"Oh. Fresh scuff marks underneath your television cabinet," he said, waving a hand dismissively.
My eyes darted over to the cabinet in question to find he was right, there were scuff marks. Weird. "You're very observant," I said with a smile I didn't mean. "I clean a lot. I must have moved it while vacuuming," I said, hoping the lie fell true. Fact of the matter was, I knew with certainty I had never moved that cabinet. First, because it weighed a ton. Second, because I knew it would leave scuff marks on the nice wood floors. So that was really weird.
We sipped the wine. Luis asked me questions about college, about my work at the church, about the possibility of a date over the weekend. I answered college questions cryptically, work questions as honestly as confidentiality would allow, and told him I would have to check my meetings schedule and get back to him. Then, twenty minutes later, as promised, he put his glass down and stood, declaring he had taken up enough of my time and made his way to the door. He kissed me on the cheek again and I closed the door behind him.
I stared at the closed door for a moment when Ben's words came to me: Lock up, Amy. Gotta look out for yourself.
My hands flew out, sliding all the locks into place before I turned to rush to the balcony. If I leaned over the railing slightly, I could watch the street. So I did, eyes following Luis' car until he disappeared before rushing back inside, putting the bar back in the sliding door and rushing over to the cabinet. Why was it out of place? If I didn't move it, and I knew I hadn't, who had? And why?
I grabbed the bottom, throwing my shoulder into the side and push, push, pushed until it finally moved, making new scuff marks all over my floor that I wasn't even thinking about because there was a swirling pit of uncertainty in my stomach. Something was off. Something was very, very wrong.
And it didn't take long for that swirling uncertainty to turn into a cold sweat of sureness. Because there, behind my television cabinet, was a large square cut-out in my wall. As in, someone removed the drywall in a huge spot, then slipped it back in. It didn't take a criminal background to know that there was something in my wall, something I didn't put there, something that didn't belong there. My heart was thumping so hard in my chest that it was making me feel lightheaded. My hands shook as I reached for the finger-sized indent at a corner, obviously put there to make it easier to remove the wall. Taking a deep breath, I yanked the square, pulling it down onto the floor. The inside was dark and I scrambled for my phone, flipping on the flashlight app on and flashing it in the hole.
If my heart was pounding before, it stopped dead right then.
Because there, nestled in my wall, was eight blocks of plastic. I leaned closer, knowing, already knowing what it was, but needing to make sure. The fluffy, brown powder was wrapped up tight and stamped with some sort of bird emblem.
"Oh my god. Oh my god," I whispered, my butt falling back onto my ankles.
There was eight kilos of heroin in my wall.
A kilo of heroin went for close to sixty-thousand dollars.
Sixty-thousand times eight.
"Oh my god."
There was almost half a million dollars worth of heroin in my wall.
"Okay. Alright," I said to myself, needing something to drown out the frenzied pace of my thoughts. "Okay."
I scrambled away from the wall, all paranoia as I checked the locks again. What were my options? I could go to the police. I could hand over the drugs, explain my innocence. But what were the chances of success there? I knew the sheriff. He was an idiot. Worse yet, he was an idiot who never got any kind of action in his career and he was looking for his 'big bust' before he retired. He would see me with eight kilos of heroin in my wall, realize I was someone who led the narcotics meeting in town, and think that was all too perfect, too sordid. Maybe I was supplying to my people in my meetings. Who would ever suspect the one who was supposed to help them anyway, right?
Okay. I didn't want to do that.
I could get rid of the heroin. But where? Where the hell could you get rid of that much product without risking someone coming upon it and turning it into the authorities or, worse yet, using it?
I could leave it in my wall. But, if someone put it in my wall, someone was sure to come back for it. What if they came back when I was still there?
No. That wasn't an option.
My eyes drifted around my apartment, landing on the red wine bottle on my counter.
"Oh you son of a..."
That was why he wanted in my apartment so badly. Not to sleep with me, to retrieve his drugs. That's why he was asking about the added security measures. Hell, he probably had a key to the original lock he installed!
"I'm so stupid," I hissed to my empty apartment.
Okay. I needed to focus. I needed to... close up the wall. Right. That was what I was going to do. I was going to act like I knew nothing. Let Luis sneak in when I wasn't around and take his drugs back. Let him think I was clueless still. I grabbed paper towels off the counter and knelt back down by my wall, using the paper towels to pick up the piece of wall and slip it back, scrubbing at the corner where I had touched it before. I sat back up, pushing the cabinet back into place. All my movements were stiff and awkward as I went into my kitchen and got cleaner and wax to get the scuff marks out of my floor. I did that with my usual OCD perfection, not stopping until the tips of my fingertips hurt, before cleaning up all evidence that I had done it at all.