Mercy Street(21)

It wasn’t a bad idea. But Timmy, disconcertingly, had no memory of saying such a thing to Winky. He wondered, not for the first time, if he was smoking too much weed.

“Nah,” he said, as though he’d considered the idea and rejected it, which he probably had. “Too much red tape.” A tattoo parlor meant licensing, inspection certificates, the Board of Health sticking its nose in. Military life had left him with an aversion to regulations, official dealings of any kind. He’d been told he had a problem with authority. He didn’t like hearing it, which proved it was entirely true.

Anyway, he had a better idea. He would open a Laundromat. A cash business—no license required, no employees to deal with. Just Timmy and his machines.

The more he talked, the better it sounded. The plan seemed somehow virtuous—cleanliness, godliness. He would be providing a necessary service. He’d still have to figure out the tax questions, but he’d rather deal with the IRS than the DEA.

The first step was to raise some cash. Timmy had done a little research. A brand-new commercial washer went for a thousand bucks. Dryers were a little cheaper. Then there were the monthly costs: rent, water, electricity. He’d need a hundred grand to get up and running.

“Holy crap! That’s a lot of cake.” Winky blinked: left eye, then right. “Can you get a business loan?”

Timmy was speechless. Never in a million years would he qualify for such a loan—a fact he understood on a cellular level, which was why the thought hadn’t occurred to him and never would. His own calculus was simpler: To open a Laundromat, he needed a pile of money. To make a pile of money, he had to sell a pile of weed.

If the referendum passed—he explained this to Winky—nothing would change overnight. The state would need a year or two to get its act together. Timmy would use the time to his advantage, to make some serious bank.

His plan was to cut out the middleman. His old buddy Wolfman had been growing for years, on a hidden corner of his family’s strawberry farm in Pasco County, Florida. The Wolfman had washed out of basic training, washed out of life in general, but in this one respect he was an overachiever—endlessly experimenting with new strains, gleefully cross-pollinating, a mad scientist of weed. Crucially, the Wolfman was no salesman. At the moment he was sitting on a bumper crop, more product than he knew what to do with.

“The main problem,” Timmy said, “will be moving the weed.”

Pasco County to Boston was fourteen hundred miles, through thirteen states. Timmy would drive the stash back himself—on weekends to avoid the traffic, the soul-killing rush hours in DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.

Winky blinked. “What about cops?”

Timmy was way ahead of him. Over the years—countless trips back and forth to see his son and fork out child support—he’d made a study of this. Up and down the I-95 corridor, speed traps were everywhere, the Dennis Links of the world plying their trade. The stopped vehicles were usually SUVs, always with Yankee plates. He would need the right car—discreet, reliable, a car that would attract no attention.

This was his thinking last week, when he bought a three-year-old Honda Civic, in cash, from a stranger on Craigslist.

To make the trip worth his while, he’d need to move some quantity. He’d heard about a Russian kid in Quincy who did customizations. For five grand he could retrofit a car with hidden compartments—invisible, virtually undetectable—ideal for stashing product.

“Real James Bond shit,” Timmy said.

He took a final, hopeful drag, but the bowl was kicked. He dipped into his own stash to refill it.

Marcel was right. There was power in having a plan.





5


The storms kept coming. There was a feeling of meteorological unease. The pigeons of Copley Square whuffed their displeasure. At the corner of Mass and Cass—the epicenter of the Methadone Mile—volunteers handed out blankets. Commuters waited for buses that never came.

Schools closed for a day, a week, for two weeks, prompting a citywide childcare crisis. In the Savin Hill section of Dorchester, streets were taken over by boys on sleds.

Boston descended on Star Market girded for battle. Toilet paper, bottled water, frozen pizzas. It was impossible to keep these items in stock. Checkout lines were staggering. Shoppers read the same headlines over and over, the aging starlet who was married again or pregnant again or fat again. They studied the contents of each other’s carts, a stranger’s secret comforts: cartons of cigarettes and extra-sensitive condoms, tubs of ice cream and cases of IPA.

In the neighborhoods, shoveling took on a feverish intensity. Parking spaces were saved with wheelbarrows, with lawn chairs, with recycling bins.

The boys attacked Savin Hill with whatever was handy: cafeteria trays, trash can lids. They raced down the slopes with war whoops, shrieks of terror and delight, because childhood always finds a way.

YEARS AGO, WHEN CLAUDIA WAS JUST STARTING OUT ON THE hotline, the callers’ questions amazed her. For a startling number of people, the basic facts of human reproduction were shrouded in mystery. She answered calls from women who douched after sex, or had sex only while menstruating, and were stunned to find themselves pregnant. More than one truly believed she’d contracted herpes from a toilet seat. And these weren’t teenagers; they were grown women. Teenagers would have known better.

Considering what passed for sex education thirty years ago, in the public schools of Clayburn, Maine, this made a certain kind of sense.