Michael Guillebeau - MAD Librarian - You Gotta Fight for Your Right to Library

“No one saw you.”

“Actually, the kid did.”

Serenity saw the child under the table staring at them. OHR gave him a little finger wave and the kid waved back. OHR handed the hat to Serenity.

“You’ll do,” she said.

MID-DAY AND DOOM had all of her high school kids, college kids, hipsters, flipsters and finger-popping daddies working in the old library on programs they were shoe-horning into any space they could find, until they could move into the new MAD the next week.

Joy had her army of homeless men and derelicts working on the transition, moving anything they could find into any spaces already complete in the new MAD. They looked like two surreal ghost armies marching to two different beats, floating through the good people of Maddington who were battling to use the old library.

Mostly, the armies got along.

Right now, one of Doom’s hipsters who went by Josh (not his real name; he was too cool to tell anyone his real name) and a walking skeleton of Joy’s called Slim (because he couldn’t remember his name), weren’t getting along.

Josh was slouched against the open front of the men’s room door, “Man, I saw it first. We’re turning the men’s room into a meeting room.”

Slim shrugged. “Don’t care, sonny. We need a room, too. Joy told me to box up the book store and find a place to store it. She needs the store space for something and the store has to be ready to move. I put that box down first, I got more coming and I’m too damned old to pick it up. Squatter’s rights.” He laughed a little he-he-he laugh. “Get it, squatter’s rights in the men’s room?”

Josh picked up a broom from the corner and waved it. “Mine.”

Serenity heard the commotion and stepped in to find them wrestling with the broom. “Stop! Both of you, stop right now. What’s going on here?”

“Joy needs this space for storage,” said Slim without taking his hand from the broom.

“It’s our space, for a meeting about a new drug from a Maddington startup. Meeting’s scheduled for right now,” said Josh, also with his hand on the broom.

A couple of geeky-looking young men pushed their way through the crowd that had gathered.

“Is this where GenTech’s meeting?”

“Yes,” said Josh.

“No,” said Slim.

“Yes,” said Serenity.

Josh tried to pull the broom away in victory but Slim pulled back. “What about my boxes?”

“Bring them in here anyway. It’ll give the GenTech folks a better place to sit.”

Done. One problem solved, about a million left. It felt good to make some progress towards peace and quiet. However, neither man was letting go of the broom. Serenity grabbed hold of it. “Oh, for crying out loud, you two.”

She yanked the broom away and the handle punched a ceiling tile free. A handful of plastic bags with white powder fell onto Serenity’s feet. Everyone froze.

Josh said, “Cocaine.”

Serenity then pushed the tile aside with the broom, and bags of white powder cascaded to the floor like a white powder waterfall.

One of the GenTech guys looked at the other.

“Is that our new product?”

SERENITY STEPPED BACK from the drugs, waved the crazies out of the bathroom and called the patrolman who was protecting the murder crime scene.

“You need to secure this,” she said, “and call it in.”

The patrolman—who looked like a twin to the library’s high school security, with the exception of a blue suit and a gun—keyed his mic and spoke into it.

Serenity spread her arms and made a gesture of pushing back the crowd. “Everybody find a home on the other side of the library. Our crime scene is about to get bigger.”

The crowd melted away until just one man was left: a tough-looking man who wasn’t budging.

“Sir, you need to—”

He reached behind his back and pulled out a pistol.

“Actually, what I need to do is take all of this off your hands and get it back to my boss.” He pointed the gun at the patrolman. “Take your gun out slowly and drop it in the toilet.”

That done, the gunman said, “Now, dump that box out and fill it up with those bags. You’re going to carry this out to my car for me.”

Serenity took slow backward steps. She got to her office, grabbed the AK-47, and stepped back out in full Rambo pose with the rifle pointed at the gunman.

Or, rather where the gunman had been a moment ago. Now, the gunman was on the floor with OHR sitting on top of him and the gun on the floor.

Joe burst in the door and took in the whole scene.

“Jesus, Serenity. What now?”

JOE STOOD in the doorway of the men’s room, just outside the yellow crime scene tape, holding on to Serenity’s AK-47. Serenity stood beside him, but he hadn’t looked at her since he had taken her weapon away. His gaze was on the white bags scattered on the floor.

“This have something to do with why you’re so excited about the library these days?”

“Of course not,” she said.

He grunted.

After a long pause he said, “Well, somebody’s going to be excited when the word gets out.” To the patrolman who was first on the scene, he said, “Any idea how much we’ve got?”

“A lot,” the man said. “Enough that we can’t count the bags until we get the go-ahead to disturb the scene.”

Joe stared at the bags in silence until Serenity got tired of waiting and said, “Joe, you don’t really think—”

He turned away from her, to another patrolman waiting at the edge of the lobby with the two GenTech guys.

“Detective Hammer,” the patrolmen said, “you need to talk to these two. They say they were supposed to have a meeting in the men’s room to discuss a new drug.”

Joe gave them his cop stare. “You had a meeting scheduled in the men’s room to discuss drugs?”

One shook his head furiously, “Not those kind of drugs. Well, kind of, but no, those aren’t ours. What we’ve got is a new approach, something that will reduce prescription drug addiction tremendously.” His eyes got bright. “We’re fusing drug tuning with genetic testing. If someone has a legitimate need for a painkiller, we sequence their DNA for markers to tell us what combinations will be most effective, and least addictive, for that individual. We think we can reduce prescription drug addiction by at least 50 percent.”

“And get rich,” said the other guy.

“Lot of people try to get rich selling drugs,” Joe said. “Sure this pile isn’t yours?”

“Of course not. Coke is really a very poor painkiller. It doesn’t—”

Joe waved his free hand. “Good for you, Einstein. I still want to know who told you to go into the men’s room and stand under a mountain of coke to plan a new drug.”

The kid flopped a hand at Serenity without much enthusiasm. “She did.”

Joe didn’t take his eyes off the GenTech boys. “I want to talk to you two some more. Not that I don’t believe you, I just want to get things straight.” He made a micro-turn toward the patrolman. “Ardarius, I don’t want these two bouncing around in here. Take them out and let them sit in a couple of squad cars.”

Ardarius nodded. When the three of them were almost at the door, Joe said, “Separate cars.”

Then Joe turned and looked evenly at Serenity. She said, “You can’t seriously think that cocaine belongs to those two boy geniuses?”

“Pretty sure I know who owns this,” he said. “Used to own this. But I’m a cop. I gather facts, and I follow where the facts point, even if I don’t like it. So, I’ll talk to those two. And mostly I’ll talk to him.” He nodded toward to the gunman, still on the floor, but now with handcuffs on. “And you.”