Louise
We didn’t dare go back to the mansion: Malone knew that place. For the same reason, I’d asked Stacey to take Kayley to her apartment.
We headed for the docks, where we could disappear among all the other vans and trucks.
Then we prowled around for somewhere to put the van where it would be out of sight.
Eventually, we found some long-abandoned garages, the windows broken and the white paint nearly invisible behind a coating of graffiti. “But the door’s chained shut,” I said.
Sean climbed out, wrapped the chain around his fists and heaved, the muscles of his back standing out in the moonlight. There was a sudden crack and clang as the chain broke and snapped against the metal door like a whip. He hauled the door open so that we could back the van in.
We didn’t dare leave the van, so we wound up climbing up on a dumpster and then onto the flat roof of the garage.
We sat on the edge with our legs hanging down, looking out over the black water of the harbor and the reflections of the lit-up cranes.
Sean put his arm around my shoulders and, for the first time since we left the jazz club, we stopped.
It hit me, then, how much had changed. Six months before, I wouldn’t have even run a red light at an empty intersection.
Now I was on the run from a drug dealer whose life I’d threatened, sitting on the roof of a graffiti-covered derelict building at midnight.
Beneath me was a van containing half a million dollars in weed and beside me was the scariest, most badass man I’d ever met.
And then that badass turned my head to face him and kissed me, long and deep, and I felt my body relax. Just having him close made things seem better. That was the biggest change of all. For the first time since my parents died, I didn’t feel like Kayley and I were on our own.
We sat there in silence while both of us had a very long think. But however evil and devious I got, I couldn’t come up with a way to turn the van full of marijuana into cash, not without going through dealers.
The worst part was, it had worked. We’d pulled it off.
The van was loaded with a bumper crop of high-grade weed that was easily worth the money we needed—probably more.
After all the months of effort, we’d done exactly what we’d set out to do.
..only to be defeated by a problem further down the chain—Malone’s greed—that was nothing to do with us.
It was human nature that had got in the way.
The science—the process—had worked just fine.
And then I had a revelation. Something Stacey had said to me. All along, I’d been thinking about the crop—that was the product of all my hard work - that was what I’d created. But maybe I’d created something else, as well.
“We need to stop thinking like criminals,” I said. “And start thinking of this like a business.”
Sean frowned. “The whole fuckin’ drugs game is a business. Supply and demand, distribution...it is a business.”
“Not completely. There’s still a few things real businesses do that these people don’t.” I thought again. “We need to contact a dealer.”
He sighed and rubbed my shoulders. “We can’t. No one below Malone’s level is big enough to handle this sort of volume. No one at Malone’s level is going to side against him. They don’t want a war.”
“That’s why we have to go up. Above Malone.”
“Who’s above Malone. Wait, the cartels? The Mexicans?” He shook his head. “Louise, that’s all backwards. The Mexicans import weed to the US, they don’t need to buy more of it.”
“No,” I said. “But I think I’ve got something else that will interest them.”
And I laid out my plan.