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Zee whistled. “That’s a fuckton of fairy dust.”
“Maybe Skrinde will forget it’s here,” I suggested. Victor and Zee both blinked at me. “No?”
“That haul is worth more than his Miami palace, Kitten,” Zee said.
“Oh. That’s why he wants this land. To store his drugs away from the city . . .” Which meant Skrinde wasn’t about to walk away, not when he was about to lose a huge chunk of his business. “We could take it back to him? Call it quits.”
“You wanna deliver a truckload of Class A drugs to a drug lord in the center of Miami?” Zee asked.
“Adding drug trafficking to our multiple counts of murder seems rather excessive.”
“Alleged murder,” I corrected. So what did we do with all the drugs? “We could dump it?”
“In the swamp?” Zee squeaked. “Do you wanna get high-as-fuck alligators? Because that’s how you get high-as-fuck alligators.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“Clearly, you have not seen Cocaine Bear.”
“There are bears here too?” Why was the Everglades not gated off like Jurassic Park?
“Cocaine bears or alligators are the least of our concerns,” Victor said. “This much cocaine is a public health threat. We cannot let Skrinde retrieve it. In fact, if it were removed, its absence would ruin Skrinde’s business, freeing South Beach from his grasp.”
Okay, so all this cocaine could be a good thing? It gave us leverage to bring down Skrinde’s entire empire. We could use this against Skrinde.
“Zodiac, please refrain from sampling the drugs,” Victor grumbled.
I looked behind us and found Zee had his finger in his mouth, an open crate beside him with one bag removed. Victor hadn’t even needed to turn around to know what Zee was up to.
“Pfft . . . I’m obviously just checkin’ it’s not flour.”
“Why would flour be hidden in unmarked crates in an isolated building in the Everglades?”
Zee shrugged. “Epic pancakes?” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I can report, it is indeed cocaine. And very fine it is too. Tom Collins would be impressed. I can’t vouch for all the crates, but I could sample a few others at random—”
“Unnecessary.”
“Ugh. You are no fun.” Zee huffed and folded his arms. “It’s not as though cocaine is illegal. Or bad for you.”
“It is, in fact, both,” Victor corrected.
“To humans, maybe. You see any humans here?”
He had a point. There were definitely no humans here.
“How are we going to make sure this doesn’t harm humans?” Hooper asked.
I had an idea . . . one that could take the drugs off the market, ruin Skrinde, and see to it that Hooper was finally left alone to enjoy his swampy amphibian paradise.
“Adam?” Victor asked, catching whatever expression my face had just performed.
I smiled. “Hooper, have you ever been to The Peach Pit?”
* * *
After parking the trucks a block from the oceanfront, our troupe of unlikely misfits headed to The Peach Pit. The doorman waved us through, then tried to stop Hooper and his crew as they didn’t really shimmer and shine or jiggle seductively in their casual clothes, but at least they had tried to smarten up for a last-minute night on the town by donning some clean overalls.
Hopefully, we wouldn’t need their additional tongue-muscle, but it couldn’t hurt to have some giant frogs along should my plan get a bit heated.
