75. Tess
TESS
With my chin in my palm, I sat and watched as Nash worked.
She grabbed a brick of cocaine off the top of a palate and placed it on the metal table on the warehouse floor. A few yards away, Blade did the same at her own station.
With the blade of a black, tactical knife, Nash ripped into the shrink wrap. She took a scoop of the white powder and used an old credit card to crush it finer. Once it was even, she poured some into a tub with water. Swirling it around, she let the coke mix in.
We’d been at this for hours, testing every palate in the warehouse for laced drugs.
Nash stuck a long test strip into the tube, before pulling it out and letting it rest on the table.
Rubbing her forehead, she set a timer on her phone as she leaned back. “This is ridiculous. We already test everything that comes in here. It’s not us.”
“I know.” Even from a few hours inside their operation, it was clear to me that the Freaks took their operation seriously. But everyone would sleep better tonight if we knew — again — that what killed Jane hadn’t come from this warehouse.
It did leave them with more questions.
Cyrus paced the edges of the warehouse, making calls and testing palates between. She demanded every single platform in the place be retested, even if it took all night.
There was a part of me that was surprised she’d included me, that she’d let me see her big secret.
But in reality, she just wanted to incriminate me further, to make it harder and harder for me to rat if I ever did leave Feverpoint.
When she was far away, I bit my lip and turned to Nash. “How is she okay with all of this?”
Nash looked around the warehouse. “What? The dealing?”
“Yeah, because of her parents.”
I still remembered why she’d ended up in Heirs of Promise. Both of her parents had been incarcerated for dealing, child neglect, and possession. With no one to take care of her, Cyrus was surrendered to the state by her uncle.
She was young, rebellious, and clearly queer. Even to me then.
Her uncle had claimed that Heirs of Promise would set her on a “path toward God.”
So much for that.
More like leaving her with abandonment issues and religious trauma.
Nash thought about her answer for a while. “There’s a few reasons. For one, she doesn’t have kids so there’s no chance of them getting involved or hurt in the process.”
“Fair enough.”
“But, she’s always been firm on what we could sell. There were always rules about how addictive the substances could be, how often we sold to repeat customers, what we’d sell to the college kids.” Nash leaned over and took a closer look at the test strip. “Negative.”
Grabbing another brick from a new palate, she repeated her steps with the same meticulous energy.
“How did all of this start?” Now was my chance, if I wanted to be let in.
Looking around the warehouse, it was obvious this wasn’t their first year on the job. They’d been gaining power and control in Valemont and all of Greene County for years.
Nash shrugged. “We needed money and none of us had our legal working papers. So we took odd jobs. Blade would go to job sites and do construction, I tried to sell my art, and Cyrus… She could sell a desert to a thirsty man.
“Eventually, she realized that Atwood was getting nasty drugs from nasty sources. And she decided to fix that, tired of reading news stories about teenagers ending up in the hospital. It all just kind of grew from there.”
“Right.” I licked my lips, my eyes growing heavy with exhaustion.
Standing up from her chair, Blade yawns. “All negative over here.”
“Same.” Nash said after checking the final test strip.
Cyrus grumbled as she shoved her phone back into her pocket. “No one has information. Everything’s a dead fucking end.”
Crossing my arms over my legs, I shrugged. “How did she get something so potent?”
Blade scoffed. “It has to be him.”
“Who?” Nash whipped her head around to look at Blade, “Rubin?”
In a mocking voice, Blade held her hands to the sky. “The all holy Messenger.”
“It was the last place she was seen.” I added.
“And the only place we can’t search.” Nash stood, gripping her metal seat in her palms.
Cyrus wasn’t buying it. “No. We don’t know that. It was the last place we saw her. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t come down from Mount Sinai and get a bag from someone. Fuck, she could’ve gone a few towns over to get it.”
“But why? You said DMT is hard to find. Was she using it before? And if she wasn’t, how did she get enough to OD?” None of it was adding up in my mind. There were too many holes, like a colander of information.
Shaking her head, Cyrus snapped. “She freaked out when we brought her to Violence. She wanted nothing to do with it. Maybe Rubin doesn’t let addicts live there.”
“He is big on so-called clean living. Back to nature and all that.” I added.
“Maybe she went back, they found out she was hanging out with some sketchy dealer and kicked her out.” Blade posited.
Something was clicking for Nash. “She could’ve come back to town, met up with her supplier and gotten too much. Maybe she was extra depressed and needed a bigger hit.”
From what Nash had told me about DMT, the shit really messed with serotonin levels. Take it once and your whole system was depleted of it, leaving you depressed and anxious.
“Then how have we not found the source?” Blade asked as she headed for the warehouse door.
Cyrus looked over the warehouse. “I’m not sure. It’s always a possibility that Rubin is involved. But we need to be careful digging into him. Without evidence to prove it was him, any death will fall on us. We don’t have space for a fuck up.”
“Slow and steady.” Nash pushed open the warehouse door as I followed behind. “Blade’s favorite.”
“Gah. Please no.” She zipped ahead, too much pent up energy from hours of detailed work.
Cyrus turned on the Aston Martin from her keyfob. “Either way, The Messenger has lost a member of his flock. What he does in the coming weeks will tell us everything we need to know.”
Her face grew stern, darkness leaking from her eyes. “Once we crack open his tomb, we’ll have to deal with his sycophants too.”
That alone was a daunting task. From the gathering at the gazebo, it was clear that Rubin’s power was growing. People were scared, terrified of what Valemont had become — of what the world was becoming.
And if I knew anything about hyper-religious groups, it was that they didn’t take kindly to intruders or nonbelievers.
We all piled into the car, agreeing to pick up the Cadillac on the way back to Feverpoint.
But as I tried to resist the urge to fall asleep in Cyrus’ car, I couldn’t help but remember Fright Night was around the corner. And given everything I’d learned tonight, I needed to win my forty grand.
All of this was becoming a tangled web. And I needed to get my cut and run. Or at least have the option to.