Stinking Rich Read online

  The man was on his hands and knees in his garden when Danny pulled up. He said, “Still driving that beater, I hear,” when Danny killed the engine.

  “Mom sent lasagna. Got a smoke?”

  “On the picnic table. Heard you pull in, thought maybe you’d treat me to a tailor made.”

  “Ran out.” Danny pulled a pinch of Drum tobacco from the old man’s pouch and dropped it into a paper. He stretched the shreds, fluffing them between thumbs and index fingers and rolled it the right amount of tight. Sparking a light, he took a puff and walked the cigarette over to where Ernie had sat himself on a cut sixteen-inch log. Heading back to the table to roll another cigarette for himself, he said, “Garden’s looking good. You’ll have a nice haul of tomatoes in a couple weeks.”

  “It’ll take three. Haven’t had much sun this summer.”

  The two men smoked in silence for a while. Then Ernie said, “Your mother tells me you applied for a fork lift course. Offered by the government?”

  “Didn’t get in,” Danny lied. “They only took ten guys. I must’ve been number eleven.”

  “Don’t worry. Something will come along. Always does. You still got the unemployment check coming in?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, that’s something, anyways,” Ernie said.

  Danny knew from his mother that Ernie lived on disability, on account of his blindness. They’d been friends forever, since before he was born, and she helped him out now and then with a meal or some grocery shopping. In return, Ernie gave them basket-loads of cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, and garlic; just about every other thing you could grow. How the old man managed it—barely able to see like that—forever amazed him. He and his mom would come by at harvest time to help out some, but otherwise Ernie worked the plot alone, guiding the heavy work with steel wires run for that purpose, and weeding by feel on his hands and knees.

  “How’s her cough?” Ernie asked, meaning his mom.

  “Worse.” Danny told him how the doctor had said winters were going to get harder on her each year. “Just wish I could earn enough to send her south. Maybe even move there.” He saw Ernie stifle a grimace. “’Course that’ll never happen,” he said, wondering who’d be around to help the old man if he and his mom were gone. He wished he could let him know about the pile of dough he was making and how it was going to change everything. He wished he could tell him there was more to life than collecting a government hand-out, and how he’d finally hit it big. He wished he could talk—to anyone really—instead of lying all the time.

  He asked, “Anything you need done? Before I take off, I mean.”

  Ernie thought a moment and said, “There’s a bag of lime needs carrying from the shed over to the kybo. I can handle it, but if you don’t mind...”

  Danny lugged the twenty pound sack across the yard and dumped it into the barrel inside the outhouse. He couldn’t understand why Ernie insisted on living so completely off the grid. A little running water could go a long way to making life simpler. He put it down to stubbornness. He gave Ernie a tap on the shoulder and said goodbye, pausing only to grab a baseball bat he’d noticed in the shed. He didn’t like the idea of facing Shooter empty-handed.

  By the time he pulled into Lester’s yard, it was just after noon and he knew he could count on his pal being gone fishing with his cousin. It was a manly ritual boys learned from their dads, a weekly reward for hard work shirking whatever job they were pretending to hold down at the time. A perfect way to avoid the missus and the yapping kids. Until the kids were old enough to fish and the cycle began again.

  Lester had no missus and no kids he could name, but his cousin had got himself a wife named Mary Lou and three brats under eight; Lester went along for moral support. Since his friend would be off somewhere on a fourteen-foot aluminum boat with a two-four in the cooler and worms in a cardboard box, Danny figured it would be easy to let himself into the trailer and take back his carton of smokes.

  The yellow-fanged Rottweiler crawled out from under the trailer before Danny had even stopped the engine, taking up a position between the car and the front door. Danny got out and walked toward the dog, slapping the bat loudly into his left palm as he advanced. Maybe he ought to have borrowed Ernie’s shotgun instead.

  Shooter backed up, tail down, a tuft of long black bristles standing up on the back of his short thick neck. He was growling but didn’t try to stop Danny from going up the steps. The door’s lock wasn’t quite as flimsy as the rest of the trailer and it didn’t give way to Danny’s pull. As he leaned his knee into the wall for leverage and yanked harder, car tires crunched on the gravel behind him. He turned to see Lester’s hand-me-down Ford drive into the clearing.

