Shallow Graves

caught Pellam’s eyes and paused. Thencontinued. “Sam’s okay. I gave him something. He’s sleeping.”
    Meg ignored him. Said to Pellam, “Why are you telling me this?”
    But Keith preempted her. He’d overheard Pellam and he asked, “What else did you find in the shack?”
    Pellam said to Meg, “I found some of that stuff, the drugs Sam got.”
    “So they’re the ones?” she blurted. “They’re the ones behind it . . . But why would they come here? Because Sam was a witness?”
    “They weren’t after Sam.”
    Keith had stopped walking. He sat down. Pellam said to him, “They had five or six thousand vials there. All packaged and ready to go. . . . So, Keith, tell me: Were they distributing? Or were they skimming from you?”
    Keith’s eyes swam around the room. “Both, apparently.”
    Meg stared at her husband. “What do you mean?”
    “Your partners came here to kill you,” Pellam said. “And your family.”
    “Partners?” Meg gasped.
    Pellam said to Keith, “Would they have enough information to make the drugs themselves? Could they do it without your factory?”
    Keith didn’t say anything.
    Both, apparently.
    Keith looked at the wall beyond which two of his employees lay. “I paid them enough.”
    “There’s never enough.”
    “How’d you find out?”
    Pellam said, “In one of the bags in their shack were notes from you. Some cash.” He nodded. “I came here to tell Meg.”
    She turned to Pellam. Wanted to say something, it seemed, but couldn’t.
    Keith said, “They were just punks but they had contacts in New York, New Jersey, Brooklyn. I needed them.”
    Pellam asked, “What is it exactly? The drug.”
    Keith explained. “It’s an oral synthetic narcotic.”
    To her husband Meg whispered, “No. This isn’t happening.”
    Keith took a breath and Pellam could see he was running through the inventory of lies he might choose from. A boy in front of a broken window. He looked at both Pellam and Meg and said, “It’s not what you think.”
    “No, no, no . . .” She shook her head.
    “Meg, it’s just a product. I—”
    “Product!” Meg said. “This shit is poison and you call it a product ?”
    “You don’t understand, Meg,” he snapped. “It’s not like that.”
    “What is it like, then?”
    “It’s a fantastic discovery! It took me two years to perfect it.”
    “Discovery?”
    Pellam said wryly, “State of the art. Normally, heroin you have to shoot up to get the best rush. This stuff, all you do is chew it.”
    Keith said, “What I developed was a new vasodilator. The narcotic goes into the blood cells under the tongue in milliseconds.”
    Pellam continued. “A new Yuppie drug of choice. No need to shoot up. No needles. No AIDS risk . . .”
    Keith said, “I was going to license it for legitimate medical purposes. We just needed a little more capital . . . We were going to distribute samples to medical research companies—you don’t need FDA approval for that. But Dale started selling underground to get some cash flow. By the time I found out we were in too deep.”
    “Liar.”
    “No, Meg, really—”
    She stepped toward him. “Tell me how my poor baby got in too deep! You and Dale had cash from day one. You bought out your contract . . . Oh, you had somebody bankrolling you and knew exactly who you were going to sell this shit to from the day you opened your factory.”
    “Stop it!”
    “Tell me how someone put a gun to your head and forced you to—” She stopped speaking, frowned. “Wait.” More horror in her eyes. “And what happened to him, to Dale?”
    “He . . .” Keith looked away.
    “They killed him. Those twins . . . Why? Was he getting too greedy?”
    “It all got out of hand,” Keith said furiously.
    She was continuing, “And those other men, the ones from New York . . . And the boy who overdosed last year . . . And Ned! This morning. They killed him too! And Tom thought Sam had done it! Oh, Jesus Christ.”
    “And Marty,” Pellam said.
    It took Keith a moment to realize who Marty was.He said, “That was an accident. I swear to God. Bobby and Billy were trying to scare the two of you out of here. That’s all. We didn’t want strangers in town. We couldn’t risk any publicity.”
    Pellam said, “Accident? You killed your partner and who knows who else—and you expect me to believe that you just wanted to scare Marty?”
    Meg, incredulous. Shaking her head slowly, her ponytail