"Coke Deals" by Kenneth Larot Yamat
8:00PM
Damien Aquino goes over the plan one more time. He'll buy a kilo of coke from the dealer for about ten grand, he'll cut the coke in half with a kilo of baking soda, and then he'll sell off his shit one gram at a time for eighty bucks per gram. He plans on selling his entire stash of coke over the weekend, after which he should have about one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Easy money. Easier than filling up vending machines with nuts and bolts and industrial supplies, easier than counting and bagging screws and nails for ten hours a day. Getting paid for four years of work over the course of weekend. It really is easy money. Damien has his baggies and his triple beam balance ready. He meets the dealer in about an hour.
6:00AM
He gets ready for work. His outfits are already pre-made: a blue polo shirt and a pair of Docker khakis. He gets into the shower, lathering up the soap against his body. The sweat and grime of the previous day washed away, washed down the drain. The week is over, it's Friday, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Damien won't be working. Damien has been thinking about moonlighting as a coke dealer during the weekends. He has an appointment later tonight with a coke dealer who will sell him a kilo of shit for ten grand. Damien thinks that it's a killer deal. He bought coke retail once at a night club and paid one hundred bucks for a gram. He's paying ten dollars per gram by buying a kilo at a time. He could really fucking kill it by selling the whole kilo one gram at a time.
9:30PM
The drug deal went smooth and without a hitch. He paid the drug dealer ten grand, he's been pulling out two grand per day from his bank account for the past five days, and received his kilo of cocaine. He cracks open the package of coke, and a box of baking soda, he pulls out two playing cards, and proceeds to cut the coke. He measures out one gram doses and puts them into small two inch by two inch baggies. He measures out two thousand bags of shit and puts them into his satchel and heads out for a night on the town. If he gets caught with this much shit he'll be in the slammer for decades. Fuck it. Life is all or nothing. He wants to get rich.
4:00PM
His phone beeps. A text message from his bank alerting him of a recent transaction: A direct deposit for sixteen hundred dollars. That would be his paycheck. Damien puts his phone away and continues counting screws. He pours out ten pounds of drywall screws and boxes them up for a construction company that uses thousands of pounds of these screws per month. Hyacinth construction. Right now their biggest job is a new office building on Marshall Street and Jackson Avenue. Once the thing is finished one hundred fifty thousand square feet of office space will house ten thousand corporate drones in a massive corporate hive. All potential customers for Damien’s coke outfit. Random drug screenings are bullshit. No one gets tested for drugs, maybe except for onboarding, but that's about it.
8:50PM
Ten minutes until his meeting with the drug dealer. The exchange is to take place at the Starbucks on McKee and Alum Rock. Damien brings a revolver just in case things get ugly. Starbucks is a public place, so there really isn't a chance that things will go wrong. But you never know. Something sketchy like a cocaine deal comes with its own set of unique possibilities. He might get robbed of his ten grand and not get any shit. That would be really fucked.
5:00PM
The Bank of America on Merrill Boulevard and Fragonard Street is open until 6:00PM, so Damien still has time to pick up some cash. He needs two grand more for a total of ten grand for the kilo of coke. He gets to the bank and the line is ten people deep and there are only two tellers on the line. It's his turn and he asks the teller for two grand in hundreds. The teller asks Damien what he's going to do with his money. Nosey Cunt. He tells the teller that he is buying a used car. The teller asks what kind. Damien says a 1997 Toyota Camry. The teller wishes Damien good luck with the car purchase.
9:10PM
The dealer is ten minutes late and Damien is getting nervous. What the fuck is going on. Why the fuck is he late. The dealer said he'd be wearing a leather motorcycle jacks with safety pins and spikes and studs. Damien walks up to the barista and orders another coffee, when in comes a guy wearing a motorcycle jacket with safety pins and spikes and studs. The dealer apologizes for being late. Damien gets his coffee and he and the drug dealer head to a corner of the coffee shop. The dealer offers Damien a bump of the shit before he buys the whole kilo. Damien takes a hit and realizes that what he is buying is in fact good shit.
10:00PM
The coke is flying out of Damien's satchel, the shit is really moving. Some people are buying ten grams at a time. It's amazing how many people keep eight-hundred bucks in their wallet, as though they were waiting at the club for a cocaine dealer to sell them shit. This is how easy money comes, but it's getting a little dangerous, he's attracting the attention of the bouncer, and this is a potential problem. If, however, one of the bouncers makes an issue out of Damien selling coke he'll just pay them off. I couple hundred should do it. Damien still has his revolver on him just in case anyone tries to get cute. The bouncers didn't frisk him before he got into the club. They just checked his ID under a black light and that was it.
3:00PM
This new epoxy by Henkel Loctite is really flying out of the warehouse. Damien just closed an invoice for sixty thousand from a solar panel installation company. They buy a lot of just about everything, but these purchases for epoxy are really making the sales month a real killer. The margins might not be all that great, Henkel Loctite sets the prices for the epoxy at about twenty percent over the wholesale price, but the volume makes up for what's lacking as far as margin goes. The solar companies, the construction companies, the manufacturing companies, and the aircraft companies are all buying a lot of the epoxy. It's easy money, it's almost like selling cocaine.
3:00AM
Damien has been to six clubs and three bars and has nearly sold out of his entire stock of cocaine. He’s carrying around several fat wads of cash: hundreds and twenties. Two thousand grams of coke in five hours, this is a really good business. He could put his brothers and sisters through college, he can buy a house, he can pay his rent in cash. One hundred and sixty grand is nothing to sneeze at, he wonders how he’s going to get this cash into his bank account, maybe by depositing two grand at a time for eighty days, that’s going to look funny if anyone takes a peek at his account, nobody has eighty days straight of positive cash flow into an account. Usually payday is when the balance is highest, and it gets lower from there. One-hundred and sixty grand is a lot of money, too much in fact, he has no idea what he’s going to do with it all, and more importantly, how he’s going to get it all into his bank account.
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