Arsen heard Quinn cry out. He dropped the spatula onto the counter and dashed down the hall, nearly knocking her down as they collided.
“What’s wrong?” he cried as she flung herself into his arms, holding him tight. He could feel her trembling there, her breath coming hard and fast. “Quinn, what’s wrong?”
She said nothing, but her embrace never loosened. He’d left eggs cooking on the stove when she cried out. He tried to squirm out of her embrace, but she only locked on tighter.
“Quinn, the eggs are going to burn.” She didn’t seem to hear, so he pried her arms from around him as gently as possible and then held her hands as he pulled her with him to the kitchen. When he arrived at the stove, he stirred the eggs again. They weren’t burned beyond eating, which was good.
As he stirred one handed, he grinned at her. “Have a nightmare? I’d have nightmares too if I went through what you did.”
He turned away from the eggs and dropped four pieces of bread into the toaster. When he turned back, she’d stepped up and was stirring the eggs. He took a bag of shredded cheese out of the fridge, setting it near her, then got out butter for the toast. She looked at the cheese a moment before opening the bag and dumping a healthy portion into the pan, folding the eggs over and reducing the heat to melt the cheese.
As he buttered toast, she scraped the eggs onto the two plates he’d sat out, then quickly swished the pan clean with a brush before placing it in the dishwasher. She sat the plates on the table while he poured up coffee.
“Quinn?” he asked as she ate. “Is that your first name?” he continued when she looked up.
She paused, her eyes narrowing as she focused. “Yes,” she mumbled, then her face relaxed. “Quinn Nettleton.”
He sat back in his chair and watched her a moment. Her voice was smooth and rich, like honey, a beautiful voice. It made his blood run hot. “Nice to meet you, Quinn. Do you know who I am?”
“Arsen.”
He grinned, then chuckled. “That’s right. At least you’ve been listening. Do you know how you got here?”
“Yes,” she said, but didn’t elaborate.
“Is there someone I can call? Family?”
“No.”
“Can you tell me what happened to you?”
She looked down and shook her head.
“Do you remember?”
She nodded her head, but said nothing.
“That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me. Do you remember Doc Holiday said he needed to draw blood? You okay with that?”
Again she nodded.
“Okay. As soon as breakfast is over, we’ll get you over to see Doc, then you can come with me to the clubhouse. Do you understand nobody there is going to hurt you?”
He smiled as she nodded. “That’s good. People aren’t going to want to have you around if you keep assaulting them. Are you feeling okay? Do you need the pain meds?”
She looked up at him, then slowly nodded.
“You know where they are.”
She gave him a flicker of a smile and slid back, taking one pain killer, then emptying two of the antibiotic capsules into her hand. She ran a glass of water and tossed them back then returned to the table.
Since she seemed to have exhausted her supply of words, they finished the meal in silence. Quinn kept her eyes low. He didn’t like that she seemed to be sliding back into silence, but just getting her name and knowing she was aware of what was going on around her was an improvement over the zombified state she was in most of the day yesterday.
She cleared the table as he loaded the dishwasher, then he showered and dressed. When he got out, she was waiting, dressed in the same clothes she had on yesterday. He frowned; they were going to have to do something about that, and soon.
When they arrived at Doc’s practice, Desert Sun Family Medical, they were immediately whisked to the back. One of Doc’s nurses drew Quinn’s blood without so much as a glance at Quinn’s bruised and battered appearance. That raised Arsen’s eyebrows. He made a mental note to ask Doc if he’d given the woman a head’s up of what to expect. He’d hate to think that the nurse wouldn’t have commented on Quinn’s condition otherwise.
Quinn was a trooper throughout the procedure, though she gripped Arsen’s hand tightly at the prick of the needle.
When they arrived at the clubhouse, she was his shadow. She didn’t interfere, but she also didn’t let him out of her sight as he went about his business. It was normal, routine stuff, so he didn’t mind . About ten, he picked up the baggie with two tablets he’d gotten from the Advocates and waved his arm, calling her to him. He was going to the plant to test the pills.
They went out the back of the clubhouse and walked the couple hundred feet the large prefab metal building. The Blacktop Blades empire also included a legitimate business enterprise, Botanical Bath Beads, or B3. Arsen had figured out a long time ago that the best way to conduct illegitimate business was to cover it with a legitimate one.
She followed him into the large building full of busy, large, stainless steel machines, tended by men she recognized from the clubhouse yesterday. He turned right just inside the door and trotted up a set of steps to a small glassed area on a mezzanine. She followed him into the room and her eyes widened in amazement. The room was full of expensive looking machines, none of which she recognized, so she stood by the door. Arsen moved about the room with practiced ease.
He entered the quality control lab and started the gas chromatograph with an attached mass spectrometer heating as he prepared the samples by removing a small section of each of the two tablets and liquefying it, being careful to keep the samples separate. By the time his samples were prepared and inserted into the autoloader, the machine as ready. He selected his detection profile and started the machine working.
He pulled out a chair and sat down, kicking another across the floor to her. “You might as well sit down. Unlike on television, this takes a while.”
They sat for almost an hour, Arsen occasionally checking on the machine as it whirred and sighed. He tried to engage her in conversation a couple of times, but finally gave up when she would either not answer or simply nod or shake her head.
The attached computer bleated, and he spun in his chair and typed a moment. “That’s one,” he said, pushing his chair back. “Seven more to go. It’s almost lunch time. We’ll come back and check on this later.”