  “Shit.”

  Lester stepped out of the car with a grin.

  “Hey, Dannyboy. How’s it hangin’?”

  With his master’s arrival, Shooter straightened up, stopped cringing, and started creeping back toward Danny, snarling loud now.

  “Hey, Lester, uh, what are you doing here? I thought you’d be fishing.”

  “Mary Lou told my cuz she’d cut him a new one if he didn’t finish cleanin’ out the basement for some garage sale she wants to have tomorrow. But, hey, Danny, nice of you to drop by and...what’s with the baseball bat? D’you...” And then Lester started to put two and two together.

  “I want my smokes, Lester.”

  “Screw you and your smokes, numbnuts. What are you doin’ at my door?”

  Danny was still standing on the trailer step, turned halfway around. He looked from Lester to the dog and back. Shooter’s lips were peeled in a snarl, showing off his pink and black gums and hungry-looking teeth. Danny slapped the bat into his hand but it no longer seemed to have any effect on the dog. He was sweating hard. Shooter lowered his shoulders into a crunch and moved forward.

  “Tell him to back off, Lester,” Danny said, thinking his voice sounded a little squeaky. “Back him off or I’ll hit him.”

  “Bullshit, Danny. He’ll bite your balls clean off before you touch him. Shooter, go. GO.”

  The dog leapt forward. Danny jumped. His right foot caught on the bottom step and he fell onto his back, right leg up in the air, presenting a tempting target for the dog. Shooter snapped and missed. Danny kicked him in the head. The dog yelped and jumped back, then prepared to attack again. What was it his mother always said about dogs? About not letting them know he was afraid? How could he not be afraid, lying there, waiting for Shooter to rip his calf open?

  “Call him off, Lester. He’s gonna tear a chunk outta my leg.”

  “Like I care, Dannyboy. He’s just doin’ his job.”

  “I swear, that mutt puts his teeth into me, I’m going straight to the cops. No fucking SPCA nice guys. They’ll put a bullet in your damn dog.”

  That gave Lester pause. “Shooter,” he said. “Down, boy. Back down.”

  Lester lunged forward and grabbed at the plastic-covered clothes line attached to Shooter’s collar. The dog escaped his reach and leaned into Danny. Danny flung his leg to the right and swung the bat as hard as he could from his prone position. His palms were sweaty and the bat flew from his hands. It shot like a rocket over Shooter’s head and struck Lester right between the eyes. He fell like a bag of rocks on top of his dog, giving Danny enough time to jump to his feet.

  Before the dog could get loose, Danny sprinted to his car and jumped in. He slammed the door behind him, and realized he’d wet his jeans. Whimpering, he watched for five minutes as the dog leapt at the car over and over. Somehow, Shooter managed to get his teeth into the side mirror. He tore it off.

  The Rottweiler seemed to feel wrenching the mirror from the car made his point. He stopped lunging and barking. Still growling, he moved off a few feet and lay down in the shadow cast by Lester’s car, doing his best to gnaw on the mirror’s chrome arm.

  Lester hadn’t moved.

  Danny rolled his window down a couple of inches and yelled at him.

  “Lester. Mo
ron. Get up. Think I’m coming out with your freaking dog?”

  Lester lay still. Danny honked the horn. No movement.

  Danny started the car and drove slowly to where Lester lay. He looked at the pool of blood around his head. Lester’s eyes stared at the space under Danny’s car. Danny could swear he was grinning. The bat had crushed his nose flat, and all his teeth showed, tongue peeking out the gap. Pebbles and pine needles pressed into his cheek. Sticking halfway out of his shirt pocket was a pack of Players Special Blend. Kings.

  Three

  Perko gunned the ATV out of the forest and into the barnyard. He dismounted with a groan. As wide and cushy as the three-wheeler’s seat was, nothing could make the ride through the bush comfortable. He hated the backwoods trail, but it was critical he never be seen entering the farm’s front gate. He maintained complete arm’s length insulation from the grow operation that was, in every way, his baby.

  The day before, he had called the punk farmer and told him, “Time to go buy beer and groceries. Get the fuck out. Don’t be back before dark.” He checked the spot between the ancient pickup on collapsed tires and the rusted out baler. No car. The punk was a good listener.

