Bax

 

Two days later, Bax sat at a work table in a warehouse in Raceland, less than an hour's drive from New Orleans. The Lucky Hand was shuttered, with a sign on the door saying “Closed Until Further Notice.” The bar had functioned as an immediate rendezvous point following the staged attack on Stef, but the next logical step was to make it seem abandoned, in order to convince Altamura and his men that any remaining Devils had skipped town. Skull had slipped the warehouse's owner some cash to let them use it for a few weeks, and the MC made it into a temporary base of operations.

 

They'd also made a firm rule: Until this scam was over, no member of the Devils was allowed to wear his cut or even ride his motorcycle, and all of the bikers were strictly forbidden from setting foot in New Orleans. All it would take was for one of them to be recognized—if word got back to Altamura, he could pounce on that Devil and torture him into giving up the location of the others.

 

As most of the Devils sat in another section of the warehouse with Mule—drinking beer by the case, watching TV, and having belching contests with each other—Bax watched as Chillie Millie set up the chemistry supplies she'd bought in Baton Rouge the previous day. The array of burners, funnels, and chemicals made the corner of the dusty room look like a section of Dr. Frankenstein's lab. Tommy, David, and Harry observed this scene as well.

 

“Were you able to pick up everything you'll need?” David asked.

 

Millie examined one of the tall glass beakers, polishing it meticulously with a small square of fabric. “It'll do.”

 

“I still don't see why someone like you would buy all-new equipment in every place you go,” Tommy mused. He removed a chocolate bar from his pocket, unwrapped it, and took a big bite as he wandered over to Millie's setup. “Why not just bring your own kit with you?”

 

Based on the look Millie gave Tommy, Bax figured that must have been one of the dumbest questions anyone had ever asked her. “Do you travel around with a big suitcase full of evidence from the crimes you've committed?”

 

Tommy blinked. “No, I guess not. I never thought of it that way.” He licked chocolate from his fingertips, reaching for a funnel. “What does this stuff even do, anyway?”

 

Millie's thin fingers clamped around Tommy's wrist. “It gets busted over your head if you try to touch it with your grubby hands.”

 

“Okay, okay!” She released Tommy's wrist, and he rubbed it. “Jesus, your hands are like ice, you know that?”

 

“Poor circulation,” she sneered. “It's how I got my nickname. Or did you think it came from my warm, sunny disposition?”

 

Tommy shook his head, returning to his seat next to Bax. “You've got problems, lady,” he grumbled under his breath.

 

There was a series of five rhythmic knocks high on the door, followed by a pause and five more knocks lower down. The coded knock was Skull's idea—a crude approximation of the first few bars of “All Along the Watchtower.”

 

Harry unlocked the door and Skull entered, carrying a shopping bag. In place of his usual outlaw duds, he wore a new pair of jeans and an ugly sweater.

 

“I can't believe you've got me riding around in a rental car like some half-assed cager,” Skull said, dropping the bag on the floor. “And in this stupid outfit, no less. I may as well have had James fucking Taylor playing on the radio.”

 

“Hey, low profile means low profile,” Tommy snapped. “You get seen and I get dead, remember? No one recognized you, did they?”

 

“Not 'til I met up with Whitman over in Hattiesburg. Once he was done laughing his ass off at my clothes, it took a lot to convince him we weren't going to use his stuff to set up shop for ourselves down here. He knew it wasn't for recreational use, since using junk is against club rules.”

 

“So what did you tell him?” Bax asked.

 

“I said we were gonna use it to set some guy up for possession with intent.” Skull opened the shopping bag and took out a brick of heroin wrapped in clear plastic. “He wasn't thrilled about us using his stuff to do that, so it cost extra.”

 

Millie took the brick from Skull, examining it carefully. “Hmm. Some serious color impurities, and a significant amount of particulate matter. Whatever you paid for this, it was too much.” She carried the brick over to a plastic bucket and pried off the round plastic top, revealing a clear liquid inside.

 

“What's that?” Harry asked.

 

Millie dug her thumbnail into the plastic wrapping of the brick, prying it apart to expose the powder beneath it.

 

“This is water,” she said, dumping the heroin into it.

 

“What the fuck are you doing?” Skull shrieked. He ran to the bucket just in time to see the heroin dissolve into it. “Do you have any idea how much that's worth?”

 

“Nothing compared to what it'll be worth in a few hours, I assure you.”

 

Skull turned to Bax, his face red. “What the hell is this crazy bitch talking about?”

 

Bax smiled, slapping Skull on the shoulder good-naturedly. “Relax, Skull! You're about to watch an act of absolute alchemy. You've heard of spinning straw into gold? Well, Chillie Millie is going to turn this stepped-on garbage into the purest junk you've ever seen.”

 

“Bullshit,” Skull growled. “No one can really do that. It's a fucking urban myth.”

