Badlands (10 page)

Winkie: “How much did you say you had?”

T-Lock: “Well, I could only use Rachel's bathroom scale, so it may not be perfectly accurate, but I got fourteen and a half pounds. I weighed it twice, man. Fourteen point five fucking pounds of this shit.”

Winkie: “Jesus! How much is it worth on the street?”

T-Lock: “I don't know for sure, but—”

Winkie: “Fuck, it's millions. I know hits are going for two hundred a gram and that's shit that's been cut way down. There are a shitload of high-quality meth grams in that bag.”

T-Lock: “I got on the Internet today before I got too fucked up. The local yokels did that big bust last year, remember? They got three pounds of meth off one guy, and the article said the street value was two hundred and seventy thousand, remember that?”

Winkie: “Sort of. I know prices went up right after that and a couple of the guys were bitching about it.”

T-Lock: “Yeah, they said it went up to two hundred and fifty a gram for a while. Anyway, let's say the price is back to two hundred dollars a gram again now. So I did the math. We're talking ninety thousand a pound minimum. So fourteen and a half pounds is worth one point three million on the street, easy. Maybe one and a half million. Plus that fifty-four thousand in cash. Yeah, I know the bills are marked, but they worked today when I leased that Escalade, didn't they?”

Winkie: “You're a fucking millionaire! Jesus, I know a millionaire. You ain't gonna forget your friends, are you?”

Kyle thought
,
That's for me and my mom.

*   *   *

THE OLD
wooden boat on the side of Raheem's house had been there when Raheem's family moved here from Detroit. The boat had a deep V hull and had been stored upside-down on the side of the house for years. The finish on the hull had long ago deteriorated and the sun had faded the boat gray. When Kyle and Raheem turned it upright the inside was filled with cobwebs, old leaves, and a nest made by field mice. The oarlocks were rusted and the lines of the gunwales were warped but the floor of the boat was solid and it looked sound. They tested it by filling it with water from a garden hose. It didn't leak. There was a wooden box affixed to the bow with a hasp that could be locked up. There were also two-foot-long storage boxes on the inside gunwales. No oars, though.

Kyle and Raheem spent days cleaning it out, lubricating the oarlocks with WD-40 they found in Raheem's dad's garage, and coating the interior and exterior with a polyurethane topcoat from gallon cans they'd found at a construction site. By the end of the summer they sometimes just sat in it, a white kid from North Dakota and a black kid from Detroit, pretending they were floating down the Missouri River on the world's greatest adventure. Raheem did lots of fake casts and caught dozens of imaginary fish. Kyle sat at the center bench seat and feigned rowing. He waved at passing farmers and ranchers on the shores who waved back. Eagles perched on tree branches that stretched out over the water. Puffy white clouds scudded across a wide blue sky.

That's when the plan was hatched. The idea had come to him after a trip to the Badlands.

Kyle studied his list. He'd crossed out items many times and added new ones. Half the beer was gone, and the words seemed to swim across the page.

Sleeping bags

Food (jerkie, crackers, things like that)

Fishing poles and tackel

Raincoats

Binokulars

Pistol or rifle (animals, hoboes)

Journal for writing

Map

Knife

X-tra clothes

Swimming trunks

Rope

Tent

Plates and utensuls

Matches

Oars (get B4 summer)

Cell phone

Money

At least, he thought, that last item was possible now. It was why he'd taken the paper route in the first place. But money shouldn't be a problem anymore. Unless T-Lock blew all of it.

*   *   *

WINKIE: “BUT
you know somebody out there is looking for this shit, right? They'll want it back.”

T-Lock: “What if it was just one guy? Have you thought of that? If it was just one guy maybe there isn't anyone even looking for him.”

Winkie: “No way it was just one guy. That many pounds and all that cash? No fuckin' way. There are people out there wondering where it went.”

T-Lock: “You think I haven't thought of that? Of course they'll want it back. But they don't know who took it, do they? All they know is their guy rolled his car and got dead. They don't know what happened to the stuff inside. Think about it, man. As far as they know it's still out there in the prairie, or hidden inside the car wreck. Or maybe the dead guy sold it all and hid the cash before he took his dirt nap? How are they going to know? They might think even the cops recovered it and are keeping it quiet. Or maybe some corrupt cop grabbed it and took it home. There's nothing that points to me, man.”

Winkie (laughing): “Except that Cadillac Escalade out there.”

T-Lock: “That's why we drove up there and bought it in Minot, man! Those car dealers up there are used to Bakken workers strolling in with rolls of cash. That's nothing new to them anymore. And I leased it, remember? I didn't buy it outright. That would have raised too many red flags. You've got to give me more credit, man. You're starting to piss me off, Winkie.”

*   *   *

FOR THE
hundredth time, Kyle studied the map he'd printed off at school. He tried to tune out what was being said in the living room.

The Missouri started in southern Montana and flowed north through Great Falls then across the entire state until it entered North Dakota and Grimstad. On the western side of the river it was Mountain Time and on the eastern side it was Central. From Grimstad, it flowed south and east, through Bismarck, Pierre, Omaha, Kansas City, and Saint Louis. In Saint Louis, the river joined the Mississippi and continued south through Memphis and finally to New Orleans, Louisiana. Even the names sounded exciting and exotic. Raheem said he'd never been to New Orleans but he wanted to go there because it was warm, unlike North Dakota. Plus, Raheem said, that was where the Saints played in the Superdome and women walked around on the streets flashing their bare breasts at everyone.

So when the ice broke up on the river in the spring and after the high water, they'd launch their boat. Kyle still hadn't figured out what he'd tell his mother about it. He knew she'd miss him, and he'd miss her.

