Six

Billy Finster was in the garage out back of his house, tinkering with the blue 1980 Camaro, the front end precariously propped up on jacks so he could work on the engine from the underside if he needed to, not that he would have had a clue what to do once he got down there. The car had been sitting this way, front end up, ass end down, for the better part of two years, ever since he bought it off a guy in Stamford for three grand. Dude had said it needed a "bit of work," which turned out to mean doesn't run worth a shit. But Billy'd always loved that vintage of Camaro, and figured, even though he didn't know the first thing about car repair, he could learn a few of the fundamentals and get the thing running one of these days.

And to that end, he had invested a fair chunk of change in recent weeks. A carpenter was only as good as his tools, right? Well, the same maxim surely had to apply to people who refurbished classic vehicles. So Billy had bought a high-torque pneumatic wrench, an air hammer, a wide variety of ratchets and extenders, specialty tools to check a car's suspension and front-end alignment, buffers and polishers, even some new shelving. Lots of stuff. Lucy had said it was like buying a high-end computer for a horse. It could be the best one on the market, but the horse was never, ever going to be able to do so much as check its email.

Pissed Billy off when she talked that way.

She'd popped into the garage to tell him she was going in for an afternoon shift at the Bridgeport hospital cafeteria where she worked. She usually had Friday off but someone had booked off sick and she was going to cover. An entire shift of overtime.

"I'm off," she said.

"Get some beer and some Dorito things."

"I'm not going to the fucking grocery store. I'm going to work."

"On your way back," he said. "And not some cheap-ass beer. Good stuff. We've got the money."

"You've got the money," she said.

Jesus, this again, he thought. Lucy was as bad as Stuart, wanting him to share the wealth. What did they think this was? Socialism? Billy dug a couple of twenties from his pocket and slapped them into her open palm. She turned and headed for her car.

"You gonna say thank you?"

She shot him a middle finger over her shoulder. Seconds later she was behind the wheel of her Kia and gone.

He had the hood up on the Camaro, looking at the engine like it was the Sphinx. The air cleaner had been removed and was sitting on a nearby bench, exposing the carburetor. Billy, guided by a handbook on this particular model, had taken it apart and cleaned it more than once. He'd installed a new battery, changed the points and plugs, but still hadn't been able to get the damn engine to turn over.

He heard tires crunching on gravel. Maybe Lucy'd come back, wanting more money so she could get some of that soy milk shit she liked or God forbid a pack of cut-up veggie sticks. He hoped it wasn't Stuart. He needed a break from his friend today. Stuart was starting to be like that tiny dog Chester in the Looney Tunes cartoons, the one always running in front of the big dog, Spike, asking: "What do you want to do now, Spike? You wanna play ball? You wanna chase cars?" And Spike takes a swipe at him, knocking him off his paws.

There were times Billy wondered if Stuart's parents dropped him on his head a lot when he was little. He spent half his time laughing at online videos of people walking into poles, stepping out into traffic, getting bit in the nuts by pit bulls.

The side door opened before he could get to it and it wasn't Lucy or Stuart, although it was a man and a woman, standing there, silhouetted in the afternoon sun.

Andrea and Gerhard. Or better known, at least in Billy's head, as Psycho Bitch and Butthead.

Gerhard, thirtyish, short and stocky and bald, looked like he would be the tougher of the two, coming in at two hundred and fifty pounds, with a hint of a snake tattoo coming up from under his shirt collar, big beefy arms under a shirt that was a size too small for him, but it was the woman who always set Billy's teeth on edge.

Thin and wiry, probably close to forty, black eyes set against a dry, wrinkled face, with stringy hair that hung down below her shoulders, she struck Billy as someone who'd spent too much time catching rays on a beach or a prison workout yard. She had a small scar on her right cheek and one eye never seemed to open the whole way, like she was squinting.

This was not a scheduled pickup day. They'd been here this past Monday, so he had nothing for them today. He'd be taking their next shipment off the plane in three days.

"Hey, guys," he said, moving toward them and extending a hand. "Sup? This is kind of unexpected. Want a beer or something?" Billy pointed a thumb over his shoulder at a mini-fridge resting atop the workbench. "Corona?"

"Not a social call, Billy," said Gerhard.

Like it ever was. These two had always been pure business. Where's our stuff, here's your money, now fuck off.

Andrea was looking at him with those dead eyes, Billy half expecting them to blink vertically like some half-human, half-reptile thing in a horror movie. She said simply, "Billy."

He nodded.

She asked, "You ever eat Raisin Bran?"

"What?"

"You know. Raisin Bran. Those flakes, they got raisins in them. You ever eat them for breakfast?"

The fuck, he thought. There was a reason he thought of her as Psycho Bitch. Asking shit that made no sense.

"Maybe. I don't know. I guess I've eaten it."

"Remember the song? A jingle, like." She sang it. "Two scoops of juicy raisins in every box of Kellogg's Raisin Brain."

Billy just looked at her. Andrea took a step closer as she continued with her story. Gerhard smiled.

"When I was like fourteen I thought, is there really two scoops in every box? So I buy one, empty it out on the kitchen table, and pick out all the raisins. Every last fucking one." Andrea grinned. "Guess what I found."

Billy shook his head.

"There was like one and three-quarters scoops. What do you think of that?"

Billy shrugged and said, "I guess it would depend on how they define a scoop. Like, what's a scoop? A cup? Half a cup, or—"

"I know what a fucking scoop is," Andrea said. "It's a scoop. Like those little shovel-like things at the bargain-bin store. And this didn't have two of them. So I put all that shit back in the box and take it back the store and tell them I want my money back because they ripped me off and this dipshit store manager basically tells me to fuck off so what did I do?"

