Chapter Eight
RHYS
SITTING AT the little table in the kitchen with my laptop, I’m going through emails and checking reports as the music from Ms. Harlow’s studio fills all the quiet spaces. As soon as we got back to the cabin, she unceremoniously walked into her studio room and hasn’t come back out.
My phone buzzes on the table, and I look down to see Swan’s name on the screen.
Putting the phone to my ear, I answer. “Abbot.”
“How are things in paradise?” The teasing humor in his voice gets my hackles up.
“Did you call to socialize or to talk about work?” I deadpan. I’m not in the mood to joke.
When Ms. Harlow stopped in the middle of the living room when we walked into the cabin, I thought something was wrong and I almost bumped into her. I didn’t mean to grab her, it was an instinct, but the way she shoved my hand off her has bothered me since it happened.
I don’t know why she stopped so suddenly, and it pisses me off because she pushed my hand away. Everything about her fucks with my head.
He laughs like he actually said something funny. “Fine. Did you see the emails I sent you? I included all the files I could find for Trendell, he’s led a colorful life.”
Trendell’s our stabbing victim.
Holding the phone between my ear and my shoulder, I switch screens to my email. “I was just about to open them. You want to give me the cliff notes version?”
“Sure. I’ll start with the arrest report, it’s longer than my fucking arm. He’s got distribution, intent to distribute, possession, larceny, domestic abuse. You name it, he’s been busted for it.”
I open the attachment with the list of charges. “What types of drugs?”
“It would be easier to list the drugs he hasn’t been associated with. They vary from schedule one to schedule five, but you can tell he got ballsier with each charge.”
“Did you pull his juvenile record?”
He huffs like it was a stupid question. “Who do you think you’re talking to?
His first arrest was when he was fourteen.
He broke into a shaved ice shack in the middle of the night expecting there to be money in the till.
After that, it was breaking into cars, and then he graduated into marijuana possession. ”
“Was he in the system? Foster care?”
“Nope, he had a good home life. He just got involved with the wrong people.”
Fucking figures.
Opening another attachment, I look over his involvement with our heroin supplier, Jessup, who settled in Tulsa about ten years ago. “When did he get mixed up with Jessup?”
“Hard to say, he was arrested when he was nineteen with a large amount of pot, but then he was caught again when he was twenty with black tar. I’m not sure that his arrest for pot was connected to Jessup, or that they connected after that, but there was a connection sometime in that year, for sure. ”
Black tar, also known as Mexican black tar heroin, is a major Mexican export and has gained major traction in the Tulsa area. It’s cheaper than powdered heroin, but just as strong. The misconception among users is that it is less potent because of its form, resulting in an increase in overdoses.
Swan goes on. “According to his arrest record, he was one of Jessup’s street guys for a while, but they cut him loose almost two years ago.”
“Is that when he got involved with the Ghost?”
“Yep.” Swan pops the P. “For about a year he was busted with small amounts of fentanyl, but he’s been dealing the combo for the past five months.”
Ghost is our new dealer, aptly named because we can’t fucking figure out who he is. Fentanyl first showed up about five years ago, but the major dealer who brought it to Tulsa was found dead in his car with a bullet between his eyes - something else that we have yet to solve.
Then, three years ago, fentanyl deaths skyrocketed. This new guy keeps himself buried so far away from the public that we can’t get an ID on him. We know the two guys who stabbed Trendell work for Ghost, but we can’t seem to get anything to stick to them.
Catching them would have gotten me some answers I’ve been desperate for.
We’ve had a guy undercover in Jessup’s close circle, but he’s been MIA for a few weeks, which is a whole other issue.
“Do you think they killed him because he was double-dipping and selling on the side?”
“I’d bet my left nut on it.” Swan says as his desk chair squeaks over the line.
Trendell’s dabbling in mixing the heroin he bought from Jessup and the fentanyl he bought from Ghost to sell on the street was his downfall. The increase in deaths because of his ignorance was drawing unwanted attention, so they had to get rid of him.
Ms. Harlow’s intrusion the other night set my case back at least five steps and my promotion by years, if it’s even on the table still at all.
After I wrap up my conversation with Swan, I scrub my hands over my face. What a fucking cluster fuck.
