Bad to the Bones(27)
Knoxie frowned. “You’re dating that cum factory snatch?” It surprised him because he’d always thought of Turk as being a highly closeted gay. He didn’t know why he thought that. There was no hard evidence, it was just a hunch he’d always had about the guy. He was too impossibly good-looking to be real. “Sure. I’m taking the truck from here.”
All expression fell from Turk’s face. “You’re…”
Knoxie nodded. All of his brisk, efficient SEAL experience was coming back to him. “Truck needs a driver to Bihari, doesn’t it?”
A sly smile came over Turk’s face. Even Knoxie had to grin as he walked to the back of the truck where Lytton and the satanic-looking Ziggy were piling bags of heroin into the cage’s trunk. “Don’t take them all,” Knoxie instructed his brothers, “or I’ll have nothing left to deliver.”
Hoisting himself up into the trailer itself, Knoxie strode to the garbanzo bean pallets that had been yanked aside to reveal plastic bags of yellowish powder, A-1 bricks stacked up like a bunch of cheap coffee creamer. Knoxie unbuttoned his 501s, primed and ready to whizz all over the remaining four kilos of heroin.
Behind him, Lytton chuckled. “Are you being literal or symbolic? Look what else we found.”
Lytton politely waited for Knoxie to finish splashing the smack before handing him a slim white box that was stamped “Haldol.” There were five ampules in that particular box, and Lytton pointed to a cardboard box on the floor that held more slim white boxes.
Knoxie waved the box around. “What the f*ck is this? Isn’t this some drug from the seventies?”
“Exactly my thought.” Lytton was actually Dr. Driving Hawk, having a PhD in chemistry. “Haloperidol was used a lot in the seventies to zone out schizophrenics who were being belligerent or argumentative. Around ’07 the FDA issued a warning due to it causing heart attacks and sudden death. It’s still used a lot on elderly folks without their knowledge, although it’s known to make Alzheimer patients worse.”
“So maybe this is the ‘knockout drops’ the guy was raving about.”
“Exactly. Judging from what I saw on that mesa, they’d been drugging those poor homeless people with Haldol. Dystonia, dry mouth, muscle rigidity, blurred vision, somnolence…it all fits. It’s contraindicated to put it in someone’s beer, as they just pass out. The heroin is probably just for sale, to make them money.”
“Mixed with the PM. I’m sure there’s a stash of strawberry flavoring too up in that f*cking Rollercoaster Canyon.”
“Right,” said Lytton. “They’re trying to expand their base, rope in the teen set with the cheese, and I’ve got a beef with that. I want the head of that swami on a f*cking platter.”
“Someone needs to end him,” agreed Ziggy. He jingled his cage keys to indicate he was ready to blow, so Knoxie took control of the Safeway truck with the other beaner as his copilot.
The guy was understandably shaking with terror, so Knoxie learned little on the drive up to Bihari. By the time Knoxie cut off 17 onto 179, he’d learned the guy was from Los Mochis and pretended not to know about the cargo in back. When Knoxie tried to question him about cheese, the guy pretended to think he was talking about cotija and queso fresco. He giggled when he talked about cheese, a sure sign of guilt, but hey. His boss’s bloodied body was in the sleeper with some pages from the Book of Matthew stuffed in his mouth, most of his cargo had been jacked, and he was probably jonesing for some of that Tylenol PM.
Knoxie had lived in Arizona long enough to know that when the cartels decided to expand their pipeline they flooded it with cheap, pure A-1 heroin to create a city of addicts crying for more. He was surprised the beaners were doing the heavy lifting themselves, not white front men to shield them from the DEA.
“Who’s this Stuart Grillo?” he asked in Spanish. “His name is all over this paperwork.”
The beaner shrugged. “I wish I knew. We took over from him in Phoenix. Do you know him?”
“I think I might,” Knoxie admitted, because it really didn’t matter.
Knoxie hadn’t buried a guy in a long time. Obviously not since the Special Ops had issued him a Get out of Jail Free card had he been forced to bury a guy. Sure, he probably could’ve bashed the Presención naco over the head with the grip of his gun, wrestled him to the ground in a headlock, tied him up, something of that nature. The truth was, Knoxie was already predisposed to want to put down the driver.
First, there was all that brainwashed bullshit Bellamy tried to lay on them about her pie-in-the-sky master, who sounded more and more like just another Jim Jones of a f*cking rapist. Knoxie didn’t know Bellamy well, but already he’d developed a paternal, protective feeling for her. Fuck, he’d literally saved her ass from certain death out there on the plateau with her flimsy leggings, barefoot, stumbling around with her internal core temperature of ninety-five degrees.
Then, even after he’d agreed to participate in this run, there had been that phone call from Maddy herself the day before. She told him she believed that Bellamy’s sister Virginia was up at the stupid f*cking compound.
What the f*ck? Bellamy had mentioned a sister in passing, but not that she was still imprisoned up in that loony canyon. No doubt she felt at the time she was protecting Virginia, but that knowledge doubled Knoxie’s intensity to save both girls from the cult. The more intel he could gather here today, the better.