Painkiller, Princess

by Chester Gattle

  He turned his head to her. “Why would he be setting me up?”

  Missy shrugged, staring down the hall at the back door. “Maybe he tracked Quincy down, but the sicario bribed him. Now he and the sicario are over there waiting for you to knock on the door like a dolt.”

  “And Terrance Hamilton? Who’s that?”

  “I don’t know, Jacob. I have no clue. That’s why I called the police.”

  “Something’s going to happen. Something bad. I just know it. Gregory’s going to flip. He’s going to kill Quincy.”

  “Jacob! Don’t say that.” Missy groaned and leaned her head against the back of the chair. She let out a deep sigh. “I just want this to all be over. Why can’t this be over?”

  “It will be. Soon,” Jacob assured her. “It won’t go on forever. It can’t. Whoever’s putting out this order is going to get killed or arrested or something. They always do. It’s the cartel.”

  “And then what about the next guy?”

  “He’ll have his own problems. His own agenda. I’ll be forgotten.”

  “So we’re waiting for some drug boss to get himself killed? That’s the plan?”

  He reiterated one of Missy’s favorite inspirational quotes, something she put on Instagram all the time: “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Then, taking Missy’s silence as a sign she believed there was some merit to his point, he repeated, “This can’t go on forever.”

  “But long enough to drive me insane.” She then jumped as her phone started ringing. “Hello? No, nothing’s changed.”

  Jacob bounced from the couch and pressed his nose against the window.

  “Okay. Thank you.” Missy hung up and joined him.

  “Can’t see much,” Jacob said, shifting around, trying to get a line of sight to the neighbor’s. “I’m going outside. Just down there, where I can see.” He pointed to a weedy batch of trees near the road.

  Before Missy could give her thoughts on that, he was out the front door, scurrying down the hill in a crouch, phone in hand.

  Just like the old days.

  If you could consider earlier that year the “old days.”

  What a wild ride that’d been, stalking that drug dealer in Gold Medal Park. And the ride had just gotten crazier and crazier. And deadlier. But there’d been a lot of good. Most important, he and Missy had saved those trafficking victims. And Morena was going to grow up in a loving family now. He’d nearly killed himself (and Missy) numerous times, but he’d do it all again if he had to (assuming the same result). And soon, when his book came out, it could be used as a platform against human trafficking. A cautionary tale. A plea to stand up and fight. Or so he hoped.

  Near the road, there was a pine tree as thick as the brute who’d attacked him at Fitger’s, and he pressed against it, his phone held high.

  The police officer was ringing the doorbell.

  The door snapped open. A dark-haired, tanned man (definitely not Gregory or the sicario) answered. Terrance Hamilton? The two spoke for a minute. The man appeared to invite the officer inside, gesturing to “come on in,” but the officer declined. Another minute of conversation, then the officer shook Terrance’s hand, waved at someone in the house, and returned to his squad car.

  The scowl on Jacob’s face remained until the police cruiser had passed. He went trudging back up to the house.

  Gregory’s screwing with us.

  Missy opened the door, and as he slipped inside, she asked, “Quincy wasn’t there?”

  Jacob deleted the video he’d taken. “The cop just stood at the door and chatted with some random guy.”

  Missy’s phone rang. She said, “The police,” and put it on speaker.

  The dispatch operator told her what Jacob already knew: the officer hadn’t found anything related to their dog or the man who claimed to have him.

  Missy asked the operator, “So what about our dog?”

  “Just keep looking for him,” the operator said. “That man, Gregory, he’s trying to scam you. This happens with lost dogs.”

  “But it’s not a lost dog,” Missy said. “The cartel—”

  “I understand, ma’am. If Gregory contacts you again, call us back. It’s likely the house he wanted you to go to is someone who’s working with him in the scam, but at this time, there’s nothing we can do.”

  “The officer didn’t even go in, though,” Jacob said.

  The operator, without missing a beat at the sound of the new voice, said, “Sir, the house appeared normal.”

  “Who answered the door?” Jacob asked.

  “The homeowner.”

  “Are you at least going to search for him? For Gregory?” Jacob pressed. “He sent us a selfie with our dog. He’s got him somewhere.”

  “Yes, we’re doing what we can. If we find him or your dog, we’ll notify you.”

  Jacob rolled his eyes as Missy thanked the operator and hung up.

  “Do you see how big that house is?” Jacob grumbled, gesturing out the window.

  “Kind of,” Missy said. “The trees block it.”

  Jacob’s phone then came to life. “Shit. It’s Gregory.”

  “Answer it,” Missy cried.

  “No, it’s just a text. It says, ‘Dick move. You want your dog? Don’t send the cops. You’re not getting out of paying me my finder’s fee.’”

  “He’s the dick,” Missy said. “Ask him why he wasn’t at the house.”

  Jacob did. “He says, ‘Multi-step process. Money first. Dog second.’”

  “Ridiculous,” Missy groaned. “What a greedy asshole.”

  “Still think it’s a setup?”

  “I’m calling the police back.”

  “Wait. Just hold off. Let me get some proof. I want the cop to actually go in next time.”

  “Proof? Isn’t the text proof enough?”

  “I want video of him inside the house or something. Maybe a picture of Quincy.”

  Missy stared out the window, biting a finger.

  “I’ll take my pepper spray. If he confronts me, I’ll light him up.” Jacob waved a hand, canvassing the area all around him.

  Missy said, “You’d better.”

  He nodded. “Be right back. I’m going to go see about our dog.”

  XIX.

  Day Thirteen, Still Tuesday

  Three Dead

  Jacob went out the back of Emmelia’s house, where there was a small deck just off the nook, and headed east, parallel to the road, until there was no way he’d be spotted crossing over to the neighbor’s property. Under the chorus of frogs partying in a nearby pond, he crept through the pines and birch trees toward 1925.

  For some reason, this side of the road was lousy with cockleburs, and by the time he got close enough to catch glimpses of the house through the branches, his jeans were covered in the tenacious, prickly seed vessels. He could ignore most of them, but the clump hanging from his crotch was a real troublemaker and took several hard whacks before it finally went flying into the weeds. After sending Missy a text, he pushed ahead, using the glow from the house to help guide the way until he stood at the edge of the woods. As a prop plane droned by overhead, he studied the prairie-style home.

  Nobody was upstairs—the top-floor windows were completely dark—but there seemed to be life on the ground floor. Light and shadows were bouncing around within the rooms. He even had access to two of the three windows. (The third was near the back of the house, where the ground dropped steeply to accommodate a walkout basement.) He’d get his proof no problem.

  When the plane’s buzzing had faded, Jacob knelt and listened. The frogs in their pond. Branches clicking in the breeze. An owl’s fluttering as it went from one tree to another. A rustle of furry feet bouncing through the undergrowth. There were numerous unseen activities.

  But what’s in the house? Where’s Gregory? Where’s Quincy?

  He heard nothing from 1925, not even the steady whirring of an air conditioner. Given that the temperature was in the mideighties, it wa
s surely on, just probably between cycles. If he gave it a moment, it’d turn on again. Then he could use it as cover to advance upon the house.

  He patted himself on the back for thinking of that. He could be a proper spy with this kind of street-smart thinking.

  While he gave it a minute, he sent Missy a selfie with the house in the background, nearly clicking a button that would’ve also posted the photo to Instagram. Just a brain fart away from broadcasting his location to the world. Not so spy like anymore, are you?

  Focus. He turned around and faced the house. The man who’d answered the door (“Mr. Terrance Hamilton”) was standing near a window. Terrance was thin, almost gaunt, and looked surprisingly like Marc Anthony. He pulled a bag of chips from a cabinet and disappeared.

  Then that’s the kitchen.

  A second later, in the rightmost window, another man, his head shaved bald (Not Gregory. Where is Gregory?), stood and took the bag from Terrance.

  That’s the living room.

  Jacob watched for a few more minutes, but when a wolf howled in the distance, he figured it was time to move, with or without that air conditioner.

  As he crossed the lawn, the cockleburs clinging to his jeans bristled and pricked at his thighs. He slipped between two boxwoods in the decorative rocks that circled the house and leaned against the siding, flicking away what he could of those damn cockleburs.

  When most of them were lying in the rocks, he inched over to the living room window, and with the carefullest of peeks, gathered more intel.

  Terrance and his shiny-headed buddy were lounging on a leather couch, the chips between them, watching a TV just out of sight on the wall shared with the kitchen. A previously unseen third man (still not Gregory) was relaxing in a La-Z-Boy, a leg dangling over one of the arms while a pistol balanced on the other.

  Jacob dipped away, nostrils flaring, lungs filling with the wooded air. He gripped his pepper spray, understanding now. Or at least parts of it. Not everything fit together, but he had enough of it.

  Missy had been right. It was a setup. But it went deeper than that. Gregory had been playing them all along. Locating Quincy had just been the most recent bit of it.

  That’s why he didn’t mace the sicario in the parking lot.

  Gregory was actually working for the cartel. He’d tipped them off about Days Inn, and before that, he’d tipped them off about Fitger’s. He’d been helping them every step of the way.

  And that’s how she escaped.

  Gregory had been waiting below the balcony with something soft for her to land on. Four stories was much too high from which to jump, so of course she’d had help. And these men inside 1925 were the reinforcements. This was their Duluth stash house. How’d that cop not know?

  The gears in Jacob’s head then really got going.

  It’d been Gregory who’d shot at him at the state fair. And it’d been Gregory who’d set fire to their apartment. And then, after failing twice, Gregory had recruited some professionals. Except the first two had done no better, so an entire crew was now here to take care of the job.

  It was all coming together, and the clarity of such an understanding draped Jacob in a false confidence. He was going to get them all arrested. In thirty minutes’ time, it’d be all over social media: #JacobDoesItAgain. The woods would be alight with the flashing blue and white of a dozen squad cars up and down the street. Gregory and his cartel friends would be marched from the house in cuffs.

  Jacob pushed his phone above the edge of the windowsill and recorded the men for half a minute. He then snapped three pictures for good measure before crouching in the rocks to inspect their quality.

  Decent. Other than the gun beside the man spread eagle in the chair, the scene looked regrettably innocuous. In the last photo, someone had been coming up the stairs behind the La-Z-Boy. Jacob zoomed in. He’d only captured the top of the person’s head, but the jet-black hair with a smooth, clean part in the middle was clearly not Gregory.

  Jacob snuck another peek through the window, but this new mystery person wasn’t there. How many people are there?

  And what else is there?

  The stash house he’d uncovered in San Diego had contained millions of dollars in cash and 450 kilos of cocaine. What was here in Duluth? Would it shock the city to know? He had to find out.

  Jacob sent Missy a quick text: “These guys are going down.”

  She replied with a series of question marks, but he had no time to answer. With the situation as it was, and him having the element of surprise, he had to inspect the rest of the place now.

  So he started recording another video and shuffled to the center window. He got some footage of hickory hardwood cabinets, light granite countertop, and shiny black appliances, but no black-haired sicario or Gregory or Quincy or anything of real interest.

  Moving on…

  Jacob crawled from the bushes and snuck down the yard to the basement, where a deck with skeletal legs of timber hovered above a slab of concrete. He gazed through the nearest of two broad windows.

  In the center of the dark space, a carpeted L-shaped staircase and a patch of vinyl flooring at its base were illuminated in a faint light flowing down from the first floor. But other than that, there was nothing to be seen. The basement was empty. He tiptoed to the glass door between the windows.

  Why he felt compelled to do what he then did never revealed itself again, but in the moment, it was what he felt absolutely needed to be done if he was going to get Quincy back and put an end to all of this.

  He tried the handle, and the door clicked open. Jacob turned the phone’s camera on himself and gave it a look of surprise and intrigue. “Wow,” he mouthed.

  In San Diego the DEA had been the ones to actually uncover the drugs and cash. In fact he imagined when they’d been making their discovery and counting the money, he’d been still stuck in the tunnel, barely alive. This time around, though, he had a chance at it. He’d hold up the stacks of paper; he’d count the bags of illicit drugs; and his followers would see he was really truly in the thick of it. Tina would absolutely freak with delight when he sent her the selfies with piles of cocaine and dollar bills in the background. Maybe he could arrange the cash into the shape of a chair and perch atop it like the man in the La-Z-Boy. King of the bills. How much money would that have to be? Millions?

  Would anyone know if I took a stack or two? He could just chuck it into the woods and get it later after the police had left.

  No, that was something Gregory would do. Not him. He couldn’t let himself get greedy. Or distracted. He still hadn’t even found anything yet.

  Jacob breathed deep and wiggled the door, testing the hinges. They made no sound, so he poked his head inside. The view was no better than before, but now there were sounds—the TV in the living room, someone’s rubber-soled steps on hardwood—and smells—wet cardboard, microwave popcorn, and sweet lilac perfume.

  Stepping in, Jacob’s eyes locked on two slivers of light beneath two doors in the back of the basement. Their stash. He gave the staircase a wide berth, proceeding on tiptoes, ready to bolt the instant it sounded like someone was coming down.

  Every muscle in his body was wound up like a spring-loaded trap, but at the same time he was almost giddy, nearly chuckling at what he was doing. Earlier that year, he’d nearly shit himself as he’d followed a small-time drug dealer down the bright, busy streets of Minneapolis. Now he was sneaking across a basement in a house that belonged to the cartel. And four of them are right above me! He’d come a long way.

  As he passed the stairs, he snapped on his phone’s flashlight and pointed it at the nearest corner, illuminating an unfinished wall. He swung the phone to his left, to the opposite corner. The same setup: two-by-fours, sheets of drywall, and a faux-wood door.

  His phone gently vibrated—a text from Missy, surely—but he’d get to that in a second. He turned to the nearest room for a closer inspection.

  ~

  Emmelia was driving home, t
he café having closed for the day, trying to understand what would compel someone to lace her opioids with fentanyl. The margins were good—fantastic, really—and the product was excellent. There was no need to mess with it, especially with something as unwieldy and lethal as fentanyl. Thankfully no one else had been killed because of Gregory Johnson’s greed and stupidity.

  But between that girl’s overdose and Bump’s slaughter, things had gotten tight around the city. She’d had to scale back on her shipments to little more than a trickle. Her buyers in Canada were already threatening to go elsewhere.

  And now she’d have to cut Gregory off. He accounted for about five percent of her volume, but it had to be done.

  She still couldn’t believe he was such a rock-star salesman. She hadn’t even known he’d existed until now. But they’d get to know each other quite well soon enough. Barry was waiting for her to give him the go-ahead and pick the guy up. Then there’d be a day or two of “discussions” and coming to terms and warnings and apologies.

  The timing of this, however, depended on her new roommates, Jacob and Missy, and how long they stayed. Could be a day. Could be a week.

  She’d originally wanted to kidnap the psycho and his girlfriend and just truck them out of town (like what the city did with the black bears that occasionally wandered in). Just get them out of sight and hope they never came back. She had a few bottles of xylazine, the horse tranquilizer, in the back of her fridge that would work. The tranquilizer, leftover from her delivery days, was long expired, but it was still potent enough to put a person down. (For a hundred dollars, Barry had let her test it on him.)

  Of course, there was the possibility that it wouldn’t work on Jacob, that animal. The fury he’d unleashed on Bump had her worried.

  Miraculously, though, she hadn’t needed to fret. Jacob and Missy came running right into her arms, just plopped down in her café and asked to be carried away to sanctuary.

  Right this way, please.

  So now instead of drugging and hauling them a hundred miles away under the cover of night, she could just casually work on convincing them to leave on their own accord. Go up into the Boundary Waters or somewhere. It’s so much safer. Duluth’s too crazy.