Paolo couldn’t see anything through the blindfold covering his eyes. Not a sliver of light, not even a shadow. Fear wrapped around him, insulating him from the frigid air.
“Where are we?” He clutched Ray’s arm as he stepped out of the vehicle, his feet hitting a solid, flat surface. Ray had picked Paolo up in a black sedan outside his apartment building just after the sun set, blindfolding him before they started their drive through the city no more than half an hour ago.
“I told you before. No questions. Move fast.” With a firm hand on his shoulder, Ray pushed Paolo forward.
“Did Crazy T have to go through this to meet the boss, too?”
Ray cuffed him on the side of the head. “You aren’t meeting the boss. He only meets with his biggest customers. Now, shut the fuck up and walk.”
“Can I ask one more question? What happened to Crazy T?”
“Overdosed.” Ray pulled Paolo to a stop. “Wait here.”
Paolo drew in a deep, calming breath and smelled freshly cut grass, a rarity in the inner city where he lived. They had to be out in the burbs, somewhere nice where they had the time and money to water and cut the grass. He heard the beep of a security panel, and the distant hum of a lawnmower. Definitely a residential area, and this was a bungalow or ranch house since there were no steps.
He heard the creak of a door and felt a blast of cold air as Ray pushed him forward. He thought about Crazy T coming here to buy his dope, and how Crazy T was gone. He had to be careful not to make the same mistake. It was easy to get addicted and hard to quit. But Paolo was smart. He would limit himself to just one bump a day, maybe two if he had an important job to do. Just enough to keep him going, but not enough that Mr. Rizzoli would ever notice, or to push him into addiction.
Ray gave a satisfied snort as he pulled off Paolo’s blindfold. “That shut you up.”
Paolo blinked as his eyes adjusted to the light. He was standing in the living room of what appeared to be a middle-class family home. Tan leather couches were positioned in front of a wall-mounted TV, separated by fancy tables holding ornate lamps that cast the room in a soft glow. Behind thick curtains, Paolo glimpsed the slats of closed blinds. Pictures of landscapes decorated the wall, and framed photographs filled the mantelpiece above the fireplace.
Unnerved by the incongruity of a drug dealer hiding out in an average family home, he hesitated in the hallway. “Maybe we should take off our shoes.”
His mom had always made him take off his shoes before he walked into the house. He only forgot once, and his mother had suffered his lapse when his father got home to find her on her knees trying to get the stains out of the carpet.
“What? Are you shitting me? No one takes off their shoes.” Ray led Paolo over to a table covered in clear packages of white powder.
“Is this the boss’s place?” Paolo opened the bag he’d been instructed to bring to carry the dope.
“You think I’m gonna tell you anything about the boss?” Ray snorted a laugh. “I’ve seen what he does to guys who piss him off, and I’ve got no interest in being treated like a piece of meat.”
Paolo’s heart thudded in his chest. This was almost as bad as the mob. One day he would have a job where mistakes weren’t punished with torture and death.
“We’ve got five locations in the valley,” Ray said, lifting one of the bags. “Three in the northeast, one in the southwest, and one in Henderson. Once we know you can be trusted, you’ll be given directions to one of the locations to pick up your supply. After today, you’re responsible for your own transport. If you need anything other than coke, we’ve got heroin and meth.”
Paolo stared at the bag. “Do you give it to me like that?”
“Pendejo! I thought Crazy T set you up with his label.”
Paolo didn’t know much Spanish, but he figured Ray had called him something equivalent to an idiot. “I haven’t seen him in a week. Maybe he was planning to do it before he died.”
Ray let off another stream of invective. “You buy it from me, you package it up, and you sell it. Crazy T had lots of customers who knew his Pink Label brand. They knew he could be trusted, and he sold good quality stuff. If I were you, I’d take over his brand. He had a good business going until he snorted it away. He was charging twenty dollars for an eight ball. You do the math.”
“Not really my strong suit.” Paolo dug into his pocket and pulled out all the money he had earned in the last few months working for Mr. Rizzoli.
“He was getting $160 per gram, and he paid us $60. He was more than doubling his money.”
Paolo’s eyes widened and he pointed to the packages. “In that case, I’ll take one.”
Ray doubled over with laughter. “You really are bad at math, unless you got forty grand in that bag.”
“I’ve got one thousand dollars.” And no way to pay his rent or buy food if Mr. Rizzoli didn’t pay him before he got this racket going.
“You come up with another four hundred and ninety-nine thousand, and you get to meet the boss, even sit down with him for a drink,” Ray said. “For one thousand, you get to entertain yourself while I measure it out.”
“Sure.” Paolo’s shoulders slumped. So now he’d have to try and find a way to duplicate Crazy T’s label. He couldn’t remember what he’d done with the empty packets, although he knew where Crazy T lived because they’d gone to his place after the party and met his girlfriend.
He wandered around the room as Ray carefully measured the powder on a digital scale. Was this one of the dealer’s houses? Or was it just a front in case of a police raid? The pictures on the mantle looked real enough. He studied the photos of a family—a man, woman, and child, all with the same dark hair and complexion as Ray—in front of the “The Castle” of Chichén Itzá, in Mexico. There were pictures of the family on a beach, in front of a huge church, and another of them eating ice cream in a park.
Paolo felt a pang of longing for the days before his mother died and the rare occasions his dad wasn’t in a hitting mood. The mob was the closest he’d ever come to having a real family since his mother was injured. If they ever found out what he was doing …
“Are these pictures real?” Paolo knew he wasn’t a smart guy, but even he wouldn’t have put up pictures of himself in a drug house for anyone to see.
Ray shrugged. “Dunno. They’ve always been there. I just go where I’m told to go. We move around a lot to throw off the cops.” He held out a baggie. “Here you go. This is what your one grand buys. Be smart and you can double, even triple your money. Be stupid and you’ll wind up like Crazy T.”
Paolo reached for the bag, hesitated. “You said I’d get all the coke I wanted for free. That was part of the deal.”
“I just gave you a bag of coke with a street value of almost two grand and you just paid one thousand.” Ray grinned. “You wanna snort it all yourself, you’re practically getting it for free.”
Paolo’s hand tightened around the bag. A deal was a deal. If someone broke a deal with the mob, they wound up with bruises and broken bones, if they were lucky, or dead if they weren’t. But he didn’t have the mob behind him to enforce the deal. He was physically no match for Ray who looked to be in his late thirties and had about eighty pounds of muscle on him. Hell, he didn’t even have a gun.
“We had a deal,” he muttered, shoving the baggie into his backpack.
“You’re nothing,” Ray said, not unkindly. “You’re the lowest of the low. Bottom feeder. The boss doesn’t even know you exist. When you have big money, then you’re in a position to start asking for favors. Then we listen.” He held out the blindfold. “Ready to roll? You’ve got my number. Get in touch when you need to top up. I’ve got guys on the street who will tell me how you do. I get a good report, then I’ll send you an address. But you gotta move fast to secure the territory. Everyone wants a piece of the action: street gangs, Triads, Russians, Albanians, even the fucking Mafia. They all want a piece of the pie.”
“The Mafia isn’t involved in the drug trade.” He shuddered when the blindfold went over his eyes. Sometimes, when his dad was in a really bad mood, his mother used to hide him in the linen closet and close the door. Even now he associated darkness with the scent of laundry detergent, a sense of suffocation, and abject fear.
“Sure, they are.” Ray tied the blindfold tight. “They’re our biggest customers.”