously, he hadn’t mixed it enough. He was supposed to be acquiring new customers, not killing them. Well, he thought, live and learn. He opened the bags he’d just filled, dumped the pills into the mortar, then crushed and blended and mixed them just a bit more.
VII.
Day Seven, Wednesday
One Dead
Bump kept looking in the rearview mirror. The drive from Chicago to the northeast corner of Minnesota would be spent primarily in Wisconsin, a largely unbroken farm-tilled landscape that could either put a man into a thoughtless stupor or send his mind wandering to nonsensical locales. Bump fell into the latter. He was wondering if maybe the Sinaloa Cartel was behind this whole Jacob White mess. By his calculation, White was an elite member of the Sinaloa Cartel. The guy had wanted to be kidnapped in Tijuana, and once inside the CJNG’s operation, he went about systematically destroying it. Four dead and millions in cash and hundreds of kilos of drugs seized. An underground smuggling network dismantled. It was a real piece of work.
This theory made sense. Sinaloa was dying and desperate. The CJNG was taking over. White’s recent success would only delay the inevitable, but it would give the Sinaloa Cartel another day to pretend it was still in control of the plaza.
Painkiller, Princess Page 5