Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

Inside the office, Everett leaned against one wall, arms crossed in front of him. Rhonda was stooped in front of the safe, working the dial. “So Clete, what was this plan of yours? I mean the other nine steps.”

“Just open it,” Clete said.

“You’re going to, what? Drive to a motel somewhere, feed Harlan fast food and squeeze out vintage?”

“Something like that.”

“Then what?”

Clete looked at Travis, his grin saying, Can you believe how stupid she is? “Uh, then we sell the stuff and get rich?” He laughed.

Rhonda pressed down on the safe’s handle and pulled the door open.

“Don’t you pull a gun out of there,” Clete said. The pistol in his left hand was pointed at her temple.

Rhonda shook her head in annoyance. “Here,” she said, and tossed him a key ring. Both Clete’s hands were occupied, and the keys bounced off his stomach and hit the floor.

Travis stooped to pick them up. “Okay,” he said to Everett. He didn’t sound happy.

Everett shrugged and walked out of the room with Travis’ gun at his back. “Hurry,” Clete said.

Rhonda stood and straightened her suit jacket. “Let me understand this. You’re going to take as much vintage as you can carry, and take Harlan with you, and take Paxton with you to keep Harlan producing.”

“Wrap her up,” Clete said to Paxton. He gestured with the gun for Rhonda to take a seat in her big leather desk chair. Rhonda sighed and sat, and Paxton kneeled next to her.

“After you sell off the vintage in the coolers, you’ve just got Harlan,” Rhonda said. “Say you manage to keep him alive and producing. That gives you about four ounces of vintage to sell a day.”

“At least four,” Clete said.

“Okay, say five. Or ten! Why not?”

Pax pulled off a long stretch of tape with his teeth, then tore it off. He began to wrap it around her shins and the central post of the desk chair. Rhonda was wearing nylons, so at least the tape wouldn’t pull her hair off when it was removed.

Rhonda said to Clete, “So how did you figure to make money with that? You can’t sell it to charlies-after today you’ll never be able to set foot in Switchcreek again. And I can’t see much of a market anywhere else.”

“Ha! Doreen said you’d say that. We’re not idiots, Aunt Rhonda. We’ll sell it to the outsiders, just like you do.”

“Really.”

“Don’t play dumb. I’ve seen what the vintage does to them.”

“Have you? Give an unchanged person the vintage and they get all weepy and sentimental, and then fall asleep. Not exactly a wonder drug. You’d be better off selling them Nyquil.”

“That’s the old weak shit,” Clete said, and he squatted to look into the safe. “The stuff from Elwyn and Bob and the other old men. Harlan’s vintage, though-that knocks skips on their asses. And the best thing is, it’s addictive as all hell.”

“So are cigarettes, hon, but even Marlboro has a marketing plan. Ooh, careful there, Paxton, I don’t have the best circulation.”

“Make it tight,” Clete said.

A savage expression flickered across Rhonda’s face, quick as the chop of a cleaver. Pax looked at Clete, but the chub boy had missed it-he was pulling out the account book and a stack of papers.

“All righty then,” Rhonda said, her voice as calm as before. “Say that you did have the world’s greatest narcotic-and you don’t-you’ve still got major sales and distribution problems. First of all, how’re you going to get people to try it? They never heard of this stuff, they don’t know what it does. There’s no demand. You’d spend the first year giving away free samples just to explain what your product was.”

Clete looked up in annoyance. “No I wouldn’t. Now where’s the cash?”

“Then you’ve got to think about the competition,” Rhonda said. She shifted her weight as Pax started to wrap her left arm. “How you going to outsell something as cheap as meth? Any hillbilly with a hotplate can make crystal meth. Or Oxycontin? Or cocaine? Tons of that stuff is crossing the border every day. You think you can meet those price points? It’s like trying to compete with Wal-Mart. All you’ve got is a few dribs and drabs of vintage.”

“But you’re selling it to outsiders!” Clete said. “Everybody knows you’re making a ton of money off the old men. Look at this place-you built this whole building, you’ve got that car, you run the whole town… Next you’re going to tell me that bullshit that you’re using it for research.”

“Oh, hon, that’s just what we tell the stupid people,” Rhonda said.

Pax stopped his wrapping. “What?”

“The just-plain-ignorant-that would be you, Clete-think I’m a Colombian drug lord or something, selling vintage all over Tennessee. All I have to do is be vague and people let their imagination run away with them. And the smart people-”

“Yeah, what do you tell them?” Clete asked.

“Hon, the smart people figure it out on their own,” Rhonda said, as if explaining it to a child. “That’s how you know they’re smart people.”

Pax noticed movement and looked up. Everett stood just outside the doorway, his white polo shirt covered in a rooster tail of bright red blood. And then he stepped back out of Paxton’s line of sight.

“You’re lying,” Clete said to Rhonda. A note of doubt had crept into his voice. “I know you’re lying.”

“Hon, you keep saying that, but I don’t have to lie to you, because I know how screwed you are. You were screwed from step one. You jumped into this without doing some very basic research.”

“You’re just making this up,” he said.

“Let me ask you, Clete. How many skips have you tried out the reverend’s vintage on?”

“I didn’t have the reverend’s vintage, so I couldn’t very well try it out, could I? Besides, I didn’t have to. I saw what it did to Paxton. One drop and the boy starts tripping like a hippie. He told me he’d never felt any drug like Harlan’s vintage. Ain’t that right, Paxton?”

Pax said nothing. He knelt on the floor beside Aunt Rhonda, the nearly empty spool of tape in his hands. He’d finished securing her to the chair. He hadn’t wrapped her too tightly, but he hoped it looked convincing.

“See, he’s still half-stoned. This morning I caught him talking to the wallpaper. Doreen said Harlan’s stuff sets off these mirror cells in your head-”

“Mirror neurons,” Rhonda said.

“Yeah, the empathy thing,” Clete said. “And the emotion stuff. Love Potion Number Nine.”

Rhonda shook her head. “Clete, you do know that Doreen’s not a real nurse? She’s barely a candy striper. She only knows what Dr. Fraelich tells her, and I doubt she understands a tenth of that. And even then, the doctor’s just guessing. The most data she’s ever gotten was when she sat around watching Paxton rant and rave for a few days. And even she got it wrong.”

“What wrong?” Clete said, frustrated.

“Hon, it’s not Harlan that’s different,” Rhonda said. “It’s Paxton.”

Out in the hallway, a slam that sounded like a gunshot. Clete spun toward the doorway, one arm up-and then Doreen charged into the room. She saw the gun aimed at her and yelped.

“Jesus, Doreen, I nearly shot you!” Clete said.

“The TV,” she said. “You got to see this.”

“Where’s Harlan?”

“I couldn’t get him up! You have to see it. Some city in South America-”

“Shut the fuck up!” Clete swung back to Rhonda. “Now what the fuck do you mean, Paxton’s different?”

“Just try Harlan’s vintage on another skip, and you’ll see it doesn’t have anywhere near the same effect.”