Just One More

After about twenty seconds of silence, I called out.

“Yo,” I hissed.

More silence pounded until the light snapped on with a stunning glare. There stood Bryan by the switch, blood running down from a cut on his forehead. The stream was bright red, leaving a stain on his shirt, but I could tell that it was just a surface wound, nothing serious. More telling was the body lying twenty feet from me in an unnaturally frozen angle.

“Oh shit,” I breathed. It was the girl, Valerie, the one who’d tipped us off to the Adams. She had seemed suspicious as shit, a high school dropout who allegedly had a secret child. But now the girl was motionless on the ground, her body twisted awkwardly.

Valerie’s bleached blonde hair was dirty and unwashed, the circles under her eyes visible even in the dim light of the garage. But it was the track marks on her arms that gave her away. A junkie, clear as day, with a serious habit to boot.

I toed her body and to my relief, the blonde grunted, her eyes flickering open. Okay, so her neck was at a weird angle but it wasn’t fatal. She’d just have a sprain.

“What is this about?” I said, kneeling next to the blonde. “Where are the Adams?”

Her eyes rolled back in her head momentarily and I thought I might lose her. She emitted a series of gasping coughs and I rolled her over to her side, the better to keep her from choking. But the girl was okay. Looked like Bryan had administered a body block which would leave bruises but was hardly fatal. She bent over, clutching her middle.

“Uhh, what have you done?” she whispered, her voice hoarse.

“Come on Valerie,” I said grimly. “What’s this about? Why did you lead us here?”

The blonde closed her eyes and drowsed her head wearily, but I wasn’t about to be deterred.

I shook her roughly, insistently this time.

“Come on,” I ground out. “What do you know about the Adams?”

After a few more coughs, she managed to say a few words.

“John and Jane,” she rasped. “Don’t trust them.”

“We know that,” I said sarcastically. “But why? And how the fuck do we get out of here?”

She nodded her head wearily towards a mess in the corner.

“Don’t trust my parents either,” she said faintly. “I’ve been trapped,” she said, her voice trailing off.

What the fuck? This was new. But I looked more closely at the pile of recycling in the corner and realized that it wasn’t just a random series of boxes. One of the boxes, which had probably once held a giant flat-screen TV, was cunningly assembled so that it provided a shelter of sorts.

In the meantime, my brother strode over and kicked the flimsy shanty, revealing rags interspersed with food and a saucer of water.

“Blake,” he ground out. “She’s been kept here like a dog.”

Oh shit. So Valerie had been imprisoned by the Adams in their garage, locked in slovenly, inhumane conditions. But it got worse. The girl coughed again.

“My parents,” she said weakly. “Don’t trust them. Not just them, no one in my family.”

This was just getting more and more twisted. We’d attended the Gordons’ pool party earlier this year and although we hadn’t met the parents themselves, we’d met their daughter, the ebullient and boy-crazy Chrissy. Chrissy also happened to be Callie’s best friend. Oh shit, was our girl in danger upstairs?

“Valerie,” I rasped, my voice urgent now. “Tell us if Callie’s in trouble. We need to know.”

The blonde coughed again, her body jerking on the concrete floor, but I could tell she was slowly recovering.

“My parents,” she said wearily. “My sister. They’re running drugs in San Francisco, Canterdale is a distribution point. The cocaine is shipped in with school supplies, and Chrissy picks them up before they flow through a network of couriers.”

Shit. This was starting to make more sense. The drugs came through Canterdale before Chrissy, the golden girl, picked up the loads, transporting them to her parents’ home. The Gordons in turn acted as distributors, saturating San Francisco with junk.

“But what about the Adams?” I asked urgently. “What’s their role in this?”

“The Adams are small-time distributors,” wheezed Valerie. “My parents cut them in after their son got hooked. The Adams didn’t care about their son,” she said bitterly. “They just cared about the money they could make.”

Damn, but St. Francis Wood was some fucked-up neighborhood. Picture perfect on the outside, but as deadly as a viper’s nest on the inside. Actually, why was I surprised? Parents who didn’t give a shit about their kids were de rigeur in rich enclaves.

But my brother and I were still trapped in this dank basement, with our girl upstairs.

“How do we get out of here?” I asked grimly. The color was coming back to the blonde’s face.

“There’s no way,” she said sadly, shaking her head. “Trust me, I’ve been living here for two years, I’ve checked every nook and cranny. You got a fix for me?” she asked hopefully, her hands beginning to shake.