“Shut up,” Dickie told him. “Or I’m gonna work on you first.”
Randy backed away, but his routine did buy me just enough time to catch hold of how I knew Dickie’s name—Dancin’ Dan mentioned it the night we drove home from Gangland. Dickie was the one who fought Robo-Troy before Dan.
Now Dickie stood right in front of me, swishing the knife blade in the air. “Here we are—you and me again. Looks like I’m gonna have to do that nose job on you after all.”
“So, you’re Dickie,” I said.
His eyes narrowed. “Yeah, what of it?”
And I’m like, “Dan told me about you.”
The knife stopped swishing. “You know Dan?”
“Do I know Dan? Are you kidding? Dan and I are tight. We fought in the rumbles on the same night. He told me all about you and Robo-Troy, said you came the closest of anyone in the history of the rumbles to beating Troy.”
Dickie smiled. “Dan said that?”
“Sure.”
“Well, I guess I done pretty good. A lot better than Dan, that’s for sure. Old Dan sure got a faceful, didn’t he?”
“Not as bad as me,” I said. “I almost got my nose broken.”
Dickie gave me a playful punch on the shoulder. “Well, how do you like that? You’re buddies with Dan.”
“Would you shut up,” Tres ordered. “Forget whether he knew some stupid guy named Dan. We have a little persuading to do here, remember?”
Dickie glared at him. “Dan’s not stupid. He’s my main man.”
“That’s okay,” Tres told him. “Marry him if you want to, but I’m the one who’s paying you.”
Dickie folded his knife shut. “I don’t believe I like the way you’re talking.”
“Look,” Tres said. “I have a hundred extra dollars here if you’ll just forget about how I’m talking and get back to doing your job.”
During this, my heart pounded so hard I thought it might crack a rib. You never know how you’ll react in a situation like this, but I was beginning to think there was something more wrong with me than just stress. Randy didn’t look so good either.
“I don’t know,” Dickie said. “If you got an extra hundred, I’ll bet you got an extra two hundred.”
Tres pulled out his wallet. “Okay, two hundred.”
The switchblade flicked open again, and Dickie’s like, “Or maybe I’ll just take everything you got.”
Tres reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a black pistol. That’s Oklahoma for you—even the rich kids are packing. But he wasn’t exactly Mr. Cool about it. His hands shook so badly he fumbled the pistol and couldn’t catch it before it clattered onto the floor.
Dickie’s like, “Ha! Looks like I got the advantage in this deal here.”
Tres looked panicked.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Ashton strode around the desk. “Do I have to do everything?” She had a pistol of her own.
“Drop that knife,” she ordered Dickie. “And get over there with those two idiots.”
All in a moment her softness had hardened into steel. She pointed the gun with the barrel turned sideways the way gang-bangers in movies do, which struck me as a kind of reverse pretentiousness.
As Tres plucked his pistol from the floor, Dickie warily followed Ashton’s orders. Now the three of us stood with our backs to the desk, and Tres stood next to Ashton. She had all the beauty of a well-polished missile.
I’m like, “What’s going on?”
“It really is too bad you had to know about Hector Maldonado,” she said, her hard blue eyes fixed on me. “Things would’ve been so much easier if you had never found him in that Dumpster.”
I tried to speak, but suddenly my mouth wouldn’t work. My thoughts had sped to a blur. Then something strange happened—it was like a bottle rocket exploded in my mind. Everything around me glowed, especially Ashton.
My whirling thoughts lined up in order, and it was like I could turn them over one by one in rapid succession and inspect them from all sides. I knew what’d happened—the liquid-rubber aftertaste in my drink hadn’t come from some diet sweetener. It came from the drug Ashton added. The same drug she killed Hector with. Of course. There was no doubt. But how long would it take to kill me?
“You expect me to believe you’re gonna shoot us?” said Dickie. His voice rang like a gong. I felt like I could hear his whole life in it. “You don’t have the guts.”
She smiled. “You might ask your two compadres about that. I can see they’re starting to feel the effects of the deadly little cocktail I mixed for them.”
“I think I’m getting ready to puke,” Randy said. “You’d better let me out of here.”
“Sorry,” she said. “You should know by now I was never going to let you out of here, not even if you took the payoff. I just had to buy enough time until I was sure the drug was working. And you know what the beauty of it is? It’s not an illegal drug at all. They call it Dragon Ice. You can order it online. The company pretends it’s a type of bath salt, but it gives off a lovely little semi-hallucinogenic buzz if you take the right amount. There’s just one tiny problem—if you take too much, you die.”
“Just like Hector did,” I said. The words came out perfectly now as if my mouth was a mold forming them from silver. “You were just using him all along, weren’t you? Making him think he was your boyfriend, making him deliver meals for FOKC with you. He was the one the Ockle ladies saw you with. But that whole charity thing was an act. You only did it so you could dig up some poor guy like Hector to drag to Gangland, just like Nash did to me when he pretended to be my friend. Maybe you even wanted Hector to do some crime for you. Like rob a pharmacy. Rowan chickened out on that, so you dropped him and went looking for someone of your own to do it.”