Zee-ster? He’s a user, not a dealer.”
“He spreads it around some,” Tad said. “I mean, he did. Could be they caught somebody he ran with, they gave him up.”
“Whatever. But this puts us in a kind of bad spot. We ran with him, too. Somebody might remember us.”
“Remember me, you mean. You look like ten thousand other surfer dudes. Me, I kinda stand out.”
Bobby waved that off. “The point is, we let ourselves get public with him more than we should have, because he was a movie star and cool and all. If he had the Hammer caps on him when they took him out of the game, they are gonna go over his background with a microscope… everywhere he went, everybody he saw. A guy like that can’t move in this town anonymously unless he wears a bag over his head, and Zeigler never was one to hide his pretty face. The cops and the feds will burn many shoe soles tracking every move the man made. Somebody will cover all of the trendy places where the Zee-ster liked to party.”
Tad nodded.
“All right, here’s what I want you to do. You search your memory and dig up every time you saw Zee in public, anywhere might have had a security cam lit. Get to those places before the feds or the local police do, get the recordings or wipe them or whatever.”
“Yeah. I can do that.”
“He never came here, and when I bought drinks or dinner, I paid cash, so there’s no e-trail on me. I’ve made up a list of the places where I went with him alone, or where you and him and me were. Add those to your list. Crowd he traveled with, they don’t know us well enough to send anybody here, hell, they were usually too stoned to know who they were, much less us, but vids are different. If we’re on a tape, a RAM drive or a DVD, that’s bad. If that’s gone, we’re clear.”
Tad nodded again. “Yeah, I got it. Only a few places they might have captured images of us.”
“We can’t do shit about some tourist who snapped a few frames of Zeigler while we were at Disneyland or the beach or whatever, but the feds probably won’t find them, either. I think we can ride this out, we do it right.”
“I wonder how they did figure out to go for him?”
“He fucked up. He liked to brag about doing five girls at a time while he was on the Hammer, and like you said, he passed out dope to the people around him like it was chewing gum. Doesn’t matter how they found him. What matters is, they don’t find us.”
“I hear that.” Tad had no desire to finish out his little remaining time on earth in a cell. He’d punch his own ticket before he’d let that happen.
“So we’re on vacation for the next couple months,” Bobby said. “No production, no deliveries, we are shut down. Maybe we’ll go to Maui, drive the crooked road out to Hana, kick back on the black sand beach and watch the girls awhile.”
Tad nodded absently. “Yeah.” But what he was thinking was, he had Thor’s Hammer in his pocket, the last one Bobby had made, and it still had a few more hours of shelf life left. If he didn’t take it, it was going to go to waste, and Bobby wasn’t gonna be making any more until he felt safe.
Tad might not have a couple months left in him, you never could tell.
Should he take it? He and Bobby hadn’t spent that much time with the Zee-ster out in public. Half a dozen spots in the last couple of months, no more, and most places didn’t keep vid records more than a day or two, maybe a week, before they recorded over the old stuff. He could shave it close, check out the first few places, drop the cap, and finish the last few before it came on full blast. And even after it came on, he could maintain enough to take care of the security stuff, he was pretty sure. For a couple hours, anyway.
There was some risk, sure, but what the hell, he didn’t have much to lose, did he?
There was one other possibility, something he hadn’t ever tried, but he’d held in reserve, just in case something happened to Bobby before it did him. He could let the cap croak, clean up the security cam stuff, and head out to the islands with Bobby. Then, in a week or two, he could find some reason to split with Bobby for a couple days. Tell him he was gonna go camp out by the Sacred Pools or something — Bobby hated camping — then catch a flight back to L.A.
He’d been with Bobby a long time. And while he wasn’t in Bobby’s league as a chemist, he knew a fair amount about drugs. He had managed, over the time they’d been dealing the Hammer, to be around Bobby at one point or another during every step of the creation and blending of the ingredients for the drug. Yeah, he didn’t even know what they all
He wasn’t a genius like Bobby, he couldn’t create the stuff from scratch, no way. But while not everybody could create a major symphony from nothing, like Mozart, a whole lot of people could play the sucker if they had the sheet music. Tad knew Bobby’s routine; he’d watched it, memorized it, and he could do that much. Ma and Pa out in the RV had all the stuff for Thor’s Hammer, neatly stored in little bottles. He could pay them a visit. They’d never think twice about it. He’d collected the stuff for Bobby several times.
Of course, when Bobby found out, he’d be pissed, so maybe Tad might have to eliminate Ma and Pa, torch the RV, and hope Bobby would blame it on rival dealers or the law. Then again, maybe Tad wouldn’t be around when Bobby found out. The hole he had to climb out of each time was deeper and deeper. One day, he’d hit the bottom and not be able to make it back, and that was gonna be sooner rather than later.
It was something to think about.
“You gonna sit there staring into space all day or what?”
“Huh. Oh, yeah. I’m going. I need to, uh, freshen up a bit, then I’m good.”
“Fine. Do what you need to do, but don’t get pulled over for a ticket or whatever, be careful, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, don’t worry.”
“I have to worry, Tad, for the both of us.”
Tad headed for the bathroom and another hit of the Mexican white. As he walked, he fingered the capsule in his watch pocket to make sure it was still there. As long as he took care of business, what could it hurt to take it? It would be a crime to just waste it.
And even if he did take it, a few weeks from now he could
He smiled at himself in the bathroom mirror.
It was like looking at a grinning skull.
Drayne was pissed off at himself. He knew better than to associate with people he dealt to, he knew better. He’d talked to a lot of dope dealers over the years, had wrangled access to a lot of FBI files via his father, without the old man knowing, of course, and he’d learned a whole lot about the biz before he had ever sold his first pill.
The upside of things were big bucks and big thrills. Dopers who were smart made fortunes, and they got to make the assorted varieties of cops look stupid while they did it. Big money, big rushes, the thrill of victory, and all that green to feed the machine.
There was a downside, of course. Stupid dopers could get killed by a rival dealer. Or ripped off and maybe killed by a customer. Or busted and sent to the graybar hotel for twenty years on a heavy federal rap. Or busted by the local yokels. Lot of minefield in the illegal trade, and you couldn’t complain to the cops if somebody pointed a gun at you and stole your dope or your money.
The thing was, if you were a dealer, and if you did it long enough, and if you didn’t move around a bunch while you were doing it, you were sooner or later going to get caught. Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of dealers who stayed in the biz for more than a few years in one place eventually got nailed. Sometimes it was a distributor who gave ‘em up, sometimes it was an ex-wife or girlfriend, sometimes the cops found’em on their own.
Once you got a lot of cash in your hands, it sometimes made you stupid. You bought expensive, flashy toys, you got to thinking because you were rich you were invincible, and just like Zeigler, all your money didn’t mean squat when the bullets started to fly. You couldn’t take it with you.
So Drayne had always kept a low profile. No yachts, no car that couldn’t be leased by half of L.A. No bodyguards with muscles and bulges under their jackets to make people wonder who you were who needed