Later that evening, I’ve moved to the couch that was my bed last night and have been reading and comparing notes. The sound of bare feet on wood in the short hallway pulls my attention from my work as she walks across the living room.
Her perfect peach of an ass in short, thin shorts walks through the kitchen into her studio with papers from a spiral notebook in her hand. Her long wavy ponytail is swaying between her shoulder blades.
I’m not sure if she is teasing me with her clothing choices or if she always dresses like this, but her patched-together shorts are paper thin and look like they were cut from an old quilt with a drawstring in the front.
Her tiny tank top looks like it was crocheted and is layered over a lace camisole bra that clings to her ribs.
Both the top and the bra have thin spaghetti straps.
Part of me thinks she is who she is without a care about what anyone else thinks, but the part of me that’s trying to stop my dick from standing at attention thinks she’s doing it on purpose. That part of me also enjoys looking at whatever golden skin she wants to show me.
She walks back through the kitchen with something in her hand and barely glances at me on her way to the front door.
“Where are you going?” I ask, the piece of paper I was about to flip to the back of the stack frozen in the air.
Her eyes cut to me as she grabs the door handle. “To get some air.” When I set my papers on the couch as she pulls the door open, she says, “Alone.”
I stand up anyway, and she huffs and rolls her eyes as she walks through the door and pulls it closed before I get to it. If there were a lock on the other side, I think she would lock me in.
Her bare feet thump on the wooden planks as she walks across the front porch and disappears around the corner to the side deck. I walk to the corner and lean against the house with my hands in my pockets and watch her sit on a lounger next to a fire pit.
The sky is black and full of stars, and I can hear the stream moving over the rocks at the edge of the deck. There is a tree frog close to the deck battling with the crickets to see who can be the loudest.
What she does next shocks the shit out of me.
She sets a joint between her lips and lights it and then sets the corner of the papers on fire and drops them into the black metal bowl of the pit.
As if I’m not there, watching her, she leans back on the lounger to look at the stars and takes another drag off the joint.
“You remember I’m part of a drug task force with the FBI, right?”
Without looking at me, she quips, “You know I’m not Pablo Escobar, right?”
Since she’s not looking at me, I don’t have to hide that I’m suppressing a smile. I decide I’m not going to press her about it because I think the papers in the fire pit might have something to do with her needing to relax. “What’s with the papers?”
Ignoring the question, she takes another drag off her joint and stares up at the sky. “Have you seen Men In Black? Specifically, part three.”
I shake my head once. “No. I don’t watch much TV.”
She smiles. “Figures. Well, there’s this character, Griffin, who is multi-dimensional and can see every possible dimension there is.
” She rolls her head on the lounger to look at me, the smile still on her face.
I think it may be the pot relaxing her, because I don’t think I’d get a genuine smile any other time. “He’s my favorite character.”
Rolling her head back to center to look at the stars, she goes on, “Anyway, I always wonder if there’s any truth to that, you know, dimensions where there are people still alive that might not be in others.” She seems to sober some. “Just wishful thinking, I guess.”
Realization washes over me. She just unintentionally let down a wall. Walking to the other lounger that’s opposite the fire pit, I sit down and look at her. Her eyes are heavy, definitely high, and she’s relaxed.
“What’s with the papers you just burned?”
Her eyes flick in my direction, and then she looks at the ashes in the metal bowl. “Just conversations with my mom.” She huffs a small laugh before she rolls her head and looks at me again. “Don’t worry, I know she doesn’t talk back. But I know she’s listening.”
Flipping through the info in my head that I read about her, I try to remember how old she was when her mom died. I think she was seven or eight.
Sitting across from me is a woman who didn’t get to have a relationship with her mom.
That’s the reason for the attitude and the metal fucking walls.
She takes another drag and laughs again.
“But what really blows my mind is, just hear me out, what if those dimensions ever overlap some, like if there’s a ripple somewhere, like a butterfly on the water?
If a dimension with a live person overlaps a dimension that same person doesn’t inhabit anymore, could that be how we see ghosts? And can they see us?”
She sighs and stops talking. When we were in the house earlier and I watched her playing with the babies and talking to her siblings, I saw a side of her she doesn’t show other people. The soft side.