  The farm looked like every other halfway-abandoned homestead in central Ontario. For nearly two decades, the owner had let the land run to scrub after many lifetimes of careful pasturing. No self-respecting cow would be caught navigating the stone, rubble, and low-lying juniper. A handful of poplar trees and some spruce had taken hold but no hardwood yet, except in the woodlot and even it was overrun by brambles and saplings around the edges. Before Perko’s operation had moved in, nobody at all had lived at the farm for at least three years. The hayfields lay across the road and had long been rented to a nearby farmer. Perko knew the geezer must have noticed the recent tenant in the front farm house, but he didn’t worry. In the no-smoke-no-fire book of rural etiquette, he counted on him and every other neighbor to respect the “Mean Dog” sign he had tacked to the front gate. Farmers could be every bit as nosy as they were helpful. The flipside was that people in the country knew how to mind their own business as long as nothing too loud or funny-smelling was going on.

  Perko’s tenancy was a strictly cash deal, struck with the eighty-seven-year-old owner. The widow nearly choked on her teeth when he paid eight months’ rent up front. She still had enough gumption to ask for a damage deposit which Perko was convinced she immediately blew at the Great Horned Owl Charity Casino. They ran a shuttle four times a day to and from the retirement villa.

  The barn was easily a hundred twenty years old. It leaned slightly to one side, but the long grey timbers looked as solid as rock from a distance. It was tucked conveniently behind the farmhouse and further screened by a spur of the woodlot.

  Perko headed around back to a bright aluminum garage door wide enough to accommodate a tractor. He unlocked the padlock and rattled the length of old chain through the door’s handles. Inside he was greeted by a press of air so thick with organic dust he could feel it on his teeth. A shiver of anticipation ran down his spine as he spread his arms wide and beamed at his masterpiece.

  The tumble-down barn’s cavernous interior was all twenty-first century. Thirty-mil black plastic lined the inside walls. Styrofoam insulation was glued and tacked to the plastic. Scaffolding erected right up to the roof created four floors where once there had been two. A mosaic of chrome, wire, white and black plastic tubing and hoses ran in every direction, all of it shimmering under a metal halide dawn. Each level had aisles of hydroponic basins, filled with slow-flowing nutrient-enriched water that bathed the roots of row upon row of pungent marijuana plants.

  The man-made central nervous system created the ideal growing environment for some of the most potent cannabis the world had ever known. And it was all his.

  That his creation looked like a massive fire hazard wasn’t lost on Perko, but the smoke his operation was intended to produce would be far sweeter than the toxic mess that would occur should the barn itself ever burn. He had overseen the installation himself, using the Libidos’ regular crew of off-duty city and hydro workers—the region’s best experts on bypassing power meter monitoring. He paid the men cash and fed them beer and pizza during the overnight build-out sessions. It took less than a week to complete the installation. Perko himself cloned cuttings from two other Libido grow ops.

  He used Frederick, one of Nancy’s Nasties, to hire a guy to babysit the plants for the sixteen weeks until harvest time. Frederick’s great-great-aunt had been the Nasties’ matriarch, Nancy Nickerson, a gin-swilling grandmother of six hardcore repeat convicts who ran the original show. The two remaining grandsons were in walkers by now and what was left of the gang had fallen on rough times. Still, it was critical there be no connection between Perko and his pot farmer so that if the place ever got busted, the punk couldn’t rat anyone out.

  The plants had grown quickly, the Himalayan Gold outperforming the Texada Timewarp, and both crops starting to flower in just under two months. Once a week, he called the resident farmer from a pay phone and told him to leave the property: “Payday. Time to get lost.” Week by week, the plants matured, and he walked the aisles like a botanist, pausing here and there to crumble a leaf between his fingers and smell its sweet spice.

  Today, things were looking different. A back corner had been sealed off with a black plastic curtain behind which the mother plant cuttings for the next crop were rooting in their little trays, nearly ready to be transplanted. The black curtain served to block out ambient light, ensuring the babies received exactly twenty hours of artificial daylight—no more, no less—from the overhanging light racks. The punk farmer was doing his job well, not that it would ever occur to Perko to tell him as much.

