“Work is dead. I could stay home. It’s totally boring there these days. Seriously.”
“Seriously,” she said, “no, you can’t.”
“You are a party pooper.”
“Life is full of suffering, haven’t you learned that yet?”
Jay rolled out of the bed, scratched his chest, and padded toward the bathroom. “You’ll be sorry when I’m gone. You’ll finish your class and be all alone in this big old condo, and you’ll wish I was here.”
“I’ll try to be brave.”
“You want to shower?”
“Yes. After you leave.”
“You don’t trust me. I’m hurt.”
“I can see that. Go on. I’ll cook supper when you get home.”
“What, roots and twigs?”
“You said you liked my cooking.”
“That was before you threw me out into the cold,” he said.
“It’s supposed to hit seventy-two today,” she said. “Not so cold.”
“I was speaking metaphorically.”
“Go and shower, Jay.”
He grinned at her. Boy, did he like having her around. Really. A lot. More than anything he could think of. He headed for the shower and considered for the hundredth time the proposition he’d been working on in his head for the last couple of weeks. Was it possible to make it permanent? Legally permanent? As in getting married? Would she go for it?
There was only one way to find out, but he was hesitant. What if she said no?
That would be… bad.
The hot water began to steam up the bathroom. He called out to Saji: “Hey—?”
“No,” she cut him off. “Definitely not.”
But he was rinsing the shampoo from his hair when the shower door slid open and Saji followed the draft of cool air in, gloriously naked and grinning.
“Why, Sojan Rinpoche! What are you doing here?”
“I came to wash your back is all.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Turn around.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He turned around. She reached out, and her soapy hand began rubbing him.
However, the hand was definitely not stroking his back, nope, no sir, no indeedy!
He laughed, and she laughed with him.
Yep, he was going to be late to work, no two ways about it.
“Hey, I think you missed a spot there.”
“I didn’t miss it. I was ignoring it. Easy to do, it’s so… small.”
“Ooh. You are a cruel woman. Cruel.”
“Suffer, big daddy, suffer….”
3
Robert Drayne looked up from his mixing bench in front of the big picture window as a pair of young women in thong bikinis jogged past on the hard-packed wet sand, just at the water line. No rain today, the sky was clear, the Pacific Ocean a nice blue and fairly calm, and the two honeys were blond and tan and bouncy. Not bad for a Monday. He grinned. He loved this town.
He looked back at the bench. He had a batch ready to time and encapsulate, only six hits, and where the hell was Tad? You didn’t want to start the clock ticking and then have the stuff sit on the table for an hour or two. That might cut things a little close. Even with a master such as himself, the timing could get a little tricky, could be an hour either way.
As if in response, the door alarm ching-chinged as somebody disarmed it and entered the house.
That had better be Tad….
Drayne dumped a bit of catalyst into the white compound, stirred in the fine red powder so that the resulting mix started turning pale pink. Drayne worked by sight and smell, he kept adding catalyst until the right shade was achieved — a shade somewhere between titty and bubble gum — and that sharp, cherry-and-almond odor drifted up and told him it was about right, too.
Ah, there we go….
“About fucking time,” Drayne said. There was no real anger in his voice, just making a comment was all.
“Traffic is bad on the Coast Highway,” Tad said by way of explanation. “The tourists are all slowing down to look at the house coming down in the mud slide. How’s it coming?”
“Catalyst mixed, as of thirty seconds ago.”
Tad looked at his watch.
Drayne grabbed one of the big purple gel caps, a special run he’d had made three years ago by a guy in Mexico who was, unfortunately, no longer among the living. Well, what the hell, he had more than a thousand caps left. Worry about it when he ran out.
He opened the cap and scooped up the mix with both halves, expertly judging how much so that he could put the cap together again without overfilling it. He looked up and smiled. This was the easy part. The real work was in the creation and mixing of the various components. That had to be done in a lab, and the current one was an RV parked in a dinky burg on the edge of the Mojave Desert, a couple of hours away from here. By tomorrow, it would be parked a hundred miles away, the old retired couple driving it looking about as illegal and dangerous as a bowl of prunes. In this biz, appearance counted for a lot. Who’d pull over Ma and Pa Yeehaw in their RV with Missouri plates for anything but a traffic ticket? And Ma could talk her way out of that by making a cop think about his sweet little ole granny. And if the cop got really horsey, Pa would cap him with the.40 SIG he kept under the seat.
Tad Bershaw was Drayne’s age, well, actually, he was a year younger at thirty-one, but he looked fifty, rode hard and put up wet, like Drayne’s grandma used to say. Tad was black-haired, skinny, pale, and had dark circles under his eyes, a real heroin-chic kinda guy. He always wore black, even in the middle of summer, long sleeves, long pants, pointy-toed leather boots. And sunglasses, of course. He looked like a vampire or maybe one of the old beatniks, because he also had a little patch of hair under his lip.
Drayne, on the other hand, looked like a surfer, which he had been: tanned, sun-bleached dishwater blond hair, still enough muscle to pass for a gymnast or a swimmer. He had to admit, they made an odd-looking couple when they went out. Not that they went out that often.
Drayne put the finished cap down and picked up another empty. He had enough mix for six. Five for sale and one for Tad. At a thousand bucks each, it wasn’t a bad day’s work, not bad at all, given that their costs were about thirty-five dollars a cap.
“You heard about the guy in Atlantic City?” Tad asked.
Drayne worked on the third cap. “Olivetti?”
“Yeah.”
“No. What happened?”
“Hammer ate him. He ran amok, tore up a casino, beat the shit out of some rent-a-cops and local police before they cooked him. DOA.”
Drayne shrugged again. “Too bad. He was a good customer.”
“We got a guy coming from NYC says Olivetti referred him. Are we interested?”
Drayne finished the fourth cap. Found one of the special-special empties for number five. “No. If Olivetti is dead, the reference is dead. We don’t sell to him.”
“I figured,” Tad said. “Just checking.”
“You shouldn’t have to check. You know the deal. A vetted customer vets a newbie, always. First time we get a guy we can’t check out, that will be a narc, you got to figure it that way.”
“I hear you.”
Drayne finished the fifth cap, reached for Tad’s empty. “How are you working today’s produce?”
“Three off the net, FedEx Same Day as soon as we get the payment transfers to the dissolving account. One is a pickup, three-messenger drop. One is hand-to-hand.”
“Who’s the hand-to-hand?”
“The Zee-ster.”
Drayne grinned. “Be sure to tell him we want tickets to his next premiere.”
“Already in the pipe.”
“Okay, here you go. Last one is yours, be sure the double-special, that’s number five, goes out.”