Page 7 of The Murder Inn

The woman pulled the door closed a little, an automatic reaction, trying to protect her cub from the predator on the porch.

“I didn’t realize there were kids living on the street,” Driver said. “We’ve kept an eye out, but I’ll make sure the guys are aware. You know how construction sites can get. There’s a lot of noise, a lot of distraction, a lot of big trucksbacking inandbacking out.”

Driver saw his words register in the woman’s face. Her mouth puckered, her jaw locked.

“You wouldn’t want somebody small to go wandering,” Driver said. “And one of the guys doesn’t see. Those big trucks have terrible reversing vision.” He bent and put his hands on his knees, waved at the toddler in the hallway. “You like big trucks, little buddy?”

The woman shut the door on him. Driver’s icy, phony smile turned genuine as he headed back to the work site.

CHAPTER SIX

THE PLASTIC SHEETING covering the doorway to the living room rustled as Driver shoved it aside. The precautions he and his crew had to take with the interior of the house were tedious. On the fold-out tables stretched along the length of the room, Pooney and Marris, two of Driver’s crew, were suited up and masked—like the men outside, except these two were pouring an even deadlier powder into storage containers marked with labels. Driver liked accuracy, so he couldn’t call what they had been producing “fentanyl.” That was a legal prescription drug, a thing made in medical labs, prepared with care and consideration. Whatever Pooney and Marris were making here followed a similar recipe, but tweaked with substitutes easily stolen from chemical storage warehouses or hardware stores.

Every surface in the living room, the “cook” room, was swathed in plastic. It crumpled under his boots and the fabric booties of the workers. The danger was that if Driver’s people left a singletrace of their drug on a rug or counter, even just a few specks, it could bring down his entire operation. More than a hundred times more powerful than heroin, their mix might be snuffled up by the curious and beloved family dog when the owners of the house returned after the job was done. It would not chew through the animal slowly like a worm in an apple. It would make the creature shrivel up and die like a spider in a flame.

And then there would be questions. Questions that Driver couldn’t afford to have answered.

Pooney pulled his mask off and stepped away from the equipment on the tables when he noticed Driver. Pooney was a typical meth cook; hollow-cheeked and rail-thin, blessed with just enough intellect to cook drugs, steal cars, write bad checks, and say “Lawyer” and nothing else when he found himself in a police interrogation room. So many of the skinny drug cook’s available brain cells had been exhausted learning those things, he was now hard-pressed to remember much beyond how to dress himself in the morning. He had taken up the position of meth cook after Driver’s former employee OD’d on his own product.

Marris, Pooney’s narcotic sous-chef, was a typical meth cook’s girlfriend. The parasitic prostitute had lost enough body fat and teeth to the drug that the price of her sexual services plummeted and she had to charm her way into the life of a man like Pooney, where she would remain, hooks embedded, until she sucked him dry.

“One more day,” Pooney said, before Driver could ask. He held his hands up in surrender. “Sorry, boss. It’s the salty air around here. It’s messin’ with the levels.”

“Let me ask you a question, Pooney,” Driver said. “What did Cline do to you when you went over deadline?”

Pooney thought about it. Driver waited. Across the table, Marris was picking at an angry sore on her neck.

“One time he stuck my head in a car door and slammed it,” Pooney volunteered.

“You think I’d do better or worse than that, Poon?” Driver asked.

“I don’t know,” Pooney said.

“You want to find out?”

“No, boss.”

Driver jutted his chin at the table, and Pooney and the woman masked up again and got back to work. Mitchell Cline was Pooney’s former boss. The last drug kingpin in Gloucester, Cline had been a professional gangster, until he was thrown off a building in Boston, or so Driver heard. Driver had been sniffing around the cute little coastal town, interested in its relative proximity to the Canadian border and the lack of serious monitoring of the ports around Cape Ann, and had found a bunch of deadbeats left over from Cline’s reign, popping each other on street corners as they tried to decide who would step up as the new boss. There’d been almost a sense of relief when Driver arrived—like a pit bull arriving at a scuffle between Chihuahuas. On his first night in town, his crew murdered eight random dopers and dealers, as a show of power. Once he’d made his display, Driver invited all Cline’s former men to either join his ranks or scram. He kept his original construction crew for his inner-circle team, the men who guarded him and the houses he was hired to reclad, which he used as cover for his pop-up drug labs. Driver tapped Cline’s former guys for distribution and dealing, keeping them at arm’s length until he got to know them.

It wasn’t an easy takeover, showing the local boys who wasboss without the resident law enforcers knowing about it. Disappearing men while making it obvious where they’d gone to certain people and not others. But Driver had been doing this a long time. He had the sleight of hand down pat.

Driver was considering making himself a coffee in the family’s kitchen when Pooney suddenly pulled his mask off again, marched over to Driver, and puffed up his chest. “Boss? Marris and me: we have a proposal for you.” He blasted out the words like he’d been building up the pressure of the announcement for some time.

“Oh Jesus.” Driver turned away and headed for the kitchen.

“Check it: We’re doing pretty good here. You’re happy with our recipe. The skells are happy. People are buying like crazy. I know we’re a little late on this batch but that’s our first slipup since we started working for you, yeah?”

“What do you want, Poon?” Driver rummaged through the family’s cupboards for the coffee. He found a tin of matcha powder and felt hopeless despair. “You want a raise? You want the night off? You gonna take your gal there to the drive-in and get a couple of malts?”

“What’s a malt?” Marris asked through her mask.

“We want our own slice of the business, you know?” Pooney puffed his chest even further. He looked like an underfed rooster. “We want to hire a couple more cooks, train them up, expand the output and take a bigger share of the profits for doing that.”

Driver rubbed his eyes. After the complainer across the street with the kid and the near-miss with the sheriff’s deputy, he didn’t need this. He gave up on the coffee and locked eyes with Pooney.

“Pooney,” Driver said, “if you think I’m going to give you and that walking, talking tapeworm you call a girlfriend any more responsibility than you already have, you’re out of your peanut-sized mind. I am honestly shocked that you haven’t already brought this whole business to a grinding halt by screwing up the recipe and serving every addict in Eastern New England with hotshots.”

“Boss.” Pooney tried to laugh off the insult but his face was hangdog.

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