“Fuck me.” Sidney snatched one of the baggies away. She held it up to the light. She was looking for the sparkly flakes that indicated purity, which put her up there with the professional coke users. “Damn, this looks lethal.”
Callie wondered if that would be the case. Sidney was already buzzing on enough stims to take down a wildebeest. You didn’t get that kind of tolerance from recreational use.
As if to prove the point, Sidney opened a drawer and took out a small mirror with a razor blade on top and a four-inch gold-plated straw that was either intended to aid particularly wealthy toddlers in the consumption of juice or for spoiled rich assholes to snort coke.
Callie tested the waters. “You ever inject it?”
For the first time, Sidney looked guarded. “Shit man, that’s a whole ’nother level.”
“Forget I asked.” Callie opened the plastic bag and shook the pure white powder onto the mirror. “How long did you two know each other before you got married?”
“Uh … I think it was two years ago?” Sidney was watching the coke with a hungry eye. Maybe her life was already on the downslope after all. “He’s got this jag-off friend, Reggie. He’d come into the dealership like he owned the place. He was always hitting on me but come on.”
Callie knew what she meant. Sidney wasn’t going to waste her beauty and youth on a man who couldn’t afford it.
“And then Andrew came up to me one day and we started talking, and I was like, what a surprise this guy’s not a total douche. Which, considering Reggie, was like a fucking miracle.”
Callie made a show of chopping the blade through the white powder. She listened as Sidney droned on about Reggie—how he was always leering at her, how he was basically Andrew’s lapdog, but her eyes stayed on the razor blade the same hungry way Sidney’s were.
If a scientist had been tasked with developing a drug that would make people waste all of their money, cocaine was what they would’ve come up with. The high lasted about fifteen to twenty minutes, and you could spend the rest of your miserable life chasing that first rush because it was never going to be better than the first big, beautiful hit. The joke was that two people could do a trailer load of coke between them and, when they were done, they’d both agree that all it would take was one more trailer load to get them high.
Which was why Callie had laced the coke with fentanyl.
She cut out four lines, asking Sidney, “So, how’d he ask you out?”
“He caught me reading one of my psych books for school, and we started talking, and, unlike ninety-nine percent of the fucking mansplainers who try to educate me about what I’ve been studying for, like, six years, he actually knew what he was talking about.” The woman’s gaze had not left Callie’s hand, but now, she pulled herself away. More cabinets were opened. A small marble cutting board came out. She found a ceramic bowl for the limes. “Then he started flirting with me, keeping me from answering the phones, and I was, like, Dude, you’re going to get me fired. And he was like, Dude, I’m going to fire you if you don’t go out with me.”
Callie gathered that was the official definition of workplace harassment, but she said, “I like a man who knows what he wants.”
Sidney opened another drawer. “You like that in a woman, too?”
Callie’s mouth opened to answer, but then she saw what Sidney took out of the drawer.
The razor blade slipped through Callie’s fingers, screeching across the small mirror.
Cracked wooden handle. Serrated blade bent three different ways. The steak knife looked like something Linda had bought at the grocery store. Callie had used it to cut Andrew’s hot dog into pieces. Then she had used it to slice open Buddy’s leg.
“Max?” Sidney asked.
Callie searched for her voice. The sound of her own heartbeat was overwhelming, drowning out the soft music, muffling Sidney’s deep voice. “That—that’s a pretty cheap wedding gift.”
Sidney looked at the knife. “Yeah, Andy gets pissed off when I use it, like he couldn’t go out and buy fifty more. He stole it from his babysitter or something. I don’t know the story. He’s so weird about it.”
Callie watched the blade cut through one of the limes. Her lungs felt shaky. “He’s got a babysitter fetish?”
“Girl,” Sidney said. “He’s got an everything fetish.”
Callie felt a pinch of pain in her thumb. The razor had shaved off a thin layer of skin. Blood trickled down her wrist. She had come here with a plan, but the sight of the knife had taken her back to the Waleskis’ kitchen.