by Peter Craig
Choop gouged and stripped off the plastic wrap from Bennie’s face, peeling through it like molting skin. Bennie looked frozen in a scream, his open mouth pressing up against the clear bubble, his eyes strained, twisting like a fish on dry land. Choop scraped off the last layer, and Bennie gasped and recovered his breath, sniffling, mumbling in Spanish.
“That’s only thirty seconds, Bennie,” Jonah said. “You got to exercise or something, man. Do some cardiovascular. That’s just sad.”
The white kid by the front door yelled, “Iván’s bringing the car around.”
Jonah dropped to one knee, cursing and securing the cords, while Choop was peeling more wrap off the edge of the roll. He began encircling Bennie’s face again, this time so tightly that an immediate seal formed, fogging with breath. Bennie looked trapped under a sheet of ice. His feet wiggled and his tongue rolled out against the plastic, while Choop kept unrolling the sheets around him, thick as a cocoon, until his face was obscured under intersecting wrinkles, only one terrified eye visible through the folds.
“Jonah—oh my God!” Lydia was ducking away, reeling backward into the corner.
“Stay there, Lydia. If you leave this room, you’re in worse trouble.”
Lydia closed her eyes and heard muffled shouts and shoes scrambling on the linoleum, and the crinkling sound of the plastic condensing and settling over the man’s face. Jonah suddenly grabbed her, shook her, and turned her so that she was facing Bennie. “Open your eyes. Open your eyes, Lydia—right now.”
“No. Please. Jonah, whatever you’re trying to show me—I learned, okay? I learned. I’ll do everything right from now on. Please don’t kill him.”
“Lydia. Open your eyes and see this—now.”
She opened her eyes, and she was face-to-face with a man in his last gasping moments. Bennie’s eyes landed upon her, blinking against the compressed sheets. The veins in his neck rose into lightning-shaped streaks; his skin turned red, then purple. After a few moments, the twitching arms and legs accelerated like a suffering insect’s, until the eye lost focus and clouded, and a steam of breath spread around his mouth, a ghost caught in a plastic bag.
The dog whimpered in the front yard.
Lydia nearly threw up in the sink. She couldn’t believe how easy it had been; and she couldn’t stand the ripe garbage smell of the room any longer. The body slumped forward against the cords. Everyone inside was silent as the dog barked and the Impala hummed outside. It seemed to Lydia that she should do something, anything, grab the telephone or scream out a window. Instead she stood speechless, unsure if she was a hostage or an accomplice.
Jonah said, “Don’t pout over there. That was the easy part. We got a long day still. All my psychos get a bonus tonight, as soon as this is cleaned up. Me—I don’t get a damn thing. And I’m out sixty grand. How’s that for your education, Lydia? You just went to college in one fucking day.”
There followed a macabre rush of errands, the body rolled into sheets and lowered into the trunk, the house locked and sealed. On the drive away, Jonah sat pressed against Lydia, and didn’t say a word except to order Choop back to his house in the hills, where he and Lydia would switch cars. Once there, the Impala sped off, presumably to dump the body in some canyon, while Jonah ordered Lydia into the front seat beside him.
“Come on. You’re tired already? We just started.”
He drove in silence down the hill, and she realized from the wending of the car through streets in Hollywood that he was heading back toward the cottage. It was near dusk, the sun fallen behind phone wires and billboards and the ragged tops of palm trees, when Jonah lowered the visor, which cast a shadow across his face. He spoke straight ahead at the road and the thickening traffic. “You didn’t even say good-bye, Lydia.”
The shock of his tone, hurt and small, completely disarmed her. She began crying, leaning against her closed window.
“Do you have any idea how pathetic this is? Do you want to kill me, Lydia? I’m asking you straight out. Because I’d much rather you put a gun in my mouth.”
“Jonah—I’ll fix everything.”
“I’m not talking about that,” he said. “One load went out of the house a week ago, then another load went back in. The first load was cash, all of it, and it was just counted over the past two days down south. I got the news this morning: We’re light.”
