was face down on the pavement, Alex securing his hands behind his back.
“You ain’t got nothing—”
“Shut it,” Alex barked, then looked up at Kyle and grinned when he saw the plastic bag of pills in his grip. Alex stood and hauled Raphael to his feet.
“Well, well, I figured we’d spend half the day looking for you and the other half trying to find where you had your stash. And here you were walking right down the fuckin’ street with this shit in your pocket. Must be our lucky day.”
“Fuck you,” Raphael growled.
“It’d be luckier if we didn’t have to be in the stinkin’ alley with the garbage,” Alex muttered.
“You talking about the garbage in the cans over here or the garbage you got standing right in front of you?” Kyle asked, dropping the plastic baggie of pills into an evidence bag. Looking up, he said, “We’re hauling you in while we get these pills analyzed. You can save yourself a lot of hassle by going ahead and telling me what I got.”
“Fuck you,” Raphael repeated.
“I knew you were a dumb shit, but I figured you’d made it this far having some smarts. Looks like you don’t even have that.” He held the other man’s gaze for a moment. Raphael was clear-eyed, his clothes clean and looking fairly new. Dangling the bag in his hand, he said, “You're clean. You’re not using the shit you peddle, but if this turns out to be what I think it is, you’d be smart to start talking.”
Raphael said nothing.
“If I call for a team to do a sweep of your apartment building and come up with the rest of the shit, you lose making a deal.” He waited a few seconds and watched as the wheels began turning behind Raphael’s eyes. “I’m telling you, man, I don’t just want these pills off the streets, I want the ones higher up calling the shots. That ain’t you, I know that much.”
“Shit, man, I just get the stuff and move it on.”
“You process it? You crush it and add it before moving it on?”
Raphael shook his head, his hair slinging back and forth. “No! The people that buy the shit can do what they want to with it.”
“Like Marquee?”
Raphael’s eyes jumped up to his. “Shit! That fucker gave me up?”
“Doesn’t matter how we got you, we got you. And what you’ve gotta decide is what the fuck you’re going to do.”
They waited another minute, then Kyle growled. The stench of the alley following on the heels of the stench of Marquee’s building had him lose his patience. Pulling out his phone, he called for backup.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t gonna let you know anything,” Raphael bit out, his jaw hard.
“I don’t think you get it. You’re not calling the shots. And we’re not standing in this fuckin’ alley any longer. So, I got officers gonna do a sweep of your building, and you’re coming down to the station where your ass is going to be in a chair while we have a little chat. And on the way, you can think real hard about how you want this to go down. ‘Cause I got no problem nailing you for everything even though I want the higher-ups.”
As soon as the officers arrived, they directed some to the apartment building and another car took Raphael down to the station. Scrubbing his hand over his face, Kyle said, “Let’s go to the lab and see what we can get before we question him.”
Glad that the lab was not overly crowded, they headed directly to one of the technicians. It didn’t pass his notice that the antiseptic odor of the lab seemed daisy-fresh after having been in the stench of Raphael’s and Marquee’s residences.
The technician smiled as they approached. “What can I do for you?”
Alex handed him the bag as Kyle said, “Just need an identification off of these for now.”
Nodding, the technician looked at the pills under a microscope, jotting down the individual notations. He grinned as he lifted his head and said, “I take it you’re hoping these are from Kilton Pharmaceuticals since they had that van robbed? Well, it’s your lucky day… these are definitely from Kilton Pharmaceuticals.”
“I notice they’re all the same kind. Can you tell us what the drug is?”
Rolling his eyes, he said, “Geez, come here sometime and ask me a hard question. What you’ve got here is their brand of fentanyl.”
Alex had stepped to the side to take a phone call and Kyle