Michael Crichton - Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues

Who?

Finally it was four o’clock, and to my relief and the members’ indescribable joy, I politely excused myself, regretting, to the ladies, that it looked after all as though I weren’t going to be given a chance to play for them. They said it was a shame, I agreed it was a shame, and I made my escape.

On the way out, I looked around for Annie to say goodbye, but I didn’t see her. I didn’t look very hard.

I GOT BACK TO THE room just after four. I was a little bit smashed, but I didn’t mind and I didn’t figure that Sukie would. I kicked the door open, put my hands in my pockets, and walked in.

“Well, hi there,” I said.

“Well, hi there,” John said. “Bought the Lotus this morning. Magnificent machine. Got a pretty good trade-in on the Ferrari, too, better than I thought.”

“Swell,” I said, looking around.

No Sukie.

“I also got a place for the chick to stay,” John said. “Sharon’s old place. She’s moved out, you know, and the rent’s paid for another two weeks, and the furniture’s still there, so…”

“Fine,” I said, still looking.

“Don’t thank me or anything, Peter-old-boy,” John said. I looked over at him and realized that he was hugely pleased with himself for having lined up the place.

“Yeah, thanks, man, thanks. But where is she?”

“Here,” John said, sprawling back on the couch and suddenly intensely interested in the new Rolling Stone.

“In Cambridge?”

“No, in Boston. She just called from the airport. Christ, that reminds me. What’d you give her our number for? You know I don’t like—”

“Why did she call?”

John shrugged. “Some hang-up. They lost her bag.”

“What bag,” I said, but it wasn’t a question. I just wanted to know what I was already afraid I knew.

“The bag with the grass.” John sighed. He seemed to be taking it well. I couldn’t believe he was just sitting there, telling me she’d lost the dope and sighing.

“The bag with the grass,” I said. “Sweet Jesus, how could she lose that? It was under the goddamn seat—”

“No,” said John. “She checked it.”

“She what?”

“Checked it. It was a forty-brick run. You know as well as I do that if you’re carrying forty bricks, you’re gonna have to check one of the bags.”

“You didn’t tell me it was going to be that big a—”

“You didn’t ask,” John said, slipping back into his magazine. He was again suddenly fascinated by the magazine, the bastard. From behind it he said, “Anyway, she’ll be okay. She said they just lost it somewhere in transit.”

“In transit, my ass,” I said. “What did you tell her to do?”

“I told her to go back and get it.”

I HAD TO SIT DOWN for a minute to think that one out, it was so unbelievable. And then I found that I couldn’t think, that I was so pissed that I couldn’t do anything but shout at John and tell him what I thought about sending the chick back. He just sat and stared at me and said nothing and finally I realized that I was wasting precious time. Bag or no bag, if I could get to Sukie before they did… “Where’re the keys to the Lotus?”

“Give me back the Rolling Stone,” John said. I’d ripped it out of his hands without knowing what I was doing, and as I handed it back he gave me the keys. “Don’t run it over forty-five-hundred revs,” he yelled after me, as I hustled out the door, “it’s just had a valve job.”

All the way out to the airport I ground the gears and ran it over forty-five-hundred revs. Fucking John, he’d really screwed me this time, screwed me so bad that I couldn’t believe it was happening—that he’d just let it happen. The dude had a loose bolt somewhere, especially when it came to chicks. Or other people. Or other people’s chicks. I mean, what the hell was the cat thinking of, sending Sukie back for the bag. Because he knew about running dope, and he knew about “lost” bags at the airport. This wasn’t the first time we’d ever “lost” a bag. The first time had cost John a pretty penny, to buy Jeffrey off, and we’d all learned from the experience. Ever since then, we’d had strict rules for runs, especially runs which involved bags in the hold. First, no matching sets of luggage. Second, no name tags. Third, no real names used on tickets, so that nothing could be traced from the baggage check on a busted bag. Fourth, the specially designed, double-locked, lined bags, which made it impossible for the heat to open the bags without irreparably breaking them and so disqualifying any potential evidence on the grounds of illegal search and seizure.

Those were the first four rules, and the fifth was never to go back for a lost bag. Because it just meant trouble and time in court and a hell of a lot of money. We never went back for a “lost” bag, because these days the narcs didn’t always have to open a bag to find the stuff. The narcs were into all kinds of things now: dogs trained to growl at the smell of dope, even dope soaked in Coca-Cola and wrapped in aluminum; and odor-analyzers, weird little machines with a sort of gun attachment that sniffed the air and lit up when they smelled dope.

And so anything that we put in the hold was a strictly calculated risk, and not something to be toyed with. Because the heat had their own little, hustle: when they’d catch a bag full of weed, they’d hold it, announce that it was lost, and then bust whoever showed up to claim it. Not a very original hustle—and anybody who’s carrying always knows that if they say your bag is lost, split. Split fast and never go back. But Sukie’d never run any dope before, and so she’d called John and asked him what to do. And John—

Fucking John.

I hot-assed it through Sumner tunnel, paid my toll, and blasted up the ramp toward the airport—only to come to a dead halt twenty yards up the road. Airport traffic. Newsboys sauntered in and out among the rows of cars with maddening assurance that nobody was going anywhere. Hawking the Boston papers, the most provincial newspapers in America (“Saugus Man Dies in New York Nuclear Holocaust”) and the crookedest (look at page ten for the small item “Ten Officials Indicted in 44 Million Swindle”) as befits the town. I sat in the car and swore and lit a cigarette and got paranoid. My head was completely spaced. I couldn’t even remember if Sukie had come in on United or TWA. Most of all, I couldn’t figure out what John had been trying to do when he’d sent her back. Because if anyone knew how much it’d cost to buy her off of a forty-brick rap, he did. American justice is extraordinarily expensive; the bribe must always measure up to the crime. Forty bricks was going to set John back quite a ways, if anything happened to Sukie.

If anything happened to Sukie…

I had visions of arriving just as they were slapping the cuffs on her, of a fleeting glance of her face looking over her shoulder, looking at me sadly the way she had that night they had dragged me away. She was showing no reproach and somehow that made it worse. And then suddenly she was at the end of a long hallway, it was somewhere in Berkeley but I knew that the hallway would look the same no matter where it was, fluorescent lights leering, and she had on a gray sack dress and two matrons were taking her, still cuffed, down a flight of stairs. I watched helplessly and saw again the sad, un-reproachful face over the shoulder.

Then the line started moving and I began thinking about lawyers and bail bondsmen and where in the world I was going to scrape up the bread. I drifted out of my lane and some swine in a Cadillac honked and skinned my front fender in a burping burst of exhaust. Fuck you, fella. I was down the ramp and at the airport and parked in a cab zone before I knew it. A cop shouted at me that I’d have to move, but I just ran inside, past the people and the porters and the heat that seemed to be everywhere, wondering why I’d never noticed how many heat hung around the place.