“We’re what?”
“We made an agreement, and we’re both in this now. You’re not like Bennie. I do care about you, whether you believe me or not, and I tried to teach you something. I tried to make you understand—and you didn’t. But I’m not going to let your ignorance take me down here, Lydia. We’re down almost a hundred grand in this house. Where did it go?”
“Jonah—I never saw it, I never looked. I did what you told me.”
“You never did anything I told you, Lydia. Because you’re a child, and there’s only two things you know how to do: run away or throw a tantrum. The one thing I was worried about with you, Lydia—it’s turned out to be true. You’re weak. Too weak and too cowardly to stand up for anything or to be accountable. And now I don’t care whether you hate me or not—I’m going to show you something. You’re going to learn this lesson now—even if it kills you. Even if it kills me.”
After a few blocks of silence, Jonah spoke in a voice as slow and calm as a hypnotist’s: “We’re going to come up with the money, and we’re going to solve this problem. To do this, you’re going to do exactly what I tell you. You’re going to put in a real day’s work. Or there are going to be dead teenyboppers all over this city. Do you finally understand me?”
“I always did, Jonah,” she said. “I told you I did.”
“Then show me.”
Upon first arriving at the house, Lydia saw that the windows were smashed around the security bars; the door was loose and tilted against the frame. The mob had torn apart the house even more violently after she’d left. Inside there was shattered glass and bedrolls, moldering food and beer bottles; the floor looked like a homeless encampment, with tiny clouds of gnats swarming around wadded paper towels and perching on the open lid of a pizza box. Part of the kitchen wall was scorched black from a small fire, and, beyond it, the sliding glass door gaped open, shards across the linoleum floor and across the deck outside. Someone had attacked the drywall in one bathroom with either a bat or a crowbar, smashing holes into it; the metal door was missing from the fuse box, and the ceiling fan was uprooted like a flower.
As Lydia wandered the rooms, Jonah stood still in the threshold. She was ranting as she navigated the wreckage, but Jonah dismissed her promise that she could find the money. They’d never recoup the losses that way. She needed to carry out his specific orders. He explained the system of circulating money and merchandise. Whatever the load, it came from the border and needed a way station before it was divvied up and moved to distributors around the country. Los Angeles was simply the hub: So there was a massive raw tonnage of supply that sometimes needed to sit for days in limbo. The houses were mostly holding cash, waiting to be transported back south, where collusive banks would launder it. Some of the houses were currently holding shipments stalled on the way up—meant to head north or out to the Midwest. He knew a way out of this mess, a way to balance the books quickly; something he’d done before in a bind. Through his boys, he had connections to move crystal meth. They could extract bags of methamphetamine from the walls. With everyone together, they could step on the stuff in a few hours—turn a hundred pounds into two hundred pounds. Cut it with tetracycline and Epsom salts and flour. They’d undersell the competition, flood the markets—move the stuff rapidly at five grand or five-fifty a pound. But she had put them in this bind, and she would need to take the risks, starting with a first, tough errand. All during his speech his phone was ringing.
“When you get to the stash, it’s in one-pound bricks. Get a bag and fill it up.”
“Jonah, I don’t even know where it is.”
“You’ll
find it. If it’s still here. I’ll be back in an hour.”
For a few minutes, Lydia imagined herself running toward the boulevard, vanishing onto a bus and into afternoon traffic, but the idea of an unplanned escape began to seem even more dangerous to her, as if, like a mouse tunneling into a new room, she would only leave by the same route she’d come in.
She searched everywhere in the house. She found condoms, lost wallets, cell phones, panties, contact solution, unknown toothbrushes, and fallen earrings. The toilets were clogged, the shower didn’t work, the bathroom floor was soaked. There were 40s of malt liquor, wine coolers, Bacardi bottles, a residue of buds and yellow crust in the sink; there was a half-eaten ham sandwich in the refrigerator—but there was nothing Jonah described. With a flashlight, she crawled under the house, into a two-foot-high crawl space of chalky dust, cool and rank, and under a dripping portion of rotted linoleum she shined the light around the wires and the rusted conduits of pipes.
