Flash fiction: secret meetings

If Sasha had told anyone, he would not be here. He’d had a sense about what it was when he’d got the call asking if he could drive across Poland with some unspecified goods, when they’d asked for his phone and he’d had to bargain for one last call with his wife. All of this was confirmed when he finally arrived at the given destination.

Science fiction type metal gates in the middle of a forest, six guys carrying the kind of guns money can’t buy. Six guys prodding him away while they unloaded barrels from the car.

Why were drugs illegal anyway, when so much else wasn’t?

They showed him a basement where a few mattresses lay perpendicular to the corridor. They grinned, guns in hand, and kicked him in. He wondered numbly if he’d be let out again, but he was too exhausted to contemplate the future much further. He fell into sleep, like a pebble to water, he dreamt he was led by the men unloading the truck, taken to a well in the middle of the forest, and made to strip off and dive. He awoke heart pounding and his clothes damp with sweat, before getting ready for the drive back.

Jobs like this made his skin crawl, but they were the jobs you couldn’t really refuse or get wrong without someone deciding you knew too much to be allowed to just walk free. It had started small, this involvement. Through an ex girlfriend whose dad had always seemed nice enough at the time. Nice enough could have you killed for one wrong move, and while the relationship ended years ago, decades, the jobs had become a till death do-us-part kind of commitment.

He drove eighteen hours home, wondering. Did Nadja know? Had she someone set this up? He preferred to stay clear of the family as much as possible, wary of their scheming, the endless talk of how they’d get more money, where from, and who would pay the price if it all went down. Sasha worried his name came up too often as a lamb for the butcher in those discreet conversations, but what could he do? If he told anyone, he’d be dead, and Susanna would be left alone.

Still. Life wasn’t so bad. The jobs were enough, though he’d trade all of it back if he could, for a past with no secrets.