White Rabbit(46)
“Did what?”
She meets my eyes steadily across the back of the seat. “He cut the supply. He bought a pill press and a rabbit stamp from some shady Chinese company over the internet, he took an entire delivery of white rabbits from their supplier, ground it all down to powder, and then mixed it with … I don’t even know. Baking soda and ketamine, or maybe GHB or fucking Ambien or something, I’ve got no idea—a bunch of depressants. Stuff he figured would mellow people out. Only, Fox is an idiot, and he fucked it all up! He thought he could double the amount of pills right under their supplier’s nose, pocket half the take, and that no one would notice!”
“Oh shit,” Sebastian observes, eyes wide.
“Yeah.” Lia laughs. “‘Oh shit.’ Turns out, Fox’s version of the white rabbit made people sick as hell, or it made them black out, or have fucking seizures. But Fox thought he could still get away with it. I mean, he had to try, anyway—it was either that or admit what he’d done, and volunteer to get his kneecaps pounded into gravel.”
I slump back against my seat, my head whirling from the impact of Fox’s mind-boggling stupidity. Burlington is a small town; there are less than fifty thousand people within the city limits, and only just double that if you include the outlying urban zone. Any kingpin who’s bothered to claim our little strip of Lake Champlain shoreline as his territory would know in a heartbeat if extra merchandise suddenly hit the street. The scheme was breathtaking in its hubris and staggering in its ineptitude.
“So he bungled it,” I summarize, “and he sold Hayden a defective batch.”
“A thousand dollars’ worth.” Lia’s tone actually borders on satisfaction. “Arlo’s customers had started complaining, and he knew something was up because the pills looked different; but it wasn’t until he found Fox’s extra stash at the Whitneys’ lake house tonight that he figured out what was really going on.”
“And that’s when they started brawling, and Fox threw Arlo out,” Sebastian concludes.
“Yeah.” She exhales, the energy that carried her through the account abating on a single breath. “I don’t think you have any idea what kind of position Fox put Arlo in. He was moving those pills, too, you know. And even though he had nothing to do with Fox’s dumbass plot, that doesn’t mean his supplier will see it that way.”
The cynic in me wants to say something sarcastic about her concern for Arlo, who has still been intentionally selling a notorious drug with wildly violent side effects. It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy who accidentally got cut while living by the sword.
But, of course, the one who had been truly endangered by Fox’s half-witted scheming was Fox. By my count, in one fell swoop he’d made three dangerous enemies: Arlo, Hayden, and whatever shady drug lord was paying them to fence white rabbits to high school students in the first place. The real problem is that, if I wanted to get my four grand, I was going to have risk antagonizing all the same people—and with potentially similar results.
“But why did Hayden come here looking for the money?” Sebastian asks. There’s a secondary meaning to the question: We both know where Hayden’s money is, and he’s already come perilously close to guessing the truth about it.
“I told you, I don’t know!” She tosses her hands up, exasperated. “He was barely speaking in complete sentences! He just kept saying that he wanted it back, and how ‘Nobody cheats Hayden Covington,’ and he said … he said he was going to get it one way or the other, even if it was too late to get it back from Fox.” Her voice drops to an agitated whisper, and light spilling through the Jeep’s windshield makes her eyes shine like gemstones as she states, “And now I’m worried he’s going to go after Arlo.”
15
“The last person who needs our help is freaking Arlo,” Sebastian argues nervously as the Jeep rumbles over fragmented asphalt on the short drive to the Rossi home. “Not only is he just about the only guy we know who could possibly take Hayden in a fair fight, he’s also got a fucking gun, remember?”
“Yeah, well. I won’t pretend I’d cry about it if my asshole brother took a couple rounds to the face, but I’ve got a feeling Isabel will be more likely to pay me if I can stop him from getting his head ventilated.” My response sounds as flip as I intended it to, but, truthfully, I’m just as on edge as Sebastian. I’m not at all interested in becoming collateral damage in a drug dispute, and I don’t like the way the edges of Fox’s death seem to bleed inevitably into ugly, menacing territory.
To compound my worries, I’m starting to become convinced that my older brother has more or less officially lost his feeble grip on mental stability for the night—that he’s willing to do violence to anyone he thinks is standing between him and his money. Arlo’s gun won’t scare him, as I believe that fear is something Hayden genuinely does not experience; and since the tattooed drug dealer obviously doesn’t have what Hayden is looking for, there’s every chance that we could be on our way to interrupting a very volatile confrontation.
Based on what Lia said, I’m even more certain that Hayden went back out to the lake house after his first visit earlier in the evening. Whether he’d been there when we were, I still can’t be sure—but if he’s going around town in search of his money, then it means he somehow knows it wasn’t in Fox’s possession, where he should by all rights assume it was. The minute April turned herself in, the Burlington PD undoubtedly notified the authorities on South Hero, who would have immediately sealed the Whitneys’ property off as a crime scene; so then, at some point prior to that, my brother must have returned there and searched the place thoroughly enough to become convinced that someone removed his thousand bucks from the premises.