  Stacked near the tractor door were dozens of bales of dried pot, each wrapped in burlap and plastic, and weighing in at twenty-five pounds. Perko drew a deep breath, eyes gleaming, and admired his first harvest.

  On the other side of the door, he noticed a charred empty oil drum stuffed with odds and sods of plastic and framing materials. It looked like farm boy was using his noggin and doing the barrel burn indoors rather than sending a thick black smoke signal up from the yard. He’d have to tell him to check the HVAC filters to make sure they weren’t getting clogged.

  Done inspecting the barn, Perko walked over to the house to leave an envelope containing sixty twenty-dollar bills on the kitchen table. On the envelope he scrawled a note: “Tuesday night, make yourself scarce. The Boss.” Then he underlined “Boss” because it made him feel good.

  On previous visits, he had nosed around the house a bit to get a sense of his employee’s at-home behavior, looking for evidence of parties, or girlfriends, or anyone other than the farmer himself. Visitors were strictly forbidden. Based on his snooping, Perko was satisfied that the only company enjoyed by his charge was a lizard that occupied one of the rooms on the second floor. It had to weigh nearly twenty pounds. Perko made another mental note to find out just how big lizards could grow—he didn’t want to wind up ambushed by a dragon.

  Today, he noticed a few bags of dried bud, more than his farmer could possibly smoke on his own. Clearly, the guy was selling a little on the side. Perko shrugged. Selling factory leavings was against the rules, but he was willing to let it slide. When you were growing over a million dollars’ worth of marijuana and some poor sod was fool enough to shoulder the personal risk of incarceration, it was best not to quibble when he sold a little plant waste. If the punk got busted dealing, he had nothing to gain by confessing to running a factory-scale pot farm, never mind the fact that he didn’t have a clue who he actually worked for.

  Riding back into the bush on his ATV, Perko smiled with pride at the elegance of the operation. He’d learned a hell of a lot with the Libidos. They were so smart, he figured they ought to be running the whole damn country.

  Four

  After killing Lester Freeden with a baseball bat to the face, Danny drove straight to the farmhouse. To thi
nk. To be alone and think.

  He’d killed a man.

  A friend, if he could call Lester that. It was an accident. There was that. Maybe he should tell the cops. Danny actually turned around toward town twice, thinking that’s what he’d do. But tell them what? That Lester had it coming? That he ought to have given him back his smokes?

  Danny pulled to side of the road and puked until his heaves were dry.

  He didn’t like his odds explaining to a couple cops that he’d whacked Lester in the head with a baseball bat because he was afraid of his dog. Could he even be sure it was Shooter he was aiming for? Or that he cared Lester was dead? He just didn’t like the fact it was him had done the killing. Lester, stupid asshole, couldn’t even die without fucking things up.

  At the farm, he stepped out of his car to open the gate. He waved absentmindedly to the farmer doing whatever it was needed doing in the hayfield across the road. Despite having watched the old man for hours on end, Danny had never spoken to him; nor did he intend to. Lonely as he was, he knew better than to get close to the locals.

  The farmhouse stood squarely between the barn and the road. Danny had seen a thousand lookalikes all over the Kawarthas, moving with his mother every time another landlord gave them the boot. It had a front door dead center between two identical windows: one each for the living and dining rooms. Its front porch was big enough to hold two weatherworn chairs on one side and a rocking loveseat on the other. The lone arched window on the second floor was still intact but its glass panes were cloudy with age. The hundred twenty-year-old building was in bad need of a paint job, bare wood exposed on most boards.

  Danny let himself into the kitchen at the back of the house and spotted the envelope left on the table by his biker boss. His gut wrenched at the reminder of how he had blown the whack of cash the night before at blackjack. It plummeted to new depths as his synapses jumped from the casino to Lester’s trailer to his cold dead eyes staring up at him, blood oozing from his crushed nose. He knew full well his mother would hate the idea that the money with which he planned to give her a better life came from criminal activity—even though he was pretty sure growing pot was low on her personal totem pole of crime. But murder? With a bat? Even if attempted dogslaughter would be a better name for it, how the hell could he explain that one to her?