She frowned. "Look, Ralph. We all got baggage to carry, okay? I try to do one thing at a time, and do it right. I know how messed up I can get. This deal means a lot to me-it's kind of like my one shot, as I see it, and I don't want to screw it up. I've done that enough times already."
She got up and walked to the grimy window and looked out on the narrow canyon of junk outside. "You're a guy. You can take what you want in life. Me, it's always been the shit end of the stick. I want a change."
She turned and looked at him. He'd just finished taking a pill himself and washing it down. The gun was no longer in view, and he'd put three more pills on the arm of her chair.
"You said part of your plan was to streamline our supply sources. I think that's the words you used. What did that mean?"
She was struck by the change of subject. Had her ingestion of a single Ecstasy tablet turned the tables? "Just what it sounded like," she answered him, pocketing the extra pills. "Right now it's catch-as-catch-can. You got a bunch of competing bigwigs in Holyoke, a few more out of upper New York State, some from Canada, a shit-load of one-shot wonders working street corners-"
"I know one who deals right out of her vagina," Ralph interrupted. "Little wet bags of the stuff. You ever do that?"
She ignored him. "There's no control. Everyone looks at this as a really ripe market, 'cause the prices are so good compared to Massachusetts or New York, but that misses the point. It's short-term thinking. If we set up a dependable, consistent pipeline, and enforce it to keep everyone else out, think how that would change the business."
He looked skeptical. "That works both ways, though. You're saying we should do all this through Rivera. What's to stop him from jacking our prices up? Right now we can shop around for the best deal."
Her heart gave a triple beat for no reason, and she felt an odd wave of warmth run through her. She sat back down, brushing it aside in the interests of making her point. "It's a monopoly, Ralph. You pass the costs along."
"Meaning we're right back where we started, at the same profit margin."
She was shaking her head. "Wrong. You forgot the consistency advantage. You got more product and more clients as a result. Even if Rivera doubles his price, forcing you to do the same, you'll still be selling to four times more people, if you do this right. Plus, we plan to go outside Rutland and push this till it covers the state. There is an element of the top dog winning out, but that's you already, right? You're one of the top dogs in town."
Unsurprisingly, that last comment proved the most effective. Ralph smiled broadly and settled back into his mildewy armchair. "You could say that. Sure you don't want to fool around?"
Sam was feeling hot, her heart was beating more rapidly than made sense. The drug was kicking in and making her nervous, even slightly paranoid. But she also had energy to spare all of a sudden, and a strong desire to get things done.
She stood up. "Sorry, Ralph. Not in the mood. And I gotta get crackin'. You in or not?"
"I'm not in or out. I want to think about it."
She opened the door and looked back at him. "Okay, but the clock's ticking."
"I got a question for you," he said unexpectedly "What happens if Torres and the others don't take kindly to this?"
"They've been dealt with. I told you."
He gave her an enigmatic look, his face washed by the anemic light slipping in through the open door. "I like you. Otherwise, I wouldn't waste my time. But Jimmy Hollowell thought the same thing. Maybe you should ask yourself what happened to him."
Chapter 18
Sammie kept trying to concentrate. She knew she'd heard something important while talking with Ralph Meiner, but she couldn't get hold of it. Instead, she was distracted by everything she saw passing by the windows of her car-lights, trees, endless rows of buildings. Although slightly blurred and a little stuttery, as in an old silent movie, it all took on an intensity, a beauty, and a mysterious serenity that she'd never before noticed. She found herself unexpectedly walking across a broad stretch of park, out of the car, not remembering having left it, totally attuned to the smells and sensations around her. She felt happy, even euphoric, tingling with sensuality. She dropped to her knees and and placed her hands on the ground, curling her fingers through the grass as if it were a lover's hair, grinding her teeth with the passion, before finally stretching out to feel the resonance of the earth against her body. In an unexpected shift, however, that same sensation led her back in time to when, as a child, she'd press her ear against a wall to distinguish the muted murmurings on the other side. Now, as back then, she was confronted with messages she couldn't decipher-except that this time it was a dilemma she found pleasantly seductive, even sexually stimulating.
By the time the effects of the Ecstasy wore off, she was tired, dirty, disoriented, and let down. It was late and dark, and it took her half an hour to locate her car at the park's edge. As for the overall experience, she was caught between worrying about any long-range consequences and the strong, lingering memory of having tasted something unimaginably appealing. She realized with a shock that had she been on the drug the night before, when standing so close to Manuel in the basement, she wouldn't have hesitated entering his embrace-a thought that troubled her beyond anything else.
* * *
"I was stupid."
Joe reached out and took Gail's hand in his own. "You were trying to make amends for something you shouldn't have felt guilty about in the first place. It still doesn't mean it wasn't worth the attempt."
"She took me for a patsy, and she was right. I played right into it."
"I'm glad you didn't shoot her boyfriend," he said, half as an aside.
Gail thought about that for a couple of beats. "I didn't even see him. All I saw was the other guy's face."
The other guy-to Joe's knowledge, she hadn't spoken her rapist's actual name in years.
"But you stayed in control. You did what you thought was right, realized you were being had, and you corrected the situation. Take that for what it is, Gail. You were not stupid."
She smiled thinly. They were in her living room, her more pawnable possessions still gathered near the double doors where either Debbie and Nelson had piled them up or the cops had placed them after cataloging and removing them from Nelson's rust bucket of a van.
"You say the nicest things," she said with irony. "I just wish it made me feel better."
"How's Laurie doing?" he asked.
"The same. I called Rachel a while ago." She'd been staring at the floor but now fixed him with a direct look. "Joe, I'm sorry I shut you out."
"You had a lot on your mind."
She shook her head. "I'm not sure I did. I think I had only one thing on my mind-to turn back the clock somehow. You know, the funny thing is that I never much liked Laurie. The little time I spent with her, all she did was complain about her life, which for my money was pampered and privileged and overindulged. And yet she whined about how bored she was and how terrible her parents were. I didn't know what she was doing in Brattleboro because I took no interest. I had a Post-it note on my computer-'call Laurie.' I saw it every day until I finally threw it out. Never called her once."
"You think anything would've changed if you had?" he asked gently.
He gave her credit. Someone else might have flared at that. Gail merely nodded acceptingly. "Probably not. I still wouldn't have liked her. And she never saw me as anything other than her mother's sister, anyhow."
"That may not be true," he countered. "She ever say that?"
"No," she admitted. "We never had that long a conversation."
Joe sensed they were past the worst of Gail's self-recrimination, certainly far enough for him to ask, "So why did you go after Debbie so hard, if Laurie meant that little?"