"Welcome to home sweet home," she said cheerily, a watt and a half too bright to be believable. "Grab a piece of floor and take a load off."
Gail glanced around, feeling Nelson still standing too close for comfort. "That's okay. I just dropped by to see how you were. I thought we were going to have brunch today. I started getting worried."
"No worry" Debbie said. "Everything's A-okay"
"Yeah," Nelson said from right behind her. "Stick around. Want some weed?"
She shifted her weight, leaning away from him, keeping her eyes on Debbie. "No. Should you be doing that?"
The young woman's eyes grew round. "What? This?" She brandished the joint.
"Doesn't it violate the agreement you have with the treatment center?"
Debbie laughed. "God. I guess so. But what they don't know won't hurt them, right?"
Here her eyes narrowed slightly so Gail would get the message.
Nelson moved a couple of inches closer and said in a seductive near miss, "Yeah. Our little secret. Sure you don't want a hit, at least?"
She faced him squarely, giving in to her growing annoyance. "Sit down, junior." She turned toward the bed. "And listen up. This is not about my being your buddy and winking while you ruin your life. I've got one too many on my conscience already. But I can help, and I will help if you meet me halfway."
Nelson had moved across the room, his expression closed.
"Chill out, Gail," Debbie said tiredly. "I'm not ruining my life. You want to know the truth, I'm getting it back together." She dangled the joint between her fingers. "This is nothing-it's like you having a beer. I am getting counseling. You said that yourself. I'm fine."
Gail had a sudden memory of herself at nearly the same age, sitting in a similar setting, albeit on a farm near Marlboro, smoking pot and spouting the same nonsense. To her, as to Debbie right now, the comparison between alcohol and marijuana had been benign and reasonable. But Gail had grown up, become a teetotaler, and no longer saw any benefit to either substance. If weed was a gateway to more addictive drugs, then beer was a gateway to liquor, in her hardened view.
But she knew she couldn't take that line with this girl, especially given the company she was keeping. Nelson might have been as big a threat as he was a ladies' man, but Gail seriously doubted he had Debbie's best interests in mind.
"I'm not going to argue the point here," she said instead. "Not with him around, and not with that crap in your system. I have something to offer you-I can be a guide to the other side, if you like. But you're going to have to come to me next time, and you better be clean."
With that, she turned on her heel, left the room, and slammed the door behind her, making sure they could hear the slap of her heels on the sidewalk as she retreated toward her car.
But her heart wasn't in it. She knew some of the techniques, had seen them used in her volunteer counseling, and didn't need telling that what she'd just laid down was part of a tried-and-true process. But none of it held against her mental snapshot of Laurie lying in that hospital bed-along with the caption that Gail had played a role in putting her there.
She knew full well that if Debbie didn't seek her out in short order, Gail would be back at this motel trying something else. It might be an obsession in the making, but a worthwhile one.
Or so she told herself.
* * *
Joe hung up the phone on Gail's machine without leaving a message. He'd already left two, and worried he was back where he'd been before his midnight visit. Her niece had affected her like a tectonic shift. Gail may have still been walking and talking, albeit under stress, but who knew what had changed underneath?
He was still in Rutland, the meeting having run for hours. They had hashed out everything from procedures and responsibilities to how to prosecute any arrests they might make. They'd even talked about various forfeiture strategies, in case they picked up any money, cars, or valuable property along the way. Notes had been taken, graphs produced, deadlines established, communication webs and chains of command. The most satisfying aspect of it from Gunther's perspective was that the VBI would be playing the support role he'd asked for, across the board, from the Rutland PD, to the state police drug task force, to merely picking up slack where necessary. In all things concerning Sam and whatever she might encounter, however, they were autonomous, free to act spontaneously and instinctively, the only proviso being that McCall be kept inside the circle.
Which was both good and bad news. For, beyond a couple of unsolved homicides, a governor's political pressure, and the overall goal of denting the drug trade, they were primarily responsible for the care and welfare of a single cop. What Sam had done of her own volition now made her the top of the proverbial iceberg, leaving them all to make sure she stayed upright.
Their hopes were that she might open the doors through which they could complete most of the tasks before them. But Joe Gunther's biggest fear was that, were the slightest thing to go wrong, everything could collapse, and he could lose someone as close to him as his own flesh and blood.
He stared at the phone again, thinking back briefly to Gail, wondering what she was up to.
So many loose strings, he thought. So much at risk.
Chapter 11
Sammie checked herself in the cracked mirror, pondering the symbolism of seeing herself reflected in two halves.
"About right," she murmured, and turned off the light.
She stepped out of the bathroom and moved to where Johnny Rivera was packing up bundles of heroin with latex-gloved hands, sitting before a set of electronic scales, a razor blade, a pile of rubber bands, and an assortment of small plastic bags, each stamped with the symbol of a lurking panther, clearly his trademark.
"Ready for your maiden voyage?" he asked. He followed that with a suggestive glance. "I guess your maiden days are pretty long gone, though, huh?"
"That's for me to know," she said, watching him expertly scraping and cutting the drug into the baggie-sized quantities he'd proposed she sell in Vermont in order to prove her worth. He had the heroin separated into three groups: the highly compacted "plugs," which arrived from New York looking like oversized pieces of chalk; the baggies, with so little drug in them-just.025 gram-that it almost resembled the fluff from a dandelion; and finally, the bundles, made up of ten bags apiece.
Each plug was enough to create forty bundles, or four hundred bags. Sammie figured that Johnny, depending on his haggling skills, maybe paid $1,200 to $1,500 for each plug. From what Bill Dancer had told her, she knew such an amount, broken down into bags, might fetch a mere $2,000 in Holyoke-that's what she'd paid him to buy into tonight's run. In Vermont, the same amount could go for $14,000. No surprise that Johnny had seized this as an opportunity. The surprise was that his competitors hadn't taken him out yet-except that business was perhaps still so good in Holyoke, claims from the police chief notwithstanding, that even at low local prices, enough money was being made to exceed demand.
"Who're my contacts going to be in Bratt and Rutland?" she asked casually.
He paused in his work to look up at her. "What did you just say? 'That's for me to know'? This is a test, girlie. You don't get contacts. You make sales-a lot of sales real quick-and my contacts, as you call them, will report back to me how good you did. You do that, and bring me back the money, and we'll see about what else. We talked about this yesterday. You said your boyfriend Dancer had all the contacts you need. Your bullshit beginning to show?"
She shrugged. "My efficient business sense is beginning to show. I got lots of people to go to, but you want to waste time doing a dog-and-pony act, that's fine with me. I'll jump through a few hoops for you, but you better be serious. What's my cut going to be?"