To which Horatia snarled something unintelligible under her breath, so Rice began again, taking it nice and reasonable.
“Look,” she said, “you already stacked the deck at the design stage so this stuff would induce euphoria, right? With no side effects?”
“That we’ve seen, yet.”
Rice nodded. “And you could make a lot of it, pretty fast, if you needed to.”
Horatia, shrugging: “Absolutely. But I don’t need to.”
And there it was again: Horatia’s marvelous people-blindness—so endearingly hilarious when watching her trample over everybody else’s feelings, so infuriating once you realized she really didn’t even grasp that you had them too.
“Don’t you?” Rice leant back in her chair as if the whole topic was boring her. “‘Case you hadn’t noticed, ‘Rache, you’re not the only one whose income just dried up—I mean, you do remember who paid for all this, right?” A dismissive wave at the lab. “Sure, you could take what you’ve got to any major Big Pharma group, but you know they’d keep you on rats for at least another ten years, and you could lose intellectual property rights at almost any stage of that curve.” Sly: “This’d be just like skipping straight to human trials…if you can even call junkies human.”
“Says the woman who thinks ‘E’ makes any first date better. And you’d find a paying customer base—where, exactly?”
“Where wouldn’t I? Some of my best friends…oh, all right, more like all of ‘em, actually. Everyone I’ve ever taken a class with, shared a club with, hooked up with…”
“…Except for me, that is.”
Now it was Rice’s turn to nod, her grin stretching wider, as she locked Horatia’s hot gaze with her own, even hotter, stare. “All except for you, yes.”
Horatia did hem, haw and fume a bit more after that, but by post-Afternoon Delight snack-time, it was a fully done deal. They attacked the sub-equation together that night, worked ‘til 5:30 a.m., and spent the rest of the weekend on cooking/packaging. Friday evening after that, the hot new party favour known as “reA” was officially out on the street. Rice hit the circuit with fifty tiny baggies stashed in her purse’s lining, wearing a winning combination of Victoria’s Secret lingerie on top, red pleather fetish gear on bottom: salesperson mode, plausible and charming. Her twin trade secrets were a head-full of previous contacts and a complete willingness to do that all-important first little bump while her targets watched, ostensibly to prove she wasn’t “wearing a wire,” or some shit.
Test passed, the marks soon took a snort of their own, and sagged back, eyelids fluttering—oh man, shit, that’s good! Followed at speed by the one-hit-you’re-hooked routine of immediately double-dipping, rubbing it on their gums, all the while wondering out loud: Uh, Rice…it wears off kinda fast…can you, like, shoot this stuff, or what?
Well—
—let’s find out, shall we?
—
Sometime later, Rice, too, would have occasion to wonder, the way she once had on Horatia’s own behalf. So why did I even take that first hit, anyway? Fully knowing, in her heart—and elsewhere—the only possible correct answer:
…Oh yeah. ‘Cause I thought I was immune, too. Or indestructible, at the very least…
And the funny thing, in hindsight? That was the part which turned out to be true.
—
Start-up fees alone kept their penetration of the Greater Toronto Area’s synthetic drug market fairly shallow at first, though Horatia’s demented insistence on tracking—and analyzing—their clients’ habit-based bell-curves rendered functional invisibility not really an option. Still, Rice made sure they stayed close to the radar, if not actually under it. She had no doubt their main competitors knew of them, but it seemed unlikely they could gauge exactly how much of their profits reA sales might be cutting into, let alone who its creators were or where they lived.
By summer, however, the inevitable finally became evitable…and Rice and Horatia woke, one way-too-early morning, to find their lab-loft suddenly full of thugs with guns. Their leader, Dieter Dorfmann, was a rooster-proud flyweight boxer of a guy with a shaved head, albino-blond eyebrows, inept jailhouse tats and a scary little lisp; Rice had bought crystal meth off and on from his various club dudes for about a year now, and always maintained there wasn’t much wrong with him that a good swift dick up the ass wouldn’t cure, plastic or otherwise. Still, it was funny how much less innately ridiculous he seemed when bolstered by five other well-armed guys of varying sobriety, all of them busily tossing the place for whatever they could find.
Rice and Horatia froze, stranded, halfway down the stairs from their sleeping platform—both barely dressed, with Horatia maintaining a white-knuckled clamp on Rice’s wrist. The good part: nobody’d knocked over anything likely to explode, as yet. The bad part…everything else, pretty much: guys with guns, no guns of their own (not that Rice even knew how to shoot a gun, but she thought she could probably work it out fairly fast, given sufficient contextual pressure). No way to reach the door without being seen and/or stopped…
…so Rice went with her most basic instinct, instead—chill hard enough to cool down the whole room, thus keeping people calm enough for she and H to stay alive. In her best amused drawl, therefore, the knot in her gut thankfully inaudible—
“Yo, D, man…I can call you D, right?”
A rippling wave of pistol-cock clicks brought six separate barrels their way, at this; Horatia had already ducked behind Rice before Rice could even react, which might’ve looked bad from the outside, but provoked a weird rush of affection: That’s my girl. Dorfmann turned, cutting her the only-slightly-curious wall-eye. “DD,” he said.
Rice shrugged. “Yeah, well, whatever, D-squared—looks like you’re looking for something, so maybe I can help. What’s the issue?”
“Uhhh…you two rich bitches, shitting where I eat? Pushing your homebrew crap in my territory, without even kicking some back to me for the privilege?” Adding, as his chief button-men—equally large, brown and unimaginatively monickered brothaz Big Trey and Lil Trey—smirked behind him: “That’s just rude, dude.”
“Granted. How ‘bout we rectify that right now, then?”
“Okay. You turn over what you got, you don’t make any more, and you pay up for what you screwed us out of. Then you get to live…maybe.”