Mercy Street(78)

No question, there were bugs. Last night, as he was loading the car, the trap had malfunctioned. The compartment simply would not open. He went through the steps again—driver’s seat, defroster, front and rear windows, key card—and still nothing. Finally he called Alex Voinovich.

“What’s the problem?” the kid asked. Techno music in the background, the cawing laugh of a drunken girl.

“The trap won’t open.”

Alex walked him through the steps in order. Still, the trap wouldn’t budge.

“Are you sure?” Alex sounded skeptical.

Timmy said, “I am absolutely fuckin sure.”

“Shit. All right. Bring it over in the morning and I’ll have a look,” the kid said—magnanimously, as though he were doing Timmy a huge fucking favor.

“I’m two thousand miles away. I can’t bring it over in the morning.”

“When you get back, then. It’s probably a short. Simple fix.”

If it’s so simple, why did you screw it up in the first place? Timmy would have said, if there were any fucking point.

He packed the car in the usual way, as he’d done for years driving back and forth from Marcel’s. He fit what he could around the spare tire. The rest he packed into two Igloo coolers. The weed was tightly bound in layers and layers of Saran Wrap, then crammed into large Tupperwares. With all that packaging it took up a lot of space.

Timmy thought, That is a fuckload of weed.

On top of the Tupperwares he arranged the beer cans, like that was going to fool anybody. If a cop got as far as opening the coolers, the beer cans wouldn’t save him. If a cop opened the coolers, Timmy was already toast.

In the end he left half the product behind, in Wolfman’s barn. I’ll get it next time, he promised. He had enough to supply his regular customers for two months, three at the outside. He smoked a bowl to calm his nerves and, at last, got on the road.

HE WAS GETTING TOO OLD FOR THIS.

Long ago he’d enjoyed the intrigue, the feeling of danger. To his teenage self, sneaking a joint in someone’s basement had seemed radically adventurous. The fear of getting caught only enhanced the high. If weed had been legal, would he still be smoking all these years later? It seemed unlikely. Probably he’d have lost interest, the way he lost interest in drinking once a fake ID was unnecessary. It was the opposite of thrilling, it was somehow demoralizing, to bring home a sixer from the package store like a younger, slightly less defeated version of his dad.

That morning, watching the sun rise over a Shell station outside Deltona, he saw the truth clearly: for a middle-aged man, selling weed was a ludicrous way to make a living. He thought of his old buddy Dennis Link, the Massachusetts statie, now staking out speed traps in his stormtrooper boots. Was his own career path any less ridiculous? Dennis, at least, would have a state pension, a house to remortgage so he could send his kids to college. After twenty years of playing cops and robbers, Timmy had jack shit.

Like any displaced worker, he’d been resistant to the changes ahead. When weed became legal he would lose his profession, the only one he’d ever practiced. On the other hand, retiring from weed would open up his life. No longer would he spend his days waiting for the phone to ring. He would see the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam maybe. Timmy knew these places only from television. In point of fact, he had never been anywhere.

While filling his gas tank, he made a decision: in a year or two, when the Laundromat was up and running, he would quit smoking weed altogether. The idea was revolutionary. Until that moment, the possibility had never crossed his mind.

He got back into the car, wondering if Claudia had ever seen the Grand Canyon. One day they could drive there together, hours and hours on the open road, never saying a word.

Weeks had passed since their night together. At first he’d waited patiently. Sooner or later she would text him, or simply show up at his door.

Claudia Something. He had tried to recall everything he knew about her. She had a job, which was stressful. She’d grown up in Maine and liked cars and weed.

The point being that he had no fucking idea how to find her. Short of walking the streets of Cambridge and Somerville, questioning strangers—Hey, do you know Claudia?—he had no strategy at all.

He carried her with him. When their night together was still fresh in his memory, he had sketched her to give Connor something to work with. Connor got the body right: the small hands and slender legs, the naked torso compact and guitar-shaped. At Timmy’s request, he gave her long hair. (Maybe Claudia could be convinced to grow hers.) After some discussion, Connor left the face blank.

Next time you see her, he told Timmy, take a picture.

But there had been no next time. The faceless woman on his back remained an outline, a void to be filled with something. The outline showed what was missing, an empty space shaped exactly like her.

BY THE TIME HE REACHED THE GEORGIA BORDER IT WAS LATE morning, the sun high overhead. He had forgotten his sunglasses. When he flicked on the air-conditioning, nothing happened. Whatever short had disabled the trap had also killed the AC.

Jesus fucking Christ.

He got off at the next exit, a curving ramp that peeled off into nowhere—a brand-new stretch of four-lane highway with empty fields on either side. He drove until he found a place to pull over, an abandoned gas station that looked ready for demolition, a crumbling patch of asphalt. What he needed, truly needed, was to smoke a bowl and collect his thoughts. Under the floor mat he kept, for just such emergencies, a small-bore pipe packed with a single hit of weed.