ON OUR WAY TO HEAVEN

PROLOGUE

   Elsa

Getting ready for the delivery of the final package filled my heart with familiar dread. As I pushed the packets of cocaine into the gym bag I had purchased some time ago, beads of sweat rolled down my thin face. I felt exhausted. The stress increased with each delivery I had to make. My eye shot to the window of the box I call home as a police car drove past with its sirens on. Alertness, a very important virtue in this line of business I was involved in.

It was sad that while in the quest for a purpose of living, I lost my freedom. I missed my simple life of serving coffee and pastries and putting snobbish customers in their place. Then, I had felt that something was missing and I wanted to do more with myself which led me right into the gnarly arms of Ricardo, a Mexican drug lord otherwise known as Ratty.

I always found the name funny till the day a guy laughed out at the mention of the name and Ricardo had two fingers on his left hand cut off. And I had only gotten to see Ricardo himself twice. I would have given anything to be back in my former life.

I ran my fingers through my messy hair letting out a deep sigh. I put the last pack in, zipped up the bag and pushed it under the bed, my improvised safe. I could almost hear the half-finished bag of chips and pile of dirty laundry under there complaining that there wasn't any more space to fit in anything else. It wasn't my fault. Or maybe it was. I pretty much live in a cardboard box.

The apartment was quite small. With one room serving as the living room, bedroom, kitchen and dining room. The restroom was a small enclosure at one side of the room, just a few steps away, which also doubled for the bathroom. Sadly, and at the same time, luckily, I didn't have people over often. Or ever.

I looked at the half-broken face of my antique wristwatch and the time read 8:45pm. I had to deliver the bag to a guy named Dusty by 10:00pm tonight at the Disney theme park. I sighed again.

The exchange was the trickiest part of the business because you hardly deliver to the same person twice making it impossible to keep track of names. You are not given a picture or any other information than just a name and location. All you have to do is arrive at the location a good twenty minutes before the agreed time and look out for any strangely parked cars and pray damn well it wasn't the police. Most time, the cops get intel on a proposed exchange and arrive undercover in a "strangely parked car" waiting for the unfortunate delivery guy. And this happened often. And a lot of couriers like myself have either ended up in prison or worse, dead.

I was introduced to Ratty by a friend from college who was also delivery coke for him. She had called it an avenue for extra cash even though I found it odd that a girl would be dealing with those kind of men and thugs. She had explained the risks but would end each sentence with how much she made after each successful delivery. At the end of the day, I finally agreed to join her and run the "errands" and through to her words, we made a lot of money that night. I was intrigued and somehow, the risk was somewhat appealing. After delivering a couple on my own, it was obvious that I wasn't necessarily doing it for the money but for the adrenaline rush.

However the whole deal started losing its appeal when guns became involved. The risks tripled and the cops were everywhere. Couriers were either killed by the people they went to supply or they got nabbed by the cops. I found out that we were at the bottom of the food chain. We were the ones they didn't mind disposing when necessary. We were in the most dangerous line of the work with absolutely no backup. "You have to be smart" Pablo, Rattys' second in command would often say. "The cops will always be out there hunting you like dogs, but the smartest will succeed".

If you get caught or killed, you got replaced pronto and your corpse would be thrown in the ocean or any dumpster close enough. If you got caught, they leave you to rot in the prison cell and if they perceive you are a threat, they see that you get "taken care of".