Page 41 of Race With The Devil

“If you had a husband, he’d go with you.”

She giggled, girlish. “Okay. I’ll get a husband just to get a free bodyguard.”

“You’re going to have to tell me where to go from here.”

“Keep going up North Fort Valley Road. His spread isn’t marked very well for obvious reasons. There’s a weird skiing billboard right before it.”

So we turned after the weird skiing billboard, and predictably there was a locked gate with an intercom. Tutti didn’t even answer the intercom, a security guard did. Although I’m sure Tutti was watching the camera himself.

I barked, “Tell Tutti Tanner and Unity are here with Corey Shabazz.”

There was some back and forth, then Tutti himself got on the line. “I don’t see Corey in your car.”

I said, “That’s because he’s rolled up in a rug in the back seat.”

Silence for a few seconds. Then the gate silently opened.

It was pitch black out by now, and with no lights to guide the way, I had to make decisions by the light of my headlamps and Unity’s memory of visiting Lavinia.

I stopped the car. “What the fuck is that?”

“Oh,” said Unity in a small voice. “Those are caged roosters, about sixty of them. He brings them out to the sideshows and stages cockfights.”

I shuddered. “Oh Law. That’s disgusting as hell. People like to see this shit?”

“I guess low-budget ghetto people do. They bet on the fights. See, there are little metal spurs he puts on the birds, and he injects them with steroids. They can’t be rehabbed. Hurts me to look at them. I say they should be put out of their misery. There’s a beaten-up pit bull too living in filth.”

I hated Tutti Morgan even more now, if such a thing was possible. “Well. Maybe a quick call to the SPCA would do the trick. A felon like Tutti might actually get slapped with a couple years.”

“How’s he ever going to get out of this illegal game? He’s in it for life,” said Unity. “If it’s too hot to make fentanyl, he just turns to K2.”

I agreed. “He’s a fucking goner, all right. He’s too flush to ever give up this game.”

An enormous lake-shaped swimming pool was lit up, as was the rocky waterfall. The colonial style house with pillars was around the next bend. Tutti was on the front portico to meet us. Made sense he wouldn’t even want us—or the body—inside.

“You stay here,” I told Unity, and I got out of the car. I doubted she would stay there, and I was right. Within thirty seconds she was at my side.

Much as it repelled me, I shook Tutti Morgan’s hand genially. It still behooved us to make him think we were on his side, searching for his beloved wife’s murderer.

I explained, “He broke into Unity’s apartment, dope-sick. He seemed to be acting in accordance with an ingestion of K2, and we found a package in his pocket.” Showing Tutti the packet of Scooby Bites we’d taken from Corey, he predictably ripped it from my hand, examining it every which way as if he’d never seen it before.

Unity, at my side, was a bit less tactful. “Are you behind these Scooby Bites?”

I added, “The company is called Oshkosh Gosh, and you’re from Oshkosh.” Wolf had just texted that the owners of the fake cannabis company were listed as Chino and Daddy Gee, obvious although inventive fake names to anyone over the age of forty.

Tutti sighed, apparently deeply depressed at the sight of the foil packet. “Yes, that’s me, all right. Scooby Bites. Named after my dear departed Great Dane.”

I lifted my upper lip. “Scooby?” I asked skeptically.

“No, Bite. He used to love eating weed, so I had to give him treats to keep him away from it.” He sighed thoroughly again. “Well. Let my men get Corey out of your car. I appreciate you not calling the cops. Someone breaks into my house and dies, well, I call the cops.”

Two beefy guys I had pegged as former military were lifting the rolled-up rug from my rental car. I lied, “Well, I didn’t want you to get in trouble when they inevitably did an autopsy and realized he OD’d on your fake weed. What do you put in there, anyway?”

Tutti waxed proud. “Oh, all sorts of ethnobotanicals, such as Blue Lotus, Dwarf Skullcap, and Siberian Motherwort.”

Unity sneered. “I’m sure it’s all on the up and up. Very ‘woo woo’.”

“Not really,” Tutti admitted. “There are also synthetic cannabinoids in here. Some have pronounceable names like Mepirapim and Nabilone, but most just go by alphanumeric monikers such as FDU-PB-22 and HU-308 CAS.”