Read Online Jericho by George Fetherling - Free Book Online

and guys, cause it takes the scariness out of having sex (which is scarier when you’re young, I guess—I guess I remember that if I try hard enough). They get the energy to go all night for only twenty bucks a pop, but it probably cost less than a penny to make once you’ve got the set-up,especially when it’s cut with speed or strychnine or what have you. Boots had a squad of people like me selling it to the kids in the clubs where they go to dance. No two batches look the same, which tells me that it was made in a lot of different places so that, if one gets pushed over, the business doesn’t have a recession.
    Sometimes the kids told me afterwards what they liked or didn’t like about the little brown ones that looked like laxative and the white jobbies that looked like thin aspirins. “Dude, I gave my girlfriend the one with the light purple spots and like twenty-four hours later she’s still curled up naked on the floor talking to herself and sort of giggling.” I collected all this info like a good field rep and was planning to pass it up the line to—who? I have no idea. No one saw Boots any more. Suddenly he wasn’t in a position to let himself be seen. I assumed this was mostly because he couldn’t afford to have his fingerprints on anything, but looking back it might have been fear of a turf war too. A person heard stuff. In the old days, I guess, the ethnic groups, they hated one another because they were different. But now, ever since Brian Ef Mulroney, it’s all about hating em for business reasons. I don’t know which is better and which is worse.
    I rose late that day, as I hadn’t been keeping regular hours. I went to this place where I often ate breakfast and grabbed a booth. While I’m waiting for the eggs to come, I pick up the paper, which was lying back to front. When I turned it over, you could have knocked me over with a coke spoon. M URDER AT RAVE CLUB is what it said. The story was about how Boots was with two others, one of them female, ID still unknown or withheld (but I figure it might havebeen Annie, that straight girl he liked). They were standing outside this club on Hamilton Street like they were waiting for something. I know the joint well. It’s in an old warehouse. If you put back all the original filth, it would fit right in along the river back in Windsor. It’s the kind of building with a roof, turned up at the end, that extends out way over the front, to keep the trucks out of the rain in the old days. These days the insides are a big open dance floor with a bar running almost the whole way down one wall and really bad loud music all the time: the kind of place where they stamp your hand and the bouncers have cell phones. Seems Boots and his friends were standing out front at two in the morning on what used to be the loading dock when somebody guns him down from a car. The paper said witnesses—maybe his old lady, maybe the other guy, or maybe just some twinkie who happened to be watching from the wrong spot at the wrong time—told the cops it was Chinese or Vietnamese guys (ethnic Chinese from Vietnam is probably what they meant).
    The news really put the fear into me, man, and not just because I was probably out of work all of a sudden. I liked observing Boots or at least how he built things, but I didn’t like dealing in chemicals instead of what you actually grow. I’m old-fashioned that way even though I’m not a back-to-the-land type. Organics had always been part of my retirement plan, part of the Project. What worried me about the situation was I knew how somebody would checkmate somebody else and then a third person would retaliate right back at em. Eventually the damage starts to trickle down like water dripping through the ceiling. Hey, I grew up listening to Lonnie talk about stuff like this.
    Over the next little while I read the papers really close. The story got worse and worse, with hints that the politicians might be mixed up in it somehow. When I