Page 64 of Golden Touch
Before I can answer, the door opens and Nash enters the kitchen. “Hey, kids. Don’t mind me. Just need a cup of coffee. Anyone else want one?”
After I shake my head and Benito declines, Nash makes his way over to the coffeemaker and starts puttering with it.
“What was his response,” Benito asks me, “when you asked him about the shop?”
“Well…” I drop my voice. “He backhanded me. Then he told me to mind my own fucking business and not to question him.”
At the kitchen counter, Nash goes completely still.
“Was that the first time he hit you?” Benito asks.
I nod with as much nonchalance as I can muster.
“And then what happened?”
“He was very apologetic after his, um, outburst. He told me that he was sorry and that I’d triggered him. He said a friend’s disloyalty had messed him up when he was younger. That was his exact phrase—‘it messed me up.’” I clear my throat again. “Anyway, I didn’t ask a second time. I didn’t even want to think about it for a while.”
“I bet,” Benito says kindly.
There’s an awkward pause while I wrestle with what to say next. It’s hard to account for the next couple of months in my life. I’d known in my gut that Razor was running some kind of sketchy operation, and that I was increasingly tangled up in it.
Even so, I didn’t want to believe it. My finances were stable for the first time in my adult life. Razor didn’t let me contribute torent or a mortgage.I take care of my woman, he’d said. So I’d been giving a lot of my income to Jennie, who had a son to care for. And to my brother…
“Livia, what was the next thing that made you suspicious?” Benito asks. “I know you eventually left, because you’re sitting right here.”
“Well…” I glance at Nash’s back, wishing I didn’t have to explain this in front of him. “I didn’t want to admit that I was sleeping with a criminal. And he, uh, was super nice to me for a while. Flowers. Love notes. The whole shebang. But then the revenue from Burlington went bonkers.”
Benito’s eyes brighten. “Definebonkers.”
“They netted a quarter million dollars in one month, most of it in cash. Lots of sales of bikes. So I started listening closely when the guys were getting their beers on. They never said a word about selling motorcycles, which I thought was weird.”
“Did drugs ever come up?”
I shrug. “Not in a very clear way. Their conversation was more or less encoded. But they kept talking about ‘fresh product’ in a way that just didn’t sound like bikes.”
“Why did you think it might be drugs?” Benito asks.
I close my eyes and try to think. “They mentioned ‘dealers’ sometimes. And it didn’t sound like auto dealers. It just didn’t. And they mentioned ‘drops.’ Maybe I watch too much TV, but it gave me a whiff of the drug dealers onThe Wire.”
Benito grins. “Great show.”
“Yeah, it was. But I didn’t want to live it. And I noticed that the guys who went to ‘make a drop’ were using their own motorcycles as transportation. So whatever they were dropping had to be small.”
Benito scribbles on his pad, drinking this in. “You ever see any packaging? Vials? Powders?”
I shake my head. “That must happen elsewhere. And Razor was too careful to let anything like that happen in front of me. In fact, he sometimes shushed them when the chatter got toodetailed. One time they were planning a drop behind an old CVS, and he came into the room and told them to shut up.”
“Interesting.”
“So I started poking around in ways I couldn’t get caught. I looked closely at their motorcycle sales. Looked up some VIN numbers online. It’s not that hard. That’s where it got weird.”
“Yeah?” He sits forward in his chair.
“The VINs didn’t make sense. They were all the right number of digits, but the make and model didn’t line up with the details in the ledger book. And it wasn’t just one or two sales—it was all of them.”
He whistles again. “What month’s sales were you looking at? When was the bonkers month?”
It takes me a few minutes to work out the dates. But I’m able to narrow it down to March or April, the months before I escaped. “And pretty soon after that, I knew it was time to go.”