She turned her head, posing the question to her partner.

Gerhard put his index finger to his temple. "Tire iron."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Billy asked.

Gerhard said, "You Raisin-Branned us."

"I what?"

"We did the inventory," Gerhard said. "You came up short."

"I don't understand," Billy said.

"We're short Flizzies," Gerhard said. "Our southern friends, they told us what they sent, we looked at how much we got, and we found what you might call discrepancy."

"Guys, come on," Billy said pleadingly. "You saying I dipped into the shipment? There's no way. You treat me fair and square, pay me good. I'm not gonna mess with that. What's supposedly missing?"

Gerhard said, "It's not supposedly missing. Andrea, do we supposedly think it's missing, or do we know it's missing?"

Andrea said, "We know."

"I've never even peeked inside a shipment. I don't know what's in there and don't want to know what's in there. The fuck are Flizzies?"

Although Billy was playing dumb, a role to which anyone who knew him would say he was well suited, he did know what Flizzies were because on one visit Gerhard had a free pack in his hand, like he'd been sampling his own merchandise. Powerful little pills that looked like candy, that were disguised as candy, and were often packaged to look like candy. But they were not candy. They were, in fact, tablets of fentanyl—a wonderfully potent synthetic opioid that could make all your pain go away—that had been manufactured to the highest standards in a Tijuana lab, put in a carry-on bag, flown to a small regional airport south of Hartford that handled international flights, and retrieved discreetly by Billy the baggage handler.

Billy, pointing to a six-foot-wide, floor-to-ceiling set of lockers along the back wall next to the workbench, said, "I bring it back, it goes right in there, and that stays locked all the time."

Andrea asked, "Who else uses this garage?"

"Nobody."

"You've got a wife. You saying she never comes out here?"

"Yeah, sure, sometimes, but Lucy doesn't have the locker key."

"Lucy," Andrea said.

"Yeah, but I got the only key. Lucy's working all the time anyway at the hospital."

"She a nurse or a doctor?" Gerhard asked.

"Cafeteria."

It was true, about Lucy not having her own key. Although there were times, Billy thought but did not say out loud, when he left his full set of keys by the front door or next to his bed or didn't know where the fuck they were. He was always calling out to Lucy, asking if she'd seen them. But that didn't mean she'd ever used the key.

"Kids?" Andrea asked. "You got kids coming in here, thinking they could eat that shit?"

"No kids around here. All we got is some nosy old lady next door."

Gerhard said, "People snooping around here at night?"

"Why would anyone be snooping? No one knows what's in here. Anyone broke in, they'd steal my tools, and nobody's touched those. I keep the garage doors locked whenever I'm not around."

"The airport, then?" Andrea asked. "You leaving our shit unattended before you bring it back?"

"No way. Never let it out of my sight once I pick it up. When I know it's a flight with your stuff, I'm the first one there to unload."

Andrea looked at the Camaro. "You got friends that help you work on this piece of shit?"

Billy blinked. "Nope, nobody."

Although, he thought, Stuart was often here. But what she'd asked was, was there ever anyone who helped, and Stuart was about as helpful as a rash on your nuts. He'd open up a folding lawn chair, the one with the disintegrating webbing, half his butt hanging through the seat, watching Billy work on the Camaro. But did Stuart even know where he stashed the stuff? That it was in the locker? If he did, would Stuart be dumb enough to rip him off if he could somehow get his key when he wasn't looking?

Shit.

Billy, trying not to sound nervous, offered an alternate theory. "Could be someone's dipping into your product before the bag goes on the plane."

Andrea acted as though she hadn't heard, instead focused on a small box with thick red and black wires leading from it. At the end of each wire was a set of metal alligator clips with rubber-coated handles.

"This some kind of sex thing?" she asked. "Biggest fucking nipple clamps I ever saw."

"That's... that's a portable car battery charger. Like jumper cables, but you don't need the other car."

Andrea gazed upon the gadget thoughtfully, picking up the handles and squeezing them so that the clips opened and closed like tiny raptor jaws with jagged teeth. "So I clip these things to a battery and hit this button and it sends a charge?"

Billy nodded.

Andrea looked at Gerhard and gave him a knowing nod. Gerhard came up behind Billy and pinned his arms.

"The fuck, man!"

Andrea moved close to Billy, set the charger and the cables on the trunk of the Camaro, then started to roll up the front of his Whalers sweatshirt until it cleared his nipples. She bunched it at the top so it wouldn't come back down.

"Cut it out!" Billy said. "Fuckin' cut it out!"

Next she picked up the two cables and rubbed the clips over each of his nipples. "So if I hooked these up and hit the switch, what would happen, Billy?"

"It could fuckin' kill me," he said, starting to whimper. "I swear, honest, I didn't take your shit. I didn't."

Andrea opened the clip in her left hand that was attached to the black cable and hooked it onto Billy's right nipple.

Billy screamed as blood trickled down his chest.

She continued to brush his left nipple with the other clip while Gerhard spoke.

"Here's how it is, Billy. You're going to have to compensate us for our loss. Which works out to about what we've paid you so far."

"Please please please," he whispered, looking at the clip in Andrea's hand. "I... I don't have that money anymore. I've spent it. On stuff for the shop."

"Is that our problem?" Gerhard asked Andrea.

"That is not our problem," she replied.

"There you have it," Gerhard said. "You pick up the next shipment on Monday. When we come for it, we can settle up."

With that, Andrea dropped the second cable to the floor, leaving the first one still attached, and she and Gerhard exited the garage.

Billy, struggling to catch his breath, tears running down his cheeks, freed himself from the clamp and slowly dropped to the floor.