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

“How ’bout the bread, man,” he said, still keeping his distance from the blade. “How ’bout the bread. You got the bricks now how ’bout the bread!”

I told him to relax again and reached for the bag, knife out to cut the string, and all of a sudden he was banging on the roof of the Caddy, banging hard and the doors were opening and I suddenly realized why he’d been so paranoid about the knife, if he hadn’t been trying to rip me off he wouldn’t have given a goddamn about the knife. He wouldn’t have even been thinking about the knife. He would’ve been shitting in his pants because of an insane honky who was insisting on tasting his bricks in broad daylight, on a side street just three blocks off Telegraph, a side street that the heat could come down at any moment, just casually cruising, the heat, and then I knew what was happening, knew and it was unbelievable that I’d walked into it as alone and blind as I had. The four of them were standing around me now and they had their hands in their pockets and before they could get them out I was talking.

“Listen, man, you digging that window, that window over there, that ground-floor window, my brother lives in there and right now he’s got a forty-four trained right on your fucking head, you dig? You mess with me and the dogs around here gonna be munching your guts for dinner, you dig? Right in that ground floor window over there my brother—”

And as I talked two of the dudes had their hands out of their pockets and I was staring down two shiny silvered .38s, thinking, Ugly, ugly, this can’t have happened to me, this isn’t real, I didn’t walk into a setup like this, I mean, I couldn’t have, this just can’t be real—thinking, This is real, it must be real, those guns are ugly, they’re pointed right at my fucking guts, this has got to be real and I’ve got to get out of here before it gets any more real—

thinking, I know this can’t be real, I know it’s not real, it’s happening so fast, all of it, but I’ve got to get out of here so fast before it is real—

thinking, Suddenly I’m getting my ass out of here before I’m not around anymore to dig how real it is; and then out of nowhere I started yelling, yelling my lungs out, not daring to look at the spades, yelling at the window yelling

“Zeph, hey Zeph, Zeph, these boys are looking for trouble, show ’em where you’re at in there, Zeph” and I kept right on yelling, and the dudes were looking at each other and getting a little more nervous, and then it happened.

Whoever the hell he was, he saved my skin. Some scared little guy pulled back the curtain in the ground-floor apartment and gave me one of those Crazy Kids looks and dropped the curtain again. And that was just enough of a pause for me. I grabbed the paper bag off the roof and ran faster than I’d ever known I could run, down underneath an apartment house through the garage and running my ass off, waiting the whole time to catch something hot and sharp in the small of my back, running and waiting and running for what seemed an eternity, running up to an eight-foot fence and right over it into a backyard on the next street over.

I couldn’t believe I’d made it. I took a deep breath, but the situation had me flowing with its energy and before I’d even thought about what had happened I had the bag open and was staring at a pair of sneakers wrapped in T-shirts. I dropped the bag and went back up to Telegraph to badmouth those cats. The whole number lasted maybe twenty minutes.

Give or take ten years.

I DIDN’T WANT TO GET into that kind of scene again, but I didn’t know what else to do. So finally I went to see if Herbie was still up and about, and I found him wide-eyed and stoned out of his mind but ready to rip.

“I thought you’d show,” Herbie said as I came into the room. “Want to get some breakfast?”

I was surprised. “It’s that late?”

“Yeah.” He checked his watch. “Seven-thirty.” He stepped out the door, and came back in holding the morning paper. “Your old lady ought to have gotten a big write-up,” he said. “Big splash.” He sighed. “Wish I could help,” he said, “but…”

I nodded. There was nothing he could do. Obviously, there was nothing that any of us could do. “A forty-brick bust,” I said. “That’s a hell of a big bust.”

“She got anything else going for her?” Herbie said.

“No prior offenses, no record,” I said. “That’s something.”

He nodded. “College student?”

“No.”

“Too bad. Work history? Can she prove she doesn’t do this for a living?”

“She hasn’t worked at some job for five years, if that’s what you mean.”

“Psychiatric history?”

“Nothing,” I said. That was the last resort, so far as defense went, but for young defendants it often helped.

Herbie sighed again, and shook his head. Then he looked up suddenly. “How many bricks did you say?”

“What?”

“How many bricks was she busted for holding?”

“Forty,” I said.

“Forty kilos?”

“That’s what I said.”

“That’s odd,” Herbie said. As I’d been talking he’d been leafing through the paper. “Because it says here… wait a minute… dadadadedah… umm… Here. It says ‘Susan Blake, busted for forty pounds in twenty kilos.’”

“Well, they made a mistake,” I said. “Fucking newspapers can’t even get the facts on a goddamn local bust down right. Anyway,” I shrugged, “it was forty keys.”

Herbie stared at the paper some more. “No,” he said.

“No, what?”

“No, they did not make a mistake. The sentence is internally consistent. Forty pounds would be just under twenty kilograms. That’s accurate.”

“Yeah, well, she had forty keys, forty bricks—”

“What did they say on the news last night?”

I shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

“Well,” Herbie said, “it’s important, because if it’s only twenty keys, her bail might be lower.”

“Far out,” I said, and felt momentarily encouraged. Until I began to think of some other things that I had never thought of. Things I should have considered right off, especially with Murphy involved.

“Herbie,” I said, “this is far out. This is very far out.” Herbie looked interested. “Dig it: I know that there were forty keys in that shipment. Sukie was holding down two suitcases, twenty keys to a suitcase. Total value, ten thousand dollars. I mailed the check to her myself.”

“That is far out,” Herbie said. “The boys in blue seem to have gotten pretty arrogant.” He smiled, and buried his nose in the newspaper. “’Cause it says here ‘one suitcase,’ and that means that… Where do you think it’s being dumped?”

“Roxbury,” I said, “or Somerville. That’s a beginning, anyway.”

“Okay,” Herbie said, getting off on the whole idea of fucking up the pigs. “Now we need a car, and binoculars. I have both. Also, we have to stop off at the drugstore…”

“What?”

“I’ll meet you in the courtyard in ten minutes,” Herbie said on his way out the door.

AN HOUR LATER WE FOUND ourselves in Herbie’s VW, parked across the street from District Station House Number Four. It was still raining slightly, and on a Sunday afternoon this part of town, on the east edge of Roxbury, was quiet. Herbie gave me the binoculars. “Here,” he said. “You’re the one who knows what he looks like.”

I took the binoculars and tried to look through them. Herbie had focused them for his own eyes, and they were completely blurred for me. While I changed the focus, Herbie took off his glasses and wiped them on his tie. “You know,” he said conversationally, “Boston has the lowest pay scales for police of any place in the country.”