One minute and a hundred steps later, Julia heard the sound of a door being unlocked. Ross led her forward a few feet and then slipped the blindfold off.
As the light bled into her vision, Julia looked around the room trying to survey what he had brought her to see. She looked left and right, befuddled by the emptiness of her surroundings. They were in a small and dingy space that looked like an abandoned sanatorium. The only natural light came from one small window at the other end of the room that was partially covered with some cardboard for privacy. A stained, yellowing white carpet covered the floor. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture in the room, just piles of what looked like boxes and vials of chemicals. The room, she noticed, smelled like animal excrement.
“What is this?” she asked. “Where are we?”
“Come with me,” Ross said as he led her into a bedroom that sat off the drab living room. As they rounded the corner, a gale of cold air from an air conditioner hit them. Then, as she entered the other room, like the conclusion to a thrilling mystery novel, it all made sense to Julia. She saw why she had been blindfolded and exactly why it wasn’t safe for her to know where they were.
“I had to show you because I had to show someone,” he said.
On the wall to the left, another piece of cardboard had been taped over the window. The room was empty except for a tall, lopsided shelving unit that looked like it had not been moved in a decade.
Then there was that odor. The same pungent, earthy whiff that had greeted Julia when she entered the apartment and pulled off the blindfold. Only now it was so much stronger, an aroma that smelled more like damp soil on a forest floor.
Julia examined the shelves, then looked back at Ross and smiled. He didn’t need to tell her what she was looking at; this wasn’t the first time she had seen him play mad scientist. He had experimented on a smaller scale in their apartment a year earlier, storing his results in a black garbage bag in the closet, stuffed in between Julia’s underwear and her high-heeled shoes.
But this—this!—was grander and more impressive than anything she had ever seen. She approached the decrepit shelving unit, which spanned the width of the entire room. Everything started to make sense to her—Ross’s disappearing acts. He’d been coming here, she realized.
Ross was ebullient as he bent down to one of the lower shelves and pointed at a random tray. “Look at this one,” he said, his finger traversing the air as he spoke. “And this one, look at that.”
Julia saw that on each shelf there sat a white tray almost two feet in diameter—more than a dozen in all—and that inside these trays were hundreds of tiny shoots sprouting into the air. From a few feet away, they looked like platters full of baby porcupines. She moved closer, now peering directly into one of the white trays, and was astonished at the sheer number of brown and white mushroom stems. These were not normal mushrooms. She knew perfectly well that they were magic.
“Look over here at this one.” Ross beamed. She turned, seeing what he was pointing at; a plump hazel and milky-colored button that looked like it was ready to be picked and sprinkled on top of a salad. He was as proud as a parent.
As Julia inspected further, she started to estimate how many mushrooms he was actually growing. It was easily more than a thousand, maybe even double that. Plucked from their rectangular white plastic homes, the contents of these trays could probably fill a large black garbage bag, or even two.
“How much does this place cost?” she asked.
“It’s 450 dollars a month.”
“It’s a total shit hole.”
Ross laughed. This was fine with him. A shit hole, after all, was the perfect place to operate a secret drug laboratory.
The entire operation—his massive shroomery, the seeds of what he hoped would be his burgeoning Silk Road empire—would end up costing him more than $17,000, including rent and supplies, which were endless. There were the petri dishes, tape, and glue guns; the ingredients, including peat, gypsum, and rye; and the kitchen supplies, like the pressure cooker and kitchen timer. All of it had added up very quickly. As for the return on his investment, he estimated he could get $15 or so per gram for the mushrooms. Given that there would be several kilos of product at the end of the yield, he could easily make tens of thousands of dollars in profit. But—and this was a big “but”—this was a lot of mushrooms to offload, and it wasn’t obvious that his Web site was even going to work. Would people want to buy magic mushrooms off a stranger on the Internet?
“Aren’t you worried about getting caught?” Julia asked.
“Of course,” he replied, as if it were the most obvious question in the world. “But I need product for my site.”
He reminded her that no one else knew about this hideaway. He had taken the proper precautions to stay covert during his shroom-growing phase and even read the book The Construction and Operation of Clandestine Drug Laboratories, which was essentially a Dummies guide for setting up a felonious drug lab.
Though most people would have been shocked or distraught or entirely terrified to discover their boyfriend managing a secret drug farm, Julia was intrigued by the idea—she felt like someone who knew a secret no one else should know. In her mind, while she knew Ross could get into trouble if he was caught, she didn’t envision the consequences being that severe; it wasn’t like Ross had driven her to a secret meth lab or a heroin-making facility with a dozen half-naked workers. These were just a few trays of mushrooms.
Ross, on the other hand, was fully aware exactly what could happen if he was caught. Texas’s merciless laws could result in five to ninety-nine years in prison for four hundred grams of mushrooms. Ross’s secret farm was currently growing almost a hundred pounds of hallucinogens.
“We should go,” he said to Julia as they walked back into the living room, and he once again placed the black rag over her eyes, tightening the slipknot to block out any light.
The door lock clicked; then she heard the jingle of keys as he bolted the lair shut behind them.
Chapter 9
OPENING DAY OF THE SILK ROAD
This was it. Holy heck! Hello, 2011 . . . the end of January had finally arrived. It was more than a year since the snowflake of the idea had first landed on Ross; several months since he had realized it could actually work; weeks since he had shown Julia his covert shroomery. Now it was only a few hours before it was time to unveil the Silk Road to the world.