She followed him back to the clubhouse where he headed straight to the bar, and she blinked in surprise when he popped up with a pair of sodas. He handed one to her, opening the other for himself. He moved off, taking a pull from the bottle before flopping into an oversize leather chair and putting his feet up.
She sat down beside him. “Thank you,” she said, her voice low.
“You’re welcome.”
Their cans were about half empty when men and women began arriving through the back of the clubhouse. Only moments after that, food began to appear, being placed on three large tables. “Time to eat,” he said standing and walking to the tables in a room adjoining the kitchen.
The tables were large enough to seat at least twenty people each, so there was plenty of room to spread out. She sat down next to Arsen, while Zane and Michelle sat down on the other side.
“How are you this morning?” Michelle asked.
“Better,” Quinn replied, staring at the table, her voice so soft it was barely audible.
The four people close enough to hear her looked at each other. “That’s good to hear,” Michelle continued.
When she didn’t answer, Arsen filled in. “Her name is Quinn Nettleton.”
“Nice to meet you, Quinn.” Michelle said. Quinn continued to stare at the table and Michelle looked at Arsen.
“I think she just needs some time. She’s trying.”
Toni sat a plate of broiled chicken with a side of squash in front of them. All members and old ladies had to work for the club in some manner, and Toni’s was helping with the clubhouse and meal preparation. It was tradition in the Blades that lunch was provided by the club during the week. When the clubhouse was built, they were well outside Tucson, with little option for grabbing a quick lunch. Especially once the plant was established, the club decided to feed the members working in the plant. In the twenty years since, the city had grown closer to their door, but the tradition continued and nobody wanted to change it. It was a time of fellowship and laughter all the members enjoyed.
“Thank you,” Quinn said softly as Toni placed her plate in front of her.
Toni paused, then realized what Quinn must have said. “You’re welcome.”
She said nothing else during the meal, keeping her eyes on the table as she ate, something Arsen made note of. She really closed down in the presence of others, even more so if there was a large group, like now.
“You have the results back on the…sample?” Zane asked, obviously changing what he was going to say at the last moment.
“Running them now. I still have to do the comparisons, but if the samples hold, I can tell from the number of spikes. Those tabs are loaded with shit that shouldn’t be in there.”
Zane nodded. “About what we expected.”
“Yeah. It pisses me off they are trying to pass that shit off as ours.”
“I’m surprised it took them this long.”
“Yeah, I guess, but it still pisses me off.”
Zane grinned. Arsen was the club’s chemist. He had designed the production process for the MDMA, and he took great pride in the fact their molly was safe, pure and consistent. “Maybe we should change the dye concentration, so it looks different.”
“No. We’ve built our reputation on that color blue and those stamps. I don’t want to change that. We’ll give the Advocates some time to find out who’s counterfeiting, then we’ll pay them a visit and explain a few things to them.”
Zane nodded. While Arsen designed their products and oversaw production of both their legal, and less so, products, he ran the business side, making sure their suppliers were paid and their permits were in order. As far as the world knew, the only thing that came out of their production facility was bath oil beads, soaps and salts, and it was his job to keep it that way. If anyone of a legal persuasion suspected something different, Zane disabused them of that notion.
“Just tossing the idea out there,” Zane said.
“I know. I’d already thought of that, or changing the stamps, but damnit, those are ours. If we change it now, the assholes that are copying us will just change with us. So we change again. Then pretty soon, nobody will know our stuff because it could be anything. Better to find out the source and give them the option of having their nuts cut off or not.”
Zane grinned. “I know what I’d choose.”
Arsen grinned back. “Yeah, but not everyone is as smart as we are.”
***
Quinn watched as Arsen worked in the lab. It was close to six and the last of the results had come in from the machine. As he worked, he explained what he was doing, but the only thing she got from it was he ran four samples of each pill to reduce false positives, the pills were of slightly different makeup, and they weren’t pure. The rest of it went right over her head. When he was finished he asked her to wait for him outside.
“Jason? Arsen. I’ve finished my analysis on the two tablets you gave me.”
“What do you have?” Jason asked, his voice tinny sounding on the phone’s speaker.
“First off, they are nowhere close to a 150 hit. One was 72 milligrams and the other was 60.”
“That’s good to know. I can use that. Anything that will make you grow two heads, make you shit your asshole out, your dick fall off, anything like that?”
Arsen snorted . “No, but both samples had methamphetamine and ketamine contamination, and one of the samples had a synthetic cathinone in it.”
“In English?”
“In English, this isn’t ecstasy, it’s a fucking drug cocktail. This was from just two samples. The dosage is all over the place and it’s loaded with containments. Because their quality control sucks, you don’t know what you’re getting. If I had a larger sample size, who knows what other shit I might find. Doses too. There is no way in hell I would I take this. Shit, I wouldn’t give it to somebody I hated. This is crap, even for street drugs.”
“On a scale, if yours is a 10, where would you put this?”
“Three to four.”
“Okay,” Jason said. “I’ll put the word on the street. Some people are going to be pissed off. I might be able to use that to track it back to its source.”
“You find out who, and where, I’ll take it from there.”
“You got it brother. It continues to be a pleasure doing business with you.”
Arsen smiled as he hung up the phone, then opened the door. “My day is done. You ready to go?”
Quinn looked at him, then smiled slightly. “Yes.”