Kiss of the Bees

thoroughly outmaneuvered by his aunt. Anglo or not, living with the Walkers was probably far preferable to living in a group home.

“I’ll talk to Wanda,” he agreed at last. “But that’s all I’ll do—talk. I’m not making any promises.”

Mitch Johnson drove to Smith’s, a grocery store on the corner of Swan and Grant. Once there, he stood in the soft-drink aisle wondering what he should buy. With one hand in the pocket of his jacket, he held one of the several vials of scopolamine between his fingers—as if for luck—while he tried to decide what to do.

What do girls that age like to drink early in the morning? he wondered. Sodas, most likely. He chose several different kinds—a six-pack of each. Maybe some kind of juice. He put two containers into his basket, one orange and one apple. And then, for good measure, he threw in a couple of cartons of chocolate milk as well. Andy had warned him against using something hot, like coffee or tea, for instance, for fear that the boiling hot liquid might somehow lessen the drug’s impact.

And it did have an impact. Mitch Johnson knew that from personal experience.

One day in August of the previous year, Andrew Carlisle had returned from another brief stay in the prison infirmary holding a small glass container in his hand.

“What’s that?” Mitch had asked, thinking it was probably some new kind of medicine that would be used to treat Andrew Carlisle’s constantly increasing catalog of ailments.

“I’ve been wondering all this time exactly how you’d manage to make off with the girl. I think I’ve found the answer.” Andy handed the glass with its colorless liquid contents over to Mitch. He opened it and took a sniff. It was odorless as well as colorless.

“I still don’t know what it is,” he said.

“Remember that article you were reading to me from the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago? The one about the Burundianga Cocktail?”

“That’s what the drug dealers down in Colombia used to relieve that diplomat of his papers and his money?”

Carlisle smiled. “That’s the one,” he said. “And here it is.”

Over the years, Andy had clearly demonstrated to Mitch that sufficient sums of money available outside the prison could account for any amount of illegal contraband inside.

“Where did you get it?” Mitch asked.

“I have my sources,” Andy answered. “And you’ll find plenty of it with your supplies once you’re on the outside. It isn’t a controlled substance, so there were no questions asked. But it made sense to me to make a single large buy rather than a series of small ones.”

“But how exactly does it work, and how much do I use?”

“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it,” Andy had replied. “There may be a certain amount of trial and error involved. You should use enough that she’s tractable, but you don’t want to use so much that she loses consciousness or even dies as a result of an overdose.”

“You’re saying we should do a dry run?” Mitch asked.

“Several dry runs might be better than just one.”

Mitch thought about that for a moment. Andy’s health was so frail that he certainly couldn’t risk taking anything out of the ordinary.

“I guess I’d better be the guinea pig then,” Mitch said. “No telling what a shot of this stuff would do to you.”

Andy nodded. “We won’t give you that much,” he said reassuringly. “Just enough to give you a little buzz so you’ll know exactly what it feels like.”

“When should we do it?”

“This afternoon. You’ll have a soda break with a little added kick.”

That afternoon, at three o’clock, Mitch Johnson had served himself up a glass of scopolamine-laced Pepsi. They used only half the contents of that one-ounce bottle. From Mitch’s point of view, it seemed as though nothing at all happened. He didn’t feel any particular loss of control. He remembered climbing up on the upper bunk and lying there, feeling hot and a little flushed, waiting for the effects of the drug to hit him. The next thing he noticed was how everything around him seemed to shrink. Mitch himself grew huge, while a guard walking the corridor looked like a tiny dwarf. When Mitch came to himself again, he was eating breakfast.

“What happened to dinner?” he asked Andy irritably. “Did something happen and they skipped it?”

“You ate it,” Andrew Carlisle told him.

“The hell I did. I lay down here on the bed just a little while ago . . .” Mitch stopped short. “You mean dinner came and went, the whole night passed, and I don’t remember any of it?”

“That’s right,” Andy said. “This stuff packs a hell of a wallop, doesn’t it? Since the girl is physically so much smaller than you are, you’ll have to be careful not to give her too much. It makes you realize why some of those scopolamine-based cold medicines caution against using mechanical equipment, doesn’t it?”

They had been silent for some time after that. Mitch Johnson was stunned. Fifteen hours of his life had disappeared, leaving him no conscious memory of them.

“Did I do or say anything stupid while I was out of it?”

“Not stupid,” Andy replied. “I found it interesting rather than stupid.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve always wondered whether or not those three wetbacks were the first ones. And it turns out they weren’t.”