33
SHE WATCHED Toby grunt out slow-motion push-ups in the grass next to the Impala while they waited for the chopper.
They were up to two flights a day, he’d explained as they bounced up logging roads into a quiet clearing ringed by blow-down and littered with shotgun shells. He had everyone working overtime to harvest and hump as many loads as possible while a suddenly tentative Border Patrol floundered in bad publicity. Curing times were cut in half. Growers and clippers doubled as smugglers. Five boats were in play now, and the ground crew tripled its daily volumes. But nothing moved product quite like a helicopter, the heaping backlog of B.C. bud flooding Seattle’s market and overflowing into Portland and San Francisco and Los Angeles.
She was still unsure whether Toby was educating, courting or trapping her. She wasn’t aware of any other girl in his life, but she’d lost the ability to talk to him and had gone from liking to tolerating to dreading his volatile affections and peculiar control over her. He’d told her, for example, exactly which skirt to wear today.
She wished like hell she’d never shared all Brandon had said over lunch. Toby’s mole hunt had turned maniacal and he immediately fired three people—a clipper, a smuggler and a grower—without explanation. It didn’t stop there. He interrogated everyone, even Fisher. She’d hoped the photos might help her escape now that her cover was blown. But the way he saw it, she was the only one he knew for certain wasn’t taking the pictures. That, however, didn’t stop him from grilling her about Brandon over and over again.
After their lunch, Brandon had left multiple messages. He wanted to go out to dinner, tell her more about his work and show her his new dog. His last call spluttered around before ending with, “Not to get mushy on you, my friend, but you’re well above average.” She vaguely recalled leaving him a drunken retort. He hadn’t called since, but it continued to unnerve her that he was such a fixture in Toby’s thoughts.
He was still pumping on trembling arms, his sweat-glistened torso reminding her of the skinned and headless hogs she’d seen in meat coolers. It took the woka-woka of the incoming helicopter to get him, purple-faced, to his feet. “Turn around!” he advised, too late to spare her eyes and nostrils from the sandstorm.
He popped the Impala trunk and speed-walked two black hockey bags to the chopper, its registration number, she noticed, covered with duct tape. After three more trips to the trunk, they were loaded and rising before Madeline had buckled into the backseat. “Ninety-three seconds!” Toby called out as the Impala shrank below them.
She couldn’t look down at the lunging greenery without reeling. “Aren’t we too low?” Her eyes still burned from the sand, but when she shut them her stomach lurched. Though she tried staring up into the calm blue, that only made her dizzy. Mount Baker wasn’t a relaxing sight either, naked from the hips down, melting back into the earth.
“Welcome to America!” the pilot shouted, leering back at her legs long enough for her to see a bloodshot eyeball behind his mirrored shades and an eraser-sized mole nestled between his cheek and nostril.
Toby was barking information at her. They were traveling at 118 miles an hour, heading 43 miles southeast into Washington to a drop spot they and the catcher both knew by GPS coordinates. She’d never seen him so amped. “Our only no-fly days now are sunny weekends,” he yelled, “because of all the hikers and rangers.”
The helicopter dropped in and out of green canyons. “Aren’t we too low?” she asked again, louder.
Toby turned and grinned. “Gotta stay below the radar. At this elevation, we’re not here, see? We don’t exist.”
We don’t? She turned away from his little teeth.
Fifteen minutes later, he was jabbing a finger at a green clearing that looked no larger than a marina slip. They circled the spot twice, to see if the catcher had been followed, before falling into a stomach-lurching descent. Her mother had died instantly—and she’d never understood why that was supposed to comfort her. Who wanted to die without even a chance of saying good-bye?
The chopper leveled off into the tightest turn yet, then slowed and stabilized and settled on a surprisingly spacious and level pad forty feet from a green Toyota with a black canopy.
Toby told her to sit tight while he shuttled the bags. The truck driver looked as calm and respectable as a realtor showing property. The nameless pilot kept smacking his lips, trying to scare up saliva, and glancing at her legs.
Why had she been dragged along on this?
Toby climbed back inside, giddy and flushed, his minty B.O. filling the interior as he plopped down next to her and they lifted and twirled back into the canyon. Madeline shut her eyes until everything leveled again, and Toby was leaning his brawny torso against her, grinding her seatbelt into her pelvis and catching her mouth in mid-alarm with his own. She didn’t kiss him back, though that didn’t discourage his hand from sliding up her thigh.
She couldn’t find her voice, but then it came louder than she’d intended. “Stop!” She felt the helicopter dip and heard the pilot shouting. Just as fast, Toby leaned away and was talking rapidly. Apologizing? Complaining? She couldn’t make out anything beyond the revulsion pulsing through her. “I’m out!” she announced once she’d regained her breath.
He nodded. “We’ll talk next month.” While his voice was gentle, he wouldn’t look at her. “You can’t do this to me now.”