Chapter 8 Louise
LOUISE
I politely but hurriedly got rid of Stacey, telling her I’d had an idea involving importing rare flowers from Africa, or something and needed to think. She looked doubtful, but she had to get to her store so she hugged me and ran.
I sat down at my aging laptop and, in a testament to my naivety, typed “How to grow marijuana” into Google. It didn’t occur to me until later that doing that from my own computer might not be a good idea.
For the next seven hours, I didn’t move.
I fumbled for my phone, dialed the garden store, and called in sick without my eyes once leaving the screen.
For the first hour, I was hesitant and tentative.
I was so afraid of getting my hopes up, I was like a scientist trying to disprove a theory.
I tried every way to destroy the idea that I could.
Maybe I couldn’t grow a crop in time. Maybe it wouldn’t be worth enough. Maybe the startup costs are too high.
One by one, I eliminated those questions. It began to look viable, in terms of money. That left the botany.
I immersed myself in science. I read up on the plant itself, on gene lines and fertilizers and pest control.
There was a huge amount to research, but the internet had all the information I needed.
As I read more and more, I started to get excited.
Growing weed, I learned, is complicated and tricky.
..if you’re a civilian. But for a botany student and gardener like me it was actually relatively simple.
Hell, I’d actually specialized in this stuff at college.
I could even see a few ways I could improve on the methods people were posting about online.
I could be good at this. The skill I’d thought was so useless might actually be able to save us.
It was possible.
That left: could I actually go through with it?
I sat back from the screen. I never broke the law. I never even broke the rules. This was so far outside anything I’d normally consider, it was absurd. Me? Grow drugs?
I hesitantly clicked a few more Google links and read about raids on local grow houses, about the farmers being sentenced not to three months in county jail, but to 20 years in a federal penitentiary.
Weed may be effectively legalized, especially in liberal California, but growing your own large-scale crop of it certainly wasn’t.
I saw pictures of hollow-eyed men—and even a few women—in orange jumpsuits.
Some of them weren’t much older than me.
It wasn’t just that I’d go to jail: it was that Kayley’s only chance would evaporate. Worse, I’d miss the remaining time we had together.
I can’t do this.
But if I didn’t, she was going to die.
I clicked more links, unable to stop. Reports of shootings and arson attacks.
Paid hits. I’d been thinking of it as a business, but I’d been glossing over the fact that the business took place in that shadow world of crime most of us only see when it spills over into the headlines.
If I was going to do this, I’d have to join that world.
That was the part I definitely couldn’t do. I knew how to grow things; I had no idea how to be a criminal. I’d last a week.
Unless I had help.