Snowstorms in a Hot Climate by Sarah Dunant

Author:Sarah Dunant [Dunant, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-58836-486-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

“Me and Lenny go back a long way. But I go back further. I’ve been in the profession since 1970, got my training in Asia, a short tour of duty napalming villages in Vietnam. The perfect place for pleasure drugs: a lot of people looking to get wasted, and a lot of openings for anyone willing to keep the supply lines fueled. I was never very good at killing, but I had a certain talent for organization. And I was lucky. Six months in I took a piece of shrapnel in the head. It put my right eye on the wounded list and left my brain fit for active service. I spent my convalescence working on a few ideas, then a couple of months later I was on my way home, with an honorable discharge, a list of contacts, and a couple of kilos of sample raw material. The best grass in the world. Bringing it all back home, they called it. Why not? No one was employing veterans anyway, and as a soldier I’d been trained to break the law. First couple of years it went just great. Then they started shipping the boys home, and folks began growing their own. It was time for a change. So I switched products.

“Down south everything was humming. I went to Colombia. There were fortunes to be made in Peru and Bolivia, but it was more primitive there, and the paranoia stakes were higher. In Colombia, so long as you got in quick and knew what you were doing, the market was still open. If you paid the right people, you could even work with the law on your side. I had money to invest. And I had experience. I took a crash course in Spanish, and by the time Lenny arrived on the scene I had a police chief in each pocket and access to an airstrip up near the coast that didn’t even show on any of the official maps. I had people lining up to sell me top-quality stuff. I was set up real good. Lenny knew that. But then he knew a lot of things. He’d done his homework, and he wasn’t exactly short on bucks either.

“For him it was always a career. Like others train to be lawyers, he had set his sights on Moma Coca. For a while he just watched. Hung around. I knew he was there. He was either a narc or a novice. And I was very good at spotting narcs. He moved into my hotel, and he tried hard to get to know me.” He smiled. “He tried real hard. And in the end it worked.”

“I thought you were the one who didn’t like people. What made Lenny such an exception?”

He caught my eye briefly. “It was a long time ago. Could be I liked people more. Or could be that Lenny had a lot going for him. He was different then, less smooth, less sure. And he was hungry. When it came to detail, he didn’t know shit from shinola, but he had a lot of fancy ideas.

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