Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense by Fynn Perry (audio ebook reader .TXT) 📕

The scientist swallowed hard. “That…that was a low yield strain—my first attempt!” he stammered. “For the love of all that is holy!” he protested, his perfect diction failing as he continued. “Everyone else has to start with opium collected from poppy pods and then extract the morphine with chemicals to then make heroin, I.. I…brewed morphine from a yeast strain! No poppies!” He gulped a breath and continued. “Now we have much higher-yielding yeast microbes for making heroin. Without that process of learning I wouldn’t have been able to make a strain capable of producing cocaine—an extremely complex operation. Now we have excellent quality for both drugs Why must people suffer with inferior–”

“Shut it!” John’s host threatened, and the man immediately stopped his babbling. “Now it’s good, sure, but you have to step up production. Demand is rising and you really don’t want to disappoint us. Think about your family—I can make them suffer, really suffer. They will beg for a bullet to end it all.”

The host raised his hands, intending to grab the scientist by the lapels of his lab coat and slam him against the plate-glass wall. John tried to intervene, reminding the logical part of his host’s brain that the scientist was the key to drug production. It would not end well for the guard if anything happened to the scientist. It seemed to work. Instead of grabbing hold of the lapels of the man’s coat, the host restrained himself and settled for resting his heavy hands on the scientist’s bony shoulders and hissing, “Look, I don’t know how you managed to brew coke and heroin. You’re a fucking genius, I get that, and the only one who could have done it. But since you have succeeded so far, you now have to speed things up. We don’t care about formulas or the genetic coding of yeast, we care only about profits, and we will spill blood and guts to get them.” The guard dropped his hands back to his sides.

Holy fucking shit! John thought, not only relieved at having saved the scientist from a beating but also stunned at hearing that the scientist might actually have found a way to brew cocaine and heroin.

With John’s spirit inside him, the guard then turned and walked back down the stairs and toward the elevator platforms. He waited for a free one, then got on it.

Emerging from the tunnel, John and his host were back in the main warehouse area––the respectable and legitimate-looking part of the business. With the huge packing machines lowered, and the robots programmed to run a different scenario, nobody would have any reason to suspect the existence of a covert operation in the basement.

John’s escape plan hinged on finding somewhere to discreetly exit his host who would, without doubt, pass out after such a long possession. Luckily, an opportunity presented itself—one that John had overlooked when he’d thought about the implications of spirit possession. His host needed to use the bathroom.

He could hide his host in one of the stalls. It would now be just a matter of time.

Fourteen

Richard Genna’s boundless enthusiasm for his work would frequently drive him to stay late into the night in his brightly lit lab, bristling with high-powered microscopes, chromatographs, spectrometers, and other specialist equipment. Attempting to link evidentiary fibers, residues, bodily fluids, and chemical compounds with people, places, and objects demanded critical thinking, emotional detachment, and precision—skills and attributes that Genna had in abundance. The forensic scientist worked in a private lab that Lazlo’s precinct used when the city’s own labs were stretched. Use of the lab, which came at high cost, was strictly controlled by the precinct captain, but Genna had done a few off-the-record things for Lazlo in the past in return for Lazlo dealing with traffic violations and parking tickets, which Genna was prone to collecting.

Lazlo called Genna now and told him about the two spider-embossed pills he had in his possession. He asked if Genna could help him out, not only by doing a chemical composition test, but also by finding out the effect of the pills on a group of lab mice. Lazlo needed to know what the exact effects of the drug were—and although the pills looked identical there was the possibility that they might have come from different batches or producers.

“OK,” he agreed. “I’ll run the tests tomorrow night. I need to get extra laboratory mice—they’re not cheap, you know. The best supplier is in Maine.”

Lazlo wasn’t interested in the details. “I need this ASAP, Richard. Call me as soon as you have the results.” Lazlo’s tone was verging on threatening.

He left for home. It had been a long day. There was nobody or nothing waiting for him there, except—if memory served him well—a half-full bottle of whiskey.

Jennifer was lying on her bed, her mind inundated with thoughts, when John entered her room, startling her.

“If I could, I would’ve called!” he said, his grinning face seeming to glow slightly more than the rest of him.

“Thank God you’re still . . .” Her words rushed out and she wanted to say ‘alive’ but settled on “in one piece.”

John let her relief sink in before relating what he had witnessed at the fulfillment center. As he spoke, he watched the progression of emotions, from surprise and shock—her mouth dropped open, her fingers touched her parted lips—to relief and excitement. Then her hand slipped to rest, fingers spread like a fan, on her chest.

A long beat passed before she responded. “I know we wanted to get something on El Gordito, John…but this is so fantastic…so huge… The thing is, how will anyone believe us?” She paused, thinking. “We have no proof to take to the cops. What will I tell them? That a ghost told me about it?” She paused again, momentarily feeling resigned. “Wait…. the kidnapped scientist . . . we can at least try to identify him. Maybe there’s a news report somewhere of a