Майкл Коннелли - The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

In this pose she was interrupted one day by a visitor, who stood over her (had she forgotten to close the door?) with a leather satchel and an air of cool but not chilly professionalism.

“Mrs. Sylvia? I was wondering if you had a moment.”

“What’s the Y stand for?”

We were staring at the package on Fender’s glass coffee table, a quart-sized zip-lock bag full of gray-white powder. It looked like cocaine cut with fireplace ashes. There was a red sticker on the package with a black Y scrawled with a Sharpie.

“I’m not sure,” Fender said. “That’s just the street name.”

Fender said it was the newest thing in Asia, some kind of opiate mixed with cocaine alkaloid and crushed dinosaur bones. Not just any dinosaur—one specific skeleton that was stolen from a Hong Kong museum. Fender couldn’t remember the name of it. He said it was supposed to be like China’s version of the Allosaurus, but I didn’t know what the fuck that was either.

Because Y came from only one skeleton, that meant it was just short of impossible to get. Which is what made it attractive to Fender—who was a collector as much as he was a dealer.

“Have you tried it yet?” I said, but I could tell from the package that he hadn’t touched it.

“Nope,” he said. “I’m a businessman. Each snort is probably worth ten grand. But I am curious,” he added.

Fender and I were sitting in the living room of his spacious penthouse apartment. He had a nice view of Lake Erie out his window. The sky was overcast, the water gray.

Collector guitars decorated the walls of Fender’s apartment. An acoustic guitar reputedly owned by Johnny Cash. An electric from Eddie Van Halen. One with burn marks on it that was supposedly from that Great White concert where the pyrotechnics got out of control and killed a bunch of people.

Fender once joked that it was hard to know what was more valuable in this apartment, the guitars or the drugs. But I was as skeptical of the stories about the guitars as I was about the origins of Y.

We shared a joint and each had a bottle of beer, and talked about whether we thought the dinosaur-bone story had any truth to it. Fender said he believed there were real dinosaur bones in there—that much was probably true—but he doubted they contributed to the high.

“It’s like a rhinoceros horn,” he said. “People think it contains magical qualities, but that’s all bullshit. The real rush is that you’re snorting something rare. Exotic. We’re talking about a supply so finite that it’s practically nonexistent.”

Fender was wearing a silk robe with silly leather slippers, and his shoulder-length hair was pulled back into a ponytail. He had a soul patch and hoop earrings and looked quite a bit different from the kid I shared a room with when we were freshmen in college.

I told him I didn’t think the drug was going to go over well here. This was America. People here didn’t believe in that crap about rhinoceros horns, and they wouldn’t buy any mumbo-jumbo about mystical dinosaur-bone dust.

“I already got a buyer lined up,” he said. “We’re just haggling over price.”

“Speaking of buying things, I need to get a move on.”

He took me back to his study and unlocked the safe. I turned away so I wouldn’t see the combination. It made me uncomfortable how leisurely he was about opening it in front of me. Did that mean he was like that with other people? I hoped not.

The safe was the size of a small refrigerator. A series of shelves lined the left side, some stacked with cash, others with every kind of drug you could think of. On the right side were guns: a shotgun, some kind of military rifle, a handgun. There was also a pearl-handled switchblade, which I’d seen Fender open lots of bags of drugs with.

Fender reached in and brought out a brick of marijuana.

I handed him a stack of bills.

I shoved the marijuana into my knapsack, and we headed back to the living room.

I excused myself to his restroom before I left. When I came back, Fender and my backpack were sitting on the couch, but the bag of Y was gone.

“Why isn’t there a Chinese symbol on the package instead of a Y ?” I said.

At the bar I managed, I used rat poison that was from China—poison that I’m sure was illegal as hell here in the U.S.—and there were Chinese symbols all over the packaging. I would think that whether Y was the real thing or someone was just pretending it was an exotic Chinese drug, either way it would make sense to use a Chinese character instead of an English letter.

“Beats me, man. Maybe they’re trying to Americanize it.”

I smirked at Fender and shook my head.

“I think you’ve been had,” I said. “Someone cremated a fucking dog and put it in a bag and you just paid God knows what for it.”

“Ye of little faith,” Fender said, clapping me on the back.

He opened the six deadbolts on his door, led me into the foyer, and opened the six deadbolts on the exterior door.

“See you,” he said.

“Wouldn’t want to be you,” I said.

“Bullshit,” he said, just like every time we said goodbye. “You wish like hell you were me.”

I went directly to the bar to open up. It was important that I get there before Theresa because I had to clean up the dead rats before she arrived. She’d come in once before me and was gagging her whole shift.

Each night before I left, I’d set out the poison in the storage room. Each day when I came in to open, I’d find three or four dead rats. Today there were only two, which meant maybe I was finally making a dent in the population.

They were lying on the concrete, their bodies twisted into stiff, strangely contorted poses, like they’d been convulsing until their muscles finally locked up. Their tongues hung out of their mouths, clamped between their teeth, and a strange bloody foam spilled from their clenched jaws like dyed beer froth.

I always wondered if the rats ate the poison at the same time, or if they were so fucking stupid that they went ahead and ate it even after they could see that one of their brethren had died. I’d considered hooking up some kind of camera to watch, but that was too much effort. I didn’t care that much.

I put the two dead rats in a plastic bag and was outside tossing it into the dumpster when Theresa came walking up.

“Hey, handsome,” she said, and gave me a smile that was better than any drug.

“Hey,” I said.

I wanted to call her beautiful or good-looking or something like that, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I wasn’t sure what Fender would think about me flirting with his kid sister, but I didn’t figure he’d be too happy about it.

I was a decade older than her, for one thing. And I wasn’t exactly what you’d call a good catch. My name was on the bar’s deed, but it was really owned by Ramzen Akhmadov, the head of the Chechen mafia in Cleveland.

That’s what happens when you borrow money from the mob for your drug problem. The vig is too steep. You get in over your head. Instead of getting your legs broken, you make a deal.

And then you’re stuck. You can’t walk away. Ever.

“Did you go see my brother today?” Theresa asked as she started taking chairs off the tables.

“Yep.”

She grinned. If I saw Fender, that meant I had dope.

“You want to smoke a jay before we open?” she asked.

Theresa was a cute girl—how could I say no?

I didn’t tap into the new brick of marijuana. I left that in my backpack behind the bar and went to the stash I kept in the freezer. I rolled a joint while Theresa finished setting up the chairs.