 

“Then I guess I must have gotten my degree in mythology instead of chemistry,” Millie said calmly, “because that's exactly what I'm going to do.”

 

“Okay, fine.” Skull walked over to where Bax and the others had been sitting, grabbed a chair, turned it around backwards, and straddled it. “Show me.”

 

Millie eyed Skull and the others balefully. “You really expect me to do this for an audience? This isn't an episode of Bill Nye, you know. I'll be working with dangerous chemicals.”

 

“Relax, Millie,” Bax said. “You're a pro. I'm sure having us around won't affect your work one bit.”

 

“All right. But stay quiet, keep your distance, and no smoking. If you light up around these fumes, you could kill us all. And remember, kids—don't try this at home.”

 

Millie put on rubber gloves and a pair of safety glasses. Then she took a long, thin strip of paper from her equipment. It had colored sections on it. “We'll be monitoring this process using these pH strips.”

 

She dipped one into the water and pulled it out, checking it with a nod. “Yep, that's what I expected. Very weak. So we're going to add sodium hydroxide, or lye, to the solution.”

 

“Lye?” Skull asked, his eyebrows shooting up. “Shit, don't they use that as acid to dissolve roadkill and corpses and stuff?”

 

“Yes.” Millie unscrewed a plastic jar labeled “Caustic Soda.”

 

“But ain't that poison?”

 

She glared at him. “It's all poison. Now shut your mouth or leave the room. I'm not exactly making banana smoothies here. I need to be able to concentrate.”

 

Skull nodded, folding his arms over his chest.

 

Millie carefully measured out the white crystals of lye, dropping them into the bucket. She stirred the mixture with a glass rod, then pulled it out and touched the tip to another pH strip. She grunted quietly and repeated the process a few more times until she was satisfied with the results.

 

“We've reached a pH level of 9. Now we extract the heroin from the solution.” It seemed like she was mostly talking to herself. She popped the cap on a brown bottle, measuring the liquid and adding it to the bucket. “We use chloroform for this rather than diethyl ether, because it's non-flammable and can be used as a handy solvent for other opiates, like codeine. Not morphine, though, of course.”

 

“Of course,” Harry commented wryly.

 

Millie shot him a dirty look as she carefully skimmed the chloroform layer from the top of the bucket, pouring it into a beaker with a rounded base.

 

“Now that we've concentrated our heroin again, we wash it with a milliliter of cold water.”

 

“How the hell do you 'wash' heroin?” Tommy whispered to Bax.

 

Millie took a bottle of water from a cooler next to her equipment and applied it to the beaker with a small dropper. She swished the mixture around for a few seconds, then lit a burner and gently lowered the beaker over it. As fumes began to escape the glass container, she turned her head away and put on a surgical mask.

 

“Chloroform is a carcinogen, so I'd recommend taking shallow breaths. We need to make sure we remove it from the heat before the residue on the bottom starts to burn.” Millie waited a while longer, then switched the burner off. She used a set of tongs to lift the beaker and poured the contents into another glass container.

 

“Next, we add a diluted solution of hydrochloric acid.” She applied the liquid to the container.

 

“More acid?” Skull's eyes widened. “When they test this stuff, we want them to get high, not drop dead with holes burning through them.”

 

“Knock it off, okay?” Bax snapped. “She's a pro. She knows what she's doing. Stop breaking her balls, or you'll distract her and fuck the whole thing up.”

 

“Says the guy who almost fucked the whole thing up,” Harry snickered.

 

Millie stirred the container with the glass rod, then touched the tip to another pH strip. “As we add this, we neutralize the diacetyl morphine base and convert it into its water-soluble form as hydrochloride salt. Once all of the solid material has dissolved and we've reached a pH level of about 5 or 6, we'll have created a form of liquid heroin that's entirely free of impurities.”

 

“But we can't hand Altamura a liquid,” Skull balked. “He's expecting it in powder form. That's gonna look suspicious as hell.”

 

Millie smiled. “That's where my super-secret ingredient comes in.” She reached into a bag and pulled out a small sack of baking flour.

 

“You've got to be kidding.” Tommy shook his head.

 

“Ordinary flour,” Millie said smugly. “We use it as a base, with ten parts flour to one part heroin solution. We freeze it, crush it, screen it, and what's left will be a fine powder that kicks like it's fresh from the poppy fields.”

 

“That's some Breaking Bad shit right there,” Harry said appreciatively. “Amazing.”

 

“See? What did I tell you? Millie's a genius.” Bax grinned, elbowing Tommy in the ribs.

 

Millie smirked, miming a small curtsey.

 

“Fine,” Tommy conceded. “She's a genius. She's a wizard. She's Rumple-fucking-stiltskin. So now what?”

 

“Now call Altamura,” Bax said, “and set up the test so we can get our big payoff.”