But the pull of the plan enflamed his imagination. He thought of long days on the river with Raheem catching fish and camping on the shore. He thought of weeks and months of floating away until they eventually arrived at a city where it was warm and foreign. They'd likely be greeted as pioneers and heroes, he thought: two twelve-year-old boys who took a rowboat from the northern border of the country to the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe they'd call him “Captain Kyle,” or “Wandering Westergaard.”

Kyle drank to the name “Captain Kyle.”

*   *   *

WINKIE: “JUST
because you got it doesn't mean you can just go out and sell it. You know that, right? You can't go out to the bars and man camps with your bag of meth like you was selling hot dogs. And if you just jump into the market, well, you've got competition out there. They aren't going to like that—especially if you show up with this high-quality shit. That is, unless you plan to snort it all up your nose yourself.”

T-Lock: “Jesus, I know that. We need distribution. We need to tap into a network that's already there. That's where you got to help me, man. You know guys.”

Winkie: “I know users. I don't know many dealers.”

T-Lock: “But they know, man. They know who they buy from.”

Winkie: “What about Willie Dietrich? I've always heard Willie is hooked up.”

T-Lock: “That guy has hated me since we were in junior high.”

Winkie: “But he don't hate me. He used to bang my sister, remember? I know him. I can talk to him. But what's in it for me, man?”

T-Lock: “I'll cut you in.”

Winkie: “How much? What's my cut?”

T-Lock: “I'm still figuring it out. But it'll be enough to make you rich, I'll tell you that right now. But we've got to do this right. We can't let anybody know I've got all this shit. If assholes find out, they might try to come and get it.”

Winkie: “I'm excited but I'm also starting to get a headache. This might not be easy, you know. It might get scary as hell.”

T-Lock: “You don't worry about that. I'm the one doing the thinking here. I've got it handled, man. I've waited my whole life for something like this. I've already figured out a way to launder that marked cash. You just go out and sniff around Willie and his guys and see what you can find out. See if you hear about anyone missing a shitload of meth and cash but don't tip anyone off about what we have. Just leave it all to me.”

*   *   *

KYLE STOOD
unsteadily. The bottle was empty. The sounds from the next room seemed to meld together into a kind of background noise, like when the house was buffeted by wind.

He thought, So this is what being drunk feels like. And he wondered why adults spent so much time and money wanting to feel this way. All he wanted to do was to go to sleep.

Kyle staggered across his room and fell face-first onto his bed. Even though his room was messy he always made his bed. He always had.

He went to sleep with the droning sounds of T-Lock and Winkie scheming and arguing.

Then he dreamed about his boat, and what it would feel like to push it away from the riverbank. What it would feel like when the current took them away.

 

CHAPTER NINE

AFTER CRUISING
through the pre-boom residential areas and new developments that were going up in every direction on the outskirts of Grimstad, Kirkbride cursed under his breath as he merged into the nonstop convoy of huge muddy trucks on Main Street headed north. Steam and exhaust rose from the pavement and from beneath the vehicles. Kirkbride pointed out the trucks belonging to the major players in the oil boom: Halliburton, Sanjel, Baker Hughes, Whiting, Continental Oil, Marathon Oil, Scorpion, and Nabors.

The problem with the traffic, he said, was that the city and county had not yet had the chance to build new infrastructure that could handle the sudden tenfold increase in vehicles and machinery. The oil field traffic going north or south had to be funneled through the middle of town on roads designed to accommodate residential traffic flow, thus almost impenetrable bottlenecks were created.

“We don't even know what our population is,” he said in answer to the question Cassie asked. “It's growing that fast. A few months ago, I would have said thirty-five to forty thousand in the county. There are over ten thousand units in the man camps alone. But I was talking to the director at the water treatment facility and he says they're handling sewage now for sixty thousand plus. Imagine that,” he said with a snort, “we guess how many residents we have by the sewage they produce.”

She shook her head as he reeled off positive talking points he'd no doubt repeated many times:

• A million barrels of crude from the Bakken Formation were being shipped every day by thirty-five to forty tanker trains that stretched over a mile long each;

• North Dakota was now the second-biggest oil-producing state in the country having surpassed Alaska;

• The state's population was increasing by the thousands each month;

• The unemployment rate in Grimstad was less than half of 1 percent;

• The success rate for drilling of the hydraulic fracturing oil wells was over 99 percent;

• The power companies couldn't keep up with getting electricity to the oil wells and were more than eight hundred behind, which meant generators had to be installed on site;

• Per capita, Bakken County was first in the nation in building permits, Carhartt clothing sales, and the sale of Corvettes;

• The single bustling Walmart paid new employees $18 an hour plus benefits plus employee housing—as did practically every new business going up in town. New fast-food employees, retail clerks, and even newspaper carriers were being given signing bonuses;

• Once with the oldest demographics at sixty-plus, Bakken County now had the youngest population in the state;

• The county which five years before consisted primarily of Norwegian and German descendants now had residents from all fifty states and dozens of countries, and the previously 95 percent white population was now wildly diverse.

• The average salary in Bakken County was $80,000. Blue-collar oil field workers, drillers, oil service hitshots, and some truckers pulled in well past double that.

Then he outlined many of the negatives.

• Housing was a severe problem. Existing rooms rented for $1,000 each per month and the average two-bedroom house rented for $3,500 per month;

• Locals who didn't own their homes when the boom hit were being evicted for high-paying oil field employees;

• There was no homeless shelter, not a single psychiatrist, and plenty of stress;

• Horses on farms and ranches in the county were dying of dust inhalation kicked up by the sudden army of big trucks on unpaved county roads;

• All local business owners now had to become landlords as well or they couldn't retain employees. Every new business was accompanied by a nearby apartment building;

• Although most of the new workers were men, there were enough women and families to impact the schools, meaning not enough teachers or rooms, schoolkids living in RVs, and transients hanging around the playgrounds;