The Last Drug

November 25th, 2020

It was a rainy evening. The rain was so dense one could barely see anything through a window – the rainwater on the outside and the steam-induced vagueness on the inside made it all but impossible. Martin Williams, the DEA commander, was shivering. . It’s just the cold, he told himself. This was about to be the end of his career if he got it wrong. If he got it right, of course, it would be only the beginning of great things to come.
The DEA agents under Williams’ command were slowly surrounding their objective – an old, decrepit building built in the 1980’s by the HUD, now abandoned to rot away. Like spiders on a web, snipers with Remington M-700s perched on neighboring roofs, while their colleagues on the ground approached the entrance slowly and silently, hiding beyond old, burned-out cars as they advanced. Some say it is impossible to walk silently in combat boots. Williams’ men proved otherwise.
Williams smiled. Today he was going to become famous. Inside, Harold Uris, a famous Hollywood producer was meeting an infamous drug dealer. He didn’t know what Uris was buying, but it was good. Marijuana, Morphine, perhaps even TLD… this was going to be good.

* * *

Inside the building, Harold Uris, the famous producer in question, was sitting in an old, half-rotten armchair. In front of him sat a huge, black man with a clean-shaved head and spectacles. Behind the man, two “bodyguards” stood with hands crossed on their chest. Uris smiled – the scene reminded him of an old 2000’s movie. Uris himself, though, had nothing cinematic about him – if anything, he bore slight resemblance to a deranged scientist – thick framed glasses, a bow-tie, a pen-holder in his shirt pocket and a Palm Pilot 2020 clipped to his belt.


-      Did you bring it, Mike?
-      Sure thing. Good shit, too. Brazilian.
-      Holy shit, Mike, pure Brazilian?
-      Yeah. Two kilos of the best stuff you ever drank, chombatta.
-      That’s going to cost me two grand, Mike.
-      Whoa, man. This is Brazilian crap, Harry, you know it’s worth more than two grand. Three and we’re done.

Harold sighed as the money changed hands. Then he got on and started the process of preparing the raw brown powder into TLD. This required lots of skill to be done properly, and Harold was good at it.

-Now we can both have a drink, right Mike?

* * *
-      What do you mean ‘the chopper is going to be late’?! – Williams bellowed at his adjutant. – How the hell can a goddamn helicopter get late?! What, did it get in a traffic jam or something?
-      Uh, sir, - the DEA man stuttered – they have a small problem getting it off the ground…
-      What do you mean, ‘they have a problem getting it off the ground’, you sick loser?! Was the gunner to fat for it to fly or something?
-      Uh, sir, no, the problem is not with the gunner. It’s the mechanic we have a problem with. He apparently drained the bird of fuel and oil, and then took off the Jesus nut and sold all of that.
-      What’s a “Jesus nut”?! And why did he sell all those things?
-      Apparently, sir, it’s what holds the rotor blades together.  It seems he sold those things to maintain his TLD habit, sir.
-      WHAT? Do you mean a fucking DEA employee was a junky?
-      Yes, sir, I can see the irony, too, but…
-      Screw the irony, get me a new chopper, you loser!

* * *

Mike smiled, exposing teeth that were already yellowing from long-term marijuana and TLD consumption. He loved TLD. It was making him more alert, making him think faster, move faster, fight faster. It helped him wake up in the morning. And, most importantly, it was making him feel good.

-      Harry?
-      Yeah, what?
-      I always wanted to know… why did they ban TLD? I understand crack and all that other shit, but why TLD?
-      Ever hear of the slippery slope?
-      No man, what’s that?

* * *


-      Johnson, when is the chopper going to be here?
-      Thirty minutes, sir.
-      Good.

Williams smiled and though of all the people who he lost to drugs. There was his uncle, who got high on marijuana and drove his Savanna off a cliff. His wife’s brother, who got hit by a stray shot when two gangs started fighting over an opiate shipment. He lived, but he lost vision in his right eye. His wife, who died when she first tried a drug – The Last Drug. TLD. The dealer who sold her the dose mixed shoe wax in it for volume – and she died. Then there was Williamson himself, shot by TLD dealers after he went undercover in their gang. The shotgun blast was supposed to have killed him. He lived, but he could never have children after that.
Williams hated drug dealers.

* * *

-      So, we went all the way down that slippery slope of yours, Harry?
-      I don’t think we did. There’s a few substances they didn’t ban yet, isn’t there?
-      Like what, Super Glue? There’s probably always some legal shit you can take, but it’s just they banned all the remotely cool stuff.
-      Yeah, Mikey, you’re right. It is all the way down…

* * *

The helicopter hovered above the rooftops like a glistening black wasp. An FN-MAG was sticking out of the left side, and one could vaguely make out the silhouette of the door gunner.
Williams smiled and picked up his phone.
-      Let’s go, boys.
Maybe he couldn’t nab all drug dealers, but for this one, payback time has begun.

           * * *

-      So that’s why they call it TLD, Mike. Because it was the last one to remain legal – and later, to be banned.

Nobody found out what Mike really wanted to say. Because just at that moment, the door broke down. Mike whipped out a Beretta 92 pistol and died before he could fire a shot, his face pulverized by three 9mm slugs out of the DEA man’s machine pistol. Then, one of the guards drew a gun from under his trench coat. The blast of the sawed off Mosin-Nagant made Uris temporarily blind and deaf, and he didn’t see the agent go down. He didn’t see Williams kill the bodyguard, either. Then Williams shot the other guard before he could lunge at him with his flick knife. And then Uris’ sight came back. He took out his own gun and he shot Williams. Three times. In the head.
Later, the doctors would tell Williams he lived only because of a miracle – none of the .22 slugs hit the brain. But now, he looked dead enough for Uris to get up and utter a yell of absolute, unmitigated triumph – seconds before the helicopter outside the window behind him. The long burst of machinegun fire sent him tumbling forwards on the table, spilling the priceless TLD packet on the floor.

* * *

The DEA found five bodies, three illegal firearms, and two kilograms of high-quality Brazilian coffee.