23
IT LOOKED like an indoor Christmas-tree farm at first until she inhaled the hot sticky air and realized she was standing inside a cannabis factory the size of a Wal-Mart.
Toby monitored her every reaction while explaining in a confidential mumble that he and his associates had rented the mothballed brewery eleven months ago through a make-believe coffee company. Seedlings were grown in old beer vats ideal for controlling moisture and heat. The ventilation system filtered odors, the tile floors provided drainage and a thousand lights were hooked to computers.
Half an hour into the tour, Madeline’s hangover came to a clammy boil as she waited, out of earshot, for Toby to finish chatting with three deferential tattooed men. She still didn’t know what he considered her—top grower, confidante, lover or simply convenient front woman until his crew finished digging an underground op beneath the Damant barn. But why did he bother with that when he had something like this? Her vibrating phone interrupted her speculation, so she turned and quietly answered.
“Madeline?”
“Who’s—?”
“Brandon. Brandon Vanderkool.”
She waited.
“Your dad shot out one of our border cams last night.”
“What?” She checked on Toby’s conversation, where two others had joined in.
“He looked like a ghost, but it was definitely him, raising a rifle and pow, out goes the light. Actually, two shots,” he said breathlessly. “Pow … and then pow again. I didn’t say anything, though. What would you say about lunch?”
“Huh?”
She looked up in time to find Toby striding purposefully toward her, thigh muscles popping, arms swinging, the other men watching him, then her, then him again as he slit his own throat with an imaginary blade.
“Next Wednesday at McGiver’s?” Brandon said. “Noon or whenever you—”
“Okay.” She cut off before Toby grabbed the phone, checked the last number—Restricted—and unclipped the battery. He spoke calmly, levelly, but his eyes were hot. “You know it’s easy to turn these things on remotely, and then they can hear everything. You know that, right?”
She gently retrieved her phone and battery from his strong fingers and put them in separate pockets, her body encased in sweat.
He crowded her. “Who was it?”
“My father.”
“He’s got a restricted number?”
“He’s like that.”
“What’d he want?”
“He’s ill, remember?”
“So, what’d he want?”
“Milk and Motrin.”
“Sure hope you’ve got all the bad decisions out of your system.” He’d lit into her just that morning about getting too drunk too often and being stupid enough to be caught on television with “those flag-burning idiots.” He gestured impatiently toward the drying room and more tattooed men, his thick fingers welded to her lower vertebrae.
After a long silence, during which she scrambled to make sense of Brandon’s call, she brushed his hand away. “I thought you said you’d never work with the Angels.”
It wasn’t clear he’d heard her until a dozen steps later. “There’s bad Angels and good Angels. I had to jump your shit for their benefit, all right?”
He led her past labeled drying racks and four sallow workers busily vacuum-packing buds with some industrial-looking gadget Toby swore cost $3,000 and was worth twice that. “People want fresh pillows,” he said, turning it into a marketing jingle. “The buds don’t get crushed. Even the resin doesn’t fall off.”
Three middle-aged women appeared to be aggressively washing clothes by hand in the next room, engrossed in their labor, pouring liquid through cloth filters into a bucket, again and again, a mound of pot leaves on the table next to them. When Toby asked if there were any dry samples, they pointed blankly at a tray cluttered with crumbly wedges the color of wheat. He packed a glass pipe and offered it to Madeline, who shook her head. “Be a sport,” he said. “Does the body good.”
She took a couple puffs and tried to imagine having lunch with Brandon.
Toby thanked the ladies, who didn’t look up, and then led Madeline through heavy double doors into the largest room yet, with a vast expanse of more flowering thick-leafed pot plants than Madeline had ever imagined. He pulled out two pairs of paper sunglasses, and they strolled beneath the fierce lights through the indoor forest, the air wet and thick with the reek and sting of chemical fertilizers. “You’re looking at what might be the largest indoor grow in the world,” he told her.
The hash was kicking in so hard that she couldn’t stop smiling, although she fully expected dozens of policemen to burst into the room slinging rifles like the one in her father’s basement.
“Now you can see,” Toby said, offering his warm, meaty hand, “why we need to come up with new methods of getting much bigger loads across the border.”