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"Come ride with me, Gee. We need to talk," Jake said.
"What’s the matter with you?"
"I’m in trouble, Gee. Maybe we all are."
"That’s nothing new. What’s wrong now?"
"Three months ago Chilly came to me with this formula. Says it gonna make all of us rich. He wanted me to develop it for him."
"What kind of formula?"
"For synthetic crack."
"What do you mean, synthetic crack?"
"It’s a chemical compound, that has the same effect as crack, only there’s no cocaine in it. All the ingredients are legal, and it is twenty times cheaper to produce. Only problem is people died from using it."
"You did it? You made it for him?"
"That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Gee. LaShawn sold some to some people she gets high with, and they all died."
"My god, Jake, why did you do it?"
"Why do you think? He said he would kill Chéz if I didn’t do it. What else could I do? Now he says he’s got to start covering his tracks. He said there can’t be any trace of this that will tie it back to him. That includes me, he’s gonna kill me, Gee. He’s got to, I would be the only one who can connect him with all of it."
"You’ve got to get away from here, Jake. Far away, where he’ll never find you."
"Live in reality, Gee. Didn’t you try that? Didn’t he find you? Didn’t he shoot me in my fuckin’ leg until you said you would come back? You remember that, don’t you?"
"All right! All right, Jake. What are you gonna do?"
"I don’t know."
"Jake, you got to disappear."
"No, Gee."
"Yes, Jake, listen to me. What if the cops could tie all this back to Chilly? They’d have him for murder. And we’d be free, Jake."
"You want me to go to the cops?"
"No, but the cops need the evidence, and it has to be solid enough so he doesn’t get off."
"How we gonna do that without going to the cops? And I’m not going into witness protection. He’ll find me and kill me. He’ll kill all of us."
I looked at Mrs. Childers thinking that this is the story I’ve been waiting to hear since this whole thing began. "What happened then?" I asked.
"I told Jake that we’re not going to tell the cops a thing. That he had to disappear, go to the little hideaway he had in the Hamptons. Chilly doesn’t know about the place. Then I told him that I’d hire a private detective to find him. That you would get the evidence we needed and turn it over to the cops."
"So you hired me. And led me into all this."
"I didn’t mean for anybody to get hurt."
"Except me."
"This is your business, Nick. You were getting paid to take the risk."
"Who hit me that first night in Jake’s apartment?"