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

“Easy now, easy,” I said, helping him down onto the bed. “Let’s get your jacket off.” He moaned as I removed it, his face contorted; with the jacket off, I got him onto his stomach and pulled out his shirt, which I then tore straight up the back to see how bad the wound was.

And stopped.

For a flash I was puzzled, and then I began to get pissed. Fucking Herbie. “Where does it hurt, man?”

“Oh… oh… in the middle… right shoulder… around the scap… scapula.”

“Yes,” I said. “I see.” What I saw was a smooth, slightly flabby, white expanse of unbroken skin. “Doesn’t look too bad, though. Here, you better see for yourself. Go look in the mirror.”

“Okay,” Herbie said, doing the heavy number. With a wince he said, “Give me a hand up, Pete, buddy.”

“Sure.” I whipped him off the bed with one hand and watched in silence as he staggered to his feet and walked into the bathroom. The bathroom light went on, and there was a long silence.

Finally, quietly, came an awed voice: “Far out.”

There then followed another long silence, in which I lit a cigarette, smoked it, and tried to keep from going in and plugging the little bastard myself. After a while, I heard him say, “Most perplexing.” And then, finally, he came back into the bedroom.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Herbie said. He was being very dignified and composed. “And I apologize for being an alarmist.” And then he walked out of the room.

“Hey, where’re you going?” I went out into the hallway after him, and found him returning with the sack. He walked toward the kitchen, and as he passed me, he said, “I think we’d better count the bricks, don’t you?”

He had made a fast recovery, and I told him so. He didn’t say anything in response. Out in the kitchen, he began to count the bricks while I raided Sandra’s refrigerator. Sandra is a candy freak. Every kind of American, Italian, French, Spanish, Swiss, Indonesian, Japanese candy can be found in her refrigerator. While I was looking, I said, “How many bricks?”

“What?” Preoccupied voice.

“How many bricks?”

“C’mere and dig this, Peter.”

I turned around to look. He was holding the sack in front of him. At first I saw nothing. Then, to demonstrate, he stuck his finger into the neat little hole.

“Interesting?” he said. He then picked up one of the bricks, and cut it open with a knife before I could protest. There was a piece of dull gray metal imbedded in the brick.

I went over and plucked it out. “Far out,” I said.

“The bag was over my right shoulder,” Herbie said.

“Far out,” I said again.

“I believe you owe me an apology,” Herbie said.

And then I began to laugh. “I owe you more than that,” I said. “I owe you the biggest smoke of your life.” I got a piece of newspaper and tore off a quarter, and pulled off a chunk of brick and began to roll it into a joint.

As Herbie watched, he said with a small smile, “All in all, it was pretty exciting, wasn’t it?”

An hour later, we were still in the kitchen, drafting the statement. We were both very stoned and very happy. I was writing and Herbie was dictating. I said, “How about ‘Please release her tomorrow morning’?”

“No,” Herbie said. “Make it strong. ‘I want her released tomorrow morning’—and then put in the D.A. and the Globe and all that.”

I nodded, and made the changes.

“Is that it?” Herbie said.

“That’s it,” I said, and picked up the phone to call. The first three times I dialed, I got the siren whine of a nonexistent number. Finally, the fourth time, it began to ring. I was very, very stoned.

A woman’s voice: “Hello?”

I said, “Lieutenant Murphy, please. This is Captain Fry of the Narcotics Division.”

“Just a minute, Captain.”

A long silence at the other end of the phone, presumably while Murphy tried to figure out who the hell Captain Fry was—or who would be calling saying he was Captain Fry. Or what Captain Fry would want at this time of night, if indeed there really were a Captain Fry, whom he had never heard of… God, I was zonked.

Finally: “Murphy here.”

I jumped at the sound of his voice, the familiarity of it. For a moment I flashed back to Alameda County and the interrogation room, the kneeing, the whole riff. Then I got hold of myself. “Yes,” I said. “This is a mutual acquaintance. I thought you would appreciate knowing that I have acquired twelve kilograms of marijuana that have an interesting set of fingerprints on them.”

“Who is this?”

“The kilograms are stamped with a peace symbol and the numbers eight nine oh, which allows their California origin to be quite reliably established. The fingerprints,” I continued, “are yours and Susan Blake’s. That is an interesting combination. It is easy to explain how that combination of fingerprints got there. But I wonder, is it possible to explain how they came into my hands?”

“Who’s calling?” Murphy said, his voice tense.

“I think that a lot of people would be curious enough to be interested in my explanation,” I said. “I have one very curious acquaintance in the district attorney’s office, and another at the Boston Globe.”

There was a long, taut silence. Murphy was thinking it over. And he was going to play it our way, I knew. He had no choice. He’d have to drop charges on Sukie.

“What do you want?” he said, finally.

“I want the girl released and all charges dropped.”

There was a long, slow sigh at the other end. The bastard obviously wasn’t used to having other people play as rough as he did. Finally he cleared his throat.

“Now you listen to me, punk, and listen good. You can’t touch me, you can’t even rile me. You go near the D.A.’s office with those bricks and I’ll see to it personally that you get busted. Now. As far as I’m concerned, you can go right ahead and do anything you want. I’m going back to bed.” Click!

Herbie had been sitting across the table from me. He must have seen my face fall. “What happened?” he said.

I couldn’t believe it. I was shaking my head, absolutely not believing it. “He didn’t go for it,” I said.

I WAS SUDDENLY GHASTLY SOBER, the kind of sober where the room lights seem brighter and the shadows sharper and everything is a little bit uglier. I got up and poured myself a Scotch—some of John’s Chivas this time, the hell with him. I felt it slosh down in my stomach over the Perugina chocolate, and I thought about Speedy shooting at us, and I began to feel sick. I spent a few hours standing there, leaning against the wall, trying to decide whether I would make it or not, and finally decided I wouldn’t. I jumped for the sink.

“Flawless,” Herbie said.

I turned and looked back at him. The world was green. “Thanks,” I said.

“I meant the plan,” Herbie said, ignoring me as I wiped my mouth with a towel. He ticked the points off on his fingers. “Murphy is fronting bricks. His prints are on them. We recover the fronted bricks. We threaten to expose him unless he releases the girl. He releases the girl. We expose him anyway. A flawless plan.”

“It didn’t work,” I said again. “You can’t bust pigs, no matter how fucked-up they are.”

Herbie nodded in a puzzled way. “He must have protection,” he said. “That’s the only answer.”

I laughed, and as I did the green world shifted back to glaring white. “Uh-uh,” I said. “He doesn’t give a crap, that’s all. He knows that a couple of punk kids are trying to rip him off, and he doesn’t mind a bit. He knows they can’t touch him. The day when freaks bust wrong pigs is the day that—”