A shadow leapt and hissed at her, and Lydia dropped the flashlight.
She saw it retreat and realized it was a possum living under the bathroom. Her heart was racing so fast that she began laughing with relief.
She was just squirreling her way back toward the access panel when she heard a knock at the door above her. She lay still. The knock continued, picking up volume, sounding far away, as if she were down under a few fathoms of water. Whoever it was had a key, and she heard several distinct sets of feet move across the floor above her—an assortment of drumbeats crossing between the rooms. The voices were in Spanish and English, and someone was talking heatedly, his voice gathering in the pipes beside the bathroom. She heard a man cursing, but only the bad words had volume enough to penetrate the thick floor clearly.
She lay in the dark for a long time, then she crawled on her belly to the center point, lying under the joists, beneath the trickling pipes. She waited and breathed silently, and heard an argument trailing between rooms. Someone was rooting around in the bathroom, searching the medicine cabinet. She heard something fall, a scramble, a digging sound.
“It’s here,” shouted a man, his voice coming in a metallic echo. “All of it—it’s still here. Fucking cunt. We’re fine.”
Were these the men that Jonah worked for? She waited and heard the men tromp back outside, their voices diminishing, long unraveling sentences finally sealed off by slamming car doors.
The sun had fallen completely past the gables by the time she climbed back out, grime in her hair and under her nails. She rushed into the house, staying close to the walls. She didn’t take a single breath until she had shut herself into the bathroom. She looked down the drain; she searched the cabinets; she knocked on the walls. There was something hollow beyond them, an extra space, as in a false-bottom suitcase. One wall was rebuilt to create a pocket along the side of the house, but she didn’t understand how the men had access. She opened the medicine cabinet and saw all of her things piled haphazardly inside. She cleared off the shelves, shattering perfume bottles and makeup cases into the sink, filling the room with the cloying, department-store smell that Jonah liked on her. She grabbed the back of the medicine cabinet, trying to pry it open. It was screwed into the wall. Without a screwdriver in the house, she panicked and, with her hands trembling, tried to turn the flatheads with a nail file, a penny, and finally a paring knife from the kitchen. Eventually she worked off the screws until a panel fell forward into her hands.
She couldn’t reach down into the dark room beyond, so she climbed up with her knee wedged into the sink and squeezed through the open space, past the mirror still hanging open. She worked her way down onto the other side, climbing into a silo that stretched from the bathroom across the laundry room, filled with pressed walls of wrapped bricks.
Over the next frenetic hour, she threw the bags out; then she crawled back out, replaced the panel, and piled the compressed meth into her sleeping bag. She trundled it forward onto the porch, where—jolting with nerves—she dialed a taxi service and nearly cried to the dispatcher, who said it would take fifteen minutes. “I can’t wait fifteen minutes. I’m late for a flight.”
She dragged the bag down the steps and across the flagstone, and waited by the curb, where everyone’s trash was out but hers. She realized that she was talking to herself at full volume, and she stopped and paced in long lines and snapped her fingers, until, turning off the side alley, she saw Jonah’s BMW pull up across the street. He rushed out and took the sack, heaving it like a body into the backseat.
They drove through the traffic clotting around Olympic Boulevard. Both were quiet. A streak of headlights moved across Jonah’s face. Just past La Cienega, he said, “Don’t relax yet. We got a long week ahead of us.”
Compared to what she had been through that day, stepping on a hundred pounds of crystal meth felt like a slumber party. She stood across Jonah’s dining room table from Chase, the surly dealer from the San Fernando Valley, who lectured her about everything she did. Iván and Choop moved in and out of the rooms, and they each took little bumps of speed to keep their focus over the long night. It must have been past three in the morning when they all got the giggles. Working with scales and strainers, razor blades, pestles and mortars, chopping up piles of sugar and cold medicine, mixing it to Jonah’s exact specifications, Chase commented that this was a lot like being a prep cook at a shitty restaurant, and Iván said to Choop, “Why ain’t’chu wearing a hairnet, motherfucker?” Everyone laughed, and it seemed to Lydia that they would have laughed at anything.
When the sun rose, two hundred tightly pressed packages lay stacked together on the new dining room table. Jonah passed through the room saying that Lydia needed to return half the load to the hiding place again, mixing them up with the pure bags. When she went first to wash her face in the master bathroom, she was distracted by her sallow reflection. The drugs and sleep deprivation were getting to her. Her pupils were so dilated that her eyes looked black and wild, like a cornered animal’s, and she was getting pimples along her jawline where she had never broken out before. She tried to puzzle together the details in her mind—she had probably done twice as much crank as ever in her life; the low, steady charge, the unwavering concentration, had become its own form of inertia. She found she had been staring at herself in the mirror for a very long time, picking at spots along her neck. Twice, Jonah came into the bathroom to yell at her. She began obsessively washing her skin again, trying to scrub clean her pores. When she looked up, Jonah was standing in the doorway with an irritated tilt to his neck. He needed her to get back to the house and replace the stuff.
She panicked. She started to seize up, gasping and unable to speak, while another, more rational aspect of her was surprised by this reaction. Again, it was as if her spirit had drifted a few feet away from this stammering, hysterical body, watching a breakdown from across the room. But then, when Jonah asked her calmly if she was “too fucked up to do this right now,” she woke up suddenly into her own writhing body and felt fear like a stone on her chest.
Jonah searched through his medicine cabinet, and he tried to get her to swallow some pills. Lydia flinched and pulled away from the pills and put her hands over her mouth. She recognized herself as that child who rebelled against her medication. Jonah said, “You’re being a brat, Lydia,” the same thing her mother had always said. He was trying to maintain his calm, trying to affect a joking tone with her, and he began tickling her as she squirmed away. She howled and giggled, screaming, “Don’t ti-hi-hi-hi-ckleeee meeee!” But his fingers ran all across her, under her tightening arms and around her feet and between her legs, and he repeated, “Take the pills, you little brat.” He tickled her so violently that she jolted away in a seizure against the wall and cabinets, and the initial giddiness gave way to something like an electric shock, with her body rioting and locking up. He kept going, throwing the pills into her open mouth and placing his hand over her lips. “Swallow.”
She choked down the pills. He poured her a glass
of water as she coughed. She drank it, caught her breath, still twitching out the last remaining voltage in her legs. She was drenched in sweat. She looked up at him across the bathroom and said, “I hate being tickled. And I fucking hate you.”
“Those will help you sleep. And when you get up, Lydia—you’re going to be a new woman.”
Jonah had put her to bed with two tablets of Halcion, and she slept until early the next evening, sprawled across the satin pillows of his bed. She woke to him petting through her hair and tracing the contours of her body. She wanted to sink into this bed and live forever against the cool underside of the pillow, but he slapped her ass and told her to get to work. It seemed that he had assumed she was awake earlier, for he was already in the middle of some speech.
“. . . and keep your wits about you. All of these people are going to be nervous, really nervous about dealing with you. You’re going to be the one out front. Make back every dollar you lost out of that house. I already explained, and I already set up the list. The main thing you have to do—follow the etiquette. Don’t show up and get right to business. Treat everybody like they’re your friend, your only client—and hang out a while. The last thing these people want is some girl coming and going in fifteen minutes. But you still have to keep all the appointments. It will take you into tomorrow night, probably.”
She sat up in the bed and saw the clothes he had hung on the closet door. He wanted her to wear Adidas sweatpants and a tank top, and she asked, “Is that the uniform?”
“Look good, but not too good—okay? I don’t want anybody getting the idea you’ve got other businesses going on the side.”
At a little past six, she set off to make the deliveries, driving off in his least-practical car—a ’69 Cadillac El Dorado with a rumbling boat engine and sleek wings. At every stoplight, there seemed to be another carload of teenage boys hollering at